Posted inEntertainment

Here’s why I loved The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix

At first I doubted Jim Ramsey, a friend who I have coffee with most Sundays, when he said I should watch The Queen's Gambit -- a seven-episode Netflix mini-series about, yawn, a girl who plays chess.  That unduly confident "yawn" was the reason it took me a week or two to say to my wife one evening, let's take a look at The Queen's Gambit to see if we might like it. Well, we sure did.  Every night after that we watched another hour-long episode. Yesterday we reached the end of our immersion into the ever-so-fascinating story of Beth Harmon,…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

DIRECTV back to its irritating channel-losing ways

I'd say that I have a love-hate relationship with DIRECTV, but that wouldn't be honest. My DIRECTV relationship is almost entirely based on hate. I hate how much our monthly subscription costs. I hate how shows we've recorded mysteriously disappear from our DVR (digital video recorder). I hate that the Pac-12 Networks aren't carried.  And I hate it when DIRECTV engages in a corporate pissing match with the owner of one of the channels that we've paid to get, yet is at risk of being taken off the DIRECTV lineup for reasons that are never specifically disclosed but which obviously…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

If you can’t be with the life you love, love the life you’re with

It's Thanksgiving today. I feel like I should put a one-day hold on my usual inclination to write something snarky, critical, or in my better moments, only mildly negative. So here goes with my modification to a song lyric that popped into my head when I woke up this morning and realized what day it was. And if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with. Stephen Stills performed the song, "Love the One You're With," in 1970. I turned 22 that year. Now I'm 72. The general sentiment still rings true to me,…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

My wife thinks I’m crazy. This is normal, right?

I have direct experience of being married to only two women, Susan and Laurel. In between Susan and Laurel I got divorced, to set aside any conjecture about polygamy.  So I'm having to extrapolate from this small sample size to the much larger universe of wives. Both Susan and Laurel thought I was crazy. Not clinically, but in the sense that sometimes, and maybe often, the way I looked upon the world baffled them. My strong suspicion is that this is normal. Meaning, almost all wives look upon their husbands as crazy. I hope so, because otherwise I'm a husbandly…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Wake up to Covid reality, fellow Oregonians

I'll be blunt. If you're wearing a mask every time you're in a public place, are physically distancing, wash your hands regularly, and aren't socializing often with strangers or with large numbers of people you know -- good for you!  But if you're not doing some or all of these things -- shame on you!  You are either clueless about the skyrocketing Covid cases and hospitalizations both in Oregon and the United States as a whole, or you're so selfish, you don't care if you're helping prolong the suffering of this pandemic. Here's a chart of the depressing reality here…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Salem progressives go (mildly) wild for Biden’s victory

Saturday, around the country and indeed the world, people danced in the streets after our country's major news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.  A monthly discussion group my wife and I are part of had scheduled a Covid-aware outdoor meeting for yesterday afternoon in the back yard of Russ and Delana Beaton in northeast Salem. Laurel, my wife, did a little dance at one point. But mostly the nine of us stood around a fire expertly started by Russ, when we weren't sitting around it. Here's photos of the mildly wild celebrating by a bunch of progressives…
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