HinesSight

Hot bath plus marijuana: a recipe for fainting

Since I'm always on the lookout for fresh grandiose ideas to spice up my senior citizen life, I'm putting out an alert that if someone is looking for a Poster Child, or in my case a Poster Geezer, to be a spokesperson for the danger of mixing a hot bath and marijuana, I'm available!

(Especially if the gig comes with a generous expense allowance, which I can use to pay for our water heater electricity and visits to my favorite cannabis emporium.)

Until last night I was blissfully unaware of what can happen when someone, like me, mixes these seemingly innocuous pleasures in what can be a dangerous combination:

An especially hot bath, which I sat in for longer than usual, while puffing away on my PAX3 vaporizer filled with its typical bathtub dose of indica marijuana, reclining a bit more deeply in the tub than is typical for me.

Re-creation of what befell me last night, minus the hot water and my naked body
(use your imagination to fill in those details, if you dare)

I often feel a bit lightheaded after taking a hot bath. That was the case last night.

But I had no trouble climbing out of the tub, toweling off, getting dressed, and heading into the kitchen to prepare the evening dog treat for Mooka, the family canine, and a bowl of applesauce for me.

The problem came when I felt somewhat dizzy and decided to lean over a kitchen counter until that passed. 

My next recollection was Laurel, my wife, shaking me and saying, "Brian, you fainted."

I had no problem believing her, since I was lying on the kitchen floor. My glasses were askew, with one earpiece bent quite a bit from my fall. 

"You've got a black eye," Laurel said. 

I got up, walked over to the living room couch, and sat there for a while with an ice pack on my eye -- which I later switched to a bag of frozen peas.

Today the swelling around my eye has gone down a lot, though the area under my eye is still black, probably from my glasses being pushed against my face after I fainted. Otherwise, I have no aches or pains.

Which makes me think that my falling down after fainting must have been quite graceful. Sadly, no record of it exists, not even in my wife's memory, since she heard me fall but didn't see it.

Having grown up watching Lassie the Collie do amazing feats, like alerting the family when Timmy fell in a well, I wondered why Mooka the Husky mix wasn't licking my face when I woke up. 

Sadly, Laurel said that Mooka ran downstairs after I fainted, apparently scared by all the commotion. Lesson: don't count on your dog to rescue you from a hot bath/marijuana fainting spell. Unless you have a reincarnation of Lassie.

Some Googling revealed that fainting is fairly common after being in hot water -- shower, bath, hot tub.

Some of the stories were quite horrendous. I guess it all depends on where you are when you faint, sharp corners, deep water, and hard surfaces putting you at greater risk.

The NurseMummy web site informed me that:

As a general rule, hot showers and hot baths can cause dizziness due to a drop in blood pressure caused by the hot water dilating your blood vessels. The hot water increases your blood supply to your legs, arms, feet and hands, and reduces the amount of blood your heart has to pump; less pressure on your vessels and circulatory system. 

And the Mayo Clinic informed me that Hotter Hot Tub Water Poses Increased Fainting Risk.  

Hotter water in hot tubs poses increased health risks from fainting, Mayo Clinic researchers report. Mayo Clinic heart researchers had six subjects soak in 104 degree water (the current recommended temperature for hot tubs) and 106.7 degree water for 21 minutes to see if hotter water caused any ill effects.

They concluded that the higher temperatures posed little health risk from heart or circulation problems. But they found that when the subjects stood up to exit the tub, systolic blood pressure dropped dramatically, nearly twice as much in the hotter water compared to the 104 degree temperature. The result is less blood flow to the brain, which can cause fainting, which in turn might lead to injury by falling or by drowning. The authors point out that in an earlier study 36 hot tub deaths, 25 were found to be caused by drowning.

So the hotter than usual bathtub water, combined with the fact that in older people marijuana temporarily lowers blood pressure, likely caused me to faint.

But I'm about to head off for another bath, just not so hot. At least I'm now aware of what can happen by mixing overly hot water with a relaxing bowl of cannabis.

Which reminds me of something a friend recently told me. He said that one day he was holding a frisbee and suddenly realized that he'd forgotten how to throw it. That worried him until he realized that he'd taken LSD.

Be Covid safe at Thanksgiving, then don't worry much

Yesterday via Zoom, my wife, Laurel, and I discussed the holidays from a Covid perspective with a dozen friends about our age -- some older, in their 80s, some younger, in their 50s and 60s, and some like us, in their 70s.

So, yeah, it was a decidedly senior group. Keep that in mind as I describe both the anxiety and hope shared last night. 

Since this was a meeting of our monthly Salon discussion group, we took the opportunity to talk about what to do in December: have an in-person gathering, or keep on Zoom'ing. 

Two-thirds (8) were fine with meeting in-person at our house. We're all fully vaccinated. I'm pretty sure everybody has gotten a booster shot. We all wear masks when out and about in indoor spaces, like grocery stores, where some people may be unvaccinated.

This portion of our group, which included me and Laurel, felt that the benefit of getting together for a December potluck definitely was worth the minor Covid risk of meeting in-person.  

We don't find a Zoom meeting nearly as satisfying as a real meeting. Zoom is better than nothing, but way less satisfying than sitting in a living room and conversing face-to-face. Naturally we're concerned about our physical health. Our mental health is equally important to us, though.

The other third of our group, four people, were less enthused about meeting in-person. Two friends were adamant that they didn't want to do this maskless, since eating and drinking requires taking a mask off.

They correctly noted that asymptomatic spread of Covid can happen via vaccinated people, which potentially increases the chance that more dangerous variants other than Delta will pop up. And two friends were undecided, leaning for the moment against meeting in-person.

