HinesSight

I'm not an economist, but isn't unemployment worse than inflation?

Usually my response to bad economic news is to ignore it as much as possible. After all, what goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up.

So freaking out over short-term worries about inflation, unemployment, the stock market, gas prices, or whatever generally isn't justified. Typically, when things look to be the darkest, the economic sun is about to turn brighter.

Thus even though I find it difficult to look at my iPhone's stock market app first thing in the morning, because I don't want to get depressed before I've had breakfast (might as well wait for lunch to feel bad), until recently I was feeling pretty much OK about where the American economy was heading.

But now I'm wondering if Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, and his organization know what they're doing.

Economics isn't exactly a science like physics. In my perhaps overly cynical opinion, it strikes me as being akin to psychology -- a discipline that aspires to hard science precision, yet falls way short when it comes to being able to accurately model and predict reality.

Currently Powell says the Federal Reserve is deeply committed to fighting inflation. OK, inflation is a big problem, for sure. 

However, the rapid rise in interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve is threatening to produce a recession and high unemployment. Today Politico ran a story, "Dow hits 2022 low as markets sell off on recession fears." Excerpts:

Stocks tumbled worldwide Friday on mounting signs the global economy is weakening just as central banks raise the pressure even more with additional interest rate hikes.

...Energy prices closed sharply lower as traders worried about a possible recession. Treasury yields, which affect rates on mortgages and other kinds of loans, held at multiyear highs.

...The Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world aggressively hiked interest rates this week in hopes of undercutting high inflation, with more big increases promised for the future. But such moves also put the brakes on their economies, threatening recessions as growth slows worldwide.

Besides Friday’s discouraging data on European business activity, a separate report suggested U.S. activity is also still shrinking, though not quite as badly as in earlier months.

So even though the United States and world economies are looking more feeble,  the Federal Reserve and other central banks are planning to raise interest rates even higher because inflation is viewed as a more serious problem than a recession.

I guess that makes sense if you're a professional economist who isn't worried about losing their job, or a Wall Street type who makes money no matter what happens on Main Street. 

But since a recession will cause millions of Americans to be unemployed, it seems clear that if those future unemployed people were asked whether they'd prefer to have a job or to pay higher prices, they'd say that having a decent regular income is more important than having to spend a bit more of that income due to inflation.

Plus, higher interest rates hurt those with credit card balances, people needing a mortgage to buy a house, construction companies hit by lower demand for homes due to more expensive mortgages, and applicants for other sorts of loans.

Maybe the Federal Reserve will be able to pull off the "soft landing" that's a sweet spot where rising interest rates lower inflation to a tolerable level while the economy avoids a recession.

I'm just getting a sinking feeling that the Federal Reserve interest rate hikes are going to make us wish for more inflation and less unemployment before too long as the United States heads into a recession (which some argue is already here, at least in a mild form).

Elemental is a film with wildfire lessons for Oregon

It was purely coincidence, but there was still something wonderfully strange to have Ralph Bloemers, the Executive Producer of Elemental, a gripping documentary about wildfires, talking last Friday night in our living room with my wife and I about the film while we and other neighbors were worried about the Vitae Springs wildfire in south Salem that started that day and had led to a Level 2 (Get Set) evacuation order that extended almost to our neighborhood adjacent to the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge.

Bloemers parked his camper van at our house Friday night since he had to be both at a Friday 7 pm premiere showing of the film at Salem Cinema and a Saturday 10 am showing for survivors of the Santiam Canyon fires. Ralph was a lead attorney for our neighborhood's lengthy fight against a Measure 37 subdivision some years back that Laurel and I led, which is how we came to know him so well.

 

Bloemers talked with us before he headed off to sleep in the van. So while worried about a nearby wildfire, we heard a lot about wildfires. Mostly reassuring messages, since I told Ralph that while we'd done quite a bit of clearing of brush and trees around our house that sits on ten mostly natural acres, we didn't want to cut down some beautiful large firs and white oaks fairly close to the house.

