Posted inDogs

Human training with Chuck-It

We often hear, "be careful of what you want, for you may get it." The summer after we got Serena the Wonder Dog I took her down to the dog exercise field at Minto Brown park, where I admired the tennis ball hurling gadget that a woman was using. While I was throwing Serena's ball just a little way down the field, plus running the risk of throwing my shoulder out with every not-so-mighty hurl, she was effortlessly catapulting her dog's ball far past my distance, and with much less effort. To top it off, she didn't have to bend…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

God Bless the Troops

Somehow Laurel had made it through her, um, 39 years of living on this Earth plane without ever being exposed to the Fox News Channel. So yesterday I served as her Right Wing Television Pimp and hooked her up with channel 205 on the Dish network. We managed to watch Fox News for about two minutes before we started to gag on the ever-present American flag logo in the upper left corner of the screen, and the hyper Got-To-Kill-Those-Damn-Iraqis-Before-They-Destroy-America (but how?) rhetoric from the so-called "news" anchors, all of whom seem to be angry white men with deep inferiority complexes…
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Posted inHome life

Further evidence of male idiocy

Now, there's a title for a book, a really long book. I have an item to contribute to it. Not involving me, of course. That would be ridiculous, to think that I have ever, am now, or will in the future engage in any act that could fall under the rubric of "male idiocy" (the skeptical laughter from cyberspace is already ringing in my ears). No, this is about the bird I like to affectionately call Bastard Robin, or even nicer names, depending upon how many tons of bird poop I find splashed on my Volvo wagon each day. I'm…
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Posted inEntertainment

Roger Dodger

This was an unexpected pleasurable DVD find, made possible by the usually-reliable "two thumbs up" notice on the front cover. I don't think this movie got much notice when it was first released, which figures: it is quirky and full of great dialogue, but not much sex or violence (lots of talk about sex--little explicit action). Roger is an advertising executive who, not surprisingly, has a way with words, and a way of using words to seduce women. The only problem is that he falls prey to his own bullshit and can't separate his malarkey from his real self--assuming he…
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Posted inEntertainment Family

Academy Awards reprise

I knew it! As I surmised in my last post, I knew there was no way that Laurel and I, who go to movies at real theatres regularly, could have only gotten 10 Oscar winners right, while my sister and brother-in-law, who spend about half the year in St. Lucia, where movie-going plays a second (or nineteeth) fiddle to margarita drinking and lying in the hammocking, could have gotten 16 and 17 Oscars right. Today Carol Ann fessed up in a revealing email message: "Anyway, you were right on our internet use for winning the annual first prize. Bob actually…
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Posted inMiscellany

Laugh when it hurts too much to cry

With all the serious insanity flying around the front page of the newspaper and CNN nowadays, it is great to be put in touch with someone who can laugh at it all. One of the (two or three) HinesSight readers, Randy Smith, told me about Neal Pollack's weblog, and I became an instant fan. Sucked into Pollack's web by his shameless self-promotion, I even bought both of his books via Amazon, where I learned that his first book was the inaugural title of McSweeney's Book, Dave Egger's (author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius") publishing arm. And that's all…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Keep those coyote control ideas coming

[Update: I've observed that some people find this post via a "coyote control" Google search. What you'll read below is , obviously, a tongue-in-cheek approach to coyote control. If you want to know the truth about coyote control, take a look at some other posts I've written on the subject of controlling predators: "Is killing cougars a wildlife service?" and "Coyote debates."] I've heard from a fellow Spring Lake Estates resident who has got his shotgun facing in the right direction when it comes to controlling the coyotes around here. It's refreshing to find someone who cuts through the B.S.…
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Posted inEntertainment

Academy Awards impressions

Should have gone with my heart, "Bowling for Columbine," rather than calculating, "they'd never vote for Michael Moore"...would have won with 11 picks, rather than tying with Laurel and one other person who also had 10 at Jim Ramsey's traditional vegetarian AA potluck...regardless, 10 or 11 is still pretty pathetic; my sister and brother-in-law report they got 16 and 17 respectively, ending up the top two at their AA get-together...congratulations! though don't I recall you saying, Carol Ann, that you do advance research on the Internet, checking out the projected winners from various sources, and then averaging them all together?...doesn't…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Victory! (but the war may not be over yet)

No, we're not talking about Iraq, but about Laurel's fight to stop further partitioning (a.k.a. subdividing) of lots in Spring Lake Estates. The report from the Marion County hearings officer arrived in the mail today. She denied the Nielsen's application to partition their Oak Drive lot. We're still digesting her findings, but clearly all of Laurel's hard work researching well deepenings and replacements, plus the competent hydrogeology reviews by Malia Kapillis, paid off. The hearings officer cited numerous errors and omissions in the original hydrogeology report prepared by Nick Coffey for the Nielsens, most of which were pointed out by…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Good and bad of March 17

The good: its our anniversary, which we cleverly managed to make St. Patrick's Day, so whenever images of green beer and drunken Irishpeople start to run through my head I know it's time to start making romantic preparations. Which, this year (our 13th, which isn't bad because we're not superstitious, knock on wood) didn't require a lot of time. I guess a man knows he's been married a dozen plus years when the big present you decide to give your wife is finally fixing two mouse problems--in our well pump enclosure and (more disgustingly) our medicine drawer--and she is happy…
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Posted inHome life Sustainability

