HinesSight

I loved Emilia Pérez, a highly creative genre-bending film

Last night my wife and I finished watching Emilia Pérez on Netflix. We loved the movie, which won four Golden Globe awards this year and likely will be nominated for many Oscars. 

We tried to imagine what the pitch would have been to movie studios. "Hey guys, we want to make a film about a man who is a vicious Mexican drug lord, but whose dream is to become a transgender woman. It will be largely in Spanish with English subtitles and feature lots of singing and dancing."

Yeah, right, not going to happen seemingly would have been the typical response. Yet Jacques Audiard, writer and director, did succeed in making the movie -- which blends the genres of a musical, drama, and thriller. 

I found the song lyrics deeply moving, especially those in which cartel kingpin Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, played by transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón, expresses his deep desire to be who he truly is, a woman, before he dies. 

Basically Manitas is saying, I want to truly live before I die. Which is how almost everybody feels. Yet often we don't reveal to others, or maybe even to ourselves, what our innermost nature genuinely is. 

Before I watched Emilia Pérez, I was very sympathetic to transgender people who undergo gender-affirming care. After seeing the movie, even more so. Manitas has to go through a huge amount of trouble, making tremendous sacrifices, to become the person he feels himself to be.

This is the power of movie-making. Watching a marvelously-made film about someone transitioning from a man to a woman had much more of an emotional effect on me than all of the news stories I've read about transgender people and gender-affirming care. 

Yes, the director apologized after Mexican outrage over Emilia Pérez, which was made in Spain. And he's come in for criticism from a LGBTQ group. But I think critics of the movie are missing what really counts about it: how we humans can have an intense desire to be true to ourselves that compels us to make great sacrifices to that noble end.

In Providence strike, I'm on the side of nurses and doctors

Last Friday Oregon's largest health care strike in history kicked off as about 5,000 nurses, doctors, and midwives walked off their Providence Hospitals jobs. Dissatisfaction with working conditions was a major reason for the strike, according to the Oregon Nurses Association. 

One of Oregon’s largest healthcare providers, Providence, is a system in crisis that threatens the health and well-being of all Oregonians.  

We are nurses, doctors, physician associates, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives from Providence facilities across Oregon. Some of us have been bargaining with Providence for more than a year and are working without a contract.

Providence has rejected our common-sense proposals to improve patient care and safety by not committing to safe staffing and other critical patient safety issues in our contracts. That’s why we’re going on strike starting January 10.

When healthcare workers are asked to do more with less, patient lives are at stake. Providence has pushed nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals to work under unsafe staffing conditions.  

Providence hasn’t offered any real plan to increase retention. Providence simply isn’t competitive with other healthcare systems in the areas where they operate. That means fewer workers; longer ER lines; longer surgery waits; and more medical complications, as Oregonians can’t get the care they need quickly. 

We have made the difficult decision to go on strike because Providence executives aren’t listening to us. We need Providence to put patients before profits and do everything they can to make sure healthcare professionals can work to the top of their practice and stay for the long term.  

Today Providence paid for a full page ad in the Sunday Oregonian newspaper. I'm a digital subscriber. Here's screenshots of the ad, which I found annoying and demeaning toward nurses.

Providence Health & Services claims that the Oregon Nurses Association called a strike with the intent of cancelling patient appointments and services. I doubt there's any solid evidence supporting that assertion, and it goes against the ONA statement of concern for patient well-being. 

And Providence also claims the Oregon Nurses Association is fully responsible for disruptions to patient care. Huh?

Negotiations over union contracts obviously involve two parties, the employer and the employees. Sure, often each side blames the other for being unreasonable if a strike occurs after negotiations break down, but usually this is hyperbole. Each side should shoulder some blame for the strike.

Hopefully Providence isn't operating under a fantasy that the public is more sympathetic to a giant health care corporation than to the nurses and doctors who provide care at the eight Providence hospitals around Oregon. 

I deeply doubt this is the case.

