Posted inCurrent affairs

Mental health gets talked about at Salem City Club

It's usually good to talk through your mental health problems rather than keeping them bottled up inside of you. Today the Salem City Club did just that, albeit from a policy perspective, in a program called Oregon's Many Mental Health Crises. The not-so-cheery news is that Oregon ranks 49th out of the 50 states in the prevalence of mental illness and access to care. So for sure, we've got a mental health crisis.  State Representative Rob Nosse started things off by talking about how the legislature is trying to fix things. He's chair of the House Joint Committee on Behavioral…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

Bill Maher wrong about transgender athletes and Trump indictment

Bill Maher is a comedian. I like his jokes. It doesn't bother me when some of his one-liners mess with facts in order to get a laugh. That's what comedians often do: exaggerate in order to make a humorous point. What irritates me about Maher is when his playing loose with facts continues from his opening joke-filled monologue to the mostly serious discussion Maher has with his two panelists. Last Friday's show (April 14) featured Maher engaging in extended rants about transgender people and Trump's indictment. I didn't like what he said on both subjects. Maher claimed that transgender women…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

I try ChatGPT. Asking about myself, I’m impressed.

It took me a while, but after hearing a lot about the marvels of ChatGPT, the online chatbot offered by OpenAI, a company whose goal is A.G.I. -- artificial general intelligence that can do anything a human can do -- I got around to trying out ChatGPT just now. (All you need to do this is a free account with OpenAI.) Because I have a significant online presence, and my ego is also significant, my first question for ChatGPT was about myself. I was impressed with the result, which took about five seconds to pop up. Well, after reading that,…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

Caste is a marvelous book about our racial divisions

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn't heard of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, until I read a fairly recent TIME cover story by Wilkerson that provided an overview of Caste. Somehow I'd missed the publication of the book in 2020. Making up for lost time, I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon. It took me a while to finish Caste. For even though Wilkerson is a terrific writer with a smooth style that makes reading her a pleasure, her subject matter isn't cheery. So I'd read a short chapter on most days, rather…
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Posted inHealth

Ozempic shows that obesity often is a medical problem

I wish Bill Maher was a reader of this blog, because this post was stimulated by him. For Maher, who I argue has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths, has an outdated view of people who are obese. Here's how I put it in the above-linked post from last January. Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will…
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Posted inHome life

We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma

The memory is still sharp in my mind of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021. Twelve days without electricity. Lots of tree damage. Many trips into town to get more gasoline to keep our Honda generator functioning. Having to keep our wood stove going to keep the house warm. In short, not fun. So when some friends in our rural south Salem neighborhood told my wife and I that they were getting a Generac whole house generator, our ears perked up. Turns on automatically when the power goes out. Capable of running a heat pump, hot water heater, well…
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Posted inFood and drink Home life Salem

LifeSource dumps my favorite veggie burger. I’m crushed.

It was the cheese that first set off the alarm bells in my brain. Up until then, my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping at LifeSource Natural Foods had gone as it usually does.  Uneventfully. I had no clue that my vegetarian life would be upended before I reached the dairy aisle, my habitual final stop before heading to a checkout register. Glancing at my list to see what my wife and I needed there, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that something had changed in the alternatives-to-meat section. Cheese had taken over several feet of that section,…
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Posted inTai Chi

Why I enjoy Tai Chi as a martial art

Tai Chi is viewed by most people as merely a gentle form of exercise. Which, it certainly is. But there's another side to Tai Chi -- the martial art aspect.  I'm familiar with Tai Chi as a martial art because I'm fortunate to have an instructor here in Salem, Oregon who is highly adept at self-defense applications of Tai Chi moves. Warren Allen came to Tai Chi after a lot of experience in hard style martial arts. So he is able to recognize how Tai Chi can be a soft style martial art like aikido, as contrasted with hard style…
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Posted inEntertainment

Oscars 2023 was great, but I disagree about Best Picture

I always enjoy watching the Oscars show, and this year was no exception. I liked having a host back on stage. The tag-team approach I recall from last year didn't work as well as Jimmy Kimmel providing a continuous presence -- for the whole 3 1/2 hours or so of the 3-hour show. One thing I've learned is to always add an hour to our DVR recording time, which came in handy this year. The way I see it, watching the Oscars is a lot like watching sports. If you have a favorite team, you're going to root for them…
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Posted inScience