Which is fine. 

As with most issues, different people can be equally familiar with the same facts, yet come to varying conclusions about the meaning of those facts. My Tai Chi instructor likes to say about alternative ways of doing Tai Chi, "Not good/bad or right/wrong. Just different."

So if your family or group of friends isn't in agreement about how to handle a Thanksgiving get-together, don't make this into a battle. Likely there's a way to please most people, though maybe not everyone completely. 

The New York Times has a useful story, "We're Having a Holiday Gathering. Are We Nuts?" 

The story asks a series of questions about your gathering, beginning with Will everyone at the gathering be vaccinated? In the case of our discussion group the answer was yes. Which produced this response.

Happy Vaxgiving! Enjoy your celebration knowing that by being vaccinated, you’ve already made the party safer for everyone.

To further lower risk, encourage every adult to seek out a booster shot. It only takes a few days for the extra protection to kick in. While you’re at it, get your flu shot! Flu remains a serious health risk during the winter.

You’re well protected with vaccines and boosters, but since no vaccine provides 100 percent protection, keep going for more advice to help make sure the coronavirus doesn’t crash your holiday party.

The next question was Is there anyone who will be at your gathering who's at high risk from Covid-19? I said yes. Which elicited: 

A lot of people will share their holidays with an older parent, grandparent or others at high risk. The key to a safer celebration is this: Plan the event around the most vulnerable person in the room.

Consider bringing the party to them, so someone at high risk doesn’t have to spend time in airports or on trains. People at high risk should get booster shots and talk to their doctors about the risks of traveling.

Getting tested a few days before the party and using on-the-spot home tests on the day of the event will allow you to enjoy each other’s company without worrying. Adding a portable air cleaner, opening windows or turning on exhaust fans can also lower risk for Covid and any other viruses that might be lurking. Anyone with the sniffles should stay home.

Nobody likes wearing masks — and if everyone is vaccinated and tested, they aren’t really needed. But some high-risk people may be more comfortable using a mask and having others wear them, too.

Since we all live in the Salem area, traveling by public transport didn't apply to our group. The other advice did, though.

It makes sense to use home tests to reassure people that no one at a gathering has Covid. I'll suggest this to our group, though I'm not sure how easy it is to get home tests or how much they cost.

Regarding masks, I'm going to tell our discussion group that anyone who wants to wear a mask throughout our December gathering should do so. No need to partake of food and drink if they don't want to.

And we could use part of our house as a place where anyone who's concerned about being around maskless eaters and drinkers could do their own eating and drinking, then rejoin us when they're done.

There's ways to make almost everyone comfortable with attending a holiday gathering. This just takes a bit of common sense, collaboration, and flexibility. The New York Times story correctly points out that the most Covid-vulnerable people should get special consideration, since they run the greatest risk.

Our new composite deck looks great, thanks to Apex Paint & Remodel

We've had wooden decks and railings for the 31 years we've lived our here in rural south Salem. When we moved to our house, that was the only choice. 

So every few years I'd stain the decks and railings. When I was in my 40s, it was sort of fun. Less fun in my 50s and 60s. And in my 70s, not fun at all. 

That's one reason we had Apex Paint & Remodel take out our old decks and replace them with TimberTech composite decking with metal railings by CableBullet.

My wife and I are really happy with the recently completed result.

This is our main deck. We went with an outside mount for the railings to avoid having them bolted to the horizontal part of the deck. The cables are almost invisible at times, as in this photo taken from inside our house.

Our house was built in 1973. The railings give it a more modern look, compared to the wood railings we had before. The black metal goes nicely with our black window frames.

Here's a view of our house from further away. The upper deck on the left side of the photo also was replaced.

We'd admired cable railings when we saw them at Salem Tour of Homes houses. They don't obscure a view of our yard anywhere near as much as the wood railings did. Also, they don't have to be stained!

(I found staining our railings to be more annoying than staining the decks, since railings have four sides that need staining rather than just one.)

Here's the railing on the other side of our main deck.

Our smaller second floor deck turned out great also.

Again, the look of the metal railings is a lot cleaner than our old wood railings.

The view from inside our house is much enhanced by the cables.

Wide TimberTech boards were used for the sides of the deck. Before we had vertical wooden boards as siding. I like the horizontal look better.

The stairs turned out well also.

We've now used Apex Paint & Remodel on two projects, one inside and one outside. They're a small company with a great group of employees. They work carefully, cleaned everything up perfectly, and were pleasant to chat with.

And they play good music at a reasonable volume while they're working. Another plus!

Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma

I thought the day started off badly when our dog threw up three times on our living room carpet.

But it got considerably worse when I exited my visit to Retina Consultants here in Salem with a probable diagnosis of glaucoma.

Well to be exact, Dr. Justin Baynham told me that my test results were "suspicious of glaucoma." 

I'm trying to look at the bright side. Maybe it's good that my optometrist at Eye Care Physicians & Surgeons, Dr. Rebecca Chung, also wasn't completely sure that I have glaucoma.

That's why she referred me for a consultation at Retina Consultants. 

I've had an annual eye exam for most of my life, since I wear contacts. One year a while back the pressure in my eye was elevated, but it went down the next year.

In 2020 my previous optometrist, Dr. Betsy McDowell (now retired), didn't see any damage to the optic nerve, so it was a surprise when a field of vision test last Monday showed that my right eye sucks when it comes to peripheral vision.

However, Dr. Baynham told me this afternoon that 50% of people with glaucoma don't have high pressure in their eyes.