When someone needs care at a hospital, it is given by nurses and doctors, not by the management of the entity that owns and runs the hospital. I've appreciated the competency and friendliness of the doctors and nurses who handled my fairly recent hernia and eye operations at Salem Health, along with screening colonoscopies.  Administrators of the health care organization responsible for my care mean nothing to me.

After ten years of being a member of Regence Medicare Advantage, I just switched to a Providence Medicare Advantage plan after Regence and Salem Health failed to agree on a 2025 contract, which meant that I'd have to pay more for out-of-network care from Salem Health as of January 1.

So far (just twelve days), I'm satisfied with Providence Medicare Advantage. Several times I've phoned Providence with questions about my new insurance plan. The people I've talked with have been helpful and pleasant. But again, I'm thankful for the front-line staff at Providence, not management. 

The financial aspect of the offer Providence says it has made to nurses and doctors seems pretty reasonable. But it appears that working conditions and staffing levels may be the bigger concern for the nurses and doctors. I'm on their side, as I strongly suspect a majority of Oregonians are.

Oregon's Rose Bowl loss reminded me of Harris's presidential loss

There I was, all prepared for what I thought was going to be an enjoyable television watching time.

I'd been looking forward to this moment for months. I was highly familiar with the contest that finally was going to be decided. I realized that my favorite wasn't guaranteed to win. But there was every indication that this had a good chance of happening. I figured that the worst that could happen was an evenly matched contest where it would take a while for the winner to become obvious.

Sadly, what I just said applied equally to two disturbing events spaced about two months apart: Kamala Harris's loss to Donald Trump on November 5 in the presidential race, and the University of Oregon football team's loss to Ohio State on January 1 in the Rose Bowl.

Of course, these losses involved very different consequences. Harris's defeat risks the future of our country and indeed the entire world. Oregon's loss just means that a national championship isn't going to happen for the team ranked #1 for many weeks.

Yet both hit me hard emotionally. I wanted my favored contestant to win, really badly. I'd envisioned how good I was going to feel after their hard-fought victory had finally happened. I had settled into my TV watching chair with a lot of optimism.

But it didn't take long for me to realize that the Oregon Ducks weren't quacking away on the football field like they had earlier in the season when they'd defeated Ohio State 32-31 thanks to the Buckeyes quarterback sliding to the turf a split second too late when he had gained enough yardage to put his team in field goal range, and the game ended before a field goal could be attempted.

Either Oregon had taken a big step backward, or Ohio State was a much better team now. Probably both were true.

Regardless, watching Ohio State score 34 unanswered points in the first half, when the Buckeyes were only favored to win by three points or so, was shocking. Oregon sort of came to life at the end of the first half and some parts of the second half, though it seemed to me that the final score of 41-21 made the game seem closer than it really was. 

In football, there's always next year. Oregon had a great 2024 season with a 13-1 record. It's how much the  "1" hurts that stops me from feeling good right now about how the team did. Plus, Oregon has come close to a national championship before. I'd convinced myself that this was the year the Ducks would break through that "close but not quite" barrier.

Didn't happen. Maybe it will in 2025.

2024 Silvertongue Apple-Peal pokes satirical fun at Silverton

The Silvertongue Apple-Peal not coincidentally has a name similar to Silverton's recently deceased serious newspaper, the Appeal Tribune, which met its end in 2022 when the nearby Salem Statesman Journal stopped publishing it on the command of its corporate master, Gannett. 

Thankfully, the Silvertongue Apple-Peal lives on since 2012, thanks to local gadfly Gus Frederick, who has come out with a new edition on the pleasingly languid schedule of every two years to mark a general or midterm election. 

Our Town described Gus Frederick's effort in a story about the closing of the Appeal Tribune after 142 years. 

Frederick said The Appeal-Tribune had a personal impact on him and his eventual career in multimedia. He said, during high school, he worked on page layout for Davis, and was hired during the summer as a photo lab technician.

“The Appeal was a great initial learning experience,” said Frederick. “And while everything I do nowadays (video, photography, publishing) is digital, the analog background I lived through not only exposed those principles in graphic detail, it also makes me greatly appreciate these new modern whiz-bang tools we have today!”

