HinesSight

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.

Fortunately, there's another slate of highly qualified candidates with broad community support. Here they are. Be sure to vote for them when your ballot arrives in a few days.

Cottingham, Ortiz, Avila, and Pressey are endorsed by the Community for Salem-Keizer Schools. This is how the group describes themselves.

Community for Salem-Keizer Schools PAC is a coalition of education advocates, racial justice organizations, parents, educators, students, labor leaders, and community leaders committed to helping all children in our community succeed.

They make some great points on their web site.

Unfortunately, the Salem-Keizer School Board is dominated by very conservative politicians who represent a narrow ideological perspective. This small faction controls so much of what happens in our schools.

We can do better. Our school board can reflect the diversity of our community. We can bring back the community’s voice to board meetings.

To learn more about the candidates pictured above, check out their backgrounds on Community for Salem-Keizer Schools.

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 energy to learn who produced this yawner.

It's difficult for me to decide what was the worst thing about the show, so I'll just list some of the things that turned me off in no particular order. 

-- No production numbers. The nominated songs just got a few seconds of play rather than a full production featuring the singer of them. 

-- Few clips from the films. It was incredibly stupid to not show, say, the costumes that led to a Costume Design nomination, instead having the camera linger on the nominee while the presenter talked about them. Hey, how about showing clips from the movies?

-- More ranting about no clips. Ditto with makeup. Ditto with sound editing. Ditto with almost every award aside from Best Picture, Best Animated Feature, and maybe a few others. Again, it was crazy to have the presenter talk about the sound nominees rather than letting us hear what the movie sounded like.

-- Lack of humor. With no host possessing comedic talent, there were no moments that even elicited a smile from me, much less a laugh.

-- Unlimited acceptance speech time. In the past, the best part about most acceptance speeches was hearing the music start playing that signaled "stop talking." This year, there seemed to be no limit to the speeches, so the boredom went on... and on... and on.

-- People of color got bad deal. Lots of BIPOC nominees won awards. Unfortunately, they won them on the absolutely worst Academy Award show ever, during which I'm confident many viewers turned the boring show off, or skipped through the uninteresting parts (most of the three hours).

-- Best actress got little time. Frances McDormand, the most quirkily interesting person in the show, only spoke briefly after she won Best Actress and the show was past its three hour scheduled length. Meanwhile, script writers and other lesser award winners blabbed on forever at the beginning of the show. 

-- Dumb attendee game. I would have much preferred listening to Frances McDormand instead of suffering through the "name that song" game where nominees in attendance were asked to say whether a song had been nominated for an award or something else. I've forgotten the something else because I fast-forwarded through most of this part of the show once I saw how bad it was.

-- Audience came last. The whole show reeked of a Hollywood insider focus rather than entertaining the viewing audience. Way too much self-congratulating and way too little concern with the public who pay the bill for movies through ticket buying and streaming purchasing.

-- Humanitarian award recipient missed out. In the past I've watched every minute of the Academy Awards show because most of it was interesting. This year, the show was so boring, I fast-forwarded through the humanitarian award to get to the end of this nightmare more quickly. 

-- Setting was completely forgettable. I'd heard the show was going to be in Union Station and somewhere else. Wherever it was, that place was so bland, it added nothing to the already blah production.

(For a real review of the Academy Award show, which echoes some of my points, check out the New York Times story, "The Covid-19 Oscars: Not Masked but Still Muffled.")

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 50-70 a day. Yesterday it was 740.

So however much you freaked out a year ago, freak out ten times as much now.

Unfortunately, too many Oregonians wrongly believe it is time to go back to normal, with few if any Covid restrictions. The all-Republican Marion County commissioners are part of that group, sadly.

I hope the commissioners take a long hard look at how Marion County is doing compared to other large counties. 

These are the ten counties (out of 36) with the highest recent Covid infection rate per 100,000 population. Marion is doing the worst of any large county. Our 14 day change of +116% is double the state average of 58% -- which, again, is the worst in the nation.