On the darker side, Chung noted some damage to my right optic nerve, and Baynham confirmed that after I had a test where some sort of dye stuff was injected into my upper arm, where it quickly found its way to my eyes, which allowed images to be taken of the optic nerves.

Not good, especially in my right eye. My left eye had considerably lesser damage.

That's irreversible, unfortunately. So the goal is to keep my possible/probable glaucoma under control to prevent further damage, which Baynham said would occur by lowering my eye pressure from 21 to 14 mm Hg. 

So I've got a prescription for Latanoprost eye drops, which hopefully will reduce my eye pressure from the high normal level of 21 to the low normal level of 14.

The big message I want to convey to others is this: Get a regular eye exam! 

Not just a vision test, but an exam that checks y0ur eye pressure and dilates your eyes so the doctor can see if any optic nerve damage in occurring. This is especially important if you're over 60, have a family history of glaucoma, or at high risk for getting this disease.

I had no vision problems other than my usual nearsightedness when I went in for my annual eye exam on October 28. Though my peripheral vision is bad in my right eye, I hadn't noticed this.

A generally positive web page about glaucoma (things can be fine if it is detected and treated early) has this to say:

People with glaucoma who manage it well can live a normal, independent life. A big problem with glaucoma is that in the early stages, people with glaucoma live their lives largely unaffected by the condition while it is all the while progressing silently.

Problems with vision can at first be subtle and many people are able to manage life well with mild to moderate visual impairment. Visual loss can even go unnoticed until it becomes severe, at which point much of the damage caused by glaucoma is irreversible.

As a doctor treating hundreds of individuals with glaucoma, my goal is to pick up on early changes and use timely and effective interventions to prevent loss of vision.  Nothing warms my heart more than to hear how my patients’ vision has become stable and that they are getting on with normal lives, being productive at work, enjoying their time with family, friends and having great experiences.

...I am grateful that we can detect glaucoma at its early stages. When my patients get a diagnosis of glaucoma at an early disease stage, I am able to keep them seeing well throughout the course of their lives.

Of course, my first reaction after hearing that I probably have glaucoma was, oh, no, I'm going to go blind! That seems unlikely, now that I've been able to have more rational reactions. 

If you have glaucoma and could share some thoughts about how you've dealt with your problem, please do so in a comment on this post. Especially if things have gone well for you. No offense, but if you've gone blind from glaucoma, I'd prefer not to know this.

Mooka, our Husky mix, is obsessed with hunting moles

All dogs are strange. Every dog owner knows this. That's part of what makes them so interesting and adorable -- their strangeness.

Of course, if dogs could talk, I'm pretty sure they'd say, "Hey, you humans are even stranger!" No argument there.

I wasn't a dog person until after a divorce I got married again to a woman who had a purebred German Shepherd. I had a cat. But not for long, since the dog and cat didn't get along. Fortunately, we were able to find a cat lady on the Oregon coast who was able to adopt my cat.

Following the purebred German Shepherd, we've had two Shepherd mixes and, most recently, a Husky mix. Here's a photo of Mooka, taken shortly after we adopted her from a Texas shelter in 2019.

Even though Mooka only weighs about sixty-five pounds, right away I could tell that her Husky'ness translated into an impressive pulling ability. I'm six feet and 175 pounds, but when Mooka pulls on a leash attached to her halter, it's a bit tough for me to hold her back.

That part of being a Husky mix obviously made sense to me, since Huskies pull heavy sleds. And she's good natured, a real people lover, which also fits, given that Huskies traditionally worked closely with humans in an inhospitable environment.

What my wife and I find difficult to understand, though, is why Mooka is so obsessed with hunting moles, gophers, voles, and indeed anything else that lives underground.

When I take her for a walk in the morning, she's had her doggy breakfast. Yet today, like most days, as soon as she got out of the door, Mooka headed right for her favorite mole hunting area on our ten acres in rural south Salem, Oregon.

Catching up to her, I found Mooka carefully sniffing each of about a dozen mole mounds in a grassy field below our house. She inspected each one, eventually focusing on what I assume was the hole with the most recent mole activity.

I've never had the patience or the inclination to wait and see how long Mooka would keep on obsessing over the mole mounds. She never leaves them on their own. I have to call her away from them with increasingly loud calls of "Mooka, let's go!" 

She'll reluctantly walk away from the mole area with a wistful look backward, and an aggrieved attitude of a dog who was having ever so much fun until her killjoy human pulled her away from a joyful activity.

I've read that Huskies have a high prey drive.

OK, that explains why Mooka also is very interested in squirrels, deer, raccoons, and other creatures on our property. It just surprises me that a Husky mix would be so obsessed with hunting ground-dwelling animals.

Doesn't seem like something an Arctic dog would do. However, I suppose moles and such are common in Alaska and other points in the far north during the warm months. Regardless, this is probably Mooka's strangest habit.

She also is an anti-retriever, liking it when I throw a stick and she runs away with it, wanting me to chase her. That's strange, but our last Shepherd mix did the same thing. So maybe I'm the strange one, since I play the dog's game and try to catch them when they race away with a stick.

I am the Leaf Whisperer. Behold my talent.

After 31 years of living in a rural south Salem property that I at first considered Leaf Hell, I've upgraded my opinion to Leaf Purgatory, since Leaf Heaven is beyond my reach -- unless I develop a brain tumor that somehow makes me love to deal with gigantic amounts of leaves every fall.

Actually, I don't mind leaves all that much.

Especially on a fairly warm, sunny, calm day like this Saturday in very late October. They're undeniably beautiful. At least, when they're still on trees. Once they reach the ground, my affection for leaves diminishes.


