Posted inHome life

What Laurel leaves me

Recently a HinesSight reader, who would remain nameless except for my writing “Karen Lord,” asked a question that goes right to the heart of my marital relationship, and deserves answering in some detail. Before we get into this, I should add that Karen is our CPA. And a very good CPA at that. Further, she is probably the only liberal/progressive CPA in the entire United States, a real mark of distinction. So, if you call up Karen, tell her Brian sent you. Recently we referred a new client to her, which means, I hope, that we get a free tax…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Anti-partitioning battle continues

The Hines’ battle to save the Earth from greedy land developers, or, at least, the small corner of the Earth that is Spring Lake Estates, continues. A few weeks ago we were surprised and dismayed to learn that the Marion County Hearings Officer had overruled herself on the Nielsen’s lot partitioning case. We won the first appeal, as the Hearings Officer found that the Nielsen’s hydrologist had failed to demonstrate that this partitioning wouldn’t harm the long-term sustainability of groundwater in the surrounding area. When the Nielsen’s appealed this denial, the Marion County Board of Commissioners remanded the case back…
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Posted inEntertainment

“Winged Migration” not for the birds

Meaning, this is a movie to see, because you’ll like it. Really. It is indeed all about birds, with people showing up in just a few scenes (and even then often badly, as when hunters are shown shooting down hard-working geese, gamely migrating along in their beautiful aerodynamic fashion, only to be sent into a downward death spiral for the pleasure of a few guys who think it is macho to kill a defenseless bird with a shotgun). Roger Ebert’s review contains some interesting background information about the film, which I won’t bother to repeat. “Winged Migration” has images that…
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Posted inDogs Science

Serena renaming not in the works

At least, the past few days have convinced us that the family pet definitely shouldn’t be renamed Thor, a.k.a. the Viking thunder god. Notwithstanding Serena’s proud half German-Shepherd bloodline (the other half being Labrador, though her Lab DNA must be missing all retriever instincts, given how much time and energy I spend retrieving tennis balls), we’ve learned that she is a total dog-wuss in the presence of thunder and lightning. Here in the Camp Sherman environs of central Oregon, we’ve had some impressive thunderstorms the past few days. (A few trees reportedly caught fire on Black Butte last night, but…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Suspicions about conservatives confirmed!

I suspected it all along, that hard-core conservatives are psychologically disturbed. And now here’s a study to confirm it. Well, the U.C. Berkeley study doesn’t say exactly that conservatives are psychologically disturbed, but it isn’t hard to draw this conclusion from the findings. I mean, if at “the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality,” that doesn’t sound like the person I’d like to be, or have living next to me. As anyone can tell from listening to talk radio, conservatives can’t tolerate ambiguity very well, so they tend to see and state…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Good news (I guess)

Back on July 17, in my “yin and yang news stories” post, I noted a report that men were paying big bucks in Las Vegas to hunt naked women with paintball guns. Something about this story didn’t seem quite right, but I took it at face value. After all, can’t you believe everything the media tells you? I even saw mention of this on Fox News! (Actually, I guess this should been a tipoff right there. It kills me every time a Fox anchor says, “Fair. Balanced. Unafraid.” Fair, balanced, and Fox News are four words that don’t belong together).…
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Posted inBooks Home life Philosophy

Refrigerator friends, art, and Emerson

An eclectic collection of topics, but it’s been a week since my last post, making it difficult to focus on a single subject. Refrigerator friends…Laurel found a mention of such in an article she was reading a while back. This well describes Ron and Rita, from Seattle, whom we had the pleasure of hosting as weekend guests. A refrigerator friend is someone who unhesitatingly can walk into your house and open the refrigerator without asking, even saying, “What do you have to eat? I’m starving.” The author of the article said that everyone needs some refrigerator friends, because these are…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

The substance of emptiness

I’ve got a Buddhist book called the “The Emptiness of Emptiness.” I bought it mainly because I liked the title. Unfortunately, the title continued to be the best thing I liked about the book, even after I read it. The idea that an idea of emptiness fills up, and thus negates, the emptiness is cool. Buddhism 101. But a whole book on the subject? The title suffices. So I’m running the danger of doing the same thing by even going on as long as I have. But without saying something about emptiness, we’d be stuck in our own isolated islands…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

Yin and Yang news stories

Maybe “yin and yang” isn’t quite the right term to describe the relation between these stories. Maybe there isn’t any relation between them at all. Maybe they are just two stories, each being what each is. Still, somehow they seem to say something about the polar ends of the human condition, not that I know what the two ends consist of, nor what value should be attached to each end. The June 23 issue of Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Harry Potter rules,” all about J.K. Rowling and her fabulously successful series of five Harry Potter books. I’ve…
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Posted inHome life

Evidence suggesting ego-loss is incomplete

Notwithstanding my 30+ years of daily meditation, I still receive some subtle hints that I have not quite attained to the selfless, egoless, Buddha-like nature to which, theoretically, I aspire. Evidence along these lines was received today when I began thinking about the wonderful web site that pops up when you type “weapons of mass destruction” into the Google search engine, and click on “I’m feeling lucky”. Try it, you’ll like it (even if you’re a big Bush fan, this is still a great satire). What this click does, as explained by Google, is that you’re taken directly to the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Savage still on the loose