So almost certainly Marion County is one of the dozen or so counties that Governor Brown warned could move back to an Extreme Covid risk category. Currently we're in the High risk group.

Here's excerpts from an Oregonian story about this, "Oregon governor to close indoor dining next Friday in some counties if COVID hospitalizations spike."

In her most serious and stark tone in weeks, Gov. Kate Brown said Friday that she will shut down indoor dining in bars and restaurants in Oregon’s hardest-hit counties as soon as the end of next week if COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continue to surge.

Brown said despite her best efforts to keep the economy open while holding back on virus-control measures, she will cancel a “warning week” buffer and immediately move what looks like a dozen counties into an “extreme risk” category by next Friday if the number of statewide hospitalized patients reaches 300.

That could possibly include Clackamas County if not others in the metro area. The move would shut down indoor dining, as well as limit large gyms and movie theaters to no more than six patrons and prohibit indoor visits at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

...Based on the most recent infection rates, the counties most likely to move into extreme risk as soon as next Friday are: Baker, Clackamas, Columbia, Crook, Deschutes, Jackson, Josephine, Klamath, Linn, Marion and Polk. That’s 11 counties, and Brown had mentioned “at least” 12 counties.

If indoor dining is shut down and movie theaters/gyms are limited to six patrons, we here in Marion County will have no one to blame but ourselves.

The bizarre thing is that conservatives like to rant about government overreach when it comes to Covid restrictions, but most of them aren't willing to wear a mask, socially distance, and do the other stuff that would allow Governor Brown to lift those restrictions.

It isn't that hard, folks. 

Health care workers, including the staff in my dentist's office, wear a mask for most of their working day. Putting on a mask indoors for a shorter period, or outdoors if a crowd of people are close together, is no big deal.

Remember, the life you save could be your own. And even if you don't die from getting Covid, the risk of nasty long-term symptoms should be plenty of motivation for everybody, young and old alike.

Plus, it's the right thing to do. Wearing a mask and socially distancing protects us, and it also protects other people. Let's act as if we're all in this together.  

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 too large for surgery. I have to use an intermittent catheter to pee; maybe this will be difficult to do after surgery. My family physician said it was OK to exercise while wearing a hernia belt; maybe the surgeon will say this made my hernia worse.

Well, as often happens it turned out that none of my fears came to pass -- though the surgeon did bring up some scary stuff when describing what could go wrong with my hernia repair.

The Salem Health surgeon I saw today, Hsinchen Lin, M.D., made a great impression. Here's a screenshot from her official You Tube video.

Personable. Caring. Good communicator. And best of all, almost, Dr. Lin used the term "OCD" about herself while describing part of the hernia procedure. 

That's exactly what I want in a surgeon -- someone nice who also is obsessively compulsive about the details of the surgery she's performing. Especially when the surgery is being performed on me.

Dr. Lin started off by saying she didn't have her usual visual aid with her, so she'd have to draw me a diagram of the hernia surgery. She offered it to me as I was leaving. I grabbed the piece of paper, saying, "I'll keep this memento in a scrapbook."

Or, blog post. 

Those are my legs down at the bottom. The dot is my belly button, and the lines above are the three laparoscopic incisions she would be making.

My private parts are in the middle of the groin, though not drawn to scale, I hasten to say. The round circle on the right side of the groin is the hole where some of what should be inside me, like part of my bowel, has crept outside. 

Dr. Lin said that men are especially vulnerable to inguinal hernias due to the way the testes descend into the testicles in a boy baby. Then the wear and tear of aging can create a hernia in that already weak spot.

Plastic mesh is used to shore up the weak areas in my groin area. I penned in the word "sew" in the area where stitches would be used to fasten down the mesh. That can't be done on the lower side, for a reason I only vaguely remember.

Something to do with blood vessels and such that have to be left clear, I believe. So scar tissue forms over the mesh to keep it in place in those areas. And natural lining from my body also covers the mesh.

