HinesSight

Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount

Eight days ago I was happy with the speed of the Starlink satellite internet system that I'd been chosen to be a public beta tester for, but not with the reliability. 

As I said in "My first Starlink beta test: fast but loses satellite connection," it wasn't s surprise that the connection kept dropping, since I had to put the Starlink on its tripod on one of our decks. We live in rural south Salem, Oregon, and our home is surrounded by large oaks and firs.

So I was eager to see how the Starlink did when the Ridgeline Roof Mount I'd ordered arrived, which it did yesterday. 

Installing the Starlink on our roof was easy. I'd already gone to Lowe's and purchased 16 5-pound red bricks, which were needed to weight the Ridgeline Roof Mount with the required 80 pounds of stability.

Laying a rubber mat on our roofline was easy, as was carrying the Starlink up a ladder in the bag that was included in the Ridgeline Roof Mount kit. The dish popped into the receptacle on the mount with a satisfying click. Then I threw the cable/power cord over the side of the roof, and thence through a sliding glass door into our living room. 

My wife had figured out how to tape some insulation over the crack in the door to keep cold air out. I'd cut a small piece of wood to keep the door from being opened while we tested the Starlink in what hopefully would be its permanent location, after which we could drill a hole for the cable through our siding.

Then came the big moment. Plug in the Starlink, give it some time to find the satellites, wait for the router to come on line, choose "Starlink" for my iPhone's wi-fi network, and see how fast and reliable the Starlink is in its rooftop location. 

Initially the connection dropped a few times, before becoming highly reliable.

We were able to watch an episode of Bridgerton on Netflix with ease, using Starlink wi-fi. It was a joy to see how much crisper the picture was, since our crappy 6 Mbps CenturyLink DSL often forces Netflix to supply us with a fuzzy image, and sometimes no video at all as we wait for buffering to take place.

Eventually we lost the Starlink connection around the time we switch to watching the KGW Portland evening news. When I checked the Statistics page on the Starlink iPhone app before I went to bed, I saw there had been 12 minutes of "Beta Downtime" in the seven hours since our Starlink had been operating.

That must have caused the dropped connection, since the router was showing a red light and wasn't able to reconnect to the satellites. 

In the 27 or so hours the Starlink has been on our roof, download speeds have varied a lot -- from an unusual low of 6 Mbps, to the more typical 40-90 Mbps, all the way to an occasional 140 Mbps. 

I'm beyond happy with both the speed and reliability.

The connection hasn't dropped once due to an obstruction, according to the Statistics I made a screenshot of not long ago. There was no downtime in the last 12 hours due to an obstruction and just 49 seconds when there were no satellites. However, there was a lengthy Beta Downtime of 48 minutes this morning, the price of being a Beta tester. Likely that's an aberration.

As soon as the Starlink app was released a number of months ago, I went up on our roof in the same location the Starlink is now and tried to figure out if these three tall firs and a couple of significant oaks to the north of our house were going to pose an obstruction problem. We own the property they're on, but I wasn't eager to cut down the trees.

Looks like they aren't causing a problem, which is good news.

By the way, that 5 Mb iPhone photo just took 15 seconds to upload to Typepad, my blogging service. With DSL, I have to wait a couple of minutes for a photo to upload. At the moment Starlink has an upload speed of 5.1 Mbps, while our DSL usually is about .75 Mbps.

When I sat on our roof a few months ago in the same place the Starlink is now and checked for obstructions, trying to get the tilt of my iPhone at a more or less correct angle, I was sure those trees were going to be a problem, since they appeared in the lower portion of the Starlink obstruction checker.

But this afternoon I sat next to the Starlink and placed my iPhone alongside the dish at the same angle the dish is at, about 35 degrees, I believe. This is the pleasingly clear screenshot. So I guess the lesson is that it is difficult to tell what, if anything, is going to be an obstruction until someone actually installs a Starlink.


This is the speed test I did a few minutes ago. As noted above, this speed is pretty typical for what we've been getting the past 27 hours. It's great, given that we never get above 7 Mbps with our DSL, and that's on a good day.