 

Echoing one of the messages of Elemental, Bloemers told us that creating defensible space around a structure is less important than hardening it against wildfire. Key to that hardening is not having bark or other flammable material within six feet of the structure, having fireproof vent screens in place if a house has a crawl space, and either not having gutters or keeping the gutters clear of debris.

 

The movie shows that even a very hot wildfire won't ignite a structure if the fire is over 50 feet away, I recall it was. So it's helpful to have cleared space around a structure. However, often, or usually, embers are the bigger danger to a house. And embers can fly long distances in a wildfire, especially in a strong wind. Thus there's no way a wildfire can be controlled by bare earth, since embers can travel a mile or so, igniting other fires when they land, which then create more embers.

 

This means that wind is worse than trees burning. Yet historically forest management has been viewed as the best way to combat wildfires -- thinning trees, clearcutting, and such. Elemental features persuasive interviews with wildfire experts who say that based on solid research, taking trees out of a forest doesn't work well to reduce wildfire risk.

 

In fact, the film shows a researcher talking about an Oregon fire that spread over land that included both clearcuts and old growth forest. The clearcut land fared worst in the fire, because replanting of trees created a monoculture where all the trees were about the same size, making it easy for the fire to spread through crowns close to each other, whereas the old growth forest, being much more diverse, resisted fire to a greater degree. 

 

I've watched a lot of documentaries. Elemental is one of the best I've seen. The original photography is beautiful, and archival footage of the recent Paradise, California fire and other wildfires is expertly blended in. The film starts off by startling the viewer with scenes of the horrendous damage wildfires can do to homes/towns, and concludes by demolishing many of the myths about how wildfires should be controlled.

 

Putting them out sometimes isn't the wisest course of action. Native Americans knew that fire rejuvenates the land. Elemental shows current tribe members reverently setting fire to some of their land, making fire a sacred sacrament of sorts rather than an evil to be fought with brute force.

 

I'm sure that not everybody who sees the film will come away convinced that the policies advocated in Elemental should be followed. However, I'm confident that every viewer will find much in the film to think about, since it takes a much-needed scientific approach to dealing with wildfires. The film is shaping up to be a big success. You can see it at Salem Cinema until September 15.

 

Here's part of an email Ralph Bloemers sent me about the film in his Executive Producer role. (Copying and pasting led to some weirdness in the font sizes.)

 

Over the past five years, National Geographic and PBS Filmmakers Trip Jennings, Sara Quinn and I traveled throughout the West and across the country to visit with the top experts, indigenous fire practitioners and communities impacted by fire. We spent time capturing rebirth in the burn using time lapse and wildlife camera traps, and went into active fires with firefighters and first responders.

 

The result is a new film entitled Elemental - which seeks to present the thinking of top scientists in a visually compelling and engaging way that is directly relevant to most people’s lived experience - and offers solutions to keep our homes and communities safe.

 

Elemental has been entered into dozens of festivals and been selected for fifteen so far - including the Valley Film Festival in LA (August 6), Sonoma (September 21st), the Mill Valley Film Festival in Northern CA (early October), Sedona (Arizona), Doc Society, Greenpoint, Newburyport, Wildlife Conservation and more. 

 

For our Portland Premiere, Senator Jeff Golden, Rep Dacia Grayber and Rep Khanh Pham co hosted the event. Willamette Week named the film it’s Top Pick, it was featured in the Oregonian and on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud.  

 

We are premiering it across Oregon and other Western states in the coming months, and doing private screenings as well.  The response has been overwhelming. 

Taylor Tomlinson's stand-up comedy heals my frazzled psyche

My big problem with life is... (drumroll please)... LIFE. 

Meaning, insofar as I know what I mean, but now that I just wrote this blog's topic sentence, I'm stuck with explaining it, no matter how many problems get fixed in my life, new ones pop up like a perpetual motion machine designed by a sadist.

I suspect most people feel this way. So what are we to do? 

Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll only can take us so far, especially if we're (OK, me) so old, sex is starting to  look like the car that zipped by in the other lane and now is so small in the rearview mirror it's barely discernible; drugs are limited to marijuana because dealers of harder stuff are find to find when you're 73; and the last rock band truly worth listening to in your entirely personal opinion was Cream over fifty years ago.

