HinesSight

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there.


I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions.

I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity.

Last Friday's Real Time show was a good example of this.

His guests were Bari Weiss and Tim Ryan. I guess you could call them centrists. Ryan, a Democrat, ran for Ohio Senator against JD Vance in the 2022 midterm election. Weiss was recruited by Elon Musk to make a big ado about not much in the recent Twitter Files saga.

A central theme of Friday's show was how the American people are fed up with the woke positions of Democrats. (This has been a theme of previous shows also.) 

So there was a lot of tut-tutting about how in many parts of Ohio, and rural areas generally, having a "D" after your name can be a death knell for your election chances. OK, an obvious point, but fair enough. But I keep waiting for Maher, Ryan, or Weiss to bring up an equally valid point.

In virtually every large big city in the United States, having a "R" after your name pretty much dooms your election chances.

So why doesn't Maher spend as much time asking what Republicans need to do to win back urban voters as he does asking what Democrats need to do to win back rural voters? I also couldn't understand why Maher and his guests didn't bring up the 2022 midterm results.

There sure wasn't much of a sign that voters were fed up with Democrats because of their excessive wokeness. The Dems picked up a seat in the Senate, maintaining control of that chamber. And the Dem losses in House races was hugely below expectations. They took control of some Governorships and state legislatures.

Rather than House Republicans having a 30-40 seat majority as many pundits predicted, the GOP just has a narrow four seat majority.

Thus it seems clear that the Democratic Party is alive and well in the United States, contrary to all the doom and gloom about Dem popularity expressed by Maher and his guests.

Another thing that irritates me whenever Maher brings it up is the notion that all across the country, young children are being indoctrinated by teachers in the supposed Liberal Commandment of gender fluidity.

Maher keeps claiming that rather than teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and other core competencies, liberal elementary school teachers are spending much of their classroom time talking about how wonderful it is that some children have two mommy's or two daddy's.

Bill Maher loves to cite individual anecdotes as if this proves anything. Actually, it doesn't. If Maher presented solid data on how frequently teachers of young children are bringing up gender issues, and used an anecdote to back up those data, that'd be fine.

Instead, Maher likes to talk about a single anecdote that he or his staff dredged up, then uses that anecdote to draw broad-brush conclusions about how wokeness is destroying our educational system. 

That's a lousy way to make an argument. Maher should know better, but he appears to have entered a largely fact-free zone on his show. 

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

When Maher and his guests talked about the horrible food in the school meal program, they didn't mention that during the Trump years, it was Republicans who stood in the way of making school breakfasts and lunches more nutritious. 

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Arcimoto seems to be going out of business

I've been a long-time fan of Arcimoto, a company based in Eugene, fifty miles south of Salem, where I live.

Arcimoto makes the FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle), a three-wheeled semi-enclosed electric sort-of-motorcycle. In Oregon you don't have to wear a helmet while driving it, so it's a unique blend of a car and motorcycle.

I've been following the fortunes of Arcimoto for a long time. Heck, this blog even has an "Arcimoto" category with ten posts in it, including this one. As I said in my first post back in July 2018, I've got both Arcimoto anticipation and anxiety:

I've been following the saga of Arcimoto, a three-wheeled electric FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle) for a long time. So long, I can't remember when I plunked down $100 for a pre-order reservation. 

I must have been among the first to do this, since my reservation number is #129, and I believe they total more than 2,700 now.

Over the years I've come close to ordering a FUV, but I never did. Something always bothered me about Arcimoto. 

Lack of usable real-world driving range, since I live six miles from Salem in a rural area with some large hills between me and town, and the FUV range is 102 miles in the city and considerably less in non-city driving. Lack of local servicing. Lack of long-term reviews. Lack of free delivery (last I knew, I'd have to pay $1,000 to get a FUV delivered). And crucially, lack of evidence that Arcimoto was a viable company.

I wanted to see some solid evidence that Arcimoto was going to survive before plunking down around $20,000 for a FUV, a large increase from the $12,000 that the FUV originally was supposed to sell for. I had no interest in being one of the people who bought a FUV just before Arcimoto went out of business.

Which looks like it could happen fairly soon. 

On January 17, Arcimoto announced a $12 million public offering at $3 a share. Not surprisingly, since Arcimoto stock was trading around $6 at the time, the price of Arcimoto sank like a stone to well below $3. 