 
The Starlink router is generating an acceptable wi-fi signal. It seems to be usable everywhere in our 3,200 square foot house. So all in all, there's little I can criticize about Starlink now that the dish is up on our roof with a clear view of the northern sky. 

Sure, it will be nice to have the Beta Downtime go away, since I don't feel comfortable ditching our DSL until Starlink is more reliable.

But if the outages are limited to a few minutes a day, that's fine. It's easy to shift over to DSL wi-fi, though now that I've experienced the much faster Starlink speed, it is already tough for me to put up with DSL.

A final note: I'm impressed with Starlink support staff. Whenever I've asked them a question, which so far has been limited to the status of an order, they've responded quickly and in a friendly manner. 

My first Starlink beta test: fast but loses satellite connection

Yesterday the long-awaited box from Starlink arrived after I'd been notified that I was able to be part of the public beta test for this groundbreaking effort to bring broadband to underserved areas via thousands of low-altitude satellites. I happily paid for the equipment.

Naturally I was eager to open it up. At first glance, I wondered if somehow they'd forgotten to put the equipment inside.

But no, the goodies were under the cleverly fashioned plastic cover: satellite dish, tripod, router,, and cables.

Showing how old I am (72), I looked around for an installation manual. Then I realized that the sum total of the instructions included in the box were on the sheet that caught my eye when I first opened it up.

So I gathered that you set up the dish, plug it in, then fire up the Starlink app I had on my iPhone. Pleasingly, all the cables and power supply were already inserted into the proper places in the pieces of equipment. 

Since I hadn't gotten the roof mount I'd ordered, and it was nighttime anyway, the only viable option I had for testing the Starlink was to set it up on a small table on our upstairs deck. 

It faces north, where the Starlink satellites are located currently, so that was good. Not good were the many nearby oak and fir trees on our property in rural south Salem, Oregon. Thus I wasn't expecting much from this first test, since our roof has a considerably better view of the sky than the deck.

Getting Starlink up and running was very easy. After plugging the equipment in, and giving the router time to set itself up, I was asked to provide a password for the Starlink wi-fi network. Then I watched the Starlink app as the dish tried to connect with the satellites.

It took a few minutes for a connection to be established. That was exciting, since given the rather crappy location of the dish, I was worried that no connection at all would be possible. 

The app asked me to do a speed test. I did several of them.

They ranged between 26 Mbps and 14o Mbps. Here's a screenshot of the fastest result, which thrilled me -- since our horrible CenturyLink DSL is hugely slower. The second speed test screenshot is from this morning when I was using the DSL wi-fi.

Starlink

CenturyLink DSL

Aside from the much faster Starlink download and upload speeds, it's interesting that the Starlink latency (definition here) is so much lower than the DSL latency, even though obviously the Starlink signal has to go into space and back.

I guess having our internet connection start and finish via copper phone lines isn't so great, something I already knew after suffering through many years of DSL.

Unfortunately, the marvelous Starlink connection only lasted a few minutes before, I assume, a satellite signal was obstructed by the trees. Sometimes the connection was restored quickly, but sometimes it took quite a while. This wasn't surprising, given the location of the dish on our deck and the proximity to the afore-mentioned trees.

The Ridgeline Roof Mount I ordered a few days ago should arrive next week. That will allow me to try placing the Starlink dish in various places on our roof, since the mount is secured by the weight of concrete blocks or bricks rather than being fastened in place by screws.

I suspect the reliability of Starlink will be greater once the dish is on the roof. However, I've checked for obstructions via the Starlink app. One oak and three firs appear to be obstructing a totally clear view of the northern sky, so there's a decent chance we still will have connection interruptions.

Starlink support FAQs say that as more satellites are launched, obstructions will be less of an issue. If we still have a problem with losing the connection after the dish is on the roof, my plan is to ask for advice from Starlink support staff.

Should we have the large trees cut down (they're on our property, a benefit of living on ten acres), or is there a decent chance that upcoming satellite launches will cause any dropped connection problems to fade away? 

