Posted inHome life Writing/Weblogs

Blog blast from the 2005 Statesman Journal past

Tonight Laurel, my wife, found a clipping from the August 12, 2005 Statesman Journal. Wow, there I was in the "Got Blogs?" story by Angela Yeager, looking 16 years younger than I do now. Naturally my first thought was, I've got to write a blog post about how blogs were looked upon back in 2005.  Yeager did an excellent job at capturing the excitement of the Dawn of Blogging. Below you can read her entire story, which I was pleased to capture with my halfway decent touch typing skill. My second thought was, I wonder if Google still looks kindly…
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Posted inSports

Watching Oregon State basketball is my happy drug

It's a natural high -- watching the Oregon State men's basketball team pull out six unlikely victories,  starting with the PAC-12 tournament. UCLA. Oregon. Colorado. Those underdog wins produced a PAC-12 tournament championship, the only way Oregon State was going to make it into the NCAA March Madness. Unable to see Oregon State play during the regular season because I'm stuck with DirecTV, which refuses to carry the PAC-12 Network, I became a big admirer of how the team was able to covert their underdog role into top dog wins. Then came the NCAA tournament. Tennessee. Oklahoma State. Loyola Chicago…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Trump’s inept Covid response killed about 400,000 people

It's been clear for a long time that Donald Trump caused many thousands of Americans to die needlessly because of his astoundingly inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic. What's been in question is how many.  Thanks to Andrew Akteson, a UCLA professor, we now have an answer: nearly 400,000 deaths could have been avoided if the United States had done things differently and better. That's an astoundingly tragic number.  Not all of those unnecessary deaths are Trump's direct responsibility. But most are, since he oversaw our country's Covid response when strong public health actions could have markedly reduced the death…
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Posted inSports

Oregon State men’s basketball team is heart-stopping fun to watch

Whew! My heart rate has slowed down enough to enable me to share some praise of the Oregon State basketball team that just beat Oklahoma State -- getting Oregon State into the Sweet 16 round of NCAA's March Madness. Their first win in the tournament over Tennessee was wonderfully satisfying. Tonight's win was even better, in part because Oklahoma State has Cade Cunningham, a great player who might be the #1 pick in the NBA draft. Oregon State is a delight to watch. The team has great chemistry. When a starter is faltering, or in foul trouble as Ethan Thompson…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Goodbye, print Statesman Journal and Oregonian. We went digital.

Today was a day that I never thought would arrive -- the day my wife and I decided to stop getting home delivery of the Salem Statesman Journal and Portland Oregonian. Given our age, early 70s, we grew up reading newspapers printed on dead trees that crinkled when you turned the pages. Laurel and I both like print newspapers.  But we also like seeing the Statesman Journal and Oregonian in the paper box at the end of our driveway. And increasingly, that wasn't happening. Our neighbors reported the same thing was happening to them. So even though I registered a…
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Posted inHome life

Been married for 31 years today. But I’m not great at proposing.

In 1990 Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, March 17. Great decision. I've never forgotten our anniversary, not even once in the past 31 years, because an image of green beer always makes me think, "Time to get flowers and a card!" Shock (not). We looked much younger when we were much younger. Our wedding was at the house we'd bought a few months before in Spring Lake Estates, where we're still living. My only regret about our wedding was how I'd botched my marriage proposal. On the plus side, it was spontaneous, though I'd been thinking…
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Posted inFood and drink Health

Metabolism myths about diet, exercise, and weight loss

Science rocks. It's by far our best way of understanding reality.  But most of us, me certainly included, often are prone to embracing folk wisdom rather than science when it comes to losing weight. I'm six feet tall and 178 pounds at the moment -- though sadly, my long-term trend (I'm 72) has been to lose a bit of height and gain a bit of weight.  Since I'd like to get to about 175 pounds and know how difficult it is for me to lose even a few pounds, I was eager to read the front page story in the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Making daylight savings time permanent is a must, Congress

Tomorrow at 2 am Daylight Savings Time returns. May it never depart again.  Late fall and winter already are depressingly dark. Losing an hour of late afternoon sun in November, when Daylight Savings Time ends, means that doing anything outside at that time is dreary, if not impossible.  Fortunately, there seems to be a good chance Congress is going to do away with the twice yearly clock changeover. So says a LA Times opinion piece. It’s nearly that time of year again when Americans reset their clocks one hour ahead, grumble about losing an hour of sleep — and wonder…
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Posted inHome life

There’s tricks to chainsawing that I don’t know

I'm a chainsaw middle schooler, I suppose. Meaning, I've learned quite a bit over the 25 years or so I've occasionally used a small Stihl chainsaw on our property in rural south Salem. But in no way do I feel totally comfortable with a chainsaw. A feeling that I was reminded of today when I tackled a challenging tangle of logs that had fallen during the recent ice storm on a common property trail that runs behind our property to Spring Lake. Yesterday I had the good fortune to stop by Ace Hardware and discover that they finally had some…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

“The Great” is, well, great! Here’s why I liked it.

My wife and I came late to The Great, an engrossing ten-episode series on Hulu that is (very) roughly based on the story of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia.  It was released on May 15, 2020. We discovered it last month after looking for something else on Hulu, noticing The Great, and having my wife say, "I've heard it's pretty good." From that moment we watched The Great almost every night until we finished the last episode yesterday. Thankfully, Season 2 is in the works, because we loved the show. It's like nothing else I've ever seen -- not…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Tree cleanup guys are the new Salem-area heroes

Ah, what a difference it made to my mood having tree debris from the recent ice storm cleaned up from our rural south Salem yard. We'd done a lot of picking up small branches ourselves. And I'd been able to cut some larger limbs with my small 16-inch chainsaw. But there was no way I could handle the big limbs from a giant oak that fell on our lawn. That required a bigger chainsaw and younger muscles than I possess. So for almost three weeks my wife and I have been staring at a mass of tangled branches whenever we…
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