Posted inSustainability

Aren’t the dinosaurs dead?

Since we own a 45 mpg (in real life) 2004 Toyota Prius, we’ve been taking a smug, holier-than-thou attitude toward rising gas prices and the anguished cries of those who get 15 mpg in their way-over-sized SUV. Every time I drive back home from the store with my four bags of groceries neatly stowed away in the back compartment of the Prius, and pull alongside someone in an Expedition with their own four bags of groceries rattling around in the cavernous interior, I look over with a smile that hopefully communicates, “Now, don’t you feel silly in all that unnecessary…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

An author’s scariest moment

An author’s scariest moment is when the first advance copies of a book arrive from the printer. Also, this is an author’s most wonderful moment. But scariness precedes the wonderfulness. “Are the pages printed all screwy? Is the cover color wrong? What major typo did we miss?” Yesterday Laurel yelled from the front door at me: “A box just came. It looks like books.” Oh, God, I thought. This is it. My writing life is over. And it is just beginning. Both. Neither. I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t want to go up and open the box. I dearly wanted…
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Posted inEntertainment Science

“What the #$*! Do We Know?!”

Great question. Great movie. Short answer: not much. Made in Portland, and starring the wonderfully expressive actress Marlee Matlin (an Oscar winner for “Children of a Lesser God”), “What the #$*! Do We Know?!” mixes together a fictional storyline with non-fictional expositions of quantum physics, neuroscience, and other findings from the cutting edge of science. Having written a book about the relation of the new physics and old mystics (“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” which I’ve revised and am working to get back-in-print), this was a movie that I couldn’t miss. Unfortunately, lots of other people will. I only found two…
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Posted inDogs

Serena, our Tai Chi Zen dog

Last weekend we saw more evidence of the marvelous powers of Serena, who, in addition to being astoundingly beautiful and amazingly intelligent, has canine Tai Chi and Zen down to a “T” (bone, she could only wish, if she wasn’t the animal companion of strict vegetarians). Just as an outdoor fire is called Kentucky TV (as we were told by real live Kentuckians), so is Serena’s view out of a living room window of our Camp Sherman cabin Dog TV. For it faces a wood platform by the fire pit, under which live a flourishing family of chipmunks. Laurel leaves…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

How everyone can write for a living, guaranteed

From an essay in “Writers and their Craft” by novelist Frederick Busch: “I write for a living. I write, that is to say, for my life—for my life’s sake. Which is to say: when I write, I consider my life to be at stake; the values that help me to measure it, and the moments, memories, and emotions of it that I cherish—the people, therefore, whose presence in it makes me want to keep experiencing my life—all are at risk when I work. It feels that way to me. I believe the feeling to be true, and I write from…
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Posted inSustainability

Power to the weblog, right on!

OK, I’m showing my age in the title of this posting. But I don’t care. I’m excited that my $80 a year HinesSight weblog has stimulated some change in the $300,000,000 (eventually, perhaps) Sustainable Fairview development. This is the power of the weblog: truth. Not absolute unarguable Platonic truth—I don’t make a claim to that—but truth-as-I-see-it truth, which is what we deal with in the Blogosphere. Today I got a group email from the management of Sustainable Fairview Associates and read the minutes of some recent member/investor meetings that I no longer go to (see “Sustainability” category to the right…
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Posted inMiscellany

My inner child and Camp Sherman

Bicycling around Camp Sherman today, it hit me: my inner child wants to return to the days when people bought gas at the town store from pumps with a shell/Shell on top, and when going to the post office meant you’d catch up on the town gossip and get a chance to sit a spell on the bench outside. This was the sort of town I grew up in, Three Rivers, California. Just a few hundred people back in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. A tourist/ranching town with, yes, three forks of the Kaweah River. My mother and I lived within…
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Posted inRecreation

How to pack heavy for a weekend trip

You paid good money for a full-sized SUV or, as in our case, a station wagon. You need to make use of it! Fill it up! Learn to pack heavy for a weekend trip! Hey, gasoline is over $2 a gallon. If your rig is almost empty you’re going to burn almost as much expensive irreplaceable fossil fuel as if it were full. So why not load it up with as much stuff as possible? (click to enlarge) This is our packing philosophy, as evidenced by this photo I took just before we left for Camp Sherman yesterday afternoon. You…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Philosophy

Choking on communion

Looking back, I believe it was a sign from God that I almost choked on the wafer that was put in my mouth at my Catholic first communion. When you’re eight or nine years old this is embarrassing stuff, gagging after the priest put the wafer on my tongue. It stuck to the roof of my mouth when I tried to swallow it and wouldn’t go down. I remember hoping to God (still on my knees, of course) that I wouldn’t spit out the wafer and have it end up on the floor, an inglorious way to treat the body…
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Posted inNeighborhood Philosophy

There is no boat in this photo

I snapped this picture of Spring Lake about half an hour ago during my evening dog walk with Serena. There is no boat in this photo. Yesterday there would have been: a shiny aluminum rowboat upside down at the far end, barely visible, but irritatingly present. Boats left at our communal (common property) lake here in Spring Lake Estates are supposed to be locked to a cable near the picnic area. That rowboat wasn’t. Every time I walked around the lake it bothered me to see it beached in a place it shouldn’t have been. In my eyes it was…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Writer’s revenge: reject the rejection slip

