Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

Mention of possible Salem data center on Facebook stirs up fears

While lots of people, me definitely included, find AI models like Claude (my new cyber friend) really helpful and interesting, the data centers that make AI possible are viewed with considerably more skepticism. For good reason. Data centers typically consume huge amounts of electricity, need lots of water to cool the massive amount of computer servers, make plenty of noise, and in general have become a flashpoint for communities who don't want them to harm the quality of life of residents. So it wasn't surprising that a post today on the Salem City Council Forum Facebook page stimulated numerous concerned…
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Posted inFood and drink Salem

Royal Thai restaurant in south Salem has a great Pra Ram entree

I love Thai food. But I'm picky when it comes to what I order. Being a health-minded vegetarian cuts out a bunch of Thai dishes. I don't like green or red peppers, so that's another no-no. And while I like curry dishes, I prefer entrees with rice. So Pra Ram usually is what I order at Thai restaurants. Googling its origins just now, so I could sound knowledgeable in this blog post, I was surprised to learn from a seemingly reputable source -- Claude, my favorite AI model -- that Pra Ram is viewed by some like Chop Suey, a…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem Weblogs

Les Zaitz of Salem Reporter advises “Don’t trust the media!” at City Club talk

Last Friday Les Zaitz, the editor and CEO of Salem Reporter (our town's digital-only news source), gave a talk to the Salem City Club with the surprising title, "DON'T trust the media!" But what Zaitz meant by "media" is an expanded conception that reflects the fractured media landscape now. The day is long gone when Walter Cronkite would say at the end of his evening network news program, "And that's the way it is," followed by the date of the broadcast. These days, the way it is depends on what media source you're getting news from. Fox News may have…
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Posted inSalem

Englewood Forest Festival was a delightful Salem experience

Today Laurel, my wife, and I headed off to the Englewood Forest Festival at Englewood Park in NE Salem. Amazingly, I don't think we'd ever been to the festival in all the years we've lived here.  Our loss. Because the festival was a delight. The towering trees really do make it seem like the festival is in a forest, albeit an urban one. Once we'd parked, which was kind of an adventure given the narrow streets and number of people attending the one-day event, we browsed the many booths that line the park paths. Pleasingly, it appeared that organizers keep…
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Posted inSalem

Wow! Bentley Michaels has performed 3,000 times at Enchanted Forest Theatre

The Enchanted Forest theme park, Salem's charming local version of Disneyland, has been a part of my life since I moved to Salem in 1977 with my wife at the time, Sue, and my five year old daughter, Celeste.  We'd go to Enchanted Forest often. After my granddaughter, Evelyn, was born to Celeste and her husband, Patrick, in 2007, it didn't take long before Evelyn was enjoying Enchanted Forest as much as Celeste did when she was young. And Evelyn was living in southern California, close to Disneyland. Didn't matter. Enchanted Forest has a unique quality, born of the love…
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Posted inSalem

Salem’s downtown parking app worked well for me today

I allowed for some extra time to park in downtown Salem today, as I wasn't sure how smoothly the Beep Beep Salem app would work on the first day of paid onstreet parking and I didn't want to be late for my Tai Chi class on Court Street. But Beep Beep Salem worked great on my iPhone, undoubtedly because the iconic dog on the home screen is a skilled programmer. (I suppose the $25,000 the City of Salem paid to Flowbird to adapt their parking app for local use also could have had something to do with it.) As I…
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Posted inSalem

I’m ready for paid downtown parking with the Beep Beep Salem app

Thursday, July 10 -- that's when free three-hour on street parking in downtown Salem ends, and the new era of paid parking up to twelve hours begins.  These signs started appearing more than two weeks ago. I took this photo on June 19. It would have confused me if my Tai Chi instructor, who leases space on Court Street, hadn't posted a notice from the City of Salem saying that paid parking doesn't start until July 1, later postponed to July 10. Here's excerpts from a  June 26 Salem Reporter story, "Concern, confusion as Salem rolls out paid downtown parking."…
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Posted inSalem

Ugh. Paid on street parking coming to downtown Salem July 1

Three days a week I have to park in downtown Salem so I can go to my Tai Chi class on Court Street between Liberty and Commercial. My instructor posted this not-so-cheery card from the City of Salem, alerting us students to what is coming July 1. I find the "Get Ready to Meet Beep Beep Salem" annoying. Sure, if Beep Beep is the dog (if that's what the animal is) driving a little red car, that would be entertaining. Also, decidedly illegal, since I doubt a dog could pass the DMV test for a license. But Beep Beep Salem…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

Avelo Airlines, which flies out of Salem, is being paid for deportation ICE flights

