Posted inBicycling Salem

Sign my petition to support protected bike lanes in Salem

Yesterday I started a petition that asks the Salem, Oregon City Council to support a proposal by Salem Bike Vision to build a network of protected bike lanes in our city. You can sign it by clicking this link. Here's what the petition says. Riding a bicycle in Salem should be much safer and more fun than it is now. Sign this petition to urge the City Council to add protected bike lanes to the projects in a $300 million community improvement bond measure.I'm excited about this Salem Bike Vision proposal. A "bike lane" consisting of white lines on the…
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Posted inEntertainment

The shows I love to stream tell a lot about me

After writing the title to this blog post, I had a strong feeling of obviousness wash over me. OK, so be it. I plead guilty to stating the obvious. What people like to watch on TV says a lot about them. So does the music they like to listen to. So do the books and magazines they like to read.  Still, I find it fascinating how our personality gets projected into those sorts of activities. It's almost as if we don't need to meditate, engage in psychotherapy, or stare into the darkness of a coffee house expresso to know our…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Don’t feed the ground squirrels in Bush Park. They can bite.

Yesterday Laurel, my wife, took our dog Mooka for a walk in Salem's Bush Park. Mooka loves going to the park because she finds the California ground squirrels there endlessly fascinating. Partly because they're so tame. Partly because Mooka hugely enjoys chasing squirrels on our rural south Salem property, though I don't think she's ever caught one. (Dogs suck at climbing trees; good news for squirrels.) Laurel got into a conversation with a man who told her that a child had been bitten at Bush Park by a ground squirrel, probably while feeding one of the cute little critters. He…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Right-wing extremism responsible for 10 mass shooting deaths

Yesterday thirteen people were shot and ten killed at a Buffalo supermarket by an 18-year-old white man armed with an assault rifle and high capacity magazines. A day after one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history, law enforcement officials in New York descended on the home of the accused gunman and probed disturbing hints into his behavior, as Gov. Kathy Hochul promised action on hate speech that she said spreads “like a virus.” The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, shot 13 people on Saturday afternoon at a Tops supermarket in east Buffalo, killing 10, officials said. Almost…
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Posted inSalem

Statesman Journal eliminates opinion section. I’m irked.

I've been a subscriber to Salem's Statesman Journal newspaper for 45 years. The paper has always had an opinion section.  It's been my favorite part of the Statesman Journal. I enjoy reading letters to the editor. I like to peruse guest opinions by local people. Syndicated columns interest me. So do editorials written by newspaper staff, even when I disagreed with them -- which was frequent over the years. But yesterday Cherrill Crosby, the executive editor, wrote a piece saying that the Statesman Journal is doing away with the opinion section. The reasons were lousy.  Crosby claimed "this content does…
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Posted inBooks

Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series is so good, I’m marrying it

At the (very real) risk of sounding like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, I'm announcing some Breaking News, Happening Now. After my many years of passionate dalliances with other writers of spy novels -- notably the Gray Man and Mitch Rapp series -- I've decided to commit to a literary marriage to Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series. I discovered Silva in 2018 after making the mistake of buying the book Bill Clinton wrote with novelist James Patterson, "The President Is Missing."  The book was bad. Not the worst I've ever read, but poorly written with shallow characters. After buying it, I read…
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