But rather than curse my leafy fate, which comes with the territory of a house surrounded by large oaks, with a yard containing numerous other deciduous trees, I want to praise my ability to make copious quantities of leaves disappear from where they're not wanted.

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, I learned about Master Class. That's where, the web site says, you Learn From the World's Best.

OK, Master Class executives -- here's my pitch for hiring me to put on a Master Class in Rural Leaf Blowing and Disposal. 

Let's get one issue off the table right away. I use a leaf blower. A two-cycle Stihl backpack blower. Yes, the sort of leaf blower that is nastily proficient at spewing out hydrocarbons.

"If you look at the unburnt hydrocarbons you find that this leaf blower in 30 minutes of operation...is, in fact, emitting more hydrocarbons than driving an f 150 or any light-duty pick up from New York City to Los Angeles,"  Leamy said. 

However, I like to believe that if Al Gore or Greta Thunberg had visited me this afternoon, once they saw how many leaves I had to deal with, they would have said, "You've got our blessing to fire up that leaf blower, Brian." 

(There's no way an electric blower would be able to handle our leaves as effectively.)

Slopes require patience. There's several places in our yard where leaves must be blown uphill into an area where they can rot away in a suitable location. This requires a certain Zen sensibility, since leaves, like water, prefer to flow downhill.

And when a gust of wind blows downhill, as happened to me today, that's where leaves go: in the opposite direction from where I'd just blown them. But here there are, off of our grass and walkways.

Anyone can handle leaves on a level lawn. It takes a Leaf Whisperer like me to herd them in an area with many plantings of Oregon Grape, each of which likes to function as a leaf barrier. I forgot to take a before photo of this area. This is the after. By the way, can you find the canine in the photo above?

Don't look up in early fall, before all the leaves have departed trees. But if you do, consider that the remaining leaves will serve to hone your leaf disposal skills.

They aren't out to drive you crazy, even though I have accused our oak trees of doing this, since each tree has its own leaf falling schedule, which means they cast leaves into our yard over a period of quite a few weeks, not all at once.

I like to let leaves lay close to where they fell. This is both environmentally and philosophically pleasing. Also, the easiest thing to do. This is the beginning of a leaf pile that, by the end of leaf season, will be deep enough to make our dog delight in being able to bury herself in them. 

Ferns are even worse than Oregon Grape as leaf catchers. My wife planted these in between several trees that drop a lot of leaves and the brush into which I blow the leaves.

I'm sure that she, like the oak trees, didn't do this to drive me crazy, but to give me an additional opportunity to practice Zen-like leaf blowing patience and artistry.

This area offers a repeat of what I said before: don't look up, unless you want to get a look into your leaf blowing future.

Small logs make for an extra display of leaf blowing up-and-over skill. Also, they help prevent leaves from returning to the yard via wind.

It is eminently possible, and even fun, to blow leaves out of a water feature. They depart in a pleasing shower of spray.

Leaves that fall along one of our walkways have to be carried away in a large basket. I use them to "pave" an otherwise muddy trail that leads to the lower portion of our property. 

Bank shots are as satisfying in leaf blowing as in billiards. This corner attracts quite a few leaves as they're blown off our deck. Blowing them into the corner at a medium speed results in a rebound effect, getting them into a place where regular leaf blowing can happen. Just one of those skills one develops as a Leaf Whisperer.

Lastly, after you've put in a couple of hours on your leaf blowing craft -- which is how long it takes me to go through our yard on a day like today with lots of leaves -- take a moment to behold the majesty of what you have wrought.

Just a moment. Because until all the leaves have done their falling thing, by the next weekend you'll be doing the same leaf blowing thing. 

I liked Dave Chappelle's Netflix show, transgender jokes and all

Usually a joke is just a joke. Let's not over-think it, folks. Standup comedians are supposed to push the boundaries of what's socially acceptable.

And, naturally, be funny doing so.

Dave Chappelle's new Netflix show, "The Closer," succeeds on both counts in my obviously personal opinion. 


Others disagree. That's fine. If they feel that Chappelle was unduly nasty toward the LGBTQ community, with his special focus on transgender people, they're entitled to their own obviously personal opinion.

Me, I don't expect comedians to be paragons of virtue. I want them to make me laugh, cause me to look at life in an off-beat fashion, lead me to see familiar things through the lens of a comedic mind.

Tonight I finished watching The Closer. I enjoyed all 72 minutes of it. Having heard about the controversy over Chappelle's treatment of gays and transgender individuals, I was prepared to not like the show.

Instead, I didn't hear any jokes that made me think, Chappelle went too far. 

I must have a lot of company, since The Closer has a 96% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, I suspect many, if not most, of those who decry Chappelle's insufficient wokeness haven't seen The Closer.

They just know it's bad, because others who lack a sense of humor and want everybody to conform to their rigid view of What Can Be Spoken In Public told them to be outraged by what Chappelle says.

He ends with a moving story of a transgender woman who comes to his smaller shows in the Bay Area and laughs uproariously at his LGBTQ jokes. Having learned that she has attempted standup comedy, he invites her to open for him in a larger venue.

She bombs for 45 minutes. But she finds a seat in the front row and watches Chappelle's routine, rather than slinking into a dark corner as most comedians would.

Chappelle's telling of this story was both funny and moving.

He says that she'd been drinking quite a bit. Throughout his routine the woman and he engaged in banter about transgender issues. She turned out to be really funny. Just not during her 45 minutes on stage.

The audience was laughing. Chappelle says it was a great experience for him to have the back and forth with his transgender friend during his routine. 