Early on in the consultation Dr. Lin used the term "robot" in describing the hernia surgery. For a bit I hoped that a robot would be doing the surgery, like an internal Roomba. Lin explained, though, that she controls the four robotic arms.

The laparoscopic approach is preferred by Dr. Lin over open surgery, though she said there was a small chance she'd have to go the open route after starting with laparoscopy. 

She told me that 50% of her hernia patients don't need pain medication after the procedure, which was great news, given how some Googling yesterday revealed that sometimes the post-surgery period can be quite painful. 

My scribbling is almost illegible, but I think Lin said that I shouldn't lift more than ten pounds for six weeks. Or maybe two weeks. Guess I'll find out after the surgery. Six weeks seemed to be the usual recovery period, with a two-week follow-up to see how things are going.

I mostly blurred out in my mind the obligatory explanation of what could go wrong with the surgery. The only note I made was "Chronic pain 1-6%." I'll focus on the one percent, liking those odds.

Pleasingly, this seemed to be a rare occasion when using a catheter five times a day to empty my bladder fully (I can pee some on my own, but my bladder basically went on strike four years ago) is a plus.

Dr. Lin said that sometimes the bladder works slowly after hernia surgery, and a catheter is required. But since I'm already using a catheter, problem solved! 

I double-checked with Lin about exercising while waiting for surgery, including chores like mowing the grass on our ten rural acres with a walk-behind mower. She said that'd be fine so long as I wore a hernia belt, which I've already been doing.

Now I have to wait for Regence MedAdvantage to approve the surgery. After that I'll get a call to schedule the hernia repair. 

At the end of the consultation Dr. Lin said I should consider whether I wanted the surgery, since I'm not experiencing any pain from the hernia at the moment.

It took me about two seconds of considering to say, "Let's do it."

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 office.

It had wallpaper dating from when we moved in some 30 years ago. For some reason we decided to replace kid-room wallpaper with adult-room wallpaper, rather than having my office painted, which in retrospect would have made more sense.

Anyway, I had to get everything out of my office -- kind of a strange term for a retired guy's room where he doesn't even keep his computer -- before the wallpaper removal and painting could begin.

Believe me, there was a lot of stuff to move. Including a lot of books.

Laurel, my wife, tells me that I love clutter. Actually that isn't true. It's more that I'm comfortable with clutter. I'll blame it on my mother, which is easier than blaming it on myself.

My divorced mother was even more of a bookaholic than I am. (She also was an alcoholic, but that's another story.) Piles of books were all over the house I grew up in.

Me, I just had piles of books in my office. The rest were in bookcases.

I was able to start moving stuff back into the office while the Apex Paint and Remodel guys were finishing up the other two rooms. On Friday I asked one of the crew to take a look at the office.

"Thanks for giving me this opportunity to start fresh," I told him. "I'm taking a Marie Kondo approach, only bringing things back to this room that give me joy, that make me feel happy. If you'd seen what it looked like before, you'd know what a big change has been made here."

Philosophically speaking, which is how I frequently like to talk, this empty room experience points to the benefit of emptying out now-and-then, whether this be a physical or mental turn toward an embrace of a form of nothingness.

When we start with a blankness, it's necessary to decide what it really needs to be filled with, and what is extraneous. With my office, I was able to choose between truly satisfying items and what had crept into the room through an unthinking "might as well put that here."

Here's photos of the result, taken today after pictures had been added back to the walls.

Most of our house has natural wood walls and ceilings. I like the wood, but having off-white paint in my office rather than wallpaper markedly changed the look and feel of the room, brightening it considerably, not surprisingly.

The panther had to stay. I sit in the chair during my morning reading/meditating time. The red fan is part of my collection of Tai Chi fans. I don't know how to use them very well, but I enjoy the resounding "clack" they make when opened and closed with a flick of the body.

The Apex guy I showed my office to also was a long-time martial artist. He admired the Japanese katana swords, so I explained how the one on top in the wooden scabbard was made by a skilled fellow student.