Meditation? Yeah, I've been there and done that for a really long time.

The fact that I'm still as messed up in 2022 as I was in 1969 when I started to meditate every day tells me that based on that extensive flat trend line, the chance of me taking a sudden quantum leap to a blissful state of enlightenment is vanishingly small.

So I'm becoming increasingly convinced that television is the solution to my problems.

After all, when I'm engrossed in a good show, I forget about what was bothering me before I turned the TV on. Sure, those bothers are still going to be there when I turn the TV off, but at least I've had a break from worrying about my medical ailments, my psychological defects, global warming, why our dog won't come when I call her, Trump becoming president again, and a host of other anxieties.

In the realm of television, I'm enamored with certain types of stand-up comedy. The qualities I enjoy are honesty, observational humor as opposed to jokes, self-awareness, and, naturally, a comic's ability to laugh at themselves.

When I find a stand-up comic like that, my problems feel less important not so much because I've hidden them under a Bed of Distraction, but because the comic has laid out their own problems on the bedspread for me and anybody else watching for them to see -- which makes my own vicissitudes seem less serious, since if the comic can laugh at their problems, I can do the same with mine.

Or at least try to do the same with mine. Not surprisingly, I tend to find other people's problems more humorous than my own, though I'm working on looking on my own life as if it was material for a Netflix special.

Like "Look at You" featuring the hugely talented comic Taylor Tomlinson. I learned about her from a newspaper story about leading comedians with televised shows. The description of Tomlinson's act appealed to me the most, so my wife and I watched "Look at You" last week.

We loved it. 

Tomlinson starts off by talking about her mental problems and psychotherapy experiences. I figured that would be worth about five minutes, then she'd be on to other subjects. But no, Tomlinson stuck with that highly personal theme for, I don't know, around 20 minutes of the one hour stand-up show, maybe even longer.

For someone so young, about 25, she's remarkably self-aware. And more importantly, really funny. Tomlinson has an appealing manner about her that makes her easy to watch.

Here's some You Tube videos with material from "Look at You."

Russ & Delana Beaton's 61st anniversary celebration

Tonight Russ and Delana Beaton celebrated 61 years of marriage at the Willamette Heritage Center's Dye House. Their children, Lynn, Alan, and Brenda, organized the event in a masterful fashion.

Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent. 

After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about Russ and Delana. When a microphone was put in my hand, I said something like this:

Russ and Delana strike me as the nicest people I've ever known. I'm sitting at a table with three retired Willamette University professors. [Russ, and I think Delana also, taught there for many years.] Because I'm political and like to dig for truths under the surface, I asked them if in their experience, the Beatons really are as nice as they seem to be. Each of them said, Yes, they are. The only negative thing I heard from their Willamette colleagues was, Sometimes they can be too nice. Which doesn't seem like a flaw to me. Not at all. I only wish that one day someone would say about me, "He was too nice." For sure, this will never happen.

There were lots of stories and anecdotes about the accomplishments of Russ and Delana. They've changed so many lives for the better. To give a couple of examples -- and there are many more -- Russ was instrumental in getting Oregon's highly successful land use system off the ground, and Delana has been a tireless advocate for homeless people in Salem.

Here's some photos of their wedding 61 years ago that I captured via my iPhone. 

 

It was a beautiful celebration for a beautiful couple. In a world with so much negativity, it felt healing to be in at atmosphere of well-deserved unalloyed positivity toward the Beatons and how they’ve helped others over so many years.

Near the end, Russ said "usually such praise is only heard at your funeral." Originally scheduled for last year, but Covid led to a postponement. Russ did mention that they were married in 1961, so he saw a certain symmetry in celebrating their 61st anniversary now.

My unusual joy in reading a big thick novel, The Magus

A few days ago I felt the satisfaction of climbing a large mountain. Exhausted. Exhilarated. Satisfied. Except my mountain was a big thick book, The Magus by John Fowles.

It isn't that I'm unacquainted with big thick books. They're just usually non-fiction. It'd been a long time since I'd tackled a literary novel like this one.

