Posted inSalem

Tear down Salem’s Courthouse Square! Make it a park.

Courthouse Square is a square block disaster in downtown Salem. The three story building, previously mostly filled with county offices, is completely unusable because of dangerous construction defects. So is the adjoining bus transit mall/underground parking. Twenty million dollars still is owed on the $34,000,000 project. There's little chance that any more than the $1.8 million received in a settlement with the architects and contractors will be gotten in recompense for the construction screw-ups. Yet the Marion County commissioners seem to be headed toward throwing lots more taxpayer money down the Courthouse Square rathole. So says the Statesman Journal in…
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Posted inSustainability Web/Tech

How I’m fighting global warming Internet “trolls”

It's a tough decision: how to handle anti-science global warming deniers who repeatedly leave lengthy comments on my blog posts, filled with untruths, deceptions, and flat out lies at odds with facts about how the Earth's climate is changing because of human carbon pollution. I've tolerated this crap for a long time, but have decided to take a stand for truth (as contrasted with "truthiness," which is what global warming trolls specialize in.  In this context a troll isn't a mythical being, but someone set on disrupting courteous, respectful cyberspace discourse. They're a problem almost everywhere on the Internet. I've…
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Posted inDogs

We give Keizer Rapids Dog Park “two paws up”

Our dogs seemed to really like their visit to the Keizer Rapids Dog Park this afternoon. It was the first time my wife and I had been there. Impressive. Just as Salem (Oregon) is the dowdy little sister to much more glamorous Portland, so is Keizer usually viewed by Salemites as even more lackluster than our aptly nicknamed So-lame. Well, not when it comes to dog parks.  My wife and I are pretty sure that Salem doesn't have any fenced dog parks. Keizer Rapids is fenced-- a big plus, especially for dog-owners like us. Recently we got a young dog who…
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Posted inScience Sustainability

Arctic warming could be cause of NW cool spell

It's been freakin' cold this spring of 2012 in the Great Pacific Northwest. Also, rainy. March saw the most rainfall ever in Portland. I think here in Salem we had the third rainiest March on record. Today I went for an afternoon dog walk in 45 degree weather. Driving home from my Tai Chi class tonight, my car thermometer "dinged" with a 37 degrees nearing-freezing alert.  Global warming deniers seize upon any unusual cold spell as evidence that Al Gore is wrong; global warming is a fraud perpetrated by the United Nations One World Order and complicit climatologists; weird record-breaking…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

My iPhone speaker survives toilet water. Here’s how.

I wish I had a better story involving wild sex, drugs, or fighting off a home invasion about how my beloved iPhone 4 ended up in a toilet this morning.  Actually...I'd put the phone on some magazines that were headed to the recycling bin. Forgetting where the phone was after, um, I'd done my (stand-up) business, I grabbed the magazines from a counter and heard a highly disturbing splash as the phone hit the water. Moving as fast as my semi-awake 63 year-old self does that early in the day, I had the phone out of the toilet in just…
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Posted inHome life

Metallic coolness & great benefits: Chase Sapphire Preferred card

Up to now I've taken my credit cards pretty much for granted. They've been pieces of plastic which have simply done their job: paying for stuff I want to buy, and giving me frequent flier miles on Hawaiian or United Airlines. But after Hawaiian dropped it's direct flight from Portland, Oregon to Maui (where we vacation frequently), the luster of our Hawaiian card dimmed dramatically. Even before that happened, I looked around for an awards card that could be used on any airline, for any sort of trip. And settled on the Chase Sapphire VISA card, which I extolled in…
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Posted inDogs

Our dog cloned herself! Astonishing.

How did our dog do it? My wife and I knew that Serena, our 12-year old Shepherd/Lab mix, is super intelligent.  But cloning herself... and somehow hiding the experiment from us until a full-grown almost perfect copy was ready to be revealed... astonishing! This explains all those UPS deliveries from medical supply companies that I thought my wife had ordered for some reason, which mysteriously came to be transported to our "dog room" with teeth marks evident in the cardboard boxes, and the lab equipment I just found hidden behind Serena's dog crate. Well, we're happy Serena was able to…
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Posted inHumor

April 1 — big day in marijuana news

Of all the news reports that appeared in cyberspace today, April 1, the most interestingly informative I came across was Toke of the Town's "It's a Wild Day in Weed News. Here's the Roundup." Wow. Who knew? Some samples... Jazz Musician' Son Brings Brownie To Fourth Grade Class! Panic broke out this morning at Redwood Elementary School when a local jazz guitarist's son smuggled in through the opened doors of the grammar school a "red" sequestered Tupperware-covered container of evenly-cut Betty Crocker's "More Fudge Than Fun Brownies," for Pebbles Shapiro-Naguchi's birthday party. There'll be no birthday celebration in Room 102…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Why conservative Supreme Court justices are wrong about the mandate

My respect for the four most conservative Supreme Court justices has gone down a lot this past week, now that I've been able to learn how their supposedly top-notch legal minds view the Affordable Care Act's mandate that every American have health insurance. A cartoon by Politico's Matt Wuerker sums up the absurdity of how Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito seem to be viewing the mandate issue. Columnist (and economist) Paul Krugman made pretty much the same point as cartoonist Wuerker in his column, "Broccoli and Bad Faith." Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared…
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Posted inHome life