Now, maybe the $12 million will buy Arcimoto time to figure out how to make the company survive. But the offering prospectus said that production has halted at the newly constructed Eugene manufacturing facility, and lots of employees have been laid off. An Oregonian story tells the sorry tale.

Shares in electric vehicle manufacturer Arcimoto plunged Wednesday after the company announced it has shut down production at its Eugene factory because it is nearly out of money.

Arcimoto moved to sell $12 million in additional shares at $3 each – less than half of Tuesday’s closing price. The stock plunged nearly 60% in morning trading, to $2.51.

“We have halted our production of vehicles and will require substantial additional funding to resume production,” Arcimoto warned in a regulatory filing accompanying the stock offering. The company warned that financing may not be available on any terms, and if not, “we will be required to cease our operations and/or seek bankruptcy protection.”

Arcimoto makes a three-wheel electric motorcycle it calls the Fun Utility Vehicle, or FUV. It was briefly among Oregon’s most highly publicized young companies, with a market value that peaked above $1 billion in 2021. The company is now worth less than $7 million.

Arcimoto struggled against supply chain issues as its new factory opened last year, and it’s never been clear that its FUVs have mass-market appeal.

Arcimoto laid off 50 and furloughed another 66 employees last fall to cut costs. But that hasn’t been enough. Subsequent financial filings revealed the company’s bank account has frequently been close to empty and it’s had to sell additional shares to stay afloat, diluting existing investors’ stake. Arcimoto had 250 employees at the end of 2021, the last period for which it has reported workforce figures.

Among the tumult, the company abruptly replaced founder and CEO Mark Frohnmayer last year after his arrest for driving one of Arcimoto’s vehicles while intoxicated.

The company produced just 252 over the most recent six months for which Arcimoto reported results and delivered just 115 to customers.

For the third quarter, which ended in September, Arcimoto reported $2 million in revenue. The company lost $17 million during the period.

Arcimoto said in October it was seeking “strategic alternatives,” employing a euphemism companies use when they put their business up for sale. But no buyer has emerged for the rapidly dwindling business.

So $12 million isn't going to last very long when the company has been losing $17 million a quarter. I still like the looks of the FUV. If someone gave me one, I'd happily drive it around. But there's no way I'd buy a FUV when Arcimoto is on such a shaky financial footing.

I'm just glad that I wasn't one of the people who bought Arcimoto stock when the shares were flying high. Now they've come back to earth with a resounding thud. This is the one year price history.

Our dog's hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child.

So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing.

But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease. 

What shocked my wife, who has owned several purebred German Shepherds, a breed prone to hip dysplasia, is that a mixed breed dog who is only about five years old (she was adopted from a shelter, so we're not sure exactly how old Mooka is) would have hip dysplasia at such a relatively young age.

And not only that. Mooka also may have herniated discs in her spine, because she got a IVDD diagnosis too. That's Intervertebral Disc Disease. 

There's treatments for Mooka's problems. So we're hoping she still has quite a few years of happy running around in her future. At the moment we're just dealing with the unpleasant news that arrived this evening. 

Mooka is still the same dog she was before we got the report from our vet.

It's my wife and I who are changed, because we love Mooka and had been visualizing her being healthy for much longer, since mixed breeds/mutts tend to have fewer health problems than purebred dogs. But life is full of surprises, often unwelcome ones.

Apple Support hindered and helped my iPhone 14 setups

This tale of my three phone calls to Apple Support a few days ago has a happy ending. My wife and I are enjoying the iPhone 14 Pro Max devices that we decided to get after using iPhone 8's since 2017.

So we were six freaking iPhone generations old, something that hasn't come close to happening since we joined the iPhone cult way back when. (Too long ago for me to remember.)

When the new phones arrived in the mail after ordering them from Verizon, our cellular carrier, I waited a day before taking the plunge into setting them up. That had gone well the last time we got fresh phones, but like I said, this was over five years ago.

I decided to set up my iPhone 14 first. 

It didn't take long for a problem to pop up. All I'd done was choose English for my language and United States for my location. Then a message appeared that said, I'm pretty sure, "It may take a few minutes to activate your iPhone."

OK. No big deal. Except after fifteen minutes I began to get worried. After 45 minutes I was really worried and Googled the message. Various pieces of advice popped up, such as this one. 

I was reluctant to restart the iPhone 14, though, in part because while I thought the message meant that the phone was activating my Verizon account, I wasn't absolutely sure about this. Out of an abundance of caution I decided to phone Apple Support.

