Posted inSports

Good news: DirecTV has Big Ten Network. Bad news: How Oregon played.

Today started off on a high note for me, college football-wise. I was thrilled when, in the morning, I set my DirecTV VCR to record the 3:30 pm Oregon State vs. Idaho State game on The CW (channel 32) and the 4:30 pm Oregon vs. Idaho game on the Big Ten Network (channel 601).  While that may not sound like a big deal to football fans who don't use DirecTV -- we live in rural south Salem, Oregon, where there's no cable options -- those of us who suffered through many years of not getting the Pac-12 Networks due to…
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Posted inHome life Neighborhood

In 2024 we see very few bees and yellow jackets in rural south Salem, Oregon

We've lived at our house on ten acres in rural south Salem, about six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital, for thirty-four years. This has been an unusual year for us as regards the bee and yellow jacket population. We've seen very few of each on our property. Almost none. Typically we have several natural bee hives. We have flowering plants in our yard that were chosen to appeal to bees. In 2024, though, the bees never showed up. Same with yellow jackets. In past summers, when we'd eat breakfast on our deck some yellow jackets would appear…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Joe Biden’s speech at the DNC was met with love, and also relief

President Biden deserved the warm welcome he received at the Democratic National Convention tonight. The cries and signs of "I love Joe" were heartfelt.  However, as I watched his speech here in Oregon, where it was over well after midnight East Coast time and 9:30 or so our time, which seemed like a crazily late time to showcase what amounted to Biden's farewell to the nation as Kamala Harris is poised to enter the stretch run of her presidential campaign, I keep thinking that a big part of why Democrats love Joe is that Biden had the good sense to…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

LGBTQ people may not be born that way, but they’re formed that way

The Sunday New York Times had a great idea in the opinion section of the August 4, 2024 issue: have some of their columnists debunk a bit of conventional wisdom in their circles. Here's how it was described. Our world is more connected than ever. But it's never been easier to find yourself shepherded into a comfortable herd made up of close friends or political allies, your social set or professional peers. And those herds are the perfect environment for groupthink to thrive, to allow dubious beliefs or weak arguments to masquerade as unquestionable truisms. We asked nine of our…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

I watched The Handmaid’s Tale to learn what reelecting Trump would be like

It was a tough job, but I had to do it -- watching every second of every episode of the five seasons of The Handmaid's Tale, a show that I wasn't interested in when it aired from April 2017 to November 2022, but which grabbed my attention this year for a couple of reasons. One was that I'd seen Elisabeth Moss in The Veil and was captivated by her acting. She's the lead character in The Handmaid's Tale. Another was that I wanted to see what lessons The Handmaid's Tale had for our current political situation, where Donald Trump is…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Relax, today’s big stock market decline is no big deal

If you're like me, someone with money invested in the United States stock market, today wasn't fun. All the major market indices dropped considerably, following a couple of declining days last week.  The S&P 500 was down 3.0%, the Dow 2.6%, the NASDAQ 3.4%. I don't believe one-sentence descriptions why the stock market rises or falls are worth much, including today's "the market is worried about a possible recession." This doesn't begin to capture the complexities of why markets around the world had a tough time today. For example, lots of investors had borrowed money in Japan, because that country…
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Posted inBooks Growing older

Oh, no! Just learned that yuppies were baby boomers. I’m crushed.

Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation. And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am. What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned…
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