Posted inNeighborhood

Tree planters are lovers

This fall-bright weeping willow is on a small island in the middle of Spring Lake, a short walk through the woods from our house. Every time I walk by the tree I mentally thank Denny Nielsen, who planted the tree and regularly rowed a boat out to water it during the willow’s infancy. Denny and his wife Laurie were some of the first people to start living in Spring Lake Estates (south of Salem, near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge) when the development sprang up in the early 1970s. They have moved out, but won’t be forgotten by the neighborhood weeping…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Bill Long, a friendly reviewer

Yesterday I was pleased to have Bill Long tell me that he had posted a review of my book about Plotinus, “Return to the One,” on his web site. Bill is a friend, so I sort of expected a friendly review. But Bill also is a most straightforward and honest guy, so the “sort of” was a necessary qualifier. Bottom line: Bill liked my book, though he has some reservations about what he considers Plotinus’ excessively abstract approach to spirituality. Bill is an ordained minister, an attorney, and much more besides. He has as much capacity for abstract thought as…
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Posted inHome life

Give me liberty or give me gerbil

It’s fortunate that Patrick Henry didn’t have the same attitude toward death as I do. Or, as I did. For yesterday’s visit to our attorney showed that I’ve become more accepting of my own death—or, as I used to call it, my own gerbil—than was the case eleven years ago. Laurel and I needed to update our living wills and directives to physicians that express how you want to be treated at the end of life when hope is gone. This also was a chance to check on the status of some living trusts we barely understood that we had…
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Posted inFamily

The Tao of Paris Hilton

It’s dawned on me that I should pay more respect to Paris Hilton, my dear second cousin who, sadly, I have never met. In the past Laurel and I have enjoyed making catty observations about Paris’ seeming vacuousness. Though undeniably beautiful and sexy, her persona has a Barbie Doll quality that makes you wonder, “Is there anything there?” However, a recent Oregonian article about Paris led me to look on her in a different light. Her emptiness is the key to her recursive ability to be famous for being famous. Not just for fifteen minutes, but for…who knows?...perhaps a lifetime.…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Mini-secret of universe revealed

Back in the late 1960’s, illicit pharmacology brought me regularly to marvelous “Aha!” insights into the ultimate nature of the universe. The reason I currently neither have a Nobel prize in physics, nor am I recognized as a great spiritual sage, is that the insights were only insightful while in my artificially altered state of consciousness. They could be shared, though, which lent them more validity than they probably deserved. One moonless night in 1968 a friend and I were rolling rocks off the edge of a ravine in the Santa Cruz mountains, marveling at how long they took to…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

For want of a zipper, an hour was lost

I’ve always enjoyed the familiar fable that begins with “For want of a nail the shoe was lost” and ends, after the horse is lost for want of a shoe, and the rider is lost for want of a horse, and the battle is lost for want of a rider, with the loss of a whole damn kingdom. Nail. Kingdom. One so slight, the other so tremendous. What sort of connection could exist between them that causes a single small horseshoe nail to have the power to overthrow a vast kingdom? Science would call it chaos theory or non-linear relationships,…
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Posted inHome life

“Playbuck” press release: What do does really want?

For immediate release by Playbuck magazine “Where all our girls are buck-naked and doe-eyed” Playbuck magazine, the leading voice for male deer, is pleased to report the results of recent in-depth research into the all-important question for our readers, what do does really want? Interviews were conducted with a random sample of 462 female deer, all of mating age. They were asked what turns them on, and what doesn’t. Surprisingly, 86% of these tawny beauties said that they like their bucks to sport some macho antler velvet in the fall let’s-get-it-on season. “I can’t stand the clean antler look,” said…
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Posted inPhilosophy Writing/Weblogs

“Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing”

When is it wiser to not know something? What distinguishes scientific knowledge from spiritual knowledge? Could I cram an Oscar Wilde quotation into the essay right off the bat? These are some of the questions that I pondered when I began to work on “Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing” some years ago. Here's the PDF file. Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing It is 24 pages long, so takes a little while to download on a slow connection (you know the mantra that accompanies PDF files: “get the free Acrobat Reader if you don’t have it already”).…
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Posted inDogs

What you’re missing if you don’t have a dog

Oh, you poor cat owners. If you came home late tonight from a class, as I did, your pet probably greeted you with a meek “Meow” (if he or she even deigned to wake up). You then poured some kibble in a bowl, went on to prepare your own dinner, and now you and your cat likely are sitting in front of the TV, kitty contentedly purring on your lap. How sad. You are missing out on the "joys" of dog ownership (note the ironic quotation marks.) Let me give you an example of what having a dog can add…
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Posted inMiscellany

Cutest baby in Salem

I ran into the daughter of a friend yesterday at the 10th anniversary celebration LifeSource Natural Foods was putting on. Her baby was happily mouthing one of the free pizza samples. The sight brought back memories of how much work our washing machine put in when my own daughter was that age. Pretty quickly—instantly, in fact—the conversation turned to what also, if I were the baby’s mother, would be the first words out of my mouth when I met an acquaintance with my baby in tow. Heck, they’d be the first words when I met a stranger too. “She won…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