Having had Apple products since the Apple II+ computer debuted in the 1980s, I've had many encounters with Apple Support, almost always really positive. My wife and I buy AppleCare with every device we get -- computers, iPhones, iPads, AirPods -- because the technical support people solve our problems so easily.

That made what happened when I phoned Apple Support both surprising and disturbing. After I explained that my new iPhone 14 was stuck on the activation screen, the woman I was talking to asked how many apps I had.

"A lot," I told her, adding that I'd deleted quite a few apps before starting the Quick Start process of transferring data and settings from my old phone to the new one. "Well," she said, "that can take a few hours."

Not a great answer, but I assumed that she knew what she was talking about. So I went back to waiting and periodically staring at the message on the phone that activation could take several minutes. After several hours, and some additional Googling, I was convinced that more help was needed.

Calling Apple Support again, this time I got a woman who told me I should restart the iPhone 14. Since the iPhone came with zero instructions, I asked her how to do this. She told me to hold down the top left button while pressing the button on the right side.

That, of course, is not how iPhones restart, ever since the iPhone 10. Actually you hold down either volume button on the right side while pressing the right side button. In fact, the top left "button" isn't a button at all, but a little switch that silences the phone.

When I told the woman that the phone wouldn't restart, she put me on hold to research what every Apple Support person should know: how to restart an iPhone. That gave me time to do my own Googling, so by the time she returned with the correct approach I'd already restarted the phone.

Now it truly did take just a few minutes to activate my iPhone 14, and the rest of the setup process went smoothly.

That evening I decided to setup my wife's iPhone 14.

The activation went fine, but after apps had been transferred to the new phone, after a while I realized that none of them were downloading. That perplexed me, until I noticed that there was no wi-fi symbol at the top of the screen, just one bar showing our crappy Verizon signal strength, since we live in a rural area with no line of sight to a cell tower.

I restarted my wife's phone. I turned wi-fi off and on. Nothing worked to get our Starlink satellite broadband recognized by the iPhone 14. It showed up in Settings, but a spinning ball showed that even though the password was correct, the phone wasn't connecting to Starlink.

This time when I phoned Apple Support, perhaps because it was around 9 pm, I got a woman with an Indian accent, which I viewed as a positive omen. 

At first she had me do what I'd already done: restart the phone and turn wi-fi off and on. Then she asked if it would be OK to do the Screen Share thing. Sure, I said. Soon a red arrow appeared on the iPhone 14, but she said that she was unable to view the screen.

That caused her to ask if I could use the camera on my wife's iPhone 8 to show the screen on the iPhone 14. That took some doing, since I had to hold the old phone in one hand while doing things on the new iPhone with my other hand.

At one point I turned the front facing camera on, which briefly showed my face/head, causing the woman to say emphatically, "No, just show the screen on the new iPhone!" I got the impression that in Apple Support it is a no-no for a Screen Share to show the person asking for help, which makes sense, given the potential for weird customer behavior.

Anyway, she also needed to put me on hold and apparently seek help from a higher power in Apple Support. When she came back on the line, she told me to do something that I've forgotten, but am pretty sure was to reset the network settings. 

That got the Starlink wi-fi working. I was thrilled. I said, "Thanks so much for solving the problem. Well, thanks to you and whoever you talked with. And for Apple Support in general." So after a bad experience with Apple Support, I had a good experience. 

And our phones are a joy to use.

Another reason to hate what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter

It wasn't so long ago that I looked upon Elon Musk with admiration. Maybe even with a bit of adoration.

After all, his Space X Starlink satellite internet system had rescued me and my wife from the hell of 7Mbps CenturyLink DSL, bringing our rural south Salem home into broadband heaven. 

And I visualized owning one of his Tesla cars someday. Though they have their downsides (don't like relying so much on a touchscreen rather than normal controls), Tesla jumpstarted the electric car revolution that's bringing the internal combustion engine closer to a well-deserved global goodbye.

When he bought Twitter, I figured he wouldn't screw it up too much. After all, Space X and Tesla are successful companies, offering innovative products and services. 

But from what I've read, the difference between them and Twitter is that competent managers stood between Musk and goings-on at Space X and Tesla -- whereas so far Musk has been very hands-on with Twitter, making a string of questionable decisions that harm both Twitter and users of Twitter.

Like, me. I love Twitter. But I hate what Musk is doing to Twitter, the latest outrage occurring yesterday.