I'm not sure how The Magus ended up on a shelf where my unread books resided. I recall hearing that it was a classic thriller of sorts. This is the Amazon description.

Widely considered John Fowles's masterpiece, The Magus is "a dynamo of suspense and horror...a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul....Read it in one sitting if possible-but read it" (New York Times).
A young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. There, his friendship with a reclusive millionaire evolves into a mysterious -- and deadly -- game of violence, seduction, and betrayal. As he is drawn deeper into the trickster's psychological traps, Nicholas finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish past from present, fantasy from reality. He becomes a desperate man fighting for his sanity and his very survival. John Fowles expertly unfolds a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature.

Quite a few months ago I elevated The Magus to a row of books that I read every morning before I meditate. I'd only read a few pages a day from it, doing the exact opposite of what the New York Times recommended above: Read it in one sitting if possible.

Wow. I'm a fast reader. But it's hard to imagine reading the 656 pages of The Magus in one sitting, nor does this seem desirable. 

I savored the book. From the first pages, I highlighted passages that stuck me as particularly well-written or profound. These were the passages marked in yellow on the initial two pages.

I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.

I had long before made the discovery that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed. My father was through being the right age at the right time rather than through any great professional talent, a brigadier; and my mother was the very model of a would-be major-general's wife. That is, she never argued with him and always behaved as if he were listening in the next room, even when he was thousands of miles away.

Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility.

During my last years at school I realized that what was really wrong with my parents was that they had nothing but a blanket contempt for the sort of life I wanted to lead.

There were things, a certain emotional gentleness in my mother, an occasional euphoric jolliness in my father, I could have borne more of; but always I liked in them the things they didn't want to be liked for.

I went to Oxford in 1948. In my second year at Magdalen, soon after a long vacation during which I hardly saw my parents, my father had to fly out to India. He took my mother with him. Their plane crashed, a high-octane pyre, in a thunderstorm some forty miles east of Karachi. After the first shock I felt an almost immediate sense of relief, of freedom. My only other close relation, my mother's brother, farmed in Rhodesia, so I now had no family to trammel what I regarded as my real self. I may have been weak in filial charity, but I was strong on the discipline in vogue. 

Over and over as I read The Magus, almost on every page, I'd picture John Fowles tossing off sentences with seeming ease that I couldn't write in a thousand years of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

Maybe it wasn't that easy for Fowles. But I suspect it was. That led me to feel a curious combination of literary joy and envy as I made my way slowly through the book. I was hooked on the story, a marvelously creative plot with fascinating characters. 

And I badly wanted to be able to write even a semblance of the evocative passages that my highlighter displayed in yellow. Eventually, though, I realized that what Fowles possessed as a novelist, and I didn't, and never would, wasn't so much an exceptional ability to write, but an exceptional ability to understand people and human relationships.

Here's some excerpts from an early chapter that shows what I mean.

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car -- not so common among undergraduates in those days -- and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

I found my sexual success and the apparently ephemeral nature of love equally pleasing. It was like being good at golf, but despising the game.

At times I'd say to myself, "Man, The Magus would make a really great Netflix streaming series." I'd say this because Fowles was so adept at creating characters in his novel who were complex, flawed, and hugely interesting -- just what I look for in my TV watching.

I would like them not because they were likable. Few, if any were. But Fowles allowed me to get to know them as deeply as I've ever known another person, as strange as that may sound. Meaning, a skilled novelist is able to reveal what is in a character's mind more clearly than real people are able to do, or at least choose to do.

It was quite an adventure, reading The Magus over many months. I'd forgotten what a pleasure a marvelously written literary novel can be. Thanks for reminding me, John Fowles.

Remember Ukraine. American support can't waver.

It's been about six months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In those dark early days of the war, it seemed highly unlikely that Ukraine would still be an independent nation half a year later.

Yet here we are, with the brave Ukrainians basically fighting Russia to a standstill. So let's remember Ukraine -- today, tomorrow, every day. 

If Ukraine continues to get strong support from the United States and our allies, there's a very good chance that before too long Putin and his Kremlin cronies will realize that the price of waging their unprovoked war against Ukraine isn't worth the loss of life, sanctions, international condemnation, harm to the Russian economy, and other problems Russia is facing.