Frederick felt so inspired by his experience that, in 1987, he and friend Rick Ernst published The Silvertongue Apple-Peal, a spoof newspaper poking fun at local institutions in the style of MAD Magazine and National Lampoon. The paper was published every April 1 using then-state-of-the-art publishing software, but even with a yearly print cycle Frederick said his small staff became burned out and the spoof paper was discontinued after five years.

But The Apple-Peal made a surprise comeback in 2012, this time being published every other year and coinciding with major elections. Frederick admitted his political views “drift towards port,” but neither liberals nor conservatives are spared in this new iteration, with the 2022 issue expected to come out soon.

The 2024 Silvertongue Apple-Peal is another work of creative pseudo-journalistic genius. I love every satirical bit of it, but am particularly struck by the ads, some of which I've shown below -- in part for the practical reason that my MacBook Pro laptop doesn't have a big screen, so I'm limited in the size of the screenshots I can capture and share.

Here's part of the 2024 front page, along with some favorite ads.

GIMME-ITT refers to Gannett, the much-despised owner of the Statesman Journal and many other newspapers in the country that Gannett uses as cash cows, laying off staff to reduce expenses and making as much money as possible from a paper before it is closed for good.

It's cool that the Silvertongue Apple-Peal has ads for related magazines.


Edgy but amusing ad.


Corny financial news plus bathroom humor directed at the Statesman Journal. Perfect!

My wife made the healthiest main dish in the history of Christmas Eve dinners

Part of me says, "You shouldn't be bragging on Christmas Day." Another part says, "Dude, go ahead and brag -- you aren't bragging about yourself, but about your wife, Laurel."

I'm listening to that part.

For while the title of this blog post might seem to be an exaggeration, it accurately reflects the prevailing opinion among me, Laurel, and five friends we invited for a Christmas Eve dinner at our house last night 

Well, in the history of Christmas Eve dinners is an embellishment that I added for dramatic effect. But it's true that all seven of us agreed that few people were having as healthy a main dish as what Laurel served for dinner.

Here's a photo of my leftover plate that I'm having for dinner again today.

It's a vegetarian loaf with organic lentils, kale, brown rice, and carrots, with cranberry sauce as a glaze on top, plus some other minor ingredients. (It was supposed to have a celery stalk also; Laurel forgot to put it on the list when I went grocery shopping on Sunday, so celery wasn't included.)

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Ultimate Vegan Thanksgiving Load with Cranberry Sauce recipe. You have to scroll down a ways to find the recipe on this web page. 

Since I've been a vegetarian for 55 years, with no meat or fish entering my mouth during all that time, I readily admit that my taste buds are so attuned to healthy vegetarian food, there's no way I can compare this veggie loaf with turkey, ham, or any other food that once was walking around -- assuming it was raised outside of a factory farm, since in those places some animals don't have enough room to walk.

All I can say is that it tastes good to me, as it did to everybody who ate it last night. Of course, our Christmas Eve dinner included some other food: mashed potatoes, salad, green beans, chocolate cake, poppy seed cake. Our guests contributed several of the dishes. 

I'm not religious, but it was a Christmas miracle of sorts when I got on the scale this morning for my daily weigh-in and found that not only hadn't I gained any weight, I had lost some, even though I ate quite a bit last night.

That's a side benefit of eating healthy vegetarian food during the holidays, as well as throughout the year. It tends to be lower in calories.

My weight has bounced around a bit during the vegetarian phase of my life, which began when I was about 21. Currently I weigh just a bit more than I did in high school. However, my height is a few inches less (damn aging!) so my BMI, body mass index, must be greater now.

I'm not a strong proselytizer for vegetarianism.

Still, I'm not shy about pointing out that not only is giving up meat good for a person's health, it's good for our planet. Raising animals for food is a major contributor to rising greenhouse gas emissions, which makes being a vegetarian wise both personally and environmentally. 

