Posted inHumor Sports

Along with me, Oregon football team has #4 ranking

It was tough, but I did it! Last Saturday I pulled out a win against Ohio State, defying the odds and 100,000 crazed red-clad fans who desperately wanted me to lose so their team could maintain or improve on it's #3 in the nation ranking. Oh, guess I also need to give some credit to the University of Oregon football team. They were the ones who took the field against Ohio State.  But the way I felt after the game, I was right there with them -- a 72 year old guy who didn't even play football in high school,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

Oregon’s changing demographics — a Salem City Club talk

Today it was refreshing to hear Ethan Sharygin speak to the Salem City Club about Oregon's changing demographics. As befits the Director of the Population Research Center at Portland State University, Sharygin was 100% factual and 0% political.  These days that ratio often is completely reversed, especially when the fact-challenged side of the political spectrum is doing the talking. So my mind relished the data-filled slides Sharygin shared. Because of Covid, we met via Zoom, which made it easy for me to grab screenshots of most of his slides. In the course of introducing Sharygin, Russ Beaton made an interesting…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

Life is only predictable looking backward

My wife and I have been married for 31 years. Looking back, it was meant to be. But almost certainly that's an illusion, because life only seems predictable after things already have happened. And even that is an illusion.  To understand why, let's look more closely at how Laurel and I met. The way I usually describe this is true, yet incomplete: I responded to a personals ad Laurel placed in Willamette Week back when the Portland alternative paper only came in a print edition. In a 2016 post on my Church of the Churchless blog, "Who's afraid of The Big…
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Posted inHome life

The curious case of MFS Total Return Fund (MSFRX) distribution history

I'm a long-time owner of the MFS Total Return fund. This is a well-respected mutual fund with a usual 60-40 split between stocks and bonds/cash. So the fund generates a fairly generous income stream. Many years ago a personal holding company founded by my grandfather and uncle merged with the Total Return fund. The fund got a bunch of quality stocks, and the personal holding company received Total Return Fund shares equal in value to what the stocks were worth. (The fund absorbed all of the capital gains from the stocks, a big benefit to the personal holding company.) After…
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Posted inHome life

My tip for starting a Stihl “easy start” chainsaw

I'm no chainsaw expert, but I've owned a small Stihl chainsaw for many years, needing it on our ten acre property in rural south Salem, Oregon.  This year I got a larger Stihl chainsaw after a bad February ice storm decimated many trees. They were in short supply around here for a month or so, but I finally went into Ace Hardware and saw that chainsaws were available. I ended up getting the MS 251C, an easy start Stihl model. I liked the idea of easy starting, along with being able to easily adjust the chain tension without a tool.…
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Posted inEntertainment

“The Chair” is a great look at college free speech

I know some retired Willamette University professors who would love "The Chair" on Netflix. This is a short (three hour) series that covers a lot of ground: college politics, free speech/cancel culture, how minorities are treated in academia. My wife and I liked it a lot. Sandra Oh, who I came to know and love in "Killing Eve," has a very different role here as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English Department at a smallish university. She's terrific, as are all the other actors, notably including Everly Carganilla, who plays Kim's adopted daughter.  Though by far the youngest…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Maskless Oregonians, here’s what I’m thinking when I see you

Public health experts say we shouldn't shame people who choose not to be vaccinated or ignore mandates to wear a mask in indoor public spaces.  OK. I get that. Shaming isn't a good way to change behavior. Anyway, I'm too polite and well-mannered to go around telling maskless Oregonians what I think when I see them scoffing at Governor Brown's order to wear a mask because of the highly contagious Delta variant that has filled up almost every general hospital and ICU bed in this state.  This is causing non-Covid patients to die unnecessarily, because the mostly unvaccinated Covid patients…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Afghanistan is horrible, but Biden is doing right thing

For the past few days I've been agonizing over how I feel about the situation in Afghanistan. It pains me that the horrific scenes of panicked people at the Kabul airport trying to flee their country are happening on Biden's watch, since I view him as hugely more competent than Trump, and so far he's mostly done the right things as president. Last night my daughter, Celeste, and I talked by phone. Even though we're both progressives, much of our conversation centered on what was happening in Afghanistan.  Almost certainly the Taliban takeover will doom Afghan women and girls to…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Covid craziness tweets to make you outraged (and laugh)

For the past few days I've been collecting tweets from my Twitter feed related to the current Covid state of affairs. Most have to do with the horror show of Republican governors in Florida and Texas doing their best to kill people in their states by trying to prevent mask mandates, including in schools -- where children younger than 12 can't get a vaccine yet. Several tweets pertain to the worsening state of affairs here in Oregon. And one humorous tweet, my favorite, is from a woman in Tennesee who sent a marvelous email to school authorities regarding their policy…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Covid reality: thoughts are not facts

Driving into Salem today, listening to a news channel on satellite radio, I heard a public health expert say something that made me grab a piece of paper and write it down as soon as I came to a stop: Thoughts are not facts.  She was referring to wearing masks in schools as they reopen after a summer break. Like when a student or parent says, "But I thought that wasn't going to be necessary since Covid cases were declining so much a few months ago." OK. You thought that. But thoughts aren't facts, they're just thoughts. The only way…
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Posted inHealth