Regardless, I'm confident that Starlink will become our conduit to genuine high speed broadband. I'm beyond tired of having to deal with CenturyLink DSL. I've enquired as to whether we ever will get fiber optic out here in the "wilderness" five miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital. 

A CenturyLink manager said, no. The day we can ditch CenturyLink can't come soon enough for me.

My routine for using a pre-lubricated catheter

Since May 2017 I've used a catheter after having a urinary retention episode that showed my bladder had become atonic, a fancy word for not working any more as it should, likely due to my lengthy history of an enlarged prostate.

I haven't written a whole lot about my experiences with a catheter. Recently I decided I should, starting with a post that has a rather plaintive title, "I've learned a lot about using a catheter. But does anyone care?"

In that post I listed some questions that I wanted to address in other blog posts, regardless of whether anyone cares. If even one person finds what I have to say useful, that's good enough for me, even if I can't be sure that this person exists.

Question #2 was What routine should I use before inserting a catheter? Here's my answer.

This depends on whether a pre-lubricated catheter is being used. Early on I discovered the Speedicath Flex Coude Pro catheter, which I wrote about in my answer to the first question in my list.

It makes inserting a catheter much easier than the basic red catheter that I used for a short time before the Flex Coude Pro came into my life. That required the application of lubricant, a process I never felt comfortable with because I worried about contamination from my hands or whatever.

So I'd put on disposable plastic gloves, which further complicated the catheter insertion routine. This is my current routine, a much easier one.

(1) I pick a Flex Coude Pro from a drawer in the bathroom and place the sterile packaging it comes in next to the sink.

(2) I see whether I can urinate some on my own. Usually I attempt this while sitting on the toilet, since this was recommended by a physical therapist I went to who specializes in pelvic floor exercises, back when I had more hope than I do now that my bladder could recover quite a fit of functionality. Sometimes I pee standing up, if it feels like that is doable.

(3) I close the lid of the toilet, placing a towel over the lid. I do this because I like to have the urine resulting from a catheterization go into a plastic container with marks on it showing how many cc's of urine are in it. This helps me keep track of whether I'm drinking enough water and other liquids during the day. Obviously I don't do this when I have to use a public restroom, which is rarely. I put the container in larger containers, to minimize urine splashes on the towel or elsewhere. Here's a photo of that setup.

(4) I wash my hands with liquid soap. I've gotten into the habit of counting to 30 while I wash my hands. This isn't as crucial as when I had to apply lubricant to a catheter, but still important.

(5) I use a Handzies wipe to clean the end of my penis, using circular strokes that move away from the tip/urethra as the goal is to be sure that the catheter doesn't touch anything dirty when it is inserted. I like that Handzies are soap and water-based, as I got skin irritation when I was using alcohol wipes for a while. I count 40 circular wipes. Probably overkill, but I haven't gotten a urinary tract infection in over three and a half years of catheterizing, so I must be doing something right.

(6) I open up the Flex Coude Pro packaging and take out the catheter. Most of the lubricating liquid is supposed to be shaken out prior to use, so I hold the catheter over the sink with the non-insertion end down. I cough while doing this, which (perhaps) helps to relax the muscles that the catheter has to pass through.

(7) I stand in front of the toilet and insert the catheter slowly. My left hand holds the Flex Coude Pro in place, while my right hand pushes the catheter, enclosed in a sleeve so the hand doesn't touch the catheter itself, into my urethra. I hold my penis out at about a right angle to my body, or slightly lower. That works best for most men, given the curvature of the urethra as it connects to the bladder.

(8) After a successful removal of urine, I put the catheter back in the packaging and throw it away. I use a small cotton square moistened with tap water to clean the soap off the end of my penis, to avoid any possible irritation. I take a glance at how much urine was collected before dumping it into the toilet and flushing.

Should Oregon seniors get a Covid vaccine before teachers?

There's little debate about who should get the first doses of Covid vaccines allocated to Oregon: health care workers and long-term-care residents/staff.