That's when third-party Twitter apps stopped working, including Tweetbot, which I've been using because it is hugely better than the official Twitter app and web site. Here's the disturbing message that now appears on Tweetbot when I try to use it on my iPhone to access my Twitter feed.

This is so typical of Elon Musk's crappy mismanagement approach. Tweetbot and the other third-party Twitter apps have been widely popular. They enable more people to use Twitter. Users of the apps generate content for Twitter.

If Musk knew what he was doing, he would have scheduled an online Zoom meeting with the people who head up the third-party Twitter apps, most or all of whom are running small businesses with just a handful of employees.

I'm sure they'd be willing to listen to whatever concerns Musk has with the third-party apps, including the fact that they don't share ads that appear on Twitter. I'd be willing to pay more for my monthly Tweetbot subscription if Musk demanded that some money go to Twitter to compensate for the lack of ads.

But no, it looks like Musk decided to just shut down the apps without notice, and so far without explanation.

Some of them are still working, including the Apple version of Fenix, which I'm using at the  moment because I found the "native" Twitter app to be so horrendous, I'd rather stop using Twitter if that was my only option.

I have company. 

I agree about the official Twitter app being a terrible experience. I gave it a try yesterday before I discovered Fenix. 

Lots of ads. Many tweets from people I don't follow and aren't interested in following. Really confusing layout. No way I could see to tell which tweets were new and which I'd already read. All in all, a vastly less enjoyable experience than what Tweetbot and the other third-party apps offer.

After forcing myself to use the official Twitter app for a while, I got fed up and felt that if this is the only way I could use Twitter, I'd give up on Twitter. Hard to see how that benefits Twitter, but maybe Elon Musk doesn't care if he turns many off from the company he bought.

Hopefully, though, Musk will realize that making it impossible for third-party apps to access user accounts, he's harming himself and Twitter. But I'm not counting on this.

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did.

Here they are.

Slow Horses - Apple TV+
This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in a dingy backwater building. 

Gary Oldman is terrific as the cynical leader of the group. He casts off humorous insults to his team in a marvelous fashion, though deep down (very deep down), his character loves them. Or at least likes them. Season 2 was better than Season 1, which was very good itself.

The Recruit - Netflix
Another fresh look at the world of spying, this time from the American side of the Atlantic. We follow the ups and downs of a young 20-something lawyer newly hired by the CIA. He quickly learns that in an organization dedicated to scheming, the people he works with can't be trusted because they're schemers.

Just as he is. Like Slow Horses, The Recruit is a pleasing blend of action, humor, and personal relationships. I don't know if it's a realistic reflection of what it's like to work at the CIA, but it rings true to me. I look forward to a Season 2, though I found the final episode of Season 1 to be unsatisfying.

Fleishman is in Trouble - Hulu
A doctor with marriage problems who lives in New York City. Seems like a familiar premise for a show. That's why my expectations for it weren't very high. But Fleishman is in Trouble was enjoyable viewing. Mostly.

I found the darker episodes of the series to be kind of difficult to watch, since they were such a contrast with the lighter, humorous episodes. Clair Danes plays Dr. Toby Fleishman's wife. I'm a big fan of Danes, having loved her in Homeland. Here she's another mentally disturbed character who's fascinating to watch as she emotes her struggles.

What I liked the most about this show was how skillfully it portrayed all the characters as both flawed and virtuous. Just when I thought I knew who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were, I was surprised to learn that the good were also bad, and the bad were also good.

Social media reform is needed, but the market mainly should decide

Today NBC's Meet the Press devoted its Sunday morning hour entirely to a discussion of social media: what's wrong with the way things are now on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and such, along with what needs to be done to fix those problems.

It's a complicated subject with no easy answers. Here's what stuck in my mind after watching the program.

Algorithms. Social media sites typically use computer algorithms to determine what gets shown to users. (Twitter is an exception, at least if a third party app is used to access Twitter, which I do. I only see tweets from the people and organizations I follow, and I see all of their tweets, in chronological order.)

This encourages anger and divisiveness, since negativity generally draws more views than positivity, cute animal videos notwithstanding. Several Meet the Press guests called for more transparency in how the algorithms work. But it's unclear what this means.

A Republican congressman, who made good sense, argued that government regulation of the algorithms could cause more problems that it solves. Who decides what is divisive or misinformation? Even hate speech, while easy to decry, is difficult to pin down. Stand-up comedians often make jokes about "sacred cows" in our culture. Are those jokes hate speech or free speech?

