Posted inUncategorized

Another agnostic Christmas eve

Well, just as newspapers reprint the "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" piece every year, I'll start my own agnostic tradition and link back to my 2006 post, "An agnostic Taoist on Christmas Eve." Not much has changed. We're still heading to a vegetarian buffet at Salem's Marco Polo restaurant tomorrow. We're still irritated by Salvation Army bell ringers, Christmas music in stores, and the prevailing cultural sentiment that if you don't believe in Jesus, somehow you're impoverished during the holiday season. That's ridiculous. We feel overwhelmingly grateful that unlike the vast majority of people in the world, we…
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Posted inFamily

2007 Christmas Letter released to an eagerly awaiting world

Here it is, world! What you've been waiting for to complete the Christmas season: Laurel and Brian's 2007 Holiday Letter. Download 2007_christmas_letter.pdf Download 2007_christmas_letter.doc (shared in both PDF and Word formats) By "world," of course, I mean the subset of Earth's 6.3 billion people who look forward to the wise, witty, and moving sentiments we express in our annual letter. Not being Christians, I prefer the term "Holiday letter." Yet as a worshipper of Google, whose search engine is attuned to "Christmas letter," I shamelessly have used those words in the title of this post. If you read the letter,…
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Posted inUncategorized

TypePad thinks my comment about comment spam is spam

Ah, how marvelous became my blog's hall of mirrors after TypePad, the hosting service, had the not-so-bright idea to juice up its spam comment filter. Absolutely legitimate comments got unceremoniously moved into a spam folder, unbeknownst to me and countless other bloggers. Until the unbeknownst became knowst when I heard from an upset visitor to my other blog asking why I was censoring several of his recent comments. I had no idea what he was talking about. But then I logged onto TypePad and saw a mention of how they were thanking people for letting them know that their comment…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

India gets a cool new computer before U.S.

It's a sign of the globalization times. And of the United States' technological decline. Lenovo, a Chinese company which bought IBM's Personal Computing Division in 2005, has started to get into the home computer market. I'm interested, because my wife and I each use Lenovo-made ThinkPad notebooks that still bear the IBM logo. We like them. They're rock solid and nicely designed with a great feeling keyboard. Further, Consumer Reports rates Apple and Lenovo as the computer companies with the best support and most trouble-free products. So I've been perusing Lenovo's one and only notebook aimed at home/home office users,…
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Posted inHome life

Further unplugging of the Christmas machine

Last year we slowed down the Christmas machine, but it still had quite a bit of leftover energy. Now we're going to further unplug this monster. No Christmas tree for us. This is a pretty big decision, given that our extra-large artificial tree has been a dominating feature of our living room for quite a few years. Too dominating, we've decided. It's a pain to set up. Just about as big a pain as driving to a real tree lot, agreeing on a suitable choice, tying it to the roof rack so it has a minimal chance of falling off…
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Posted inMeasure 37

Plain truths about Oregon property rights

A few nights ago my wife and I went to a standing room only talk by Ralph Bloemers of the Crag Law Center, one of Oregon's premiere public interest attorneys. Now, it was a small room at the West Salem Public Library. But still, I was impressed by how many people turned out for this Friends of Marion County meeting about vesting and land use issues under Measures 37 and 49. Some Measure 37 claimants even came, wanting to learn how their development efforts are likely to fare under the new property rights climate ushered in by the passage of…
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Posted inUncategorized

Firefox 2.0.0.11 deserves to be shot

I'm a mild mannered vegetarian, but after spending most of the morning fixing bookmark problems caused by Firefox's latest update (2.0.0.11), I'd like to have a fox hunt and shoot this increasingly buggy web browser. I dutifully download new Firefox updates when I'm told to. In the past they've installed smoothly, aside from occasionally having to fuss with getting an update to an incompatible extension. But today Firefox started up in its new 2.0.0.11 incarnation having lost my bookmarks and RoboForm logins. Not a good way to start off the day. Because it took me a couple of hours to…
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Posted inSalem

Radio Free Salem offers hope to Oregon’s gray zone

Praise be! Help is on the way for the oppressed residents of Salem, we who have the misfortune of living in the depressing I-5 gray zone between the bright spots of Eugene and Portland (along with Albany and Woodburn, but Salem is the capital of mid-valley ho-hum ness). The December Salem Monthly asks "Could 88.5 FM be the new home of a community radio station in Oregon?" It will, if aspiring community radio station operator Karen Holman succeeds with her FCC application for a non-profit radio license. Holman is a chemistry professor at Willamette University. I hope she brews up…
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Posted inMeasure 37

Measure 49 vesting information

This is the sort of blog post that's absolutely fascinating to a few, and absolutely boring to the many. So if you're into the nitty-gritty of Oregon's Measure 49, which went a long way toward fixing the land use disaster of Measure 37, you'll love this compendium of vesting-related information. If you're not, all I can say is that what follows will be great reading for those agitated sleepless nights when you need something boring to shut your mind down. Because this is a compendium of legal writings surrounding the question of when a Measure 37 claimant has a vested…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Atheists are the embattled minority, not the religious

The more my agnostic mind ponders Mitt Romney's Faith in America speech, the more I get irritated by it. It's nonsensical – his notion that the United States is threatened by a "religion of secularism." I only wish. This country is one of the most overtly religious in the world. We vie with Saudi Arabia and other super-fundamentalist nations for the dishonor of having the most religious crazies per capita. Yesterday I said on my Church of the Churchless blog that Mitt Romney's weird religion is relevant to voters. His chosen faith, Mormonism, is strange even by religious standards. It's…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Steve Novick twists my arm; I pay up

Oh, man. A 4' 9" guy with a missing left hand just wrestled me into forking over $100 to him. Ordinarily that'd bother my macho sensibility, but last night I was happy to be bested by Steve Novick, who is a Democratic candidate for Oregon Senator Gordon Smith's seat. When the phone rang at 6:45 pm, just ten minutes before we had to leave for a neighborhood association meeting, and as I was about to bite into some rice and lentils, I was prepared to abruptly dismiss the caller. But when I heard, "This is Steve Novick," I figured the…
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Posted inSalem

Oregon is a nasty place to live, really!