Great deal on used Nissan Leaf — here in Salem, Oregon

Car has been sold. Sorry. Hope you find another used Leaf.  The all-electric Nissan Leaf is a terrific car. It's just turned out to be a less-than-ideal fit for our lifestyle. We live about six miles from the Salem city limits, so we use up twelve miles of range just getting to the edge of town. Plus, our aging dog doesn't seem to like the sloping Leaf hatch compartment (it slopes because of the mid-car battery stack). While that may not seem to be a big deal, you don't know how dogcentric my wife is. Whenever we look at a…
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Posted inScience

Cool real-time wind map of United States

Thanks to Climate Progress, I was turned on to what's described as the "coolest wind map ever." Well, since I've only seen one wind map in my life -- the one they're talking about -- I'll have to take the scientists' word on that. Indeed, it's intriguing to see a countrywide flowing view of what the wind is doing today. The map creators advise using the Chrome browser to view the map, which I use, but even so I discovered that after that web page was open for a few minutes, my MacBook's fan went noisily on. Checking the Mac…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

Fox News gets positive about Chevy Volt

It must have been my recent blog post that convinced Fox News it should stop lying about the Chevy Volt and get behind an all-American car that has won both the North American and European Car of the Year awards. Because this Steve Doocy interview strikes a whole different tone from the Volt-bashing that's been going on at Fox News. Oil-loving conservative Texan Lee Spieckerman of Spieckerman Media started off by saying that Fox News commentators have had "a fetish for demonizing the Volt," then went on to explain why the Volt is such a great car. I love Fox news,…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

Reality doesn’t register in the Republican brain

Yesterday Amazon delivered Chris Mooney's new book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality."  I've only read a few pages so far, but I can tell that I'm going to like it. And not just because Mooney agrees with how I see the two major political parties, Republicans being way more reality-denying than Democrats.  I want to understand why Republican science-deniers do what they do. Like all human behavior, they really can't help themselves. Something in their brains causes them to look upon facts in decidedly unfactual ways.  Us liberals will be ineffective in…
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Posted inHome life

Our trail camera captures…Nursing fawn! Coyotes! Bucks!

See 'em here. Absolutely free. No waiting.  Amazing (well, sort of) sights of animals in the wild, captured by our trail camera, which is ably managed by my wife, Laurel. She moves it around to where she thinks critters on our rural western Oregon property are most likely to do their critter'ing. Got some pretty good shots of...   A fawn nursing. Awwww... So cute.   A buck prowling around in the daytime.   Deer twins. More cuteness.   A raccoon family making a nightime excursion.   A coyote in our lower field.   Another shot of a coyote. A…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

U.S. justice system locks up way too many people

In some areas the United States may truly be exceptional. But our health care and criminal justice systems suck, big time. We should learn from other countries who do a much better job keeping their citizens healthy and safe. In health care, we spend twice as much as other industrialized nations, yet our health status indicators are below average and forty or fifty million Americans are uninsured. Crazy. The Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction. A single payer health care system, a.k.a. Medicare for All, would be a leap in the right direction. Our criminal justice…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

“Stand Your Ground” laws are absurdly dangerous

The more I read about the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17 year old, by a neighborhood watch volunteer who followed the black boy around his neighborhood, looking for an excuse to play policeman even though he was told by a 911 responder to stay put in his car, the more absurdly dangerous "Stand Your Ground" laws look to me. And many others. Like a former Miami police chief.  Police officers are trained to de-escalate highly charged encounters with aggressive people, using deadly force as a last resort. Citizens, on the other hand, may act from emotion and perceived…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

Crazy March weather points to global warming

This morning my wife and I had to cope with five inches of snow on the ground here in rural south Salem (Oregon). It was weird. I've lived in Oregon for forty-one years. Can't remember a time when the blooming daffodils were crushed by so much snow. Because our newspapers couldn't be delivered, over breakfast I read a story about the spring storm in the Oregonian online. Turning to the comments, I saw predictable comments along the lines of "Ha, ha, Al Gore is wrong. Can't be global warming if the Willamette Valley got record-breaking snow for this time of…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Chevy Volt — Rich Lowry is wrong about a great car

My wife and I are seriously considering selling our Nissan Leaf and getting a Chevy Volt. We've got good reasons for doing so, but that's the subject of another post. What I want to talk about now is the trashing of the Volt by conservatives such as Rich Lowry, who wrote an absurd column, "The Sad Plight of Obama's Edsel," that ran in the Portland Oregonian yesterday. There's so much wrong with Lowry's piece, it's tough to know where to start with truth-telling. I guess the title is a good place. The Volt isn't Obama's car. General Motors revealed the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sustainability

Pared down HB 4095 won’t harm Oregon land use system

I'm feeling better about what I called "land use shenanigans" that popped up at the very end of the Oregon legislature's short 2012 session. After learning more about what the $550,000 appropriated by the joint Ways and Means Committee for a pilot regional land use planning project in Josephine, Jackson, and Douglas counties would do, it looks like Oregon's efforts to protect irreplaceable farm and forest land from unnecessary development aren't much at risk. This is because HB 4095, which was a major threat to Oregon's land use system, died without getting a vote in either the House or Senate.…
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