These groups are at high risk of being infected by the virus. Plus, the older someone is, the more likely they will die after falling ill with COVID-19. Those 65 and older account for the vast majority of Covid deaths, with people 85+ accounting for about a third.

So it makes sense that both the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and Oregon health officials agree on who should be immunized initially with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

After that, though, who should be next in line?

Oregon Governor Kate Brown has said that she wants teachers and school staff to be a priority. Reportedly ACIP has a somewhat different idea.

Regarding who will be next in line for the subsequent rollout phases, the ACIP has named as priority groups “workers in essential and critical industries, people at high risk for severe COVID-19 illness due to underlying medical conditions, [and] people 65 years and older.”

Those ACIP priorities obviously need to be refined, as the way they're stated above is much too general to be useful. So who exactly should come next? Essential workers such as teachers, people with underlying conditions, or seniors 65 and older?

Here's my thoughts, which I readily admit are biased by the fact that I'm 72 and my wife also is over 65 with an underlying condition, asthma. I'm well aware how anxious our friends are about getting COVID-19, most of whom are about our age or older. 

Our chances of having a severe case of Covid are high, much greater than, say, a 35 year old teacher. 

But it's reasonable to take other factors into consideration, such as the desirability of reopening schools to in-person learning as soon as possible. Governor Brown now is allowing local school districts to decide when to reopen -- a controversial move that is making many parents happy, but disturbing many teachers.

Especially if a school district reopens before teachers and staff have gotten vaccinated. 

Again, I'm biased because of my age. Even so, it's a plain fact that dying from Covid is something that can't be reversed, while falling behind in school because of distance learning likely is temporary. And you're still alive, regardless.

To me that argues for prioritizing those 65+ over teachers and other essential workers, most of whom are younger. This happens to be in line with an August Harris poll of Americans cited in a CDC presentation. (The poll defined seniors as 55+.)

Those with preexisting conditions apparently are "immunocompromised people." They deserve to be a vaccination priority, though here's a good reason to have seniors be an even higher priority.

Age is clear-cut. It is on Oregon drivers licenses.

Since pharmacies like Walgreens and Rite-Aid are going to play a large role in getting people immunized, it would be easy for health officials to announce that currently those 80 and older can go there and get the vaccine. Then lower the age to 70 and older. And so on.

This eliminates the complexity and confusion of people having to prove that they have an underlying condition. Perhaps those people are best served by getting vaccinated at their doctor's office, since the doctor knows what health problems they have. 

A key thing is to make the priorities for vaccination simple and fair. Oregonians shouldn't have to worry about people cutting ahead of the line, so to speak. A vaccine free-for-all has to be avoided at all costs. 

I'm reminded of the Vietnam draft lottery that took place on December 1, 1969, when I was a senior in college.

The lottery was intended to reduce the inequities of who got sent off to possibly die in the Vietnam War. I remember sitting around with friends in front of a TV, watching birth dates drawn one by one from a glass jar. My birthday was the 234th chosen. The first 195 were later drafted, so I escaped by virtue of chance.

This was a fair, though nerve-racking, way of choosing who was put at risk of dying in an unpopular war. I'm not suggesting that Covid vaccines be prioritized this way, but some form of a lottery could make sense in determining, say, when those aged 65 get to head off to a pharmacy to get their shot 

Rather than having everybody that age compete for vaccinations at the same time, birth dates could be chosen randomly and publicized by the media. Maybe this wouldn't be necessary, but it would help promote a sense of fairness among the public.

Let's all be compassionate Warriors of Reality in 2021

My hoped for New Year's resolution is that as many Americans as possible vow to do better at being (1) more compassionate and (2) more in touch with reality.

I see these goals as being complementary. 

Compassion requires a clear-eyed view of what is causing our fellow humans, animals, and other living beings to suffer. If we aren't correct about what is real, versus what only exists within our own mind, we'll be thrown off track by misplaced concern.

For example, here in Oregon there's currently a push by some to demand that businesses shut down by Covid restrictions, such as restaurants, be allowed to reopen.