Looks like Macy's store in downtown Salem is closing soon

I've heard from two people that the Macy's store in downtown Salem is closing after the first of the year. I don't know if that means January 1 or a later date.

But reportedly this news comes from Macy's employees, so it seems to be true -- though I don't believe there has been any official announcement. 

Adding credence to this rumor is a Reddit post from two months ago. 

So, idk if it’s public knowledge yet, but Macys in downtown mall is closing. I’m a former employee and they told us in June/July-ish? They’re declining in service, they’re treating their employees worse and worse. So quick reminder, when you go there, have some gd compassion. Y’all asking and not having any shred of compassion? It’s gonna make things worse. This town had the tendency to not take a three seconds to compose a 10 second sentence that isn’t selfish. Be. Nice.

Also, not closing because they’re not making money, it’s because of the building being so unfortunately under code and corporate doesn’t wanna spend the money.

Toodles!!

Also, a RetailWatchers post from March 2024 had the Salem Macy's on a list of stores probably closing by 2026. (Typos are in the post.)

According to an anonymous but reliable source, these Macy's stores either among the lowest sales per square foot in the company, has had its property has been acquired for redevelopment or has an upcoming expiring lease, therefore in all likelihood will close by 2026.

And a recent December 19, 2024 article in That Oregon Life, "Could Macy's Be Saying Goodbye to Salem Center Mall in 2025?," said:

The retail landscape is shifting rapidly, and once-iconic department stores are finding it increasingly difficult to stay relevant in the digital age. Macy’s, a brand that has long symbolized the quintessential American shopping experience, is facing mounting challenges as it seeks to adapt to changing consumer habits. Rumors circulating online suggest that Salem’s Macy’s location at the Salem Center Mall could be among the stores closing after the 2024 holiday season, potentially by February 2025. While Macy's has not yet confirmed which locations are on the chopping block, the speculation alone highlights the growing uncertainty around the future of physical retail spaces.

The timing of the rumored closure fits with a December 13, 2024 USA Today story:

Macy's is closing more stores than it originally announced earlier this year.

According to the company's third quarter earnings report, the department store chain is expected to close 65 locations by the end of the year, an increase from the 50 locations the company said it would close by the end of the fiscal year in February.

"We now expect to close roughly 65 locations this year," said Macy's CEO Tony Spring in the earnings call. "In line with our typical cadence, closures will occur post holiday."

The retail giant said in February that by 2026, it planned to shut down 150 "unproductive" stores, or roughly 30% of all its locations, while prioritizing investments in 350 "go-forward" stores. Macy's also said at the time the move, dubbed as "A Bold New Chapter," will allow it to focus its resources and prioritize other stores.

If the closure happens, this will be a blow to downtown Salem.

There's a lot of shopping history in that location, which was home to the first branch Meier & Frank store after it opened in 1955 -- following on the success of the original Meier & Frank store in downtown Portland. Eventually all Meier & Frank stores were sold and rebranded.

In 2005, Federated Department Stores, parent company for Macy's, purchased the stores. By September 2006, all their stores were rebranded "Macy's," ending the 149-year history of Meier & Frank Company, the "Store for Service and Accommodation", in the northwest.

Us seniors are getting screwed by the lack of Medicare long-term care

My wife and I are in our mid-70s. We're old, but not super old. Currently we're doing just fine living at our home on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. 

Yet it's becoming increasingly obvious that with increasing age comes a diminished ability to do the things that need doing. That's why we're having more yard work done by hourly workers, use a handyman to do some routine chores we used to do ourself, and have made changes such as putting screens on our gutters and railings along our outside walkway.

Such is absolutely normal. Every old person, or senior citizen if you prefer that term, is going to need help with everyday living at some point in their life. 

That's what makes our nation's crappy approach to long-term care so irritating. I used to work for the State Health Planning and Development Agency back in the 1970s-80s when health planning was a thing. (Maybe it still is, but now it isn't the same sort of thing.)

