Posted inHome life

Green tea extract and me

Somehow I’ve made room for a new friend on our overflowing supplement shelf. Welcome to the Hines household, Most Honorable Green Tea Extract. May you help bring me many years of abundant health and vitality. Laurel is a major tea drinker. She blends organic black and green tea into a powerful mixture, pours it into large juice containers, and keeps a hearty supply on hand in our two refrigerators. Laurel drinks tea throughout the day. As for me, I’ve been staying away from her strong caffeinated brew. Given my fifty-seven year old prostate, I’ve got more important things to do…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Laughing through the War on Christmas

Real war is hell and not to be joked about. But the so-called War on Christmas is a joke, so it deserves to be laughed away. Jon Stewart did a good job of this a few days ago in the course of debunking Bill O’Reilly’s false claim about a Daily Show clip. He ended his response to O’Reilly’s misleading attack with: If Bill O'Reilly needs to have an enemy, needs to feel persecuted, you know what? Here's my Kwanzaa gift to him. Are you ready? All right. I'm your enemy. Make me your enemy. I, Jon Stewart, hate Christmas, Christians,…
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Posted inSalem

I love Les Schwab

I’ve got a thing going with Les Schwab. Not with the man—my tofuish sensibilities don’t mesh with Les’ “Free Beef” mentality—but with the chain of tire stores that he founded. Yesterday I bought four tires for our Prius at the south Salem Les Schwab Tire Center and, per usual, my experience with the company was exemplary. I wasn’t thrilled about getting a new set of tires after putting only 20,000 miles on the original equipment Goodyear Integritys, which, along with quite a few other Integrity owners, I can pithily describe as four rolling pieces of crap. But the Les Schwab…
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Posted inEntertainment

“March of the Penguins” and “Pride & Prejudice”

This weekend we saw these two movies (“March” on DVD ,“Pride” in a movie theatre) and at first sight they couldn’t be more dissimilar. But with a little reflection I began to see connections. Long lines of emperor penguins, looking exactly alike, walking to their breeding ground in desolate Antarctica. Not-so-long lines of eighteenth century British men and women, each dressed to the nines, dancing in a lavishly decorated country home with the same underlying intention: breeding. It’s always about breeding, isn’t it? Darwin tells us that it is. And both of these movies testify to the power that sexual…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Suspicious timing of Statesman-Journal wolf article

Hmmmm. “This is an interesting coincidence,” I said to myself yesterday as I perused the back page of the Salem Statesman-Journal sports section. The headline read “Beaverton man gets in tangle with wolves.” For on the very day the story appeared the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission was scheduled to meet in Salem and vote on a controversial wolf-management plan. My suspicions were aroused. Could this be a case of anti-wolf media bias? The reporter who wrote the article, Henry Miller, is in charge of the newspaper’s Outdoors Section. He’s an avid hunter and fisherman. There’s nothing wrong with that,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

Ranchers overly afraid of the big bad wolf

Oregon ranchers, who I’d think would be pretty tough guys, are scared to death of the mere possibility that a few wolves might one day find their way into this state. No wolves yet have crossed the border from Idaho, but the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission has been laboring on a plan to deal with them if they do. The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association is freaking out about the plan, which is slated to be voted on tomorrow (December 1). They want ranchers to be able to kill wolves that even look cross-eyed at livestock, notwithstanding the fact that so…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Transitional fossils do exist, you creationist crazies

Thank God for science, which came up with Prozac. I’m going to need a prescription soon if anti-science zealots keep getting me so anxious about where this country is heading. Three disturbing news items bit into my brain in the past 24 hours: (1) Last night “60 Minutes” had a segment on the FDA’s religiously-based decision to reject an application to let Plan B, the morning after pill, be dispensed without a prescription. Scientific experts overwhelmingly voted to make Plan B over-the-counter. The religious right objected. Guess who won? (2) On CNN this morning I read “Priests urge stem cell…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Feed the Portland vegan!

At this culinary moment it’s most appropriate for me to ponder the sad plight of Stephen Philip Marshall, a vegan prisoner in Multnomah County’s Justice Center jail, whose request for meals with no meat, eggs, or dairy products has been turned down. Outrageous! The chant “Feed the Portland Vegan! Feed the Portland Vegan!” echoes in my not-yet-out-of-the-sixties brain as the smell of a Now & Zen wheat gluten Unturkey cooking in our oven wafts through the house (we ate Thanksgiving dinner at the home of some friends and today I got an irresistible craving for our traditional holiday fare). As…
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Posted inHome life

Laurel swears she’ll never make another pie. Again.