It took me quite a while to rearrange the books, which are my core "meaning of life" collection.

I gave Taoism the top left honor, with Buddhism taking the top right shelf. Lower down is philosophy and a variety of mystical/meditation books, including what remains of my Rumi books, which used to number in the dozens.

Atheism occupies another shelf, with neuroscience on the adjoining shelf.  I humbly (yeah, right) put books I've written on the bottom shelf along with mindfulness books and more neuroscience titles.

To astound my wife, I left the bottom left shelf empty so my balance board could fit in there rather than leaning against the filing cabinet, where it had resided for several years.

I really like the view out of the window, especially when the Japanese Maple has leaves, as it does now. 

I got this photograph at the Salem Art Fair from someone who took it in China. The artist told me that he encountered this man on a mountain that had a Taoist monastery, I think it was, at the top. I love the image of a old Chinese guy pleasantly walking along a decidedly scary path. 

Beautiful reflection of how life should be lived. On the edge; hanging on to necessary support; smiling at the abyss that awaits us all at some point. 

I vacillated on putting my black belt certificate back on a wall. Eventually I decided that since it means a lot to me, and I like the design of it (which generally doesn't include a reflection of me taking a photo of it),  I should put the certificate up.

The style was a mixed form of karate of the Korean variety. My instructor was eclectic, having trained in numerous martial art styles, but his focus was on the Chun Kuk Do Korean-based, American hybrid style founded by Chuck Norris.

It feels good to inhabit an office cleared of clutter. My wife probably is wondering how long this will last. Well, I'm wondering also. I've already fought some temptations to put back some extraneous stuff.

So far I've won that fight. Time will tell if that continues.

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 Old Days don't mean a whole lot to young people today. Assuming, of course, that they even read blog posts like this one -- a highly dubious assumption.

Nonetheless, I feel like taking a trip down memory lane into my own high school years.

After all, who knows how long my memories will be intact? At some point I might need this blog post to remind myself. 

So here goes my attempt at You think you have it tough, young 'uns, let me tell how it was way back when in 1962-66.

I lived in Three Rivers, California, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains from, no big surprise, Nevada. 

The last above-ground nuclear test in Nevada was July 17, 1962, soon after I graduated from eighth grade. Sometimes we didn't get milk at elementary school lunch time because radioactivity had seeped into the grass California cows ate.

Few people worried about what the above-ground tests were doing to people. After all, we had the damn Soviet Union Communists to worry about. 

I and an eighth grade friend published our elementary school newspaper, mimeographed, of course. We polled our classmates about whether a nuclear war was imminent. Most students thought a war was going to happen soon. 

Fallout shelters were common. Nowadays in Oregon we worry about ducking and covering from an earthquake. Back then, we practiced doing this for a hydrogen bomb attack. 

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis at the beginning of my freshman year in high school. The Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Newly elected President John F. Kennedy managed to barely avoid war with the Soviet Union. 

But Kennedy was unable to avoid being assassinated on November 22, 1963, my sophomore year in high school. Without warning, the 500 or so students in Woodlake Union High School were summoned to an assembly.

We were told President Kennedy had been shot. It was a somber bus ride home. A few days later, Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed Kennedy, was himself murdered by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

On the plus side, the Beatles came to the United States on February 7, 1964. On the negative side, boys in my high school were forbidden to have Beatles haircuts with longish hair. (Some tried, though.) 

Girls couldn't wear pants. They took Home Economics. Boys took Shop. No mingling of the sexes in these classes. Homosexuality was never mentioned in class, since it was viewed as an illegal perversion back then.

Yesterday I saw a mention of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on MSNBC. I don't recall any classroom discussion of it, nor of the blatant discrimination against Blacks in southern states that was still common in the '60s.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1966, the Vietnam War was going strong. I'd always planned to go to college, but getting a student deferment from being drafted was an additional inducement to head off to San Jose State College. 

When the draft lottery came along in 1969, I was fortunate to have my birthdate come up far enough along in the lottery to avoid being drafted.

