Posted inUncategorized

Vote for these Salem-Keizer school board candidates

Are you tired of extremist politics? I sure am. We've become a bitterly divided country. That's bad enough at the national level, but when politics becomes the focus of a school board election, students are the ones who suffer from adults marching to the beat of their personal political drummer. Unfortunately, Oregon Right to Life and other groups on the far right side of the political spectrum have set out to control the Salem-Keizer school board. They're backing a slate of candidates in the May 2021 election who want to use the school board to push their extreme political agenda.…
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Posted inEntertainment

Worst Academy Awards show ever

Every year I look forward to the Academy Awards show. I should have reversed direction this year and looked backward to previous shows that were actually entertaining.  This was the first time I fast-forwarded through much of the interminable three-plus hours, because I wanted the damn thing to end so I could do something enjoyable. Whoever came up with the atrociously bad concept for the 2021 Academy Awards should be drummed out of Hollywood forever.  It wouldn't take me long to Google who that person (or people) was. But I found the show so uninteresting, I can't summon up the…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Marion County could go into Covid “extreme risk” soon

If you thought it was OK to relax with the mask wearing and social distancing, think again. Oregon Covid cases are increasing at the highest rate in the nation, 58% in the past two weeks. The next closest state is Alabama with a 37% increase. When Alabama is kicking our butt on public health, that's reason to be worried. Here's a chart of how badly Oregon has been doing recently. Remember how freaked out everybody was in the spring of 2020 when Covid was a new thing to worry about? The 7-day average of cases in Oregon back then was…
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Posted inGrowing older Health

My hernia consultation goes well (if I ignore scary stuff)

About two weeks ago I got a hernia diagnosis, which I memorialized in "Now I can scratch 'get hernia' off my bucket list."  The diagnosis wasn't a big surprise, given the large bulge on the right side of my groin that appeared suddenly while I was sitting in a dentist's chair a few days before I got the official diagnosis based on an ultrasound.  I've been trying to be as positive as possible while waiting for a surgery consultation. But as today's consultation approached, my mind veered off in some decidedly negative directions. My hernia is large; maybe it is…
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Posted inHome life

My office looks more Zen after painting forced it on me

I wish I could say that my many years of daily meditation led to an enlightenment experience that caused me to drastically simplify the office where I hang out in our house. (By "hang out,"  I mean that this is the one room where I get to decide how it is furnished and decorated. Elsewhere, my wife calls the decor shots, mostly because she is better at this than I am.) However, what actually happened is that last week we had three rooms painted by Apex Paint and Remodel, who did a great job.  One of those rooms was my…
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Posted inGrowing older

High schoolers today, here’s what I went through in 1962-66

Every generation faces its own challenges. And the challenges we faced in our youth color how we view present-day challenges.  My granddaughter will be 14 in a few days. I sent her a card (and cash!) today, saying that she timed her entry into high school next fall quite well, since the Covid crisis should be mostly over by then. I feel for high school students who have had their lives disrupted by the pandemic for over a year. This will be an enduring memory for them, no doubt. Being a senior citizen, I'm well aware that tales of the…
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Posted inGrowing older Health

Now I can scratch “get hernia” off my bucket list

Trying to find some humor in the hernia diagnosis I received today, this cartoon reminded me that, hey, I only have a single hernia, so lucky me!  (I also have taken to wearing joggers much of the time rather than regular pants, which qualify as skinny jeans. And sure, I've got a lifetime supply of bitter regrets -- which now includes getting a hernia. But it's a stretch to say I'm in midlife, since I'm 72.) As befits my age, I don't have a great story to tell about how I ended up with a right-sided inguinal hernia. No, I…
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Posted inHome life Writing/Weblogs

Blog blast from the 2005 Statesman Journal past

Tonight Laurel, my wife, found a clipping from the August 12, 2005 Statesman Journal. Wow, there I was in the "Got Blogs?" story by Angela Yeager, looking 16 years younger than I do now. Naturally my first thought was, I've got to write a blog post about how blogs were looked upon back in 2005.  Yeager did an excellent job at capturing the excitement of the Dawn of Blogging. Below you can read her entire story, which I was pleased to capture with my halfway decent touch typing skill. My second thought was, I wonder if Google still looks kindly…
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Posted inSports

Watching Oregon State basketball is my happy drug

It's a natural high -- watching the Oregon State men's basketball team pull out six unlikely victories,  starting with the PAC-12 tournament. UCLA. Oregon. Colorado. Those underdog wins produced a PAC-12 tournament championship, the only way Oregon State was going to make it into the NCAA March Madness. Unable to see Oregon State play during the regular season because I'm stuck with DirecTV, which refuses to carry the PAC-12 Network, I became a big admirer of how the team was able to covert their underdog role into top dog wins. Then came the NCAA tournament. Tennessee. Oklahoma State. Loyola Chicago…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Trump’s inept Covid response killed about 400,000 people

It's been clear for a long time that Donald Trump caused many thousands of Americans to die needlessly because of his astoundingly inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic. What's been in question is how many.  Thanks to Andrew Akteson, a UCLA professor, we now have an answer: nearly 400,000 deaths could have been avoided if the United States had done things differently and better. That's an astoundingly tragic number.  Not all of those unnecessary deaths are Trump's direct responsibility. But most are, since he oversaw our country's Covid response when strong public health actions could have markedly reduced the death…
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Posted inSports

Oregon State men’s basketball team is heart-stopping fun to watch

Whew! My heart rate has slowed down enough to enable me to share some praise of the Oregon State basketball team that just beat Oklahoma State -- getting Oregon State into the Sweet 16 round of NCAA's March Madness. Their first win in the tournament over Tennessee was wonderfully satisfying. Tonight's win was even better, in part because Oklahoma State has Cade Cunningham, a great player who might be the #1 pick in the NBA draft. Oregon State is a delight to watch. The team has great chemistry. When a starter is faltering, or in foul trouble as Ethan Thompson…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Goodbye, print Statesman Journal and Oregonian. We went digital.