I recall a lot of talk back then, which made it into the State Health Plan that I helped write, about promoting alternatives to institutional long-term care such as nursing homes. About fifty years later, the  same talk is happening, with very little action. 

What spurred my recent thinking about this was getting an email from someone at Capital Manor here in Salem. We have a deposit at Capital Manor that puts us on a wait list for their Life Care Services. This is an appealing continuity of care approach where you start off with independent living, then are able to make use of Residential Care, Memory Care, and Home Care as needed.

That sounds great. But there's a catch.

As the Capital Manor staff person reminds us every time we hear from her, "The premise of our community, is much like a long term care plan.  The only way to get here is to have the ability to live independently and once a resident, you will have the guarantees of assisted living, nursing and memory care.  This contractual guarantee is made to our residents only and the window of opportunity to make a move here can close quickly."

So in order to receive the services of Capital Manor, you have to be able to live independently. The Capital Manor web site makes this clear, saying on the pages that I linked to above, "Capital Manor does not accept direct admissions into residential care, memory care, or home care."

This indeed is very much like a long-term care insurance plan. Or other health insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act did away with pre-existing conditions not being covered. To be approved to get long-term care through Capital Manor, you can't need long-term care at the moment.

This is exactly like the bad old days of health insurance where, if you needed insurance because you have cancer, the insurance company would exclude coverage of cancer treatment because it was a pre-existing condition.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was able to eliminate this policy by expanding the insurance coverage pool markedly -- which enabled insurance companies to spread the risk of pre-existing conditions over a large base, the basic point of insurance.

Like most old people, we don't want to sell our house and move to a continuum of care community like Capital Manor. We want to keep on living where we are until circumstances demand a move. But as the email from Capital Manor said, if we wait too long and either my wife or I are no longer able to live independently, then just when we need the services of Capital Manor, we won't qualify to join Capital Manor.

So it's a tough choice: do something we don't want to do -- sell our house and move to a less desirable residence at Capital Manor while we're still able to pass the Capital Manor health assessment -- or wait and see how long we can get by with cobbling together our own ways of "assisted living."

This isn't fair to us seniors.

I'm not blaming Capital Manor for their policy regarding the ability to live independently. If Capital Manor didn't do this, then it would be similar to people not buying health insurance until they had an expensive medical problem. Insurance companies had to exclude pre-existing conditions until the Affordable Care Act required everyone to have health insurance. 

I'm blaming our nation's legislators in Washington D.C. who haven't made long-term care an integral part of Medicare. Every person on Medicare should be able to get the same services offered by Capital Manor as part of their basic benefit package. This would allow old people to live in their homes for as long as possible, getting assistance as needed from caregivers just as Capital Manor offers for its residents.

Again, it's crazy that in order to qualify for what amounts to private long-term care insurance, you can't currently need the services that would be provided by that insurance. I understand that you couldn't get fire insurance for your house if it was in the process of burning down. However, health care isn't fire insurance; it is a necessity that should be guaranteed by the federal government, as it is in most wealthy countries, but not the United States.

It's clear that the next four years of the Trump administration won't bring genuine long-term care benefits to Medicare. We'll be lucky if massive cuts aren't made to Medicare and other entitlement programs. I just hope that when Democrats get back in power, they make this a priority. 

Our 2024 Christmas letter is partly about saber-toothed tigers

Another year, another Christmas Letter. Or as we call it, our Holiday Greetings.

Per usual, I wrote it. The key to doing that this time was an image that popped into my mind of animals going extinct. Which pretty much sums up how I look upon Christmas letters: a dying breed.

Nonetheless, I'm still alive. And I enjoy writing the Holiday Greetings. Plus, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2024 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF

Here's what's scientifically true about good nutrition

When it comes to what sorts of food are best for us, opinions abound. There's a never-ending avalanche of nutritional advice from many different sources: social media, news sites, television ads, books, and such.

Often this advice isn't based on scientific facts. That's why I was thrilled to see the special issue of New Scientist that arrived in the mail recently. The cover headline: How to Eat Better: The Seven Chewiest Questions About Nutrition and Your Health.