When Chappelle started getting criticized on Twitter by LGBTQ activists, the transgender woman stood up for him. That caused the activists to go off on her. 

Six days later she killed herself. 

Her supposed tribe, the LGBTQ community, had turned on her because she wasn't sufficiently fanatical in her devotion to their ideological purity. Instead, Chappelle said that she was a member of his tribe, the tribe of standup comedians who honor unfettered speech rather than political correctness.

Chappelle says that the transgender woman told him that she didn't want to be understood by him. She wanted him to respect her struggle as a human being:“I don’t need you to understand me, I just need you to believe… I’m having a human experience.” Beautiful. 

Everybody struggles in one way or another. Everybody faces challenges.

Blacks. Whites. Everybody. Men. Women. Everybody. Straight people. LGBTQ people. Everybody. Religious people. Atheists. Everybody. Democrats. Republicans. Everybody. Old. Young. Everybody. 

I loved watching the faces of Chappelle's audience smile and laugh during his show. Sure, there were a few serious-looking faces. But clearly his diverse audience was enjoying Chappelle's skillful comedy.

We've got to be able to laugh at each other and with each other. No exceptions.

Blacks can make fun of whites. Whites can make fun of blacks. Straight people can make fun of LGBTQ people. LGBTQ people can make fun of straight people. Men can make fun of women. Women can make fun of men.

Nothing and no one should be off limits when it comes to comedy. If you're easily offended, don't watch edgy standup comedy.

And don't expect that those of us who enjoy a good laugh are going to take your outrage at a comedian who pushes the limits as anything other than an absurdity that deserves ridicule.

Comedians are equal opportunity slaughterers of sacred cows.

And I say this as a vegetarian. If you're a Hindu who doesn't like references to sacred cows, lighten up. If not in this life, hopefully you'll be reincarnated as a standup comedian.

Might as well end by plugging my 2017 idea for a Salem "Mingling of the Tribes" roast/fundraiser that has so far garnered precisely zero enthusiasm from anyone but me. Oh, well. These blog posts bombed, and likely so would my own standup routine were I ever to attempt one.

Salem should have an annual political roast: "A Mingling of the Tribes"
"Mingling of the Tribes" effort could help to heal divisiveness in Salem

UPDATE: The morning after I wrote this, I came across a couple of stories about Chappelle and humor. The Economist has a good piece, "Dave Chappelle for gender realism." Excerpt: 
Download Dave-chappelle-for-gender-realism

Mr Chappelle is of course foul-mouthed and shocking. He delivers an anti-Semitic one-liner in his show, chuckles as his audience gasps, then repeats it slowly, three times. Transgressing public mores, to deliver laughs, or social insight, or just to make people squirm and wonder why, has been the dominant tradition in stand-up ever since Pryor put a match to institutional racism, too. This reflects a singularly American set of conditions: high levels of social tension, a dominant place in popular culture for the most persecuted group and strongly protected free speech. Mr Chappelle, who, like Pryor and Mr Murphy is African-American and a master of many forms of comedy, calls stand-up his favourite form and an “American phenomenon”.

Because of its connection with social justice, most standup comedians, especially black ones, are of the left. But, again, the phenomenon must be edgy to be funny. So no whites are excluded from Pryor’s or Mr Chappelle’s racially loaded critiques, including the sympathetic left-wingers laughing wanly in their audiences. And that dramatic tension, between performer and fans, has increased in recent years as the activist left has increasingly presumed to police speech. A declaration in 2014 by Chris Rock, another top black comedian, that he could no longer perform for college crowds because they had become “way too conservative…[in] their willingness not to offend anybody,” was a signal cultural moment. For Mr Chappelle, who was in the process of relaunching his career around that time, it was also inspiring.

He does not seem transphobic, in fact. If his comedy has a moral theme it is that everyone is flawed and everyone should be accepted. Its force lies in showing how quickly that truth is lost when group politics takes hold. Mr Chappelle has spent much of his career railing against racial injustice. Pointing out the equally manifest reality that women lose out when sex is redefined as a state of mind is consistent with that record.

Even when justice is served—as in the advance of gay rights—his subversive mind ponders why such progress is not general. “Why is it easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it is for Cassius Clay to change his name?” he asks. “Empathy is not gay. Empathy is not black. Empathy is bisexual. It must go both ways.”

And an interview of David Sedaris in the New York Times Magazine, "David Sedaris Knows What We'll Laugh at When No One is Judging," is pertinent to the controversy over Chappelle. Humor isn't something we can choose. We find something funny, or we don't. But as Sedaris says, societal restrictions can cause us to stifle our mirth for fear of seeming politically incorrect. Excerpt:

Do you think much about what you can and can’t get away with? People say, “I can’t believe what you say onstage,” because you can’t say anything anymore. I mean, I love an old-fashioned vulgar joke. There is a joke that I’ve been reading onstage: A woman wakes up on her 40th birthday, and she goes to the drugstore and says: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The druggist says, “36?” She says, “I’m 40.” Next she goes to the butcher shop and goes: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The butcher says, “32.” She goes, “No, I’m 40.” She goes up and down Main Street. Nobody comes close to guessing her age. She gets in her car and goes to the gas station. Says to the guy, “Can you guess how old I am?” He says, “I can guess your age and your birthday. But first you have to let me fondle your breasts for a while.” She says, “OK.” Then after about five minutes, he says, “You are 40 years old, and your birthday’s today.” “How did you do that?” He goes, “I was in line behind you at the butcher shop.” The audience gives the biggest laugh from that line. But first the audience makes a noise when the gas station attendant says, “You have to allow me to fondle your breasts for a while,” and she says, “OK.” Whereas 20 years ago, her agreeing to it would have just been accepted as part of the joke.

