Posted inBooks Home life Philosophy

Refrigerator friends, art, and Emerson

An eclectic collection of topics, but it’s been a week since my last post, making it difficult to focus on a single subject. Refrigerator friends…Laurel found a mention of such in an article she was reading a while back. This well describes Ron and Rita, from Seattle, whom we had the pleasure of hosting as weekend guests. A refrigerator friend is someone who unhesitatingly can walk into your house and open the refrigerator without asking, even saying, “What do you have to eat? I’m starving.” The author of the article said that everyone needs some refrigerator friends, because these are…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

The substance of emptiness

I’ve got a Buddhist book called the “The Emptiness of Emptiness.” I bought it mainly because I liked the title. Unfortunately, the title continued to be the best thing I liked about the book, even after I read it. The idea that an idea of emptiness fills up, and thus negates, the emptiness is cool. Buddhism 101. But a whole book on the subject? The title suffices. So I’m running the danger of doing the same thing by even going on as long as I have. But without saying something about emptiness, we’d be stuck in our own isolated islands…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

Yin and Yang news stories

Maybe “yin and yang” isn’t quite the right term to describe the relation between these stories. Maybe there isn’t any relation between them at all. Maybe they are just two stories, each being what each is. Still, somehow they seem to say something about the polar ends of the human condition, not that I know what the two ends consist of, nor what value should be attached to each end. The June 23 issue of Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Harry Potter rules,” all about J.K. Rowling and her fabulously successful series of five Harry Potter books. I’ve…
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Posted inHome life

Evidence suggesting ego-loss is incomplete

Notwithstanding my 30+ years of daily meditation, I still receive some subtle hints that I have not quite attained to the selfless, egoless, Buddha-like nature to which, theoretically, I aspire. Evidence along these lines was received today when I began thinking about the wonderful web site that pops up when you type “weapons of mass destruction” into the Google search engine, and click on “I’m feeling lucky”. Try it, you’ll like it (even if you’re a big Bush fan, this is still a great satire). What this click does, as explained by Google, is that you’re taken directly to the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Savage still on the loose

These days it seems like there isn’t a whole lot of good news in the Oregonian and Statesman-Journal, but Tuesday, I believe, the O had a item in the TV section relating that Michael Savage’s weekend MSNBC “talk” (actually, rant) show had been cancelled. As described in this story, Savage told a caller that he was a sodomite who deserved to get AIDS and die. When I’m feeling masochistic I occasionally tune in to Savage’s late weekday afternoon slot on KXL, though it usually isn’t possible to listen to his hateful, misinformed, childish blather for more than a few minutes.…
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Posted inPhilosophy Recreation

Zen lesson-lite

In my never-ending quest to find a deep meaning in the most trivial of circumstances, so that I may believe that the trivialities which surround me, and in fact, are me, have their roots in some unseen depths of existence, I am trying to attach some sort of Zen significance to the welter of mosquito bites on my arms and legs. “When hiking in the mountains, of what use is mosquito repellant left in the cabin?” This is a koan-lite worthy of much pondering, and, in fact, I have done just that most of today, when I wasn’t busy scratching…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

So, who you gonna’ believe?

Right now, Laurel is out watering trees that we planted on our five-acre Hines Plantation one or two years ago. She shouldn’t have to be doing this. It’s only the first part of July, not the end of August. Normally, we would have gotten about twice as much rain as actually fell in May and June. But this wasn’t a normal spring. On three days in June, I believe, high temperature marks for the date were broken in Salem. Much less rain. Much higher heat. Doesn’t this strongly suggest that something is different with the weather? And not just here,…
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Posted inEntertainment

Movie madness

Laurel and I have been caught up in summer movie madness recently, except we haven’t gone to see any of the movies that people are mad about. No Charlie’s Angels (sexist and lacks redeeming social value, according to Laurel, which are two great reasons to see it, in my no-account opinion) . No Hulk (we agree: movies based on comic book characters are off-limits). No 2 Fast 2 Furious (nothing is more boring than movies with a car theme except the Indy 500, where cars do crash—which is interesting—but only after going around and around in ovals—which isn’t). So we’ve…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

How much more can we stand?

It just keeps getting worse. Just when you think that the Bush administration can’t act any more high-handedly, dishonestly, and destructively-to-the-environment than it already is, we learn that there is more black magic in their evil bag of tricks. This is several day-old news, but it still frosts me—the decision to eliminate any significant mention of global climate change from the environmental report issued by the E.P.A. It really is astounding, how Bush and company are willing to let the planet go down the tubes so they can issue some paybacks to their corporate contributors. Why the public isn’t more…
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Posted inHome life

Surviving the Tour of Homes horror

It’s a macabre love ritual, this Tour of Homes horror I subject myself to each year. Laurel’s birthday was last Saturday, as it is every summer solstice. I made the traditional poppy seed cake, and I made the traditional butter cream frosting: 2/3 of a stick of butter and a full pound of powdered sugar—I never fully realized what a nutritional nightmare cakes are until I started making Laurel’s birthday offering. It’s the husbandly effort that counts, not the aesthetics of the result, for the cake ended up with a strangely collapsed center, for unknown reasons that I like to…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Laurel, the unlicensed geologist