The Ukrainian people won't give up their fight. The only way they lose this war is if key supporters, notably the United States, tire of supplying aid to Ukraine and punishing Russia. So preserving American public opinion in favor of Ukraine is crucial.

One way I remember Ukraine is by following The Kyiv Independent on Twitter. For more in-depth coverage of how the war is going, there's The Kyiv Independent web site. How this publication came to be makes for some interesting and inspiring reading in the About section.

The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s English-language media outlet, created by journalists who were fired from the Kyiv Post for defending editorial independence.

The Kyiv Post, Ukraine’s global voice, went silent on Nov. 8, 2021, days after celebrating the 26th year of its uninterrupted run.

The publication was shut down by the owner in his attempt to take full control of the newsroom that has always followed the principle of editorial independence. 

Yet, the editorial team of the independent Kyiv Post refused to be silenced. If we couldn’t save the Kyiv Post brand, we could save its values.

On Nov. 11, 2021, over 30 ex-Kyiv Post employees decided to continue the Kyiv Post’s legacy by launching a new publication – the Kyiv Independent.

The following values will serve as the backbone of the Kyiv Independent: 

• • The new publication will serve its readers and community, and nobody else.
  • The Kyiv Independent won’t be dependent on a rich owner or an oligarch. The publication will depend on fundraising from readers and donors and later on, commercial activities.
  • The newsroom will decide and execute the publication’s editorial policy in the community’s best interests. Attempts to influence it from outside will not be tolerated.
  • The Kyiv Independent will always be at least partly owned by its journalists.
  • The Kyiv Independent will strive to reach financial sustainability to preserve its independence in the future.

The team unanimously chose Olga Rudenko, former deputy chief editor at the Kyiv Post, who dedicated 10 years to the brand, to lead the new publication as editor-in-chief.

The Kyiv Independent is still in the making. The website you see is our first, temporary platform. 

As we embark on this new project, we vow to serve as the true, independent voice of Ukraine. 

The Kyiv Independent provides fair and reliable news on a variety of topics. From Russia’s war against Ukraine and disinformation campaigns to the ongoing pandemic and medical procurement, from human rights in occupied Donbas and Crimea to reforms in Kyiv, nothing will escape the view of the Kyiv Independent.

But we can only do it together with you. Join us today and become a part of Ukraine’s fight for a better future with the Kyiv Independent.

Decaf coffee irritates the bladder because of acidity, as well as some caffeine

Since for a bit more than five years I've had to use a urinary catheter to pee, aside from the small amount I can release on my own, coffee has been a continuing concern for me.

For decades prior to having my bladder go on strike -- technical term, becoming atonic -- I was a coffee addict. I'd drink 4-5 cups a day, at just about any time.

After starting intermittent catheterization five times a day, and knowing that the caffeine in coffee stimulates the production of urine in many people, including me, at first I split the difference and tried drinking half-caf coffee: half caffeinated and half decaf.

But it didn't take long for me to realize that even half the amount of caffeine was irritating my bladder and seemingly making it more difficult to get a catheter to pass through the bladder opening. So I switched to decaf.

Better, yet I still experienced bladder irritation. I discovered that even decaf coffee has a decent amount of caffeine. HealthLine reports:

One study analyzed 16-ounce (473-ml) cups of drip-brewed decaf coffee from nine US chains or local coffee houses. All but one contained 8.6–13.9 mg caffeine, with an average of 9.4 mg per 16-ounce (473-ml) cup.

In comparison, an average 16-ounce (473-ml) cup of regular coffee packs approximately 188 mg of caffeine.

The researchers also purchased Starbucks decaffeinated espresso and brewed coffee and measured their caffeine content.

The decaf espresso contained 3–15.8 mg per shot, while the decaf coffee had 12–13.4 mg of caffeine per 16-ounce (473-ml) serving.

While the caffeine content is lower than that of regular coffee, it’s still present.

