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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Posted inNeighborhood Sustainability

Laurel makes waves at Water Resources Commission

Friday, Laurel testified during the public comment period at a meeting of the state Water Resources Commission. I played a part also, by looking on admiringly from the audience as she spoke. Laurel spouted out terms such as “recharge rates” and “sensitive groundwater overlay areas” with wonderful fluidity. I also contributed as Laurel’s faithful and obedient secretary by making up labels for the packets she handed on to the Commission. Basically she appealed to the commissioners to step in and do something about Marion County’s longstanding apathy about groundwater problems. Laurel cited several instances in which obvious well problems were…
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Posted inHome life

Can eating animals be an act of kindness?

A postscript to my last posting: in discussing with Laurel whether a meat eater can legitimately call himself or herself an animal lover, she reminded me that she used to eat free range chickens and didn’t feel guilty about it. “After all,” Laurel said, “they lived a good life while they were alive, and if someone hadn’t raised them to be eaten, they wouldn’t have lived at all.” OK, I suppose this is a decent argument for eating animals that have been raised and slaughtered humanely, but such animals are by far the exception, rather than the rule. And if…
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Posted inHome life

Meet PVR, my new best friend

I’m calling him by his initials, because this is how he was introduced to me by the Dish Network technician who brought us together about a week ago. His full name is Personal Video Recorder (is there an impersonal version, for people who are afraid of intimacy?), but I prefer PVR, though that is a bit hard to pronounce, since it lacks a vowel. No matter how you say it, it starts to sound like “pervert” (which he isn’t at all, so far as I can tell by what he has recorded for me so far, but that might change…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Dozen Desperate Ducklings Dodge Death

Due to a daring damsel, animal lover par excellence, Laurel Lee Hines. This afternoon Laurel was driving on 25th Street, past K Mart (or whatever the heck it is called now), and noticed some adult ducks on the other side of the road—the airport side. Then she saw some other tiny dots in the road, desperate newly born ducklings frantically trying to climb up a high curb and get to their mothers. Laurel stops her car. She watches vehicles speeding by in both directions, some missing the ducklings by only a few inches. Finally...a slight break in the traffic. She…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Sad Iraq fact, #… of how many?

Today the New York Times web site reports that the National Museum of Iraq, which once boasted the greatest collection of artifacts in the Middle East (some 7,000 years old), has been completely looted. Big deal, Rumsfeld would say. This is what happens when a tyrannical government is overthrown. People celebrate, and go a little bit crazy. Except, Mr. Rumsfeld, this isn’t a matter of looters taking some office chairs from the Information Ministry. It is people taking priceless irreplaceable treasures, which by rights belong to all humanity, while U.S. troops stood by and did almost nothing to stop this…
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Posted inNeighborhood

War against partitioning continues

Recently Laurel learned that the Nielsens have asked the Marion County board of commissioners to hear an appeal of their proposed lot partitioning in Spring Lake Estates that was denied by a hearings officer. We’ve gotten a copy of the appeal request letter that was written by Nick Coffey, the Nielsen’s hydrologist. There don’t appear to be any new facts presented in the letter, just arguments that the old facts were misinterpreted by the hearings officer. This is good news, because our understanding is that the commissioners usually won’t even consider an appeal of a denied partitioning unless new facts…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Philosophy

Pit of Vipers

That’s an uplifting image, isn’t it? I can barely watch the previews for Fear Factor, where they show contestants lying down in a box, covered with a mass of creepy-crawly snakes slithering every which way over them. I’d last, oh, about one second before I screamed, “get me out of here!” I’ve been thinking about a pit of vipers ever since my martial arts instructor, Warren, spoke about this concept last week. With the war in Iraq taking the turns it has, the Saddam statue falling today being a dramatic capstone to a pretty darn successful week for the Anglo-American…
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Posted inPhilosophy

The Power of Don’t-Know

Laurel has started attending a “Power of Now” group here in Salem, which discusses, and tries to put into practice, Eckhart Tolle’s philosophy. In his book, "The Power of Now," Tolle speaks of the wisdom of living in the present moment, which, really, is the only moment in which we can live anyway. Unarguably, most of life’s anxieties, fears, and problems vanish when we either forget about those that have already occurred in the past, or stop ruminating about those that might occur in the future. Laurel likes the people who participate in the Power of Now sessions, and I’m…
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Posted inEntertainment

Femme Fatale…fabulous

Another unexpectedly delicious DVD find, "Femme Fatale," a 2002 Brian de Palma film with a Hitchcockian flavor. I can’t even remember it in the theatres. It must have had a short run, probably because it is more artsy than mainstream films, and less artsy than art house films. “Tweeners” like Femme Fatale often get overlooked, which is too bad. Any movie with Rebecca-Romjin-Stamos in it deserves to be looked at, particularly the scene in the second half where she does a highly seductive bad-girl strip tease in the basement of what looks like a biker bar. Except…we theorized that any…
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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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