So, yeah, my high school years were interesting, for sure. Also, stressful. I'm not saying my high school experience was more interesting or stressful than what young people are going through today.

Just different. Remember what's happening to you, high schoolers of 2021, so you can write about what things were like back then some fifty-odd years later, as I just did.

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 wasn't bench pressing too high of a weight. I was sitting in a dentist's chair for about 90 minutes, the first part of a lengthy session involving three fillings and a crown replacement.

During the time the new crown was being fashioned by a 3-D printer in my dentist's office, I decided to visit the restroom. When I pulled my pants down I was met by a shockingly large bulge.

Ordinarily I'd be pleased by such a bulge in the region of my groin. But this bulge was to the right of my penis, a bit less than half the size of a baseball. So impossible to miss.

I decided to ignore it for the time being, since my focus was on getting through the rest of the dental appointment. When I got home, I phoned my family physician's office.

Not surprisingly, their best guess was a hernia -- which somehow decided to manifest in a dentist's chair, since I'm certain the bulge wasn't there when I took a shower earlier that day.

I was able to see a nurse practitioner the next day. He asked if I had any pain. No, I told him.

He then stressed that if I did feel a lot of pain, that was a danger sign that should cause me to go to the ER, since a strangulated hernia where part of the colon gets deprived of blood can lead to gangrene and other nasty stuff.

I was scheduled for an ultrasound at Salem Hospital. That was done yesterday, and I got the results this morning. Not cheery findings, but pretty much what I expected.

There is a large right inguinal hernia containing fat and bowel as well as a small amount of fluid. Hernia sac measures up to 5 cm. Fascial hernia defect measures up to 3.4 cm. Hernia is partially reducible but not completely reducible.

What immediately worried me was that the nurse practitioner had said I should get a hernia belt, what used to be called a "truss." (And maybe still is, by some.) I'd ordered and gotten several belts from Amazon. 

They all said "for a reducible hernia." Meaning, the protruding stuff can be poked back into the body, thereby reducing the protrusion to nothing or almost nothing. 

So I phoned my family physician's office.

Pleasingly, I was told by a nurse to not worry and go ahead with wearing a hernia belt, which I did today. Since my hernia protrusion mostly goes away when I lie down, I put on the belt while lying prone on a bed.

The hernia belt is pretty comfortable. I went on my usual two-mile afternoon dog walk while wearing it with no problem. It gives me more confidence while I wait for a surgery consultation, which is in the works.

All in all, I'm feeling mostly OK about my new health problem. 

Hernias are much more common in men. (Thus they really should be called "Himnias.") Some Googling revealed:

Researchers estimate that about 27 percent of men and 3 percent of women will develop an inguinal hernia at some point in their lives.

OK, I've reached that point. Now I'm looking forward to getting past that point. Hopefully it won't take too long to schedule a surgery.

Reading recent Amazon reviews of hernia belts caused me to realize that many men who were diagnosed with a hernia last year around springtime had to wait quite a few months for surgery, since elective surgeries weren't being done during the first wave of Covid cases. 

I guess my hernia picked a good time to pop out for a visit. 

I'm also grateful that my family physician responded promptly to several My Chart messages I sent her with hernia questions.

Pleasingly, she said it would be fine if I kept on with my daily exercising with the Monkii 360 ball and resistance bands, as I've gotten addicted to this enjoyable wear of working out. She also told me I could continue doing physical therapy stretching exercises for my sciatica problem.

The only caveat is the same thing my physical therapist kept telling me: if it hurts after you do something, stop doing that thing. And obviously I shouldn't be lifting heavy weights.

In an attempt to be positive about having a hernia, I've discovered that when you have a couple of longstanding health problems, getting a new problem tends to shift the focus of your mind off of the old problems and onto the new problem.

Thus my sciatica isn't bothering me as much anymore. Yay! Only problem is, my hernia has become a bother.