Our (mostly Laurel's) appeal of the Nielsen lot partitioning in Spring Lake Estates continues to take its twists and turns, but the road is inexorably coming closer to its end. Some time back Laurel testified at a hearing where Denny Nielsen and his hydrologist-for-hire, Nick Coffey, presented their (weak) case for overruling the Hearing Officer's initial denial of the lot partitioning. The Marion County Commissioners decided to remand the decision back to the Hearings Officer, so several issues were revisited, such as the number and cause of well deepenings/replacements in the area, and the rate at which groundwater is being…
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Posted inHome life

My kind of humor

No matter how your day is going, a good laugh makes it go better. To that end, I highly recommend a web site with my kind of humor—cynical British wit that zeroes in on the follies of male-female relationships. Check out “things my girlfriend and I have argued about.” I rarely read something that makes me laugh out loud, and in fact, made me incapable of reading it to Laurel because I was choked up with laughter. But some of the (numerous) postings on this site did just that. Be sure to click on Margret’s photo. Margret and the author,…
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Posted inDogs

Erotic Serena.

click to enlarge Because of the bad economic times, we're thinking of branching out into some other entrepreneurial directions. As part of our market research, we'd be interested in the level of interest among HinesSight readers of tasteful pet-erotica. We have a live-in model who works for almost free (dog biscuits are cheap), and Laurel loves to snap photos of her in alluring poses. We're pretty sure a pet-erotica web site would be legal (though one never knows with Ashcroft around) but the question is: how much would people pay to view it? This is one of those secret passions…
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Posted inSustainability

Strawberries say so much

A tale of two strawberries, and what they tell us about the way of the modern world: one was part of a box bought in a Fred Meyer supermarket not long ago, nicely packaged in a plastic container that described its California origins. Large, red, attractive. And quite tasteless. The other came from a half flat of local berries bought last Wednesday from the people who park their pickup near the junction of Liberty and Commercial streets. Smallish, a darker red, slightly blemished. And sweet beyond words. Yet, I just read that Oregon strawberry growers are finding it tough to…
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Posted inRecreation

Mini-Mountain bikers

Yesterday we learned that an “easy” hiking trail can be decidedly not-so-easy for mountain bikers, especially when the bikers in question (namely, us) are more accurately termed “Mini-Mountain bikers.” That is, we like to ride on big-tired, rear-suspensioned, mucho-geared bicycles, but we prefer to skip the mountains that these bikes are, judging by their name, intended to be rode on by those who are less attached to life and limb than we are. However, we wish to emphasize that the Deschutes River Trail (from the Meadow Picnic Area to Dillon Falls) is beautiful and well worth traversing, by which we…
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Posted inRecreation

Metolius musings

Here we are in central Oregon (Camp Sherman), enjoying one of the world’s most beautiful rivers, the Metolius. The leftover Thai food in the refrigerator beckons, but a weblog posting beckons even more strongly. Brevity in writing is encouraged by gastric growlings, though. My verbosity would be minimized if I always wrote on an empty stomach. I’ve been carrying around my new digital camera, an Olympus Stylus 300 that I had to get after my daughter visited with her stylish envy-inducing Canon Elph. Having a camera small enough to fit in a waist/fanny pack has been interesting for me. Early…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

More lies from lying liars

Driving around in my car last Sunday, searching for anything other than a right-wing talk show to listen to on the AM dial (a tough job), I heard the Dolenz’s (or should it be Dolenz’?), a husband and wife personal finance team, interviewing an economist who worked on a deficit study that recently got shelved by the Treasury Department when the conclusions didn’t mesh neatly with Bush’s tax cut plans. Well, not only didn’t the conclusions not mesh neatly, they were completely opposed to the notion of reducing taxes and increasing the federal deficit. This column by Scott Burns on…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

Lies and Liars

Proving that television isn’t a total wasteland, last night we stumbled upon C-Span2 coverage of the Book Expo America convention in Los Angeles. That doesn’t sound like stimulating viewing, but we picked the right time to be watching, as we got to see a hugely entertaining panel of politically-inclined authors: Molly Ivins, Bill O’Reilly, and Al Franken. This was stuff you don’t get to see on regular talk shows—the uncensored insults and anger. Ivins was rather mild, though we didn’t hear all of her remarks. Then O’Reilly, host of the inaccurately titled “No-Spin Zone” on Fox (I believe) and author…
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Posted inFamily

Kentucky goings-on

We got back yesterday from six days in Kentucky—the annual reunion of Laurel’s family at her sister’s home outside of Lexington. Lynn and Randy were great hosts, as always, managing to keep many children, adults, dogs, and cats fed, entertained, and under enough control so nobody got seriously hurt. I did get scratched by the “good kitty,” which is a smidgen of what I would have gotten if I had ever met up with the “bad kitty” (never could get their real names straight; all that mattered was keeping their personalities straight). As soon as we arrived in our rental…
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Posted inScience Writing/Weblogs

Chimps join we “Homo’s”

If you haven’t read the news about chimpanzees being even more closely related to humans than was previously thought, here’s a link to an article in the online version of Discovery magazine. Serious thought is being given to adding a species to the Homo genus, of which Homo sapiens currently is the only member. I love the idea of having chimpanzees join us in the Homo club. We humans need reminding that we are animals, and should be treating our kin with more respect. Like, by not eating them. Or hunting them. Or mistreating them in zoos and circuses. Reading…
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