OK, that shows compassion for restaurant owners, most of whom are having a tough time during the pandemic. But it's important to also recognize the reality of 344,000 COVID-19 deaths and the many people who suffer, often for many months, from the virus even though they didn't die because of it.

It isn't easy to find the right balance between compassion for a particular group, and compassion for a different sort of people, especially when doing right for one means doing wrong for the other.

But we have to do our best.

And the only way to accomplish that, doing our best, is to combine the compassion that almost everybody (psychopaths excluded) has for people who are suffering with our equally important capacity for separating fact and fiction in the world at large.

In other words, the subjectivity of compassion should be married to the objectivity of knowing reality as it is. The progeny of this marriage will be offspring we can be proud of: wise actions, productive activism, pleasant feelings of having done the right thing.

Since compassion is a natural reaction to seeing other people going through hard times, on both an individual and societal level we need to emphasize the knowing reality aspect of my Compassion + Reality = Right Action equation. 

Compassion is akin to an engine that propels us onward in an effort to make things better. However, without a navigation system that ensures we're going in the correct direction, we run the risk of wasted motion.

Or worse, destructive motion.

I'm inclined to believe that most people set out to do the right thing. Within their own mind, they've concluded that doing this or that is justified to accomplish some desirable outcome.

Problem is, often their good intention leads to bad results because they are clueless about facts that either are deliberately ignored or innocently unaware of.

Examples abound in 2020. Here's several that come to mind.

The Black Lives Matter protests in Portland started off well: peaceful, with a powerful message of the need to reform policing and end systemic racism. But things went downhill when protesters engaged in property damage and confrontations with police. 

There was no discernible purpose behind the setting off of fireworks, defacing of buildings with graffiti, breaking windows, and such. Business owners in downtown Portland suffered through nightly protests that went on for months. 

It seemed obvious that the Black Lives Matter cause was being hurt, not helped, by the increasingly destructive protests. But reality never broke through into the closed minds of the protesters. They were caught up in the game of taunting law enforcement officers and damaging property for no good reason.

In this case it was liberals, with a heavy dose of anarchists, who failed to realize that compassion for Blacks who endure injustice had to go along with an understanding of the reality that violence in the streets was undermining the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Meanwhile, conservatives and Trump lovers were embracing an ever-expanding variety of batshit crazy conspiracy theories. QAnon infected the psyches of people who believed that Democrats were running a pedophile ring from the basement of a pizza parlor. Then came deniers of the reality of COVID-19, and of the efficacy of wearing masks to prevent infection by the virus.

Currently a large share of Republicans have bought into the baseless claim of their Liar-in-Chief, Donald Trump, that Joe Biden's win was the result of election fraud. In this case I can't discern any degree of compassion in their efforts to subvert democracy and steal the election for Trump.

It's a shameful power grab, an attempted coup, that will end only on January 6 after their last-gasp effort to derail the free and fair presidential election fails in the halls of Congress when 306 electoral college votes are counted for Biden and Harris.

Our country can't thrive, and maybe even survive, when so many citizens are either unwilling or unable to acknowledge reality. Those of us who favor fact over fiction and truth over falsehood can't merely sit by in our comfortable corner of the reality-affirming landscape.

That's why I like the term, Warriors of Reality. When we see that someone -- elected official, Facebook friend, whoever -- is trying to tear down the shared reality that binds us together, we need to say "No! This is the truth. You have no right to your own facts, just your own feelings about what is true."

Reality is the ultimate big tent. Reality holds everybody who chooses to take shelter under it. Reality doesn't need us; it is we who need it. Reality is more important than the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, because reality is what makes all these things possible.

Deniers of reality not only harm themselves, they also harm all of those who depend upon it -- which is everybody.

So if you've ever felt the need to fight for something, fight for reality. With compassion, not violence. Those who deny reality often don't know any better. Giving them facts in a calm, cool, collected manner may help them.

If not, reality still stands, with or without them.

 

I finally fill out an Advance Directive. But not a POLST.

Well, it only took me about forty years. Better late than never, as the saying goes.

