Posted inCurrent affairs

LGBTQ people may not be born that way, but they’re formed that way

The Sunday New York Times had a great idea in the opinion section of the August 4, 2024 issue: have some of their columnists debunk a bit of conventional wisdom in their circles. Here's how it was described. Our world is more connected than ever. But it's never been easier to find yourself shepherded into a comfortable herd made up of close friends or political allies, your social set or professional peers. And those herds are the perfect environment for groupthink to thrive, to allow dubious beliefs or weak arguments to masquerade as unquestionable truisms. We asked nine of our…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

I watched The Handmaid’s Tale to learn what reelecting Trump would be like

It was a tough job, but I had to do it -- watching every second of every episode of the five seasons of The Handmaid's Tale, a show that I wasn't interested in when it aired from April 2017 to November 2022, but which grabbed my attention this year for a couple of reasons. One was that I'd seen Elisabeth Moss in The Veil and was captivated by her acting. She's the lead character in The Handmaid's Tale. Another was that I wanted to see what lessons The Handmaid's Tale had for our current political situation, where Donald Trump is…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs

Relax, today’s big stock market decline is no big deal

If you're like me, someone with money invested in the United States stock market, today wasn't fun. All the major market indices dropped considerably, following a couple of declining days last week.  The S&P 500 was down 3.0%, the Dow 2.6%, the NASDAQ 3.4%. I don't believe one-sentence descriptions why the stock market rises or falls are worth much, including today's "the market is worried about a possible recession." This doesn't begin to capture the complexities of why markets around the world had a tough time today. For example, lots of investors had borrowed money in Japan, because that country…
No Comments
Posted inBooks Growing older

Oh, no! Just learned that yuppies were baby boomers. I’m crushed.

Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation. And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am. What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment Sports

I loved the Olympics opening ceremony, including drag queen part

When I first heard that the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was going to be held on the Seine River, with boats carrying the parade of nations, I thought that this could be a big mistake by the organizers. Why not respect tradition and have the ceremony in a stadium, like it always has been? Well, my thought was the mistake, not the decision to have the opening ceremony on the Seine. I recorded the lengthy ceremony. My wife and I are only partway through it, but we've loved what we've seen so far, and I know that we'll love the…
No Comments
Posted inSalem

Bound Salem Weekly issues now can be seen at Willamette Heritage Center

Salem Weekly, our city's much-beloved (and for some conservatives, much-hated) alternative newspaper that published from April 2003 to October 2018 still lives on in a certain sense -- thanks to Jim Scheppke, a retired librarian who led an effort to have almost all of the Salem Weekly issues professionally bound, then donated to the Willamette Heritage Center, where they can be reviewed by the public. Yesterday afternoon some people with ties to Salem Weekly and the binding project met at the Willamette Heritage Center to admire the volumes. We chatted about how much Salem Weekly meant to us, expressing thanks…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs

I wish Biden could have heard what my Democratic group said about him

This afternoon the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of gathered in a member's living room. Right away, a topic of conversation sprang up, because it was at the top of everyone's mind. Should President Biden withdraw from the presidential race? We spent about an hour talking about this. The discussion was vigorous. Everybody had something to say about the question. And in the end there was a clear consensus. All eleven of us felt that Biden should withdraw.  Everybody in the group is a Democrat, though naturally we disagree about many political subjects. The…
No Comments
Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

If you don’t like the record-breaking Oregon heat wave, don’t vote for Trump

It's been a rough four days here in the Willamette Valley, as well as in much of the rest of Oregon. Record high temperatures have been set on multiple days in many locations, sometimes breaking previous records by not just a little, but a lot.  Today it was 104 degrees in Salem, where I live, according to my car's thermometer. Tomorrow is expected to be just as hot, with temperatures in the high 80s and low 90s for the following six days. This isn't normal. The average high for today in Salem is 82, so we were 22 degrees above…
3
Posted inFood and drink Salem

I’ve stopped using Grubhub and DoorDash after two restaurants asked me to

Live and learn. Until recently I'd never used restaurant ordering apps on my iPhone. Old-fashioned guy that I was, I'd phone a restaurant and call in my order. But then I decided to join the 21st century, so I installed Grubhub and DoorDash.  Not knowing any better, I figured that restaurants liked these apps. Or at least, they were okay with them as alternative ways of getting orders from customers other than their own web sites. So for the past few months I've been using Grubhub and DoorDash to order from three restaurants in south Salem that I'd gotten into…
No Comments
Posted inHealth

I benefitted from my sessions at Salem’s Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic

Today I had my eighth weekly treatment from Karen Kaufman at her Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic here in Salem (Oregon). This was my first serious dive into the acupuncture waters, having previously only waded in the shallow pool of single sessions with a couple of acupuncturists. Karen Kaufman, Ph.D., L.Ac I'm convinced that Kaufman helped relieve the sciatica pain in my right leg considerably. Naturally I can't be sure of this, since I'm not a random controlled experiment, just one person who was drawn to try acupuncture after physical therapy didn't do much to relieve the pain, over the counter medications…
No Comments
Posted inHealth

