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The City calls it the Bend bug
City of Bend · October 30, 2018
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
A carved pumpkin, and the only place the City of Bend has been found naming its own mark.
On 30 October 2018 the City posted a photograph of a pumpkin on an office desk with the emblem cut into its rind, the letters pale against the orange. It is a good carving: the ring is continuous, the letters stand clear of it, and the third letter is the arched one.
The caption is the reason this is a record. In it the City calls the mark the “Bend bug” — the only name this project has found the City giving it — describes it as the word “BEnD” in a circle, with the lowercase n written deliberately, and says the City holds a registration for that version.
The registration cannot be confirmed. The Oregon Secretary of State's active-registration dataset of 15 September 2026 has no match for the City of Bend on owner, correspondent, mark description, “BEND” or “BUG”, while control searches return other Oregon municipalities. Oregon registrations run five years, the state publishes no list of expired marks, and a filing active in 2018 could have lapsed around 2023. So the City said it, no active registration exists, and neither of those sentences contradicts the other. The full record of the search is in the licensing review.
Measured
The bureau roundel, the notched construction. Narrow letters, a notched E and a notched B at the same height, an arched third letter, and rounded corners.
Read at medium confidence from 420 px of letter.
Not measured. Carved into a pumpkin. The carving's contrast against the rind is weaker than the rind's own lighting gradient, so no threshold separates letters from fruit: declared light the mask is the lit half of the pumpkin, declared near-white it is a handful of specks. Size is not the reason — the carving is 540 px across, the largest rendering of the City's construction in this archive — and a character read by eye needs no polarity. Excluding a drawing is itself a finding, so it is recorded rather than estimated.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured
Seen in use
One dated sighting, 2018. Each is a record of this object or this drawing somewhere else, and where a picture is hosted it is a documentary crop of the object, credited to whoever holds it.
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October 30, 2018 City of Bend · A pumpkin with the emblem carved into its rind Photograph of the object · instagram.com City of Bend; documentary reproduction at documentary size for commentary, with attribution and a link. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BpkuBX3gWwt/