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 on my blog post about washing lettuce that Yeager mentioned in the story. Sadly, that post has disappeared from a "wash lettuce" search. At least, I gave up looking for it after going through 10 Google search pages.

But the post lives on in all its 2004 glory. So you can still check out "American Splendor/I learn to wash lettuce." Hey, that post has faded from Internet fame, but I bet it still is the only blog post about washing lettuce to mention comic book artist Robert Crumb.

Regarding the other bloggers mentioned in this piece, www.williambragg.com still exists. Way to go, William! Hopefully college student at the time Stacy Austin is still blogging, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Here's the Statesman Journal story.

Brian Hines has written and published several books during the past 15 years, but felt his work was disappearing into a black hole.

The Salem resident has found another way to reach a much wider audience with his words -- through his two Internet blogs, HinesSight and Church of the Churchless. 

Blogs, or web logs, started in the early 1990s as an offshoot of Web sites. Most were just personal diaries where bloggers could post their intimate thoughts and feelings.

But as Internet popularity rises, so has the use of blogs to do everything from covering political events to posting favorite recipes. The uses are endless, and the popularity of blogs is skyrocketing.

How many people are blogging is a question of debate. A site such as Technorati, a service that tracks blogging topics and trends, estimates that there are 12 million blogs worldwide, up from 100,000 in 2003.

BlogHerald, another blogging tracking site and news service, estimates there are 60 million bloggers.

Hines, 56, said his blog grew out of his growing frustration with the publishing world. He moved to Salem with his wife, Laurel, and the couple reside in a 10-acre country setting south of Salem with their dog, Serena.

His books, including a 2004 meditation on the Greek philosopher Plotinus, seemed to disappear as soon as they hit the shelves.

"The silence is deafening," Hines said over an ice tea at his home.

"With blogs, you write something that takes maybe a day and then it's gone. It belongs to others then. And unlike a novel, within minutes you have instant feedback. You realize you've touched someone."

Hines estimates he gets about 1,000 page views per day on his HinesSight blog, which is daily reflections from his life on "HinesLand," his nickname for his home.

HinesSight is where readers can go to find Hines writing about everything from the best way to get rid of yellow jackets, to the dog parade in downtown Salem, to arguments with Laurel on the proper methods of washing lettuce.

One of the big draws of blogs over a regular web site is that blogs register much higher on search engines such as Google.

For instance, type in "wash lettuce" on Google, and the second highest hit is Hines' blog on his lettuce washing debate with Laurel.

Hines' other blog, Church of the Churchless, takes on more serious subjects such as spirituality, meditation and faith, and only gets several hundred page views a day.

For a writer such as Hines, blogs are heaven sent.

"The frustration of writing books is you spend so long on one piece of work, and then you have to depend on someone else like a publisher to get it out there," he said.

"With a blog, for free or for $100 a year, you've got the whole world at your fingertips."

Citizen journalism
Frustrated writers aren't the only people who use blogs though. Bloggers were at both the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions last year, writing every detail of the political parade on their blogs. This kind of citizen journalism is rising quickly -- resulting in conservative blogs, liberal blogs, blogs for anarchists, Libertarians, Greens and everyone in between.

A search on Orblogs.com, a site where Oregon-based bloggers can register, turns up hundreds of entries. Amateur film critics post their reviews of movies they've seen, music lovers list favorite songs to download or albums to check out and members of the Pacific Northwest Fiber Bloggers post pictures and tips on their latest knitting projects.

If you have an interest or political view, you are guaranteed to find a blog somewhere by someone who shares your view.

Then there are people such as Salem resident William Bragg. A traveler sho works for Willamette Academy, Bragg, 37, and his wife Jeani Bragg, moved to Salem in 1999 so she could take a job at Willamette University. He started his blog, www.williambragg.com, as a way to stay in contact with his friends all over the world.

"I'm just really bad at staying in touch with people," he said.

"I have friends and family everywhere, so it was just an easy way for people to drop in when they wanted and see what was going on with me."

