Posted inSports

Hoping for some Oregon State magic in NCAA baseball playoffs

Once again, I've become an Oregon State baseball fan now that the NCAA playoffs have begun. I would have started my fandom earlier, but DirecTV still doesn't carry the Pac12 Networks, so I've got no way to watch most the games in the regular season. Well, I've also become an Oregon baseball fan, since they too are in the playoffs. And at the moment, faring better than Oregon State -- which lost to LSU today, so that means Oregon State has to beat Sam Houston tonight (score is 3-1 in OSU's favor at the moment), then beat LSU twice tomorrow…
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Posted inEntertainment

I’ll miss Succession. But not what the Roy family stood for.

The past five years and four seasons of Succession, a highly entertaining and addictive HBO series, captivated me and my wife.  There's never been a TV show that captured so brilliantly the devious machinations of a powerful family, the Roys, as the children of billionaire mogul Logan Roy vie to succeed him as the leader of his company.  Without exception the acting was superb. The writing, exquisite. The plot twists, tantalizing. The humor, darkly funny.  I was sad when the closing credits appeared on last Sunday's final episode of the concluding season. While the Roy family couldn't be said to…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

A little Memorial Day tale of grocery coupon kindness

Memorial Day is about recognizing the ultimate sacrifice for our country: losing one's life. That deserves a lot of praise. But so do lesser sacrifices ordinary Americans perform every day to make things better for their fellow citizens. That's who I want to honor today. Not just those who have died fighting for the United States, but everybody who engages in actions large or small for the greater good. What happened to me while grocery shopping last week got me thinking about this. I was in a checkout line at the south Salem Fred Meyer. The clerk had scanned my…
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Posted inEntertainment

My memory of Tina Turner

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.) I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.
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Posted inSalem

Check out slides of the exciting re-development of Truitt Brothers cannery

There's some really encouraging stuff happening in Salem's urban core. Hey, at some point we may not need to feel like the boring-by-comparison waypoint between Portland and Eugene. That was the upbeat message I got at today's Salem City Club program about the development of downtown and riverfront properties. The speakers were Jordan Truitt, who used to be plant manager of the Truitt Brothers cannery just north of downtown, Jim Vu, board president of the Salem Main Street Association, and Shelly Ehenger, Urban Development Program Manager for the City of Salem. In this post I'm just going to share the…
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Posted inHome life

I’m told, “Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man”

I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy. Yes, I get irritated at people. But almost always I either keep my irritation to myself, or express it in as respectful a manner as possible. That's why what happened at my athletic club today surprised me. I was almost finished using the weight machines in what used to be called the Circuit Training room. It was termed that because the basic idea of it is that you go from machine to machine, getting a full body workout. But some club members who focus on the free weights and different machines in an adjoining room…
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Posted inHealth

How my trabeculectomy is doing 7 1/2 weeks after surgery

This is a follow-up to my initial blog post about the trabeculectomy eye surgery I had on March 6, reported on in "My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun." As a Johns Hopkins article about trabeculectomy says, this surgery is aimed at controlled eye pressure in people like me with glaucoma, when eye drops or laser surgery either aren't doing a good enough job at lowering eye pressure -- the only viable way of keeping glaucoma from doing more damage to the eye -- or someone can't use those other methods. In my case, Dr. Young,…
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Posted inHome life

My bad handwriting makes for interesting grocery checkout discussions

Since I'm 74, I suppose I'd have an excuse for my bad handwriting if I chose to make one up. Like, my hands are shaky due to a neurological condition. But actually my handwriting has been minimally legible to others for most of my life. Me, I can generally read what I write pretty well, though not always. On the plus side, my affliction makes for some interesting conversations in the grocery store checkout lane. Here's what the clerk at LifeSource Natural Foods here in Salem, Oregon and I talked about today. Clerk: The number you wrote on this container…
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Posted inTai Chi

Here’s a video of me doing Water Boxing (Liu He Ba Fa)

After practicing karate, a hard style martial art, for about 12 years, in 2004 I shifted to learning Tai Chi, a soft style martial art -- albeit one with useful martial applications.  I've been fortunate to have an instructor here in Salem, Oregon who had a lot of experience in several karate styles before also embracing Tai Chi, which is all that Warren Allen teaches now. So he understands the martial side of Tai Chi. Warren began learning Tai Chi from a Chinese man who used to live in Hong Kong, where he learned the Water Boxing form, Liu He…
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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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