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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Posted inFamily

Some hipness added to our drab lives

It was great to have Celeste (my daughter) and Patrick (her husband) spend the weekend, and part of Monday, with us. It was even worth driving through a seriously weird hail- and rain-storm on the way to the Portland airport Friday afternoon. The thermometer on my Volvo was at 48 degrees (outside temperature) just before the storm; it dropped to 36 degrees in the middle of the storm, during which I-205 was completely white—covered with hail—and cars were driving 30 miles an hour on an almost deserted freeway. Then, a few miles later, it warmed up, and traffic went 10…
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Posted inFamily Home life

Pancake recipe shared with world

Celeste, my daughter, is arriving from Los Angeles in a few hours for a weekend visit. (Her husband, Patrick, comes on Saturday, to enjoy with Celeste the all-too-common November-in-May Oregon weather. Our gutters were overflowing this morning, so I climbed up on the roof with my trusty high-powered leaf blower—a great way to clean gutters, by the way, even if water is in them—and ended up getting hailed on.) In honor of Celeste’s visit, for it has been quite a while since I’ve seen my one and only offspring, I have decided to share with the world the pancake recipe…
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Posted inEntertainment

Bend It Like Beckham

A great movie that leaves you feeling like you want to take up soccer (or, as they say in the civilized world, football) and be eighteen again. Or, at least, be eighteen again. Yes, it has a thoroughly happy ending, but you don’t see it obviously coming like the crude happy ending freight train of less skilled movies. Rather, it sneaks up on you in such a fashion that the big smiles come only at the end, and don’t stop even after you leave the theatre. “Bend it” is a soccer term (pertaining to the trajectory of a free kick,…
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Posted inHome life

Ah, the ecstasy, the joy, the rapture…

Yes, my Inspiron 8200 has made its Airborned journey to the Dell repair center in Memphis, Tennessee and back, all in the space of just two days. Inspiron seems much better now with her new video card, and I almost feel like taking back all of the nasty things I’ve said and thought about Dell Computer over the past few months—or however long I have been struggling with daily freezes, screen garblings, darkened displays, and consequent loss of some of my most brilliant prose, for Inspiron always seemed to shut down just before I was about to press the “save”…
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Posted inRecreation

Amtrak: a thumb up, a thumb down

Laurel and I took Amtrak to Seattle last weekend, leaving Salem Friday and returning Sunday afternoon. I loved the train ride. Laurel hated it. Go figure. But vive le difference (or is it “viva”? my one semester of French got me reading “The Little Prince,” but that’s about it). If Laurel and I were the same, I’d be her, or she’d be me. In either case, what would be the point? Conversing with myself, or hugging myself, or ______ ing myself (you fill the blank), why, it just isn’t the same as it is with Laurel, because she is different…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

Sustained by Drunkenness

I read the Tao Te Ching again over the weekend, looking, as always, for some inspiration and answers to life’s big questions. Of course, right off the bat the first line of chapter one demolishes this ridiculous expectation: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Damn! I should be able to learn the secrets of the universe from a book! Except…wasn’t the universe around for, oh, some twelve billion years before there were books? Hmmmm. Maybe what made it possible for books to eventually be written is something far different from what is in books—words, concepts,…
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Posted inRecreation

Global Warming…The Big Lie

Remember, you heard it first here, on HinesSight: Global warming is a big lie, probably propagated by the radical enviro-liberal-feminist-socialist cabal that controls everything through their secret meetings in a cavern deep underneath the offices of the New York Times, their unacknowledged, but oh-so-obvious mouthpiece. How did Laurel and I figure out the truth about this conspiracy aimed at shutting down the red, white, and blue lifeblood that keeps the American economy humming, all those fuel-sucking SUVs, coal-fired power plants, and noisy polluting snowmobiles? Simple, we did some basic research. And the Big Lie stared us in the face. Checking…
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