Bragg said he doesn't get too personal on his blog -- the site is too easily Googled.

He posts funny articles that he thinks his friends might be interested in, and sometimes posts on his own favorite subjects -- youth issues, education and the Boston Red Sox.

His entries on the Red Sox were so easy to find that when the team won the World Series last year, he was called by East Coast newspapers to comment because they needed a fan living in the West.

Sometimes the ease of finding a certain subject can be misleading. Bragg said he commented on his blog one time about a guy participating in Klingon Karaoke who had the name Jigar Mehta. People who were searching online for a Miss Norway contestant from Iran who was disqualified for acting in porn movies ended up on Bragg's site, much to his surprise. A fellow blogger clued Bragg in -- apparently "jigar" is also a term for a sexy Iranian female.

Bragg says he also uses his blog as a way to post his photography, which has started to gain some attention. 

He said he has had exhibits at coffee shops in Salem, but also is getting nice feedback online.

Freedom of expression
While his own blog is not updated daily and is more for fun, Bragg says he has friends who are blogging professionally. Some bloggers are finding advertisers for their blogs, or ask people to donate money to them.

And some are getting co-opted by corporations. Bragg said he has a friend who used to write a daily blog about the bands he loves. That music lover still writes that blog -- but now is getting paid by a record company to talk up bands signed to that particular label.

Bragg thinks the democracy of  blogs will only continue to make them popular.

The accessibility can't be beat. Sites such as Blogger.com are free, while ones such as Typepad cost $5 to $9 per month.

"There's nothing romantic about what I'm doing and what other people are doing," Bragg said. "A lot of it is ego. But I think any new form of communication, especially one that gives access to those who wouldn't have it otherwise, is positive.

Hines said he sees a danger when people are only getting information from blogs that agree with their particular life perspective.

For instance, a self-professed liberal such as Hines can post comments on a conservative blog, but he said his comments are deleted immediately.

Staying connected
College students also have found a home on blogs, where they can post personal information, as well as write about their interests.

Stacy Austin, 21, is a political science major at Oregon State University. She writes a personal blog, as well as one related to her summer internship with PolitiCorps, a division of the progressive organization Oregon Bus Project. Austin said she has been using computers since she was 7 and sees blogs as a natural extension of the Internet.

"In the future, blogs and Web sites will be synonymous," she said.

"People always ask me, 'Why do you blog?' You can't really understand unless you blog yourself. They build a community. People who build blogs feel connected. People who read my blog tend to be female and in college. I've had fathers e-mail me and say I remind them of their daughter, that reading my  blog is like connecting to their kids."

Hines said those kinds of connections is the reason that blogs will continue to proliferate.

"In a way, it's a gamble because you're opening yourself up," he said.

"On the other hand, you see these aspects that everyone has strange ideas and no one is 'normal.' You start to realize that the weirdest thing is to be completely normal. It can be a profound experience to realize you are not alone in this world."

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 -- today's victory. Once again, Oregon State wasn't favored to win any of those games.

They won all three, propelling them into the Elite Eight round, one Monday win away from becoming the only March Madness 12th seed to make it into the Final Four.

I've become a calmer Oregon State fan.

During the PAC-12 tournament I'd get really nervous near the end of a game, because I couldn't believe the team was going to pull off the upset, though I really wanted them to.

Today I watched Oregon State's slow start, glacial really, in a fairly relaxed fashion. Oregonian sports writer John Canzano put it nicely in his column today.

If you closely followed Oregon State’s dismal start to this season, you probably recognized Saturday’s game as a perfect metaphor. Slow start, encouraging middle, and lethal finish. The Beavers couldn’t get easy shots early. They could barely get the ball in bounds, really. But just like this season, something shifted midway through, and Tinkle’s team took control.

Ethan Thompson, a senior guard, deserves much of the credit for the win over Loyola Chicago. Whenever he had the ball, my nervousness ratcheted down a notch. 