Tomorrow I'm taking an Advance Directive to my family physician when I go for my annual physical exam, so it can be made part of my medical record. I've had this booklet from Oregon Health Decisions sitting at the bottom of a pile of papers in my office for a year, at least.

This booklet replaced a previous booklet that I lost or threw away.

It's kind of strange that I've been so reluctant to make my end-of-life wishes known, since I was the first executive director of Oregon Health Decisions in the 1980s, when this pioneering citizen-based bioethics organization got off the ground after a brilliant psychiatrist, Ralph Crawshaw, worked to get it going with the help of me and many other Oregonians.

In fact, I wrote the first advance directive booklet published by Oregon Health Decisions. Since back then I was in my 30s, whereas now I'm 72, it made sense that I'd put off filling out an advance directive for quite a while.

And I readily admit that as I grew older, I did my best to avoid thinking about the not-so-cheery prospect -- a certainty, actually -- of my eventual death.No longer. Yes, I'm still pretty damn healthy, though I have a couple of health problems. Most people do at my age.

I just felt it was time to do the Advance Directive thing. Probably the Covid crisis helped spur me to do this, since the prospect of being kept alive via a feeding tube, ventilator, or whatever when there is no hope of recovery isn't an appealing notion. 

What gave me the most trouble was deciding whether to complete the brightly colored POLST form that had been inserted in the booklet. That stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. My wife, Laurel, has a POLST even though she also is healthy with just a few relatively minor medical issues. 

Laurel is convinced that she doesn't want CPR, should this ever be a consideration. I believe Laurel is correct that the view of CPR in movies and TV shows, where a person recovers nicely after getting this potentially live-saving procedure, often doesn't reflect reality. For example, one CPR web site says:

Overall, all of these side effects mean that, if a person does survive CPR, their long-term health could suffer and they may be alive, but it is possible that their overall health and quality of life is significantly affected. Additionally, the psychological ramifications of a near-death experience can greatly affect a survivor, leading to anxiety, stress and depression, among other psychological conditions.

A POLST appears to be the only way to make sure that you don't get CPR, since a POLST becomes part of a registry available to medical professionals, and you can carry a POLST card with you. 

On the other hand, the POLST form says that it "is usually for persons with serious illness or frailty." And POLST.org has this FAQ about which patients should be offered a POLST form.

The POLST form is not for everyone; a POLST form is appropriate for patients who are considered to be at risk for a life-threatening clinical event because they have a serious life-limiting medical condition, which may include advanced frailty. For these patients, their current health status indicates the need for standing medical orders for emergent or future medical care.

Also, these are the patients at the greatest risk of having a medical emergency but who may not want our standard of care (standard of care currently being that everything possible to attempt to save someone's life must be done). For healthy patients, an advance directive is an appropriate tool for making future end-of-life care wishes known to loved ones.

So I decided to complete an Advance Directive, but not a POLST. I can always go the POLST route later, should this seem like a good thing for me to do. 

The Prom is a great feel-good movie (ignore The New Yorker)

Hah! A seventy-two year old father, me, showed in one instance he's more culturally with it than his forty-eight year old daughter, Celeste. 

Usually Celeste has seen, or at least heard of, cinematic offerings before me. After all, she lives in Orange County, which is a lot closer to Hollywood than I am here in Oregon.

But in a post-Christmas FaceTime call this afternoon, I asked Celeste if she had seen The Prom yet. No, she hadn't. And it appears she wasn't even aware of this Netflix production.

I highly enjoyed The Prom. So did my wife. I don't get why Rotten Tomatoes has it with a 58% positive review from critics and 68% from viewers. 

In my utterly personal opinion, this story of two girls who aren't allowed to attend their Indiana high school prom as a couple was well-acted, entertaining, and moving.

It's full of song and dance numbers involving the four lead actors: Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Ranells. I thought the last two sentences of The New Yorker review by an overly snooty Anthony Lane missed the mark.