Our Thanksgiving Eve tradition continues: cursing, confusion, and clutter fill the kitchen as Laurel labors to make an apple pie that, precisely 365 days ago, she swore would never darken her culinary door again. Yet, it did. We have been invited to share Thanksgiving with some friends. They are doing most of the cooking but gave us a few choices about what we could bring to the table. Salad. Rolls. Dessert. Laurel told them that she’d bring dessert. More precisely, an apple pie. And not a store-bought pie. A home-made pie. The stage was set for disaster. Last night I…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Intelligent designers are out to Christianize America

Advocates of intelligent design aren’t really scientists. They’re theologians. And they’re determined to root every last vestige of non-Christianity out of American culture. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after reading the first three chapters of a book that has been sitting on my “to read” bookshelf for three years. I picked up “Signs of Intelligence” a few days ago, wanting to learn from intelligent design proponents—not critics—what this movement is all about. An editor of this collection of essays is William A. Dembski, one of the few real scientists who believes in intelligent design. He’s a professor of Science…
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Posted inHome life

WildBlue satellite internet rescues us from dial-up

After many years of suffering through 24 kbps dial-up internet “surfing” (more accurately, “slogging”), we got a WildBlue satellite system installed last Wednesday. It’s working great. I just logged on to three speed tests. Ground Control says I’m getting 556 kbps download, PCPitstop’s satellite bandwidth test says 576 kbps, and SpeakEasy clocked in at 579 kbps down and 151 kbps up (WildBlue is two-way satellite, no phone line involved). Real-world wise, yesterday I downloaded a 10.9 mb virus/spyware scan update through SystemSuite, the excellent utility system that replaced my piece-of-crap Symantec software. Via dial-up it used to take me over…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Gary Hart on keeping religion out of politics

Recently I saw an interview with Hart on Fox News where he made some wise observations about how religion screws up the political process. Listening to him speak, I recalled how unfortunate it was that Dukakis rather than Hart was the Democratic nominee for president in 1988. That photo of Donna Rice sitting on his lap sunk his campaign. Otherwise, this intelligent and articulate former Colorado senator might well have won. Myself, I’ve argued that religious values have no place in politics. In the interview (a portion of which is transcribed below) Hart basically agrees, though obviously neither he nor…
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Posted inHome life

Another man satisfies my wife

Hey, I’m cool with it. I know that I can’t meet all of my wife’s needs. So it didn’t bother me when another guy came to our house yesterday and spent all afternoon doing stuff that made Laurel ooh and aah. I wish I could have given her all that pleasure on my own. But I’ve still got some macho self-esteem left, since I’ve convinced myself that it takes a real man to call the plumber. Who arrived right after lunch. First, he installed a replacement kitchen sink faucet, tearing out the old Moen that I had managed to reverse…
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Posted inNeighborhood

I pick up a hitchhiker

I started to pull over as soon as I saw her raise her hand and gesture at my car. A thirty-something woman in a long dress standing all alone on the side of Liberty Road five miles from Salem. I had to stop. My first thought was that she had car trouble and needed help. But there wasn’t any car in sight. I rolled down the passenger side window. “Oh, thank you for stopping,” she said. “I’ve been here for 45 minutes. I need a ride into town so I can catch a bus to go for a job interview.”…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Randi Rhodes is an embarrassment to progressives

I’m a progressive. Yet it’s painful for me to listen to Randi Rhodes, Air America’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. She’s an embarrassment for progressives. Rhodes routinely is uninformed, shrill, and rude. This wouldn’t be such a problem for the progressive movement if there were a wide variety of appealing liberal radio voices. But there aren’t, for the airwaves are dominated by conservative talk show hosts. The rantings of Limbaugh and Savage appeal to rabid right-wingers, just as Rhodes is the darling of unabashed lefties. On the right, Tony Snow and Sean Hannity are more moderate in tone.…
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Posted inHome life

A real man will call a plumber

Well, that’s the spin I’m putting on my phone call to Judsons Plumbing yesterday. To be honest, I feel totally emasculated. I finally had to admit that fixing a leaky kitchen sink faucet was beyond me. After my first quasi-successful fix-it attempt it took me a week to come to this conclusion. By “quasi,” I mean that I got the single-handle Moen faucet back together after disassembling it down to the cartridge and then not being able to figure how the damn thing came out. With some struggle I was able to get the faucet into working order again, aside…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Let’s clean up the (Oregon) House

On this mini 2005 Election day, it’s not too early for me to be anticipating the joy that I’ll feel when, 365 days and a few hours from now, I go out to get the newspaper and read “Minnis defeated—Dems take back Oregon House.” Yes, I realize that in clean, green Oregon, politics isn’t supposed to be personal. But Karen Minnis, the oh-so-Republican Speaker of the House, sets herself up for personal attacks with her penchant for playing the Red Queen. In the 2005 legislative session she repeatedly refused to allow the House to vote on bills that had passed…
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Posted inUncategorized

Support Apathy, Nihilism, and Despair

Finally! No more naked wrists for me. I’ve found some rubber wristbands that spout a message I can get behind. I just ordered them and can hardly wait to share an honest philosophy of life with the world. Others can wear what they like. I’m declaring my allegiance to the curmudgeon side in the battle of the bands.
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Outraged at flu shot shortages

While standing in line for a flu shot yesterday I had plenty of time to work up a major case of Irritation at Bush, the CDC, vaccine manufacturers, and anyone else who was responsible for the hour I spent shuffling along a lengthy line of tape stuck to the floor at south Salem’s Oak Tree Pharmacy. I had plenty of company. About forty people had beaten me to the clinic when I got there at 11:30 am, half an hour after the starting time. I figured that I’d beat the noon rush. I hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that…
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