Posted inHome life Humor

Here’s another dark, twisted, and funny Christmas letter

If you like dark and twisted Christmas letters, and I sure do, you'll love this one that just came from one of my wife's friends. She has a great sense of humor. I changed the names to protect the innocent, aside from my wife's name, Laurel. A previous Christmas letter by the same person that's also darkly funny can be found here.  The Dreaded Christmas Newsletter So who wants to be a millionaire? I will soon be one, but I think I must die first. My liquid assets amount to $27 in the bank, but my house is fast approaching…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

2017 Salem Women’s March in words, photos, videos

Wow, in the course of writing about the 2018 Salem Women's March, which looks like it will be a Womxn's March for reasons I'm unable to fully fathom, I just realized that I never put up a blog post about the 2017 Women's March.I must have been so eager to share the Adobe Spark page I made of that event -- words, photos, videos -- on Facebook, that I forgot to do the same in a blog post.  So... enjoy. It's fitting that I'm doing this on Christmas day, since the 2017 Women's March was a huge gift to Salem.…
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Posted inHome life

Contacting Amazon via chat worked great for me

Maybe this isn't astonishing news, but in the past I've had difficulty contacting a human at Amazon who could help with a vexing problem. So I wanted to share what worked well for me this evening. I'd gotten an email from Amazon saying that I was being charged for some tire chains that I'd returned, but hadn't been received by Amazon.  Having checked on the return status several times, I kept seeing "In Transit." Amazon had already refunded me the cost of the chains after the return shipment had been logged in via UPS. But since the chains must have…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

“Intersectionality” can be dangerous left-wing tribalism

I'm a liberal. Which is why I support liberalism. Meaning, in this context, open-minded discourse about the nature of reality where all views are welcomed, so long as they're backed up by reason and facts.  The interesting thing is that liberals can act in illiberal ways. Of course, so can conservatives. But it's more shocking and surprising when liberals try to shut down discussion of certain topics because they've bought into a dangerous tribalism that views one side, their side, as possessing all goodness and truth, and the other side as being all bad and wrong. Recently I had a…
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Posted inHome life

Behold: the 2017 Laurel and Brian Hines Christmas letter

Yes, we're still writing a Christmas letter. This year, like most years, it is darkly humorous. Hey, depression can be fun! (Especially when you're not depressed.) We are offering it up in two formats.  PDF: 2017 Laurel and Brian Hines Holiday Letter Download 2017 Christmas Letter PDFJPEG: (below)                    
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Posted inHome life

A bone scan, my doctor’s lifestyle advice, a nighttime walk in the country

Somehow the three things in the title of this blog post fit together. I'm just not sure exactly how. Like a perfectly completed jigsaw puzzle? Like a random pile of old car parts in a junkyard? Like pants and a shirt that sort of match, and sort of don't? I had my third bone density scan last week. Osteopenia was the diagnosis after the first one some five years ago. Not as serious as osteoporosis, but a step in that direction. A few days ago someone from my doctor's office phoned to tell me the results. Well, not the real…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

Everybody should be able to talk about anything (just about)

We live in strange times. They got a bit stranger for me yesterday, after I wrote a post on my Salem Political Snark blog, "Salem should have another Women's March, not a Womxn's March." Among other things, I talked about how using Womxn rather than Women didn't seem to be a wise idea, especially since the 2017 Salem Women's March was a huge success, and people thinking of attending the 2018 event would be confused by a word that is both unpronounceable and unfamiliar. I said: My biggest concern, though, is how featuring "Womxn" in the name of the event…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Gun nuts are like children playing with light-sabers (but more dangerous)

I'm hugely enjoying Kurt Andersen's book about how our country became the world's #1 purveyor of kookiness. "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" is filled with right-on observations. Andersen chronicles our nation's love affair with fantasy from 1517 up to the near-present -- which is where I am now in the book.  Today I read the Gun Crazy chapter. The following excerpt is one of the best descriptions of gun nuttery I've ever come across. Andersen is a hunter and gun owner, so this makes his characterization of gun wackos even more believable. Andersen writes: One set of fantasies has had…
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