James Alexander Thom has a great piece in the Spring 2004 Author’s Guild Bulletin: “Rejection Flip.” I sometimes wonder whether forking out $90 a year to belong to the Author’s Guild makes sense, but articles like this one are priceless. Plus, I get a certain satisfaction in turning to the last page of each issue of the Bulletin and reading the names of some fellow members who serve on the Guild Council: Judy Blume, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, Erica Jong, Scott Turow. Writing fame and fortune have evaded me so far, but hope springs eternal that someday I can…
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Posted inEntertainment

Vote for Rupert, Smile at Rumsfeld

Now that almost 24 hours has passed since last night’s “Survivor” debacle, the depression that hit me when Amber won is finally starting to fade. I should count my blessings, of course, because if Rob had won I’d still be in bed with the covers pulled over my head, trying to block out the harsh sunlight of reality. But since Rob proposed to Amber right there on live TV before the votes were counted, he ended up getting the million dollars anyway. Or at least as much of it as Amber will let him have, which likely is most of…
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Posted inEntertainment

Getting anxious about the “Survivor” finale

With all there is to worry about in the world today—Iraq, global warming, gas prices, getting Windows to work reliably—now I’ve got to spend an anxious 24 hours worrying about who is going to win “Survivor.” OK, I realize that many people don’t even watch “Survivor,” much less agonize over the outcome, but this is a pretty big deal for Laurel and me. Thursday night is sacred to us. We sit down together in front of the TV after the week’s episode has taped (or, rather, PVR’d) and hugely enjoy immersing ourselves in the reality soap opera that is Survivor…
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Posted inHome life Neighborhood

WildBlue satellite internet, my backup to Lucy Liu

My conversation with a Qwest DSL supervisor yesterday went just about as horribly as I expected. When I asked why the 70 or so homes in our quasi-rural neighborhood just five miles from the Salem city limits, and two miles from the nearest existing DSL “crossbox,” couldn’t get DSL, he evaded the question. “We’d have to go through too many gyrations,” he said irritatingly. “So this is something we’re just not going to do.” Well, thank you very much, Mr. Public Utility representative. Your dedication to bringing much-needed utilities to the public is underwhelming. To work out my frustration I…
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Posted inEntertainment Neighborhood

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (and Volume 3: The Qwest)

I’ve got a new plan for finally getting DSL in our neighborhood. I came up with it after making use of a two-for-one Hollywood Video coupon, which enabled me to watch “Kill Bill: Volume 1” along with “The Secret Lives of Dentists” the past few days. It took me that long to finish “Kill Bill,” because I had to watch it in snatches when Laurel wasn’t within eyeshot or earshot of the television. For some reason that, after fourteen years of marriage I still haven’t fully understood, Laurel believes that almost every movie should be (1) realistic, and (2) uplifting.…
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Posted inEntertainment

The Secret Lives of Dentists

We finished watching “The Secret Lives of Dentists” on DVD last night, a Sundance sort of movie. Another way of saying “Sundance sort of movie” is “grittily realistic, well acted, and a film that made us immediately watch The Daily Show so we could get smiles back on our faces.” Nonetheless, we enjoyed “The Secret Lives of Dentists,” which centers around Campbell Scott’s increasingly strong suspicion that his wife, Hope Davis, is having an affair with someone she met at an operatic production. And that just about sums up the plot line. Denis Leary, a trumpet-playing patient, serves as Scott’s…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

Running so fast to become motionless

In my soon-to-be-published book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus, I quote Marsilio Ficino, a fifteenth-century devotee of Plato—who wrote about the folly of men who seek to find rest through motion: “Because of their ceaseless longing for what is to come, they do not enjoy what is present. Although movement has to be stilled for there to be rest; yet those men are forever beginning new and different movements, in order that they may one day come to rest.” All too true. The older I get, the more I realize how much time I’ve wasted in circuitous efforts to be…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

A fresh techno-fantasy

I’m writing this on my new best friend: a too-wonderful-for-words emachines M6809 laptop. “Emey” (pronounced ee-mey), as he wants to be called, is going to change my life in two ways, one shallowly technological, the other deeply philosophical. At least, that’s the spin I’m putting on Emey’s purchase with my wife, Laurel, who could buy a heck of a lot of $10 fused glass earrings on Ebay for Emey’s $1,390 Best Buy cost ($1,640 - $250 in rebates). On the technological side, I don’t think there is a better price/performance deal on any laptop, though Emey’s sibling, the M6805, is…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

Still trying to set my hair on fire

I was sitting outside on our deck this afternoon, working hard at avoiding doing anything productive, when that damned voice in my head spoke words that I’ve been hearing way too frequently lately: “This moment will never come again.” The message was so clear it almost made me go back to my computer and get back to compiling the footnotes for the rewrite of my first book. Almost. Because, with a little more pondering of the Unfathomable Mystery that is our cosmos, I was able to tell myself: “So what matters is the moment, not what transpires in it.” Hence,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Live dangerously: Imagine Bush’s head on a stick

Things have been sort of boring recently around the Hines household, and we haven’t gotten any visits from the Secret Service for, gosh, ages. So I’m going to live dangerously and not only imagine George Bush’s head on a stick, but also write about it in my weblog. Which I just did. I’ve just committed in narrative form the same sort of horrendous offense against the president that brought a 15 year old high school student to the attention of both the local police and the Secret Service. Except this boy reflected his imaginings in artwork, and I’ve described mine…
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