It's possible both to agree entirely with the movie's politics and, at the same time, to feel that you're being strangled by a rainbow, and we should thank the Lord that "The Prom" wasn't released before the election. I can think of some states, not just Indiana, where wavering voters, disgruntled rather than wowed by the film's remorseless plea for tolerance, might have swung in the opposite direction.

Well, maybe those of us old enough to distinctly remember when lesbians and gays were really discriminated against in high school, way beyond what The Prom shows, find the aforementioned "remorseless plea for tolerance" more appealing than younger viewers like, perhaps, Lane.

Having spent 1962-66 at a small (400 students or so) central California high school in Woodlake, I watched the inspiring end of The Prom with tears beginning to form in my eyes.

Partly because I admired the courage of the student, Emma (played by Jo Ellen Pellman), who wants to take her girlfriend to the prom and meets resistance from a behind-the-times parent organization. 

And partly because I was inwardly cringing at the memories of how the guys in my high school referred to homosexuals. We'd throw around insults like "You homo!" and "Faggot!" with gleeful abandon. 

Naturally there weren't any known lesbians or gays in my high school. Yet probably they were there, just underground. In fact, they might have been using those epithets I just shared themselves. If you're afraid to be outed, you have to show that you're part of the heterosexual in-club.

I wish I could apologize in person to anyone harmed by how we spoke about homosexuals back then. My only excuse is that we didn't know any better. There was zero mention of homosexuality in any class I took in high school, so far as I can remember.

Plus, there definitely was no attempt by the teachers to encourage respect for diversity, including different ways of expressing one's sexuality than the societal norm. Back then homosexuality was viewed as an aberration, a moral failing, something to be mocked and condemned.

I can understand why young people today who live in liberal areas might look upon The Prom as making a big deal out of something that is taken for granted by most high schoolers today: being attracted to the same sex not only is no big deal, it isn't any sort of deal, just the way things are.

That's wonderful. But The Prom still has a message that needs to be heard, because not everyone agrees with what I just said. Are you listening, Indiana? 

Here's the trailer.

 

The Dreaded ChristmasLess Newsletter is funny and dark

For your holiday amusement, here's the 2020 Christmas letter from Nancy, a friend of my wife. Nancy has a great sense of humor that leans toward the dark side -- which I find highly appealing.

I've changed the names in the letter just in case anyone doesn't want their identity splashed across cyberspace. Enjoy....

The Dreaded ChristmasLess Newsletter

Not much going on this year. I got to know my couch better. Discovered new flavors of Cheetos. Immediately answer all emails, texts, IM, voicemail, tweets, Instagram, GroupMe, anything really as I am just so gosh darn happy to communicate in some form with a human.

On March 16^th, I realized that every type of employment I have involves people. Tried teaching Aqua Aerobics online but appearing in a swimsuit made the internet crash. Wanted to continue playing for churches but it’s against the law.  

Smartly, I began teaching piano online. Acquired lots of students from Russia and Somalia who will be paying me as soon as I forward all my bank account info to them.

Didn’t realize how much I missed being able to smack around a tiny little ball until Squash was forbidden this year. Took up PickledBall, a fun game where you drink 5 shots of tequila and then try to make a useless plastic ball go somewhere. My powerful serves are working well against opponents who fearfully wait from 2 courts away.

On July 26^th, Thomas was born. Never before has a child so bright, athletic, intelligent, handsome, and funny graced our planet. Can’t actually go visit him, but Marissa sends me photos and videos so I know he is not just something else that my mind created. He sleeps well through the night with just a little nip before bedtime.

Sara has single-handedly revived the economy in our area with frequent use of DoorDash and UberEats. By spending $50 on an order of french fries, she supports our local economy. She continues her studies, now entering her 14^th year of university. Not to be outdone, Robert has also gone back to school trying to Master something or other.

Waldo, our seriously solemn stray, likes the pandemic. Sara and I fight over whose turn it is to give him a walk.  With no pesky piano students around trying to pet him or inflict other acts of indulgence, he leads a carefree existence.

As this marks the strangest year ever, I have seen kids begging to go to school, forbidden by their teacher to watch presidential debates and barred from sports fields. For us adults, a night out means dressing up for dinner with a mask, gloves, fleece or fake fur, and then being escorted to a table in the street.  