Science says first humans had black skin and tightly curled hair

Racism is ridiculous for lots of reasons. A big reason is that science finds no basis for concluding that physical differences between some members of our species, Homo sapiens, make those members inherently superior to other people. In fact, there's no such thing as race, according to science. More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming that these…
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Posted inHealth

My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun

When I had surgery in 2021 to repair an inguinal hernia, my motivation was to have something wrong with me fixed so I could get back to living life as I did before the hernia popped up (literally). But the glaucoma surgery I had today was tougher to get enthusiastic about. There's no way to fix damage that's occurred to the optic nerve. All that can be done is reduce the chance of further damage.  However, Dr. Young, the glaucoma specialist in Portland I was referred to after some significant nerve damage was found in my very nearsighted right eye,…
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Posted inDogs Health Home life

When life goes wrong, it can happen in bunches

Anticipating how some people are going to react to this blog post, I want to start off by making one thing clear: While my wife Laurel, our dog, and I are going through a stretch of more problems in our lives than usual, we're fortunate to have a decent income, good health insurance, and a pleasant home. Lots of people have worse problems than we do, with fewer resources available to deal with them. Like, anyone homeless. Having hopefully defused the "privilege" objection to what I'm about to say, my main point is simple: Life can be tough, no matter…
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Posted inHome life Salem

We find that Best Buy sucks and Kelly’s rocks

My wife has been going through Best Buy hell after an incompetent salesperson ordered the wrong cooktop. Laurel had taken a Consumer Reports rating of induction cooktops into the Salem Best Buy store, pointed to the General Electric model that she wanted, and trusted that the paperwork she got was correct. Sure, she should have double-checked the model number. Or I could have. We admit that we weren't completely blameless in the mixup that led to Best Buy taking out our current radiant cooktop and installing what turned out to be a newer model GE radiant cooktop. We simply assumed…
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Posted inSalem

Why Salem snow has been so much less than Portland snow

Last night on the 11 pm news on KGW, Matt Zaffino said that Salem and the rest of the central Willamette Valley would get the most snow on Wednesday and Thursday.  At that time Portland wasn't even under a Winter Weather Advisory, which was issued only for the Central Willamette Valley and South Willamette Valley until 10 am on Thursday. But if you've been watching the evening news on Portland television stations, you know that the Portland area has been getting a lot of snow. Here in Salem, hardly anything so far. On the 6 pm news today, Zaffino explained…
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Posted inHome life

Schools should meet needs of both visual and verbal thinkers

Today our monthly Salon discussion group talked about a bunch of interesting topics, including the difference between verbal and visual ways of thinking. I brought this subject up, saying that I've started to read a story in The New Yorker about Temple Grandin and how she uses her visual skills to come up with more humane ways of designing slaughterhouses.  (As a vegetarian, I don't think slaughterhouses can be humane, but if there's ways to reduce the suffering of animals, that's a good thing.) Here's an excerpt from Thought Process, the story title in the print edition, which became How…
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Posted inSports

2023 Super Bowl made me feel pleasingly united

Most seasons I watch one NFL game: the Super Bowl. That was the case this year also. I enjoy football a lot, but the college game always has appealed more to me, probably because then I get to root for Oregon teams, and Oregon doesn't have a NFL team. However, I do consider it my non-sacred duty to watch the Super Bowl. It's an American tradition. And because it's the most important NFL game of the year, I get excited watching it. Partly that's because even though I don't have any favorite team during the regular season, I read enough…
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Posted inCoronavirus Health

I get Paxlovid “rebound,” but I’m OK with being Covid positive again

Six days ago I completed my 5-day course of Covid treatment with Paxlovid, which basically puts a brake on replication of the virus, giving your body a chance to deal with it before it gets up a big head of Covid steam. I commemorated that event with a blog post, "My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid 'rebound.'" I said: My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good.  And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like…
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Posted inCoronavirus Health

My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid “rebound”

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen.  My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good.  And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Nobody really knows how many people who take Paxlovid either get Covid symptoms after the 5-day treatment is over, or test positive after testing first positive, then negative, then positive again.…
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Posted inCoronavirus Health

I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020.  After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse. But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result.  That kicked off a flurry of phone calls. First, I called my Salem Health family physician's office. I talked with…
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Posted inEntertainment

I didn’t like “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie. Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime. After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little. Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters…
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