Are you finding that the gap between what people will laugh at and what they would admit to finding funny is getting more pronounced? You know what was interesting? I did a bookstore event the other day, and I read the funniest bits from the diary.

I got nothing. Nothing. Then people said afterward, “My face hurt from laughing.” I said: “You weren’t laughing. I was here, you know.” But you turn the lights off? In a theater, the lights are all the way down, and people will laugh.

Because people behave differently when they’re not worried about any social consequences or judgments? Yeah. Especially if you’re in America and race comes up in any way, the audience freaks out. So Andrea, the woman who assaulted me, was Black. When I shape that into an essay, I think it’s important. I was let into the foyer of a building I don’t live in; that had everything to do with me being white. If you have a character who’s Black and is not a virtuous character, the audience freaks out, because they think: If I laugh, does that make me a racist? If I don’t like this person, does that make me a racist? It’s something I’ve noticed for years. The audience freaks out, and it’s by and large a white audience freaking out, and it gets worse with every passing day.

A look at how Covid was handled in Marion and Polk counties

Today the Salem City Club meeting featured a Zoom program, "Lessons Learned Combatting COVID in the Mid-Willamette Valley."

The Salem Reporter has a good story about the program.  So I'm going to focus on how I viewed what the speakers said.

Here's a screenshot of two of the speakers, Jacqui Umstead, RN, Public Health Administrator for Polk County Health Services (top) and Katrina Rothenberger, MPH, Public Health Director for Marion County Health & Human Services (bottom).

They came across as caring and competent. Almost always that's the case with public health workers. We're fortunate to have them as key leaders in the 18-month battle against the pandemic.

I haven't been impressed with how the Marion County Board of Commissioners -- three Republicans -- have handled Covid-related affairs. They've resisted the governor's public health orders and have expressed skepticism about vaccine mandates.

So Rothenberger deserves a public health medal for doing her best to get Covid under control in Marion County, since she has had to balance the politics of keeping the Board of Commissioners happy while doing what was needed based on evolving scientific understanding of the pandemic and orders from Governor Brown.

At the end of this blog post you'll find screenshots of the slides that Rothenberger and Umstead shared. Some of the content of the slides will seem cryptic without their narration, but you'll get a feel for the lessons they learned during the Year and a Half of Covid Hell.

One clear lesson I want to emphasize is how public health and prevention needs to be a much higher health care priority. It's crazy that our country has spent trillions of dollars dealing with Covid, yet an investment of mere billions would have gone a long way toward making the United States much better prepared for dealing with the pandemic when it hit our shores.

I'm reminded of a recent New Yorker article about how Costa Rica vastly improved the health of people there by taking a public health community-based approach toward health care rather than a treatment approach centered on individual problems.

Sure, treatment is necessary when prevention fails.

However, the United States is way over-balanced toward expensive medical care rather than disease prevention. The speakers noted that the first few months of the pandemic were really tough for their understaffed/underfunded public health departments until money started arriving from the federal government.

The third speaker was Cheryl Nester Wolfe, RN, MSN, NEA-BC, President and Chief Executive Officer, Salem Health. 

In a way Salem Health is the flip side of the public health departments. Lots of money. Lots of staff. High visibility. Focused on treatment rather than prevention. However, the vaccination clinics Salem Health organized at the fairgrounds were absolutely key to getting Covid under control this year -- before the Delta variant got things out of control again.

Wolfe shared this slide that shows Salem Hospital's Covid patient census since the start of the pandemic. The yellow line is breakthrough cases that had to be hospitalized, which I gather are a subset of the blue line showing all Covid patients.

She said that 91% of Covid patients are unvaccinated. 

Wolfe said the hospital was extremely busy prior to the pandemic, which had led them to plan for additional beds. When Covid hit, hospital capacity was stretched even thinner, at times surpassing 100% of traditional capacity, as shown in the figure below.

She correctly noted that Oregon has one of the lowest (maybe the lowest) ratio of hospital beds per 1,000 population in the country. So just as the pandemic showed the downside of "just in time" supply chain/inventory management, which leaves little margin for error when unexpected events happen, the same is evident with hospital beds in Oregon.

(I bear some responsibility for this, since many years ago I worked for the State Health Planning and Development Agency, which handled requests from hospitals to expand capacity and services, something we planners were very cautious about in order to keep costs down. That was good, but sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.)

During the question and answer period I submitted a written question about why Marion and Polk counties have vaccination rates quite a bit below the state average of 68% with 1+ dose. Marion County is at 62% and Polk County is at 61%. But the moderator wasn't able to ask my question before the City Club meeting ended.

As noted above, I suspect that a lack of strong support for vaccines by conservative county commissioners is part of the reason for Marion and Polk lagging the state average. There's surely quite a few other reasons also, though.

CovidActNow.org has a nice compilation of Covid-related data for the entire United States. Here's how that web site discusses the vulnerabilities of Marion County. As you can see, they cite "Minorities & non-English speakers," "Population density," and "Housing and transport challenges" as the three Very High sources of Covid vulnerability that lead to an overall High rating.

Having three clueless county commissioners isn't one of the criteria, though I think it should be.

Here's the slides that the county public health directors shared.

 

Supply chain woe: we can't get a part for our broken washing machine

I'm not allowed to use our washing machine, since my wife (correctly) doesn't trust me to handle clothes with the proper water temperature and dryer settings.