The winds have died down. The rain has stopped. I've taken the chain saw out of my car, which I drove around with for the past three days, ready to cut my way through roads blocked by fallen trees. Things are starting to get back to normal in the Northwest after the biggest Pacific storms in a decade roared through. Here in south Salem we did fine. No power outages. No flooding. Just a bunch of fir branches blown loose by the 45-50 mph winds. But elsewhere in Oregon and Washington havoc ruled. Many roads are closed, including the I-5…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Details of Larry Craig’s gay sex come out

Christmas has arrived early for those, like me, who love it when gay-bashing conservatives turn out to be – take a guess – gay. Or at least, bi-sexual. Today's Idaho Statesman newspaper has a tell-all story, "More gay men describe sexual encounters with U.S. Sen. Craig." David Phillips. Mike Jones. Greg Ruth. Tom Russell. Four gay men, willing to put their names in print and whose allegations can't be disproved, have come forward since news of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig's guilty plea. They say they had sex with Craig or that he made a sexual advance or that he paid…
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Posted inMeasure 37

How Marion County should handle Measure 49

It's been frustrating for us and our neighbors to see bulldozers rolling on subdivision road construction just a few days before Measure 49 goes into effect on December 6. Measure 49 limits development on this property to three home sites on six acres of the least valuable farmland. The Measure 37 claimant plans 43 homes, each with a well, on this groundwater limited land. Leroy Laack, the developer, is quoted in a front page Salem Statesman Journal story: "Our intentions are to push ahead just as fast as we can within the context of the current law," Laack said. "So…
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Posted inMeasure 37

Measure 37 bulldozers roll as Marion County ignores Measure 49

Today KATU's Salem bureau filmed an excellent story about Marion County's outrageous decision to approve a construction permit for a Measure 37 subdivision just nine days before Measure 49 will make it illegal. Laurel and I were interviewed for the story. Melica Johnson and Dino, her cameraman, had us stand outside on our deck – where we were pleased to talk about how crazy it is to let bulldozers tear up Oregon farmland for a large subdivision when 62% of Oregon voters said "No!" to this on November 6. Here's my YouTube video of the two and a half minute…
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Posted inMeasure 37

Marion County disrespects Measure 49 voters

Just as our neighborhood's Keep Our Water Safe committee has been fearing, two Marion County commissioners are thumbing their noses at the 66% of county voters who said "yes" to Measure 49 on November 6 (along with 62% of Oregonians). The voters said they didn't want large subdivisions to be built on farm, forest, and groundwater limited land. Measure 49 goes into effect on December 6, ten days from now. But Sam Brentano and Patti Milne have decided to keep on issuing construction permits for large subdivisions on farm, forest, and groundwater limited land right through December 5. Mind-boggling. Crazy.…
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Posted inNeighborhood

After wine tasting, I end up with a dog of a Pinot Noir

Would a wine connoisseur buy a bottle because it has a dog face on it? Surely, not. But I'm surely not a wine connoisseur, so the outcome of my first Oregon wine tasting experience was entirely fitting to my oenophile standard. Actually, it was my first wine tasting anywhere, a fact I stated repeatedly during my visit to the nearby Ankeny Vineyard this afternoon in hopes any faux pas I committed would be more easily forgiven. I'm sure I made a few, but my wife was the only person who pointed one out to me. After a smidgen of the…
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Posted inHome life

Do the Gratitude Dance (if you’re not too full)

Thanks to a visitor on my other blog I learned about the Gratitude Dance. It's super easy to do. And perfect for today. But maybe not advised after eating a big Thanksgiving dinner. The Gratitude Dance is considerably kinder and gentler than the haka -- a traditional Polynesian dance that the Jefferson High School football team in Portland has taken up before each game. YouTube, naturally, has many haka videos. I especially liked this one, a Hakan vs. Tongan face off at a rugby match.
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Turkey pardons, PETA, and Unturkey’s sad demise

Yes, there's a lot to be thankful for on this day before Thanksgiving. But cruelty to animals isn't one of them. A few nights ago we watched HBO's "I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA." It showed many disturbing scenes, including what goes on in a turkey slaughterhouse. Believe me, if you watched that secretly-filmed footage before you sat down to devour your "bird" tomorrow, most likely you wouldn't have an appetite. Don't believe me. Watch on a PETA web site. Or on the viewer below. Here's another disturbing video of how turkeys arrive on dinner…
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Posted inComments

Comment conversations now easier to follow

Good news from TypePad, the host of this blog: it’s now possible to be notified when a new comment has been added to a HinesSight post. I’ve described this new blog feature here. I’ve also offered up some tips about Google Reader, which I’ve found to be a good way of keeping track of web site and blog content, including comments on posts. For quite a while it’s bothered me that TypePad only allows bloggers like me (who don’t customize their blogs via their own programming) to only show the most recent 10 comments in the sidebar. If a post…
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