That led me to try some coffee substitutes. Cafix turned out to be my favorite. Reading the label when my first jar arrived from Amazon, I saw "Cafix crystals offer a rich robust taste yet none of the caffeine or acidity found in coffee or tea."

Ah, acidity. I'd forgotten about that. Acidity can be a problem for people with bladder issues. See here and here. 

So I stuck with Cafix for quite a while. But a few days ago I'd forgotten about what I'd forgotten, and looked longingly at a jar of Republica Organic Decaf, coffee from Australia that I'd also gotten from Amazon, tried for a while, then set aside when I gave up decaf.

I noted that Republica is 99.7% caffeine free, which by my calculation translated into a negligible 1 mg or so of caffeine in a 16 ounce cup. I prefer the taste of Republica over Cafix, because Republica tastes like coffee, because that's what it is.

However, I've had more difficulty inserting a catheter the past few days, which reminded me that acidity is an issue for people with a bladder problem just as caffeine is. Thus reluctantly I'm going back to Cafix tomorrow.

As much as I like the taste of decaf coffee, it isn't worth it if the coffee interferes with my ability to do my urinary catheter thing. I'll continue to have a 16 ounce decaf latte every Sunday during my weekly get-together with an old friend.

That one shot of expresso, I assume it is, doesn't seem to cause me any problem, maybe because it's just a one-time drink each week, not a daily consumption of decaf coffee.

UPDATE: Well, duh, somehow I'd never thought that decaf low acid coffee exists, but naturally it does, as revealed by an Amazon search shortly after I published this post and the idea entered my mind. So soon I'll be getting some Lucy Jo's decaf low acid coffee. Will be interesting to try it.

Failing Statesman Journal fires two experienced journalists

As the Statesman Journal sinks further into a journalistic abyss of mediocrity, sadly its cruel corporate overlords are dragging down highly competent staff in another round of firings. The Statesman Journal staff directory hasn't been updated yet, so via these screenshots let's have faces and titles to go with the names. Currie was one of the four members of the Newsroom Leadership. Since Salem is the Oregon capital, and Radnovich was the reporter for state government/legislature, naturally the non-geniuses at the Gannett Corporation picked him to be fired -- a dumb move if the Statesman Journal wants to be a quality newspaper, which obviously isn't the goal here.

Saving enough money in newsrooms to pay for the outrageous salary of the Gannett CEO and board members does seem to be the goal. 

Don Currie's firing elicited some especially strong feelings since he had worked at the Statesman Journal for 27 years. 

Gannett believes that lowering the quality of its local newspapers by firing experienced journalists is going to help somehow. Hasn't worked so far. Won't work in the future.

Gannett, the country’s largest local news chain, is in a tailspin. The publisher of some 200 daily papers reported a significant loss in the second quarter — $54 million on revenues of $749 million.

According to Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the media business for Poynter, the company is either down or missing its targets in digital and print advertising as well as print circulation. The sole bright spot: a steady rise in paid digital circulation. Extensive layoffs are on the way. Edmonds quoted a memo from Maribel Perez Wadsworth, head of the media division, in which she said: “In the coming days, we will … be making necessary but painful reductions to staffing, eliminating some open positions and roles that will impact valued colleagues.” It’s hard to see how shrinking an already diminished product is going to help.

So we here in Salem need to get used to the idea that one day there won't be a daily newspaper in this town. Or if the Statesman Journal staggers on, it will be as a walking dead pale shadow of what newspapers used to be and still need to be.

 

Our curved railings by Outdoor Fence Co. turned out well

Our home in rural south Salem has quite a few quirks, most of them desirable.

For example, we have tons (literally) of granite rock in our landscaping, courtesy of the Garden Poet redesign not long after we moved here in 1990.

My wife and I love the natural look of large rocks and flat stepping stones.

But when we contacted Salem's Outdoor Fence Co. for a bid on installing a metal railing along the walkway from our driveway to front door, and another railing along the stepping stones from our carport to the walkway, those rocks became a bit of a problem.

Fortunately, not a big problem. The folks at Outdoor Fence Co. found locations for the metal posts that didn't require moving many rocks, though some of the pavers in the walkway had to be moved a ways.