But ever since our fairly new Maytag decided that it would be a fun joke to start a washing cycle, then turn off when it got to the rinse mode, Laurel hasn't been able to use the washing machine either. 

She searched our files and found that, as she remembered, we did indeed buy an extended warranty from Kelly's. Sweet, we thought. It wasn't hard to find the "Parts and Service" page on the Kelly's web site.

Which had some optimistic language.

Appliance Hospital is family owned and operated since 1947, Appliance & Refrigeration Hospital is dedicated to providing HONEST, REASONABLE, RELIABLE and REPUTABLE service to our customers in the Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Vancouver, Salem, and Bend areas.

...Our service vehicles stock a large array of factory recommended parts and equipment to quickly return your product to top operating performance.

Please give our knowledgeable, courteous service professionals an opportunity to restore your product to its proper operation. You can count on us!

Likely Appliance Hospital usually does live up to its claim that they can quickly handle a repair. It did take five days for a repairman to show up, but that was fine.

Laurel had gone to a laundromat in the meantime. Not fun, but tolerable given that we expected our washing machine to be fixed promptly.

However, the repair guy said it needed a circuit board. They didn't have one in stock. He said to wait three days, then see if the circuit board was available. Unfortunately, when Laurel phoned she was told that the part had been ordered. No word on when it would come in.

So now we're stuck with an American-made Maytag washer that's unusable for an indefinite future. There's no way to tell whether the laundromat will be Laurel's not-so-favorite hangout for another few days, few weeks, or few months. 

Almost certainly we're a victim of the Supply Chain Hell that has been causing so much disruption.

I'm sure circuit boards are complex. Probably even though Maytag washing machines are made in this country, many or most of the parts for them come from China or somewhere other than the United States.

A neighbor Laurel encountered on a walk said that he's been waiting quite a while for a dishwasher part. He's been washing dishes by hand, something that's a lot tougher to do with clothes. His HVAC upgrade also is on hold due to a lack of materials.

President Biden is working to get our supply chains functioning like they used to. But there's only so much he can do, since mostly this is in the hands of private businesses.

It's just aggravating for so many people to be impacted by shortages when the economy otherwise is doing well. 

I'll copy in a message I got recently from the person in charge of a Kickstarter project I helped fund, being attracted to the lightweight shoes promised by the project. This guy tells a fascinating story of what it's like for a small business owner in these days of supply chain problems.

Dear All, 

The following is a summary of what are the supply issues affecting the market and in particular the footwear market. The following information was collected from different sources but mainly from the Footwear News Corporation (https://footwearnews.com/) but all of the information is available online.

Last year around March when the Great Plague was upon us, nearly every industry, in nearly every country in the world, practically shut down.

And many businesses went bust, never to return.

Eighteen months later the businesses that survived have largely reopened but the reboot process has been riddled with critical errors and system failures.

For example, right now there are countless businesses in industries from retail to manufacturing that are experiencing severe labor shortages. Supply chains around the world are breaking down, resulting in product shortages and major transportation bottlenecks.

The end result of this dumpster fire is that prices are soaring. And I wanted to take this opportunity to connect some of the dots to help explain some of these important trends with regards to the delivery of the Sockwa X10 product.

So let’s revisit March 2020 again when everything shut down. You probably recall that dozens of large companies declared bankruptcy, like Nieman Marcus, GNC, JC Penny, etc.

But there were other companies that went bust which most people have probably never heard of. They were in more mundane, less sexy industries… like manufacturing...the closure of these unsexy industries created supplier shortages. Though their demise was hardly noticed, it turns out they would have a significant impact on the global economy.

Supply has fallen. Last March when a large number of manufacturers went out of business, no one noticed and no one cared. And this production capacity cannot be simply turned on again with a flip of a switch. It takes a lot of effort to resurrect a bankrupt factory, to re-hire and re-train workers.

This trend is worldwide -- even foreign factories (Chinese) have closed, and those that remain open are struggling to retain workers and operate under strict COVID protocols. Manufacturing efficiency is way down as a result, so they’re not producing enough supply to keep up with demand and the big companies like Nike and Adidas are gobbling up whatever capacity any footwear manufacturer that is still in business can offer. Not much production room for the little guys!

Then there are the actual shipping problems:

Shipping Container Pricing -- shipping container prices have exploded. From March 2020 up to March 2021 a 40ft container could be purchased for +/- $2,500-$3,000. Today's opening price is $25,000 - $30,000 per container and there is still no guarantee that you will win the price auction on those containers available.  This increase in price means that shipping your product is now 6-10x more expensive than estimated depending on the size of the product.  We estimated $5 which was realistic when we launched, now we are over $30 to ship the same product.

Shipping Delays -- then there are the crazy delays evident in almost every port in the world, that prevent container ships from delivering their cargo.

A range of factors, including COVID rules and union regulations, means there’s a shortage of maritime crew to operate the vessels. There’s also a shortage of dockworkers, truck drivers, forklift operators, etc. at the ports.

The supply chain chaos has been brewing since the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic and has been building momentum ever since. Industry insiders who have first-hand exposure to its ever-changing variables and reach admit they’ve never seen anything like it before. And these experts remain unclear about when the eye of the current Supply Chain storm may finally pass by the footwear, apparel, and textile industries.

The supply chain, shipping and logistics storm, which has battered many industries since the pandemic commenced, increased in velocity during the Summer of 2021 with container shortages, port logjams, surging shipping costs that have forced some brands to resort to air freight, and finally a shutdown of key Asian sourcing factories due to virus spread among workers in Asia.

These factors will result in shipping delays for holiday 2021 and Spring/Summer 2022, late and/or limited deliveries to retailers, possible product shortages on key items and higher costs for consumers looking to snare the season’s hottest products.