Week in review

God, that sounds like some sort of PBS public affairs program, "Week in Review." But that’s what it's been, more than a week since my last HinesSight entry, so duty calls me to summarize it all in a single blaze of what-we've-been-up-to-but-haven't-uttered-a-peep-about. Well, the most traumatic event, from which it took me several days to recover, was logging onto the L.L. Bean web site, ready to accomplish my bi-or tri-annual jeans buying in the usual minute or two, and making a horrifying, absolutely impossible to believe, discovery. L.L. Bean had discontinued selling black natural fit jeans, and had changed the…
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Posted inHome life

Clearly, a message from God

What other explanation is there? I open up the newspaper this morning, and there in the Saturday “Auto” section is a glowing review of the Mini-Cooper. I got to drive one of the original Mini-Coopers exactly one time, circa 1967, when a college friend much more knowledgeable about cars than I urged me to test drive one, as an alternative to a VW bug that I was thinking of buying. That test drive is still fresh in my mind, or, at least, as fresh as any experience from the 60s can be, for reasons that should be obvious, but which…
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Posted inFamily Home life

Oh, yeah, vegetarianism is cool

I know it is true, because Time magazine tells me so. Therefore, following some sort of possibly-twisted Aristotelian logic, since Laurel and I are vegetarians, we must be cool too. The article reports that nearly 25% of adolescents polled by Teenage Research Unlimited said vegetarianism is "cool." And college students rated salad eaters more moral, virtuous, and considerate than steak eaters. Well, obviously. Who needs a poll to tell us that? Vegetarians rule! Real vegetarians, at least. Time says that in a survey of 11,000 people, 37% of those who responded "Yes, I am a vegetarian" also reported that in…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Near-death experience and nothingness

Recently an acquaintance forwarded me an email message about a particularly amazing near-death experience. All near-death experiences are amazing, of course, because death is such: amazing, the mother of all mysteries. I've always been interesed in NDE's since I have a bit of a personal interest, as do we all, in what happens after we take our last breath. Death has a way of capturing your attention, thats for sure. But most NDE's bear a distressingly close resemblance to the nature of the person having the experience. Christians tend to see Jesus, New Agers a soul guide, and so on.…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many babies are you going to kill today?”

On Laurel's instigation, we took part in the worldwide no-war! protests today, joining 1000 or more people at the state Capitol. It had been over 30 years since either of us had been in an antiwar protest march, so we were a bit out of practice. I had the LBJ chant all ready to go, realizing that some acronym substitutions had to be made, but it bothered me that GWB didn't rhyme so nicely with "hey" or "today." Fortunately, the protest was much better organized than protests were in the late 1960s. Probably the organizers weren't nearly as stoned as…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Backups are beautiful

That's my sentiment at the moment, having just reinstalled the blogging software after more than a week in the deeper depths of upgrade-to-a-larger-hard-disk-hell. Reinstalling, and then posting an "I'm back" message resulted in the disappearance of every single trace of the old HinesSight postings--which, in retrospect, was entirely predictable, since the newly installed software had me starting from scratch. The message, my friends, is to faithfully backup your precious whatever. This is relatively easy to do with computer whatevers; I just had to copy a folder from a backup drive to the new drive. Its a bigger problem with more…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

HinesSight interruptus

My sister recently reminded me that it had been five days since my last posting. Indefensible! I shall punish myself severely, in a fashion that I cannot let myself know, or I would be able to take steps to avoid it. Let the punishment fall when I least expect it, which it will, since it isn't known even to myself. My only defense, and it is a weak one, is that dear Dell 8200 is still suffering from some start-up and performance problems, not unlike yours truly. So I continue to spend more time than usual fussing with computer maintenance…
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Posted inHome life

So proud of Laurel

I'm so proud of my lovely wife, and if you could have seen her swearing like a longshoreman in front of the bathroom mirror last month, you would be as proud of her as I am. Yes, Laurel finally has learned how to put in a contact lens. Now, it is true that five year old children undoubtedly can do this without any problem, but Laurel, who is a bit older than that, had some unique problems that she had to overcome. To wit, a blink reflex that wouldn't stop. I can't begin to tell you what we (mostly her,…
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Posted inSustainability

Thanks for feeding PollMonkey

Many thanks to everyone who fed the PollMonkey and expressed their preference for a new name for the old Fairview Training Center property. The online poll will remain up for about another week, until my one-month PollMonkey membership expires. Vote if you haven't done so already. It turns out that the management of Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA), the group that is making Fairview into a sustainable (i.e. Green) development, has changed course, and now doesn't think the property needs to be renamed right away. That's fine with me. I had advised the management that they needed to slow down and…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Life and death

What it all comes down to, doesn't it, life and death? Isn't this at the root of the human condition, and our most basic fears, longings, fantasies, desires, dreams, beliefs, everything? I went in to renew a permit this morning that had, um, expired a mere four years ago, and in the process of trying to butter up the clerk who had to decide whether this lapse deserved some sort of bureaucratic slap on the hand, we ended up having a great mini-conversation about the meaning of it all. Noting that my age, 54, was similar to hers, 53, she…
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