I find that cold remedies can be worse than the cold

I don't get sick very often. So at first I couldn't believe that I had a cold, irrationally thinking that even though I don't have allergies, my nasal congestion was due to that, rather than a cold.  But a week ago, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. Not being able to breathe through my nose was annoying, as was breathing via my mouth. Propping my head up on a couple of pillows didn't help. Neither did spraying saline solution in my nostrils, my usual approach to mild everyday congestion.  So the next day I headed off to Walgreens to…
No Comments
Posted inHome life

Photos of our yard and property, to remind me why we don’t want to move

We bought our rural south Salem house, which was built in 1973, from a couple in their mid-60s who said they were selling because the house on five acres was too much for them to maintain anymore. Well, 35 years later, Laurel and I now are in our mid-70s, taking care of the same house (extensively updated by us) and an additional five acres, for a total of ten, since we were able to buy an undeveloped neighboring lot quite a few years ago. Someday, probably, we'll have to move. In case I ever wonder why it took us so…
1
Posted inSports

Oregon State and Oregon both in NCAA baseball super regionals. Exciting!

It's a tradition for me. Since for many years I've been unable to watch the Pac-12 Networks due to their never-ending and hugely irritating pissing match with DirecTV, the only time I get to see the Oregon State baseball team play is if they either make it to the Pac-12 tournament championship game (didn't happen in 2024) or are selected to play in the NCAA tournament (which did happen in 2024). So I was able to get to know the OSU baseball team this past weekend when they hosted the Corvallis regional. Three wins in four days -- Sunday's game…
No Comments
Posted inEntertainment

Five recent streaming shows that I liked a lot

These days, on broadcast television I mainly watch news and political programs. For entertainment, it's almost entirely streaming shows that appeal to me. Here's five recent offerings that I liked a lot, or at least enough close enough to a lot that I was eager to watch all of the episodes in the series. They're ranked in the order of my liking, with (1) being my favorite. (1) The Veil - HuluAmazingly, this was my first real introduction to Elisabeth Moss, who does a terrific job playing an intelligence agent tasked with finding out whether an Islamic woman in a…
No Comments
Posted inHealth

Be sure to take Plenvu rather than Gavilyte for your colonoscopy prep

I've had four or five colonoscopies, can't remember exactly. Started when I was fifty, then, because unlucky me always has benign polyps, I'm scheduled for another colonoscopy 4-5 years later, while my more fortunate wife gets away with a 10 year repeat (she can even have the test for colon cancer that doesn't require a colonoscopy). Tomorrow I'm having another one. So today was the preparation day: no solid food, with the colon cleansing prep starting at 4 pm, with a repeat at 11 pm, a couple of hours from now.  I'm looking forward to the colonoscopy itself tomorrow morning,…
1
Posted inHealth Salem

The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation

Thanks to a story in the Statesman Journal, I learned that Salem's first psilocybin service center has opened on State Street. It's aptly named The Psilocybin Center.  Husband and wife Sammy Kahuk and Dina Odeh have opened Salem’s first psilocybin service center, and a second location is being licensed. The Psilocybin Center at 2585 State St. offers personalized “psychedelic mushrooms” sessions to anyone over the age of 21 for behavioral or physical health conditions or for spiritual or recreational purposes. It took me a while to find the web site for The Psilocybin Center, but once I did, I was…
1
Posted inCurrent affairs

Elon Musk has become an annoying genius

There's no doubt that Elon Musk is a brilliant guy, arguably a genius, who deserves a lot of credit for his accomplishments with Tesla, Space X, and other business pursuits. I've been a happy Starlink customer (a Space X offering) since it's early beta days, and it's enabled us to trade our crappy 7 Mbps copper phone line DSL for a snappy 250 Mbps satellite broadband here in rural south Salem, Oregon. But Elon Musk has gone from being fascinating to annoying. Not to everybody, because a big cause of my annoyance with Musk is what he's done with Twitter…
No Comments
Posted inGrowing older Health

After five months, I finally get medical treatment for my severe sciatica

If you've ever had severe sciatica pain, you'll find this blog post a heck of a lot more interesting than if you haven't. Usually that nerve pain is produced by problems with the spine, either degenerative or following an injury.  I wrote about my current bout with sciatica back on March 23 in "If you're wondering about my absence, the answer is sciatica." An excerpt: It can be an extremely annoying pain. My worse moments have been in the middle in the night when I need to use the bathroom, or when I get up after sleeping. A few times…
1
Posted inCurrent affairs

Stormy Daniels, porn star, is more moral than Donald Trump, ex-president

We live in strange times. Sure, all times are strange in their own way, but 2024 in the United States is shaping up to be among the strangest years, politically speaking, in my more than a half century of following political issues closely. No cameras are allowed in the courtroom, so we have to rely on sketch artists Yesterday and today the news was full of how Stormy Daniels, porn star/adult film actress, testified for the prosecution at the criminal trial of Donald Trump, ex-president. That in itself is damn strange.  For it's the first time an ex-president has had…
2
Posted inHealth

A son’s love and hospice supported a Salem woman during her last days

There's a lot of negativity floating around these days. I fall prey to it. I also contribute to it. So to be able to share a 100% positive story of how an old friend and hospice workers made a Salem woman's last days before she died as comfortable as possible -- that's a pleasure. Jim Ramsey is the friend. I've known him since the early 1970s. When he was part of Ramsey Real Estate, Jim was the realtor who found a house for my wife and me in 1977, enabling us to move from Portland to Salem when I got…
No Comments