 Anxiously awaiting the New Year, or really any year except this one, we wish you a Merry Mazel Tov and Happy Blursday.  

Wait, what day is this?

Pac-12 championship game shows how sports imitates life

Yesterday the Oregon football team defeated USC 31-24 in the Pac-12 championship game. The win was satisfying for me in many regards, some of them philosophical.

Not that philosophy was on my mind as I watched the game with rapt attention. I got so nervous in the fourth quarter I was shivering with excitement and worry, so had to put on a sweater to make it through the final minutes.

There's something about a well-played close football game like this one that resonates for reasons well beyond the obvious.

Sure, Oregon was the underdog, a 3-2 team that was in the championship game only because Washington, who came out on top in the Pac-12 North, wasn't able to play because of their Covid cases.

So that produced a pleasing plot line. Oregon backs into the championship game in a surprising fashion, encountering big bad USC with a 5-0 record, an excellent quarterback, and a top-notch receiving corps.

Those were some of the big themes that laid the foundation for an intriguing football game. But as I was recollecting high points from the game after it was over, I kept thinking of the small things the game turned on.

Which reflects my philosophical interest in chaos. I delved into chaos theory when I was writing my first book in the mid-1990s, a study of how the new physics related to ancient mysticism. 

I learned that chaotic systems aren't random. They're deterministic. However, the determinism is non-linear, since a small change can have a big effect.

The "butterfly effect" is often cited as an example of chaos, where theoretically the flapping of a butterfly wing in one part of the world can lead, through atmospheric causes and effects, weeks later to a hurricane happening in another part of the world. 

Of course, those small changes are so difficult to discern, most of us look upon our life as being the result of Big Things, not small things.

We ascribe the general course of our life to our personality, our education, our upbringing, our genetics, and such -- not, say, to an overheard conversation in a college cafeteria (I've told that story on one of my other blogs).

Likewise, the outcome of the Oregon-USC game looked like it was going to be determined by whether USC could pull off another win in the fourth quarter after trailing for the entire game, which they'd done several times before this season. Their talented quarterback, Kedon Slovis, appeared to be on the way to doing that with about four minutes left. 

I recall an announcer saying that Slovis was trying to throw the ball away to avoid a sack. Or maybe it was just a really bad throw. Regardless, at first it looked like Oregon defensive back Jamal Hill wasn't able to intercept the pass while staying in bounds. 

Then instant replay showed that Hill did manage to pull off he interception in an amazing fashion. Behold...

That changed the course of the game. Oregon went on to win. Now the sports talk is whether Oregon deserved the victory that gave them the Pac-12 championship. Some say no. Some say yes. 

All that talk rests on some small things. Hill juggling the ball and being able to control it at the last moment as he fell out of bounds. One of Hill's feet being inbounds by an inch or two. Slovis throwing the ball in just the right way to allow Hill to barely intercept it.

Without each of those small things happening, the Big Deal of Oregon becoming Pac-12 champions could have been erased. 

Such is life. The proverb "for want of a nail," says Wikipedia, is a reminder that "seemingly unimportant acts or omissions can have grave and unforeseen consequences."

In this case it was grave from USC's point of view, fortuitous from Oregon's point of view. Last night's game showed that victory or defeat, joy or sorrow, success or failure, and so much else, often hinges on factors that appear to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet make a big difference. 

Bottom line: life is marvelously unpredictable. And, really, who would want it any other way? A game of inches is much more interesting than a game of yards.

Our 2020 Christmas letter finds some humor in Covid

This year it wasn't easy for me to write our 2020 Holiday Greetings. Usually it is.

But 2020 was such a depressing year, with 300,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, at first I wondered if a Christmas letter from Laurel and me was even appropriate.

Laurel convinced me that it was, after seeing a serious first draft of the letter. She argued that looking on the light side of disturbing situations helps us get through those tough times. 

OK. That was convincing. So I started over. Here's the result in both PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2020 Christmas Letter PDF