Today was a day that I never thought would arrive -- the day my wife and I decided to stop getting home delivery of the Salem Statesman Journal and Portland Oregonian. Given our age, early 70s, we grew up reading newspapers printed on dead trees that crinkled when you turned the pages. Laurel and I both like print newspapers.  But we also like seeing the Statesman Journal and Oregonian in the paper box at the end of our driveway. And increasingly, that wasn't happening. Our neighbors reported the same thing was happening to them. So even though I registered a…
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Posted inHome life

Been married for 31 years today. But I’m not great at proposing.

In 1990 Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, March 17. Great decision. I've never forgotten our anniversary, not even once in the past 31 years, because an image of green beer always makes me think, "Time to get flowers and a card!" Shock (not). We looked much younger when we were much younger. Our wedding was at the house we'd bought a few months before in Spring Lake Estates, where we're still living. My only regret about our wedding was how I'd botched my marriage proposal. On the plus side, it was spontaneous, though I'd been thinking…
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Posted inFood and drink Health

Metabolism myths about diet, exercise, and weight loss

Science rocks. It's by far our best way of understanding reality.  But most of us, me certainly included, often are prone to embracing folk wisdom rather than science when it comes to losing weight. I'm six feet tall and 178 pounds at the moment -- though sadly, my long-term trend (I'm 72) has been to lose a bit of height and gain a bit of weight.  Since I'd like to get to about 175 pounds and know how difficult it is for me to lose even a few pounds, I was eager to read the front page story in the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Making daylight savings time permanent is a must, Congress

Tomorrow at 2 am Daylight Savings Time returns. May it never depart again.  Late fall and winter already are depressingly dark. Losing an hour of late afternoon sun in November, when Daylight Savings Time ends, means that doing anything outside at that time is dreary, if not impossible.  Fortunately, there seems to be a good chance Congress is going to do away with the twice yearly clock changeover. So says a LA Times opinion piece. It’s nearly that time of year again when Americans reset their clocks one hour ahead, grumble about losing an hour of sleep — and wonder…
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Posted inHome life

There’s tricks to chainsawing that I don’t know

I'm a chainsaw middle schooler, I suppose. Meaning, I've learned quite a bit over the 25 years or so I've occasionally used a small Stihl chainsaw on our property in rural south Salem. But in no way do I feel totally comfortable with a chainsaw. A feeling that I was reminded of today when I tackled a challenging tangle of logs that had fallen during the recent ice storm on a common property trail that runs behind our property to Spring Lake. Yesterday I had the good fortune to stop by Ace Hardware and discover that they finally had some…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

“The Great” is, well, great! Here’s why I liked it.

My wife and I came late to The Great, an engrossing ten-episode series on Hulu that is (very) roughly based on the story of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia.  It was released on May 15, 2020. We discovered it last month after looking for something else on Hulu, noticing The Great, and having my wife say, "I've heard it's pretty good." From that moment we watched The Great almost every night until we finished the last episode yesterday. Thankfully, Season 2 is in the works, because we loved the show. It's like nothing else I've ever seen -- not…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Tree cleanup guys are the new Salem-area heroes

Ah, what a difference it made to my mood having tree debris from the recent ice storm cleaned up from our rural south Salem yard. We'd done a lot of picking up small branches ourselves. And I'd been able to cut some larger limbs with my small 16-inch chainsaw. But there was no way I could handle the big limbs from a giant oak that fell on our lawn. That required a bigger chainsaw and younger muscles than I possess. So for almost three weeks my wife and I have been staring at a mass of tangled branches whenever we…
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Posted inFamily

“The Hiltons” is a book about my great-uncle, Conrad Hilton

I consider myself genetically lucky. While I had nothing to do with being born as Conrad Hilton's godchild (he was my mother's uncle, and my grandmother's brother), I got to read 443 pages about the Hilton family courtesy of J. Randy Taraborrelli's book, "The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty." Few people are able to have a book describe a relative in such tantalizing detail. Taraborrelli must have put a heck of a lot of work into his research, which included interviews with people who could cast light on the life and times of Conrad Hilton, the famous…
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Posted inHome life Salem

PGE tree clearing crew were artists at what they do

Yesterday a Portland General Electric (PGE) tree clearing crew was working in our neighborhood prior to the restoration of power following a massive ice storm. We and our neighbors had been without electricity for 11 days at this point. So it was a joy to finally see PGE repair activity occurring. Laurel, my wife, had noticed a PGE truck in the driveway of our neighbor to the south on Lake Drive in rural south Salem, where a tree was in contact with an electrical line. She walked over to talk to the crew to make sure that they knew about…
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