Here's photos of the railings that were installed last Wednesday. We're happy with how they turned out. 

The walkway railing has a pleasing curve to it. We still need to repair some pavers that had to be moved to accommodate the metal posts.

Here's a view of the walkway railing from the bottom looking toward our driveway.

The railing from our carport alongside the stepping stones also turned out well. It replaced a clunkier wooden railing that required regular maintenance. 

Here's a view of the stepping stone railing from the bottom looking up. It also has an appealing curve.

As is typical of construction work these days, it took quite a while to get a bid for the work completed. Then we had to wait considerably longer to have the railings installed. We chose a dark brown color in a semi-reflective finish.

Throughout, the staff at Outdoor Fence Co. were easy to work with. When we had questions, they got answered. When we had concerns, they got resolved.

This was a fairly tricky project and it turned out nicely thanks to the competency of Outdoor Fence Co.

RRR is a terrific action movie about India under British domination

I just finished watching RRR -- "Rise Roar Revolt" -- a movie from India on Netflix that's a mind-blowing three-hour combination of action, thriller, romance, dance, superhero, and probably other genres that I could recall if my mind wasn't in such a blown state.

(It's got English captioning, and quite a bit of the dialogue is in English.)

I loved RRR. India fascinates me. I've visited the country twice and was a devotee of an Indian guru for 35 years, which led to me spending a lot of time around people from India. So when I read about the movie in a Rolling Stone review, I knew I had to see this highly popular film.

A subversive, supersized screed set in 1920’s Delhi, the latest film from the Telugu writer-director S.S. Rajamouli — its title RRR means different things depending on what translated version you see, but the Hindi cut opts for “Rise, Roar, Revolt” —  has already broken box office records in India and earned a rapidly growing cult following everywhere else, notably the States.

The first two paragraphs of the Rolling Stone review provide a good feel for this high-energy movie.

It’s tough to pinpoint the exact moment that the movie hooks you; mileage will vary per viewer. For some, it might be right from the get go, during a Melodrama 101 preamble involving a kidnapped child and casual colonial cruelty that leaves corpses in its wake. Others may find themselves leaning forward when a supercop, sporting the world’s most luxurious old-timey mustache, single-handedly beats back a crowd of thousands to catch a rock-throwing culprit. Or maybe the sight of a ripped, shirtless man sprinting through a forest and narrowly avoiding a midair collision between an angry wolf and an even angrier tiger is your investment tipping point.

Don’t worry: Should you somehow not find yourself entertained or exhilarated within the first 20 minutes or so of RRR, a.k.a. one-ninth of this film’s running time, stick around. There’s more. A lot more. Like an emergency rescue mission involving a sinking raft, a flaming train, a horse, a motorcycle, some rope and the flag of India. And a siege on a diplomat’s mansion punctuated by a CGI menagerie tearing into the British Raj’s troops. And the most frenetic, kinetic, class-conscious dance-off to ever double as a cultural fuck-you. And bromantic montages, slo-mo brooding, flashbacks that constitute their own short films, a man kicking an arrow through a tree trunk into another man’s head, and an acrobatic sequence involving a hero leaping, fighting and shooting legions of enemy soldiers while perched on his best friend’s shoulders that would make Butch and Sundance slow-clap.

A laudatory review in The New Yorker also is worth reading. It notes that while RRR is wildly nationalistic (I don't like Prime Minister Modi's Hindu nationalism, but I'm sure we both loved RRR), it does so in an appealing fashion that transcends modern politics.

When it comes to cinematic propaganda, blatant is better than insidious. Overt advocacy has the virtue of candor and the vigor of fervent emotion. A movie such as “Top Gun: Maverick” hides its messages under the guise of unexceptionable realities, whereas another new, high-energy, political action spectacle, the Indian film “RRR” (which was released theatrically in March and is now streaming on Netflix, where it’s in the top five), makes its statements explicit. It thrusts its imaginative artistry thrillingly and gleefully to the fore.

Here's the official trailer in Hindi.

And here's a great bollywood style dance-off. Be aware that there's quite a bit of gore and violence in RRR, but it goes along with the story line.