We’re coping in our own ways

Everything changed post-November 2. The world is different now. Much scarier. But as Mark Morford says it so well in his inimitable style, the Neo-Con and Christian Right terrorists win if we moderates and liberals don’t go about our lives with energetic confident abandon. Just because the nation’s Moron/Genius Bell Curve had a marked deviation from normal on election day doesn’t mean that those who voted for Kerry have to be affected by the idiocy of a majority of voters. So Laurel and I are successfully coping in our own ways, after a few days of post-election did-that-really-happen? attempted withdrawal…
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Posted inEntertainment

“Before Sunset”

I couldn’t help but think of “My Dinner With Andre” as we watched “Before Sunset” at Salem’s one and only artsy film theatre, Salem Cinema. “Before Sunset” is almost non-stop conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). Appropriately, and as she usually does, the Salem Cinema proprietor came into the theatre to talk about the movie before it started, one of the many things I like about how she runs her business. Currently two movies are being shown concurrently, so she also plugged “The Story of the Weeping Camel.” Glancing at the small audience she said to a…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Need to find my Inner Canada

The last thing Laurel said last night before she went to sleep was, “We’ve got to move to Canada.” And the first thing she said upon waking up this morning was, “I’m going to stay in bed all day with the sheets pulled up over my head.” Diagnosis: severe post-election-stress syndrome. No doubt lots of other Kerry supporters are feeling the same way today. I’m in a bit better shape than Laurel, but I’m scheduled for my annual physical exam this afternoon and had to be honest when I filled out the “Review of Systems” section on the Patient Health…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Can’t believe I canvassed for Kerry

After I made my commitment to motionlessness with Move On PAC phone canvassing, I can’t believe that Laurel was able to drag me out Saturday morning to do door-to-door canvassing for the Democratic Party’s Carry Oregon campaign. But here’s the proof, sort of. Laurel is barely visible on the far right, and I’m hidden behind the camera, per usual. We were instructed to meet at a south Salem school at 10:00 am to get our marching orders from the party organizer in the middle of the photo. She tried to hand both Laurel and me a clipboard, meaning that we’d…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Geekiest electoral-vote predictor site

I’ve made the rounds of quite a few sites that predict the outcome of the presidential race. My favorite, because it is the geekiest (and consequently, most believable) is the geekly named "Electoral College Meta-Analysis." It’s the product of a Princeton professor whose specialties are biophysics and neuroscience. Dr. Wang says that he makes heavy use of probability and statistics in analyzing complex experimental data, so I’m ready to believe his regularly updated meta-analysis of state polls. Especially because today he is showing Kerry over Bush, 281 to 257 (with undecideds included). If you visit his site, scroll down to…
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Posted inRecreation

Police do read weblogs

Sender: “Black Butte Police” Subject: “Weblogs” This header definitely caught my eye as I scanned my Outlook inbox for new email messages. What had I done? And why was the Black Butte Police force coming after me for doing it? I skipped past the daily deluge of plaintive missives from the Kerry campaign, Democratic Party, and MoveOn.Org to click on this mysterious communication. The message was short: “By the way, we do read weblogs! Your citation will be forthcoming….Just joking. Gil Zaccaro, Chief Black Butte Ranch PD” I was immediately appreciative to Chief Zaccaro for adding “just joking.” But now…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Philosophy

Please God, no more sky-pointing

Last night I decided that a total eclipse of the moon was more common than the Red Sox winning the World Series, so I dashed inside at 8:00 pm to finish watching the real wonder of the evening. The last innings were as satisfying as I had hoped. For while my Red Sox fandom only began eight games ago, when they were down three-zip to the Yankees, it has been as genuine as it has been brief. It’s easy to like a team that calls themselves “idiots.” The linked article says, “Last year's Red Sox used the theme ‘Cowboy Up’…
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Posted inHome life

Well, that was fun

Getting there right on time and then waiting for three hours. Uncomfortable chairs. Having to fill out forms that ask personal questions. Outdated reading material. Other people being called while you sit…and sit…and sit. Why, I found that jury duty is just like going to the doctor. Except you go to the doctor because you have a problem that needs to be fixed. With jury duty, the problem is that you are there and you want to be somewhere else. At least, this seemed to be the case with all of my fellow jury duty selectees this morning, and it…
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Posted inHome life

Tai Chi cures jury duty blues

Tai Chi, it works. After a month of once-a-week classes, and some episodic at-home practicing, a real test of Tai Chi’s efficacy came this evening. For at 5:10 pm I listened to the recorded message at the Marion County jury duty office. And at 5:11 pm I was seriously bummed out. “Those called for jury duty on Tuesday, October 26 with numbers from 1 to 315 are to report by 8:00 am.” My number is 75. Bummer! 8:00 am. Double bummer!! I’m usually not even out of bed by then, much less meditated, showered, fed, dressed, and drived (to downtown…
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Posted inHome life

I go dumpster diving

I spent about eight hours yesterday dumpster diving. Or, more accurately, dumpster loading. With a few other folks I helped a friend get rid of lots of unwanted stuff that was clogging up her carport and basement. My job ended up being the trash arranger. People would leave junk on the end of the industrial-sized dumpster, and I’d walk back and forth with loads of discards, carefully placing material for maximum space utilization. This is me and my dumpster early on in our relationship. We got to know each other much more intimately as the day wore on, which ended…
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