Thompson makes very few mistakes. He's cool, calm, collected. When he's fouled, he hardly ever misses a free throw, looking even at the end of a close game like he's playing for fun in his back yard.

Jarod Lucas, a sophomore guard, is more erratic. Lucas usually plays solidly, but at times he gets a bit frantic, especially in comparison to Thompson's steadiness.

Today Lucas hit a three near the end of the game that, as the cliche goes, put a dagger into Loyola Chicago's comeback hope. He's a confident shooter, as befits his record as the third leading scorer in California high school history.

Then there's forward Warith Alatishe.

He's a highly entertaining player. Alatishe's jumping ability is amazing. He's a terrific rebounder and makes scoring over opposing players look easy, because he's shooting from such an impressive jump-shot height.

Center Roman Silva is the jumping antithesis to Alatishe. I don't recall ever seeing Silva leave the ground. Of course, when you're 7' 1" you don't need to do a lot of jumping to score or rebound. 

Silva is an appealing throwback to an earlier basketball time -- when centers played with their back to the basket and used guile to score rather than athleticism. He's a solid defender and contributes a lot to the Oregon State team, though Silva isn't a flashy highlight reel player.

Like all great teams, Oregon State is much more than the sum of its parts, the individual players. The team has excellent chemistry, buttressed by fine coaching. 

I love watching them play. After each win, I feel really good. Not just because Oregon State won, but how they won.

With teamwork. With determination. With energetic defense. With clutch offense. With solid free throw shooting. 

Monday they play either Syracuse or University of Houston for a trip to the Final Four.

Win or lose, Oregon State has become the Cinderella team of the NCAA tournament, a huge accomplishment given the preseason prediction that they'd end up at the bottom of the PAC-12 standings.

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 toll.

Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post story, "A better pandemic response might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives -- and Trump's presidency."

One year after the coronavirus pandemic began, the United States has been reshaped in remarkable ways. One of every 600 people alive at the beginning of last year has died of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Millions more have been infected with it, with some part of that group enduring lingering symptoms. Millions of people remain out of work.

The ship is turning. Multiple massive economic support packages have passed — the most recent by the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House. Millions more people have been vaccinated against the virus than have contracted it over the past several months. But there’s still the nagging question: What could have been different?

Such questions are hard to answer in real time, depending on the slow gathering and analysis of information. But we're starting to find some answers, including ones that offer a pointed political lesson.

It’s likely that the government’s response to the pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented. And it’s likely that the pandemic response cost Donald Trump the presidency.

The first point is a particularly contentious one. In the past, there's been analysis comparing the U.S. response to other countries, finding it lacking. Last summer, for example, researchers compared the American response to other countries, showing how their more muscular approaches tamped down the relative death toll.

More recently, research from Andrew Atkeson of the University of California at Los Angeles determined that implementation of robust efforts to halt the spread of the virus last May — widespread testing, mask mandates — could have held the country’s death toll below 300,000 in total.

His model estimates that the country will reach 672,000 deaths overall as vaccines are rolled out, one of every 490 Americans alive at the beginning of last year. That’s a gap of nearly 400,000 deaths.

Trump didn't embrace such mechanisms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were recommending the wearing of masks as early as April of last year, but Trump declined to do so. That helped bolster a partisan response to the pandemic, with Trump advocating for states to stay hands off — largely, it seems, out of concern that reductions in economic activity would hurt his reelection bid.

Trump is the worst president the United States ever has had. Thankfully, many, if not most, of Trump's destructive actions will be undone by the Biden administration and a Democratic congress.

However, what can't be undone are the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who are no longer with us because of Trump's horrible decision to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 and failure to implement a competent national response to the pandemic.

Everyone who voted for Trump in the 2016 election also bears some responsibility for those deaths. After all, it was an open secret that Trump disdained science and had no interest in making government a better servant of the people.

So when the pandemic hit and we needed a president who embraced science and a robust government response, all we had was a man in the White House who acted like a clown.

Which would have been funnier if almost 400,000 people hadn't died for no good reason because of Trump's antics.