My hernia operation shows weirdness of hospital billing

I've been meaning to share what my May 6 hernia operation at Salem Hospital cost, because this shows how strange health care billing can be. But I'd been putting this off -- until I was spurred into blog post action by a story in today's Statesman Journal, "Salem Hospital lacks pricing transparency, new report says." Now, what I've shared below doesn't have anything directly to do with pricing transparency, but indirectly it does. I'm on Medicare. My insurance company is Regence MedAdvantage. Here's what the Medicare billing statement showed for my hernia operation. I combined the line items into categories,…
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Posted inSports

These Tokyo Olympic moments surprised me

I'm so old, it feels like I've been watching the Olympics ever since those ancient Greeks wrestled in the nude, foreshadowing gay pride for athletic muscular dudes. Thus I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics, which were supposed to be the 2020 Olympics if Covid hadn't thrown a pandemic wrench into the gears of the games. The opening ceremony bored me. I figured that Japan would put on something to surpass the ceremony in China some years ago, which was a mesmerizing spectacle. But no, I had to watch pieces of wood being shuffled around…
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Posted inHome life

Goodbye DR Field Mower, hello John Deere X394

It was a bittersweet moment when I sold the DR Field Mower with lawnmower attachment that I'd bought in 2016. Over the past 25 years or so I've owned maybe five versions of the DR Field Mower, each better than the last. They've been put to a lot of work mowing grassy natural fields on our ten acres in rural south Salem, along with our lawn. I've written about my field mowing experiences in a number of blog posts: here, here, here, here, here, here. But as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. Hopefully so better things…
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Posted inHome life

Hey, Salemians, start a Salon discussion group

Do you enjoy intelligent talks with friends? Does embracing the art of conversation appeal to you? If so, consider starting a Salon discussion group.  That's what my wife, Laurel, and I did back in the early 1990s. Since, a group of about a dozen people has met each month in someone's home for three hours of so of pleasant conversing. Here's a photo of us in December 2017. Our Salon membership has changed some in the past four years. But everybody in the photo is still part of our group, even though Jim (front row on left) has moved to…
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Posted inBooks Salem

Five reasons to buy Kelly Williams Brown’s new book

I buy and read lots of books. So many, I deserve a bookaholic diagnosis. But at first I had some reservations about getting a new book by Kelly Williams Brown, the Salem author who wrote Adulting (about becoming a grown-up) and Gracious (a modern etiquette book of sorts). Even though I admired the writing Brown did when she was a Statesman Journal reporter, I figured that regarding Adulting, I was already so grown-up I have one foot in the grave, and regarding Gracious, I'm at the age when you just feel entitled to act however you damn well please --…
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Posted inBlack Butte Ranch Salem

Black Butte Ranch roads have lessons for Salem streets

Salem, like almost all cities, isn't a pleasant place to drive around in. The exceptions are quiet residential neighborhoods where the speed limit is low, 25 mph or a bit higher, and the streets are narrow with plenty of trees. That's why the roads in central Oregon's Black Butte Ranch, where my wife and I have owned a 1/4 share in a vacation house for about four years, can teach Salem streets some valuable lessons. Wikipedia says that the permanent residents in Black Butte Ranch only numbered 366 in the 2010 census. But "During the peak tourist season, the population,…
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Posted inSalem Sustainability

Oregon is becoming a climate change hellscape

We're not quite there yet, thankfully. Oregon hasn't transitioned from a wonderful place to live into a hellscape -- "a harshly unpleasant place or environment." But the handwriting is on the global warming wall. Today my daughter, Celeste, her husband, Patrick, and my granddaughter, Evelyn, arrived to visit us at the Black Butte Ranch house that we have a 1/4 share in.  They're from southern California, though Celeste was born and raised in Oregon.  Chatting with them as we ate pizza and salad outside at the charming Lakeside Bistro, I pointed out how little snow there is on the Three…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

Summer of Soul — great movie about 1969’s Black Woodstock

Last night, via Hulu, my wife and I finished watching Summer of Soul, a hugely entertaining movie about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that featured outdoor concerts with musicians such as... Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and The Fifth Dimension. It's been called the Black Woodstock. However, a big difference is that Woodstock, which also happened in 1969, became a cultural phenomenon, with a movie about the festival coming out just a year later in 1970. By contrast, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival sat untouched for…
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Posted inDogs Sustainability

Fireworks should be shunned like cigarettes are

I'm not delusional. I don't believe fireworks are going to be banned anytime soon. Heck, here in Salem, Oregon, the City Manager ignored pleas from the public and several city councilors to ban the use of fireworks this year given a severe drought condition and recent record-breaking high temperatures. But I'm hopeful that with enough citizen education, the downside of fireworks will be understood so well, anyone setting them off on or around the Fourth of July will be viewed by most people with the same don't you know better attitude a cigarette smoker is these days. I've been familiar…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Yellow jackets and forecasts say weekend will be HOT

Before sharing how damn HOT several weather forecasts are saying the coming weekend in Salem will be, this sign my wife put up yesterday speaks to how yellow jackets are viewing our highly unusual weather. We're used to yellow jackets causing problems on our rural property during the summer. But we rarely, if ever, see them acting aggressively before late July or August. That's when I wrote "Killing yellow jackets in their hidey-holes," my detailed description of how Laurel and I normally deal with yellow jackets. Yet here we are in late June with Laurel getting stung as she walked…
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