These days it seems like there isn’t a whole lot of good news in the Oregonian and Statesman-Journal, but Tuesday, I believe, the O had a item in the TV section relating that Michael Savage’s weekend MSNBC “talk” (actually, rant) show had been cancelled. As described in this story, Savage told a caller that he was a sodomite who deserved to get AIDS and die. When I’m feeling masochistic I occasionally tune in to Savage’s late weekday afternoon slot on KXL, though it usually isn’t possible to listen to his hateful, misinformed, childish blather for more than a few minutes.…
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Posted inPhilosophy Recreation

Zen lesson-lite

In my never-ending quest to find a deep meaning in the most trivial of circumstances, so that I may believe that the trivialities which surround me, and in fact, are me, have their roots in some unseen depths of existence, I am trying to attach some sort of Zen significance to the welter of mosquito bites on my arms and legs. “When hiking in the mountains, of what use is mosquito repellant left in the cabin?” This is a koan-lite worthy of much pondering, and, in fact, I have done just that most of today, when I wasn’t busy scratching…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

So, who you gonna’ believe?

Right now, Laurel is out watering trees that we planted on our five-acre Hines Plantation one or two years ago. She shouldn’t have to be doing this. It’s only the first part of July, not the end of August. Normally, we would have gotten about twice as much rain as actually fell in May and June. But this wasn’t a normal spring. On three days in June, I believe, high temperature marks for the date were broken in Salem. Much less rain. Much higher heat. Doesn’t this strongly suggest that something is different with the weather? And not just here,…
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Posted inEntertainment

Movie madness

Laurel and I have been caught up in summer movie madness recently, except we haven’t gone to see any of the movies that people are mad about. No Charlie’s Angels (sexist and lacks redeeming social value, according to Laurel, which are two great reasons to see it, in my no-account opinion) . No Hulk (we agree: movies based on comic book characters are off-limits). No 2 Fast 2 Furious (nothing is more boring than movies with a car theme except the Indy 500, where cars do crash—which is interesting—but only after going around and around in ovals—which isn’t). So we’ve…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

How much more can we stand?

It just keeps getting worse. Just when you think that the Bush administration can’t act any more high-handedly, dishonestly, and destructively-to-the-environment than it already is, we learn that there is more black magic in their evil bag of tricks. This is several day-old news, but it still frosts me—the decision to eliminate any significant mention of global climate change from the environmental report issued by the E.P.A. It really is astounding, how Bush and company are willing to let the planet go down the tubes so they can issue some paybacks to their corporate contributors. Why the public isn’t more…
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Posted inHome life

Surviving the Tour of Homes horror

It’s a macabre love ritual, this Tour of Homes horror I subject myself to each year. Laurel’s birthday was last Saturday, as it is every summer solstice. I made the traditional poppy seed cake, and I made the traditional butter cream frosting: 2/3 of a stick of butter and a full pound of powdered sugar—I never fully realized what a nutritional nightmare cakes are until I started making Laurel’s birthday offering. It’s the husbandly effort that counts, not the aesthetics of the result, for the cake ended up with a strangely collapsed center, for unknown reasons that I like to…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Laurel, the unlicensed geologist

Our (mostly Laurel's) appeal of the Nielsen lot partitioning in Spring Lake Estates continues to take its twists and turns, but the road is inexorably coming closer to its end. Some time back Laurel testified at a hearing where Denny Nielsen and his hydrologist-for-hire, Nick Coffey, presented their (weak) case for overruling the Hearing Officer's initial denial of the lot partitioning. The Marion County Commissioners decided to remand the decision back to the Hearings Officer, so several issues were revisited, such as the number and cause of well deepenings/replacements in the area, and the rate at which groundwater is being…
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Posted inHome life

My kind of humor

No matter how your day is going, a good laugh makes it go better. To that end, I highly recommend a web site with my kind of humor—cynical British wit that zeroes in on the follies of male-female relationships. Check out “things my girlfriend and I have argued about.” I rarely read something that makes me laugh out loud, and in fact, made me incapable of reading it to Laurel because I was choked up with laughter. But some of the (numerous) postings on this site did just that. Be sure to click on Margret’s photo. Margret and the author,…
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Posted inDogs

Erotic Serena.

click to enlarge Because of the bad economic times, we're thinking of branching out into some other entrepreneurial directions. As part of our market research, we'd be interested in the level of interest among HinesSight readers of tasteful pet-erotica. We have a live-in model who works for almost free (dog biscuits are cheap), and Laurel loves to snap photos of her in alluring poses. We're pretty sure a pet-erotica web site would be legal (though one never knows with Ashcroft around) but the question is: how much would people pay to view it? This is one of those secret passions…
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Posted inSustainability

Strawberries say so much

A tale of two strawberries, and what they tell us about the way of the modern world: one was part of a box bought in a Fred Meyer supermarket not long ago, nicely packaged in a plastic container that described its California origins. Large, red, attractive. And quite tasteless. The other came from a half flat of local berries bought last Wednesday from the people who park their pickup near the junction of Liberty and Commercial streets. Smallish, a darker red, slightly blemished. And sweet beyond words. Yet, I just read that Oregon strawberry growers are finding it tough to…
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