It was controversial when in 2023 the Salem City Council paid $2.4 million from the city's general fund to make airport improvements that were needed to attract commercial air service to Salem -- even though at the time the City of Salem was facing a large budget shortfall and was hoping to raise $25 million a year from a payroll tax on workers. Avelo Airlines, a low-cost carrier, ended up coming to town. Now Avelo is enmeshed in a controversy of its own making due to the airline contracting with the Trump administration's ICE agency (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for…
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Posted inSalem

Ukrainian refugee speaks at Salem City Club on day Trump insults Ukraine

The timing was coincidental. Still, yesterday it was jarring for me to leave for the noon Salem City Club program on "Finding Home in a New Culture and Country" after learning the news about how Trump and Vance had insulted Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, which really was an insult to the entire country, only to find that one of the program speakers was Kseniia Hnatovska, a Ukrainian. Here's how she was described in a City Club email: Kseniia and her family fled Ukraine at the onset of the war and undertook a long and challenging journey that brought them…
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Posted inHealth Salem

Salem Health dumps Regence after each blames the other

When I went in for a teeth cleaning session at my dentist's office this week, I told the front desk person that I had different insurance now, having signed up with Providence MedAdvantage at the end of 2024 because I didn't want to run the risk of my Regence MedAdvantage plan being severely handicapped by Regence and Salem Health failing to renew their contract -- which seemed likely at the time. I was told that many of their dental patients have done the same thing: dumped Regence. A few days ago the wisdom of that move became clear when Salem…
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Posted inHumor Salem

2024 Silvertongue Apple-Peal pokes satirical fun at Silverton

The Silvertongue Apple-Peal not coincidentally has a name similar to Silverton's recently deceased serious newspaper, the Appeal Tribune, which met its end in 2022 when the nearby Salem Statesman Journal stopped publishing it on the command of its corporate master, Gannett.  Thankfully, the Silvertongue Apple-Peal lives on since 2012, thanks to local gadfly Gus Frederick, who has come out with a new edition on the pleasingly languid schedule of every two years to mark a general or midterm election.  Our Town described Gus Frederick's effort in a story about the closing of the Appeal Tribune after 142 years.  Frederick said…
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Posted inSalem

Looks like Macy’s store in downtown Salem is closing soon

I've heard from two people that the Macy's store in downtown Salem is closing after the first of the year. I don't know if that means January 1 or a later date. But reportedly this news comes from Macy's employees, so it seems to be true -- though I don't believe there has been any official announcement.  Adding credence to this rumor is a Reddit post from two months ago.  So, idk if it’s public knowledge yet, but Macys in downtown mall is closing. I’m a former employee and they told us in June/July-ish? They’re declining in service, they’re treating…
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Posted inHealth Salem

Regence and Salem Health are in an annoying contract dispute

Recently I got a not-so-cheery letter from Cheryl Nester Wolfe, President and CEO of Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics. She informed me, along with many thousands of other people in Salem who get their health insurance through Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon that Salem Health's contract with Regence expires on December 31, 2024 and "despite repeated attempts to negotiate a new contract for 2025, Regence refuses to agree to fair market terms." Wolfe put most of another sentence in boldface to draw attention to it. This means that as a patient, you will likely be responsible for a…
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Posted inSalem

2024 Salem Art Fair is much improved from 2023

The Salem Art Fair and Festival is on an upward trajectory, according to my decidedly personal opinion. After going to the fair every year since I moved to Salem in 1977, enjoying the shady setting under the large oaks in Bush Park, in 2022 the fair had to move to a big grassy field with little shade because the oaks were being damaged due to soil compaction. The title of my July 15, 2022 blog post expressed how I felt about the change: "Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now." It was uncomfortably…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Posted inSalem

Statesman Journal screws up Salem’s Tuesday ice storm forecast

I'm seeing a pattern here. Last Saturday I wrote a post, "Portland's Channel 12 gets Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong." My gripe was that Channel 12's Mark Nelsen said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain on Saturday, January 13. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021.  Actually, the National Weather Service was forecasting much less freezing rain for the Salem area. That turned out to be correct, as there was little freezing rain in our area on…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Portland’s Channel 12 got Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong

Being a weather geek of sorts, I'm well aware that forecasting is an uncertain science. It's about probabilities and models, not mathematical precision.  All I ask is that professional weather forecasters recognize when they can be wrong, and communicate that to the public as clearly as possible.  Which Mark Nelsen, the main KPTV weather guy at Portland's Channel 12, failed to do Friday night, the day before today's winter storm was to hit Oregon. This annoyed me. After all, on Thursday I'd written this blog post: "Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct." It…
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