Here's the questions and a brief summary of the answers. (New Scientist is a British publication, so some spellings are different from American English.)

(1) Could when you eat matter as much as what you eat? Not really. But it's advised to "get most  of your calories earlier in the day and avoid eating altogether during your biological night, which for non-owls starts around 8pm." Owls, who wake late and go to bed late, could eat later at night. 

(2) What's the truth about hormone-balancing diets? Hormones vary a lot, so the notion of balancing doesn't make much sense. However, it's still good advice to follow hormone diets touted on social media just because they make good general nutritional sense: "eat more wholegrains, more lean proteins, plant-based fats, fruits, vegetables, high fibre foods."

(3) Is snacking really that bad for you? It depends on the quality of the snack. "If you are a grazer, as long as you're grazing on healthy food and not grazing late at night, current evidence would support that can be part of a healthy, balanced dietary pattern."

(4) What's the real supernutrient we don't get enough of? Fiber (or fibre, in British English). "Few of us appreciate just how far-reaching its health benefits go... high fibre diets lead to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels." Good sources are vegetables, fruits, wholegrain cereals, nuts, peas and beans.

(5) Do anti-inflammatory diets work? Once again, a diet that reduces chronic inflammation, which is implicated in cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, and dementia, is simply a good diet in general. "A fibre-poor diet will be more pro-inflammatory... diets that seem to offer protection are those already recognised as broadly healthy: low in processed foods, saturated fats, salt and sugars."

(6) Is personalized nutrition worth it? Probably not. "A 2023 report from the UK's Food Standards Agency concluded that the benefits of personalised nutrition 'seem somewhat marginal when compared to what is already understood about a healthy diet.'"

(7) Are fermented foods all they are cracked up to be? "The case is strongest for yogurt...[but] some of the benefits may have nothing to do with fermentation...yogurt is high in calcium, a nutrient helpful for stronger bones." Be cautious about making your own fermented food like yogurt, kombucha, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Inexpert at-home fermentation can foster harmful pathogens like salmonella. 

Oregon Ducks win Big Ten championship! We're #1!

Wow. What a game. And what a season. The University of Oregon football team went 13-0, capping it off with a nail biter of a Big Ten championship game against Penn State that the Ducks won 45-37 tonight.

It was a highly entertaining game. Somehow I remained calm through most of it. Probably that had a lot to do with my memories of the preceding twelve games, some of which -- like Boise State and Ohio State -- were won extremely narrowly.

But somehow Oregon found a way to win. That's the mark of a great team with great coaching. They manufacture their own breaks, though I readily admit that in a game of inches, Penn State came very close to beating the Ducks.

For most of the game the Oregon secondary looked pretty weak. They kept giving up a lot of yardage on pass plays where the Penn State receiver was wide open with no defender in the vicinity. However, when it mattered most, the secondary came through, as an Oregonian story says.

The Ducks were unable to move the ball on offense, giving it back to Penn State with 2:11 left and a conference title hanging in the balance.

Nikko Reed would then write himself into Ducks lore.

The senior corner picked off Allar on a deep ball to cut Penn State’s comeback attempt short, with Oregon fans taking a beat before realizing what had happened. The Ducks offense ran the ball with success — including a key first down run on third down by Gabriel to wrap up the victory.

Now the Ducks get some well-deserved rest before playing in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day against the #8 vs. #9 winner in the 12-team national championship playoff. Naturally Oregon will be the #1 seed, since they've been the top-ranked team for quite a few weeks and just defeated the #3 team.

I've loved not only watching Oregon play this season, but feeling that the style of the team is a wonderful reflection of our state.

Their uniforms are bright and flashy. They combine toughness with speed and finesse. Coach Lanning and his defensive coordinator are expressive and enthusiastic. The team plays cohesively, not panicking when things aren't going well, not becoming overly confident when they've got a large lead.

Win three more games, and the Ducks are national champions. It'd be terrific if that happens. If it doesn't, that won't take away from Oregon's unforgettable season.