Athletic giants Nike and Adidas are not going unscathed by the situation. Like the Sockwa X10, Nike & Adidas are facing problems beyond securing higher-priced container space on shipping vessels.

Crocs’ McNelly sums up the harsh realities of today’s logistics and supply chain climate. “[Vendors] are paying more for less — for less predictability, less space and less movement,” she says, predicting “it’s going to take a long time to get back to the new normal.”

I appreciate that there are some individual pledgers that are not at all happy with me for not communicating more, not producing a survey that collects your size and your address and yes I am late in delivering the product that you pledged for.  I honestly did not foresee the gravity of the above global production and shipping issues when I launched the Sockwa X10 campaign.

I believe that everyone who pledged for the Sockwa X10 understands or has access to information about what has happened since March 2020 and what is happening in the world right now.

So where does the above leave us now regarding the Sockwa X10 crowdfunding campaign?

Production: 75% of the order is ready to ship, we are just waiting for the insoles to come out of production which should now be within the next two weeks (we have had production delays for this factory too).

Shipping: As the price of shipping has increased x10 since we launched the campaign, there are two choices. One is to add an additional $25 to each pair shipped or to wait for the shipping container prices to get back to the levels or similar on which the campaign was launched.  For those that ordered more than one pair, the shipping price of extra $25/pair would reduce for the 2nd, 3rd pair etc.

I have been holding off on sending the survey in the past couple of weeks as I tried to work out how to present this extra shipping scenario in the pledge management software and also crossing my fingers that there might be some sign that shipping container prices stop increasing - I am still working on the survey presentation presently.

Nobody is or was prepared for what is happening regarding these shipping costs and shipping problems, never mind the production issues.

I still need to know sizes, delivery addresses etc because I need to know how much textile to produce for the remaining 25% of the orders.

I will try my best to either complete the pledge management survey in the next few days or find a way of getting people to enter their details onto our Shopify website.  Worst case scenario, I can get you to email me the details.

I am very sorry guys, I'm 54 years old and I have been managing my own businesses for the past 21 years and before that I ran other peoples' businesses for 10 years and I have never experienced anything vaguely close to what has happened since February/March 2021.

I appreciate that there are companies that have $millions more revenue than mine that have gone bust in the past 18 months but that doesn't help me sleep every night.  My company has not gone bust and I still intend to supply everyone who pledged with their product order.

Thank you for your understanding.  I know the above is not what anyone wants to read but it is a reality.  I will update again before the end of this month. Hopefully, I will have some better news to provide.

Kind regards,

Patrick

A big burn pile is still fun for me at 73

There's pluses and minuses that come with living on ten wooded acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. Our property is a heck of a lot of work to maintain.

But some of that work is so pleasant, it's better termed fun. Especially if that word, fun, is loosely defined. 

Today Laurel, my wife, and I tackled a large burn pile. Originally it consisted of a massive amount of branches that I'd hauled up to our burn area from a pile under two tall redwoods -- remnants of some tree work we'd had done after a destructive ice storm last February.

Here's Laurel tossing a branch onto the super-hot fire this afternoon.

It had bothered me to see the branches scattered under the redwoods.

So over the span of several days last summer, I filled up our nifty electric cart with supplies -- chain saw, gas, bar oil, water, safety gear -- and worked away at cutting up the largest branches into a size suitable to carry to the burn pile.

When most of the branches had been hauled away, I liked the way the ground under the redwoods looked.

The redwoods seemed happy also, though tree emotions can be hard to discern.

I had a relaxing 73rd birthday on Friday. Saturday was a day of labor. Laurel had been asking when I was going to get around to cutting up a bunch of wild plum trees that had collapsed in the ice storm. Some were still alive, but laying on the ground. 

They were on a trail just a few feet from our yard. So I spent three or four hours with my chainsaw cutting the base of each tree, then laboriously removing the branches that had gotten tangled up with other fallen trees and surrounding brush. I carried the trunks and branches to our lawn, then cut up the larger pieces so we could carry them to the burn pile.

Today was set everything on fire day. The Jefferson Fire District said it was OK to burn. The weather was dry and sunny. We were tired from the work we'd done the day before, but had enough energy for the burning.

I've written several other blog posts about the Joy of a Burn Pile: "Firing up a big burn pile reminds me: life is ablaze, yet ends in embers," and "A big burn pile reminds me why we're not in a retirement community." I find it really satisfying to see a lot of wood that we've carried to the burn pile go up in smoke.

However, this year smoke from the fire was pleasingly minimal. The branches that were under the redwoods were dry to start with, and they'd spent the summer under a tarp getting even drier. 

So we were able to get the fire going strong, then gradually add green branches from the wild plum trees I'd cut yesterday. I'd worried that the green wood wouldn't burn, but that worry faded as I saw that even green branches didn't stand a chance against the high heat of the fire.

We started burning at abut 1:15 pm. It only took us 90 minutes or so to get rid of the branches. Here's Laurel and Mooka, our dog, contemplating what we had wrought.

When all of the wood had been put on the burn pile, I enjoy pushing long unburnt pieces onto the hot coals, doing my best to avoid setting fire to myself. I wear leather gloves, though I took them off for this photo of Old Man and His Burn Pile.

The brown area in front of the fire used to be a pile of branches about five feet high.

A burn pile thus is akin to natural magic. You start with a huge pile of wood. You end up with a small amount of ashes. Plus heat and some smoke. By late afternoon the fire had shrunk even more, with all the wood, both dry and green, almost totally consumed.