Maybe I have a libertarian side when it comes to social media, but I'm wary of regulations that tell social media companies what content to prioritize to their users. So what's the alternative?

Market forces. I agree with several people on this special Meet the Press program who said that if social media companies don't operate in a fashion that users like, many of those users will head elsewhere. To some extent this has happened with Twitter after Elon Musk took over and mostly dismantled company efforts aimed at curbing extreme hate speech and harmful disinformation.

The woman who was a Facebook whistleblower in 2021, I think it was, tried to make an analogy between government requiring seat belts and other safety equipment in cars and regulation of social media companies. 

However, it's a bit of a stretch to do this.

Cars are an essential part of life for most people. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter aren't. Sure, they're addictive, useful, fun, and entertaining. But social media doesn't kill tens of thousands of people a year. And many social media users enjoy them just the way they are.

If someone finds Facebook, or whatever, distasteful, they can stop using it. When enough people do this, the social media company will realize that the market has spoken and changes need to be made.

Section 230. This is the part of the Communications Decency Act that prevents social media providers from being responsible for content put up by users. Here's how the Electronic Frontier Foundation describes Section 230.

Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.

The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish.

Most of the Meet the Press panel members seemed to think that keeping Section 230 is a good idea. I agree. It would be a nightmare if social media companies were legally responsible for all of the content uploaded by its users. This likely would lead to increased censorship of that content, since social media companies would want to be sure that they couldn't be sued by someone upset with user-generated content.

A better approach, someone said, is what happened with Alex Jones. He was successfully sued by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre after Jones repeatedly and loudly claimed the children weren't really dead. And Fox News is being sued by Dominion voting machines after hosts on the network said that the machines produced fraudulent election results. 

So in egregious cases the legal system can be used to punish libel. There's no need to make social media companies watchdogs over everything users upload on their platforms. 

Section 230 is meaningful to me because I'm an extremely small social media platform, having three blogs, two of which date back to 2003 and 2004. I've always allowed comments on my blogs. I go back and forth on moderating comments. Mostly I haven't moderated them, though occasionally I'll delete a comment that doesn't fit with my comment policies.

Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about blogs and Section 230.

CDA 230 also offers its legal shield to bloggers who act as intermediaries by hosting comments on their blogs. Under the law, bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers, the work of guest bloggers, tips sent via email, or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.

Thus I'm very much against Congress messing around with Section 230, unless the changes were minor and didn't alter its free speech provisions. 

Oregon pulls out a nail-biter over North Carolina in Holiday Bowl

After Oregon lost to Oregon State in the last game of the regular season, dooming Oregon's chance to play USC for the Pac-12 championship and potentially earn a Rose Bowl berth, going to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego struck me as a crappy consolation prize.

And for most of today's game against North Carolina in the Holiday Bowl, that assessment seemed right-on. I was totally prepared for Oregon to lose, end up 9-4 on the season, and look forward to better times next year, since this season would have ended in a disappointing fashion.

Then the fourth quarter happened. Bo Nix, Oregon's quarterback, played great, even though he didn't appear to be 100% after suffering a leg injury near the end of the regular season. Oregon scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, knotting the score at 27-27 with less than 30 seconds remaining.

The extra point seemed anticlimactic. But Camden Lewis pulled his kick to the left, hitting the upright with an audible "clunk," momentarily causing gasps from Oregon fans like me. Which turned to sighs of relief when the ball bounced off the upright and through the goal posts.

Whew: 28-27 Oregon. Drake Maye, the talented North Carolina quarterback, still had 19 seconds left to pull out a win. Thankfully, his pass into the end zone with one second left was knocked down by Oregon players.

It turned out that the Holiday Bowl was highly entertaining. That would have been the case no matter which team won. I'm just glad that it was Oregon. And that Bo Nix has decided to return for another year of being the Oregon quarterback. 

I'm now quite confident that diet affects how easily I can insert a urinary catheter

A bit over six months ago I theorized in a blog post, "Diet could play a role when having a problem inserting a urinary catheter." 

I asked my urologist if he thought diet could play a role in the difficulty I sometimes have inserting a catheter. His answer: "Maybe." Not very helpful, as that left it to me to figure out my own answer. 

After a lot of experimenting with different foods (I'm a health-minded 73 year old vegetarian), I'm pretty confident that yes, at least for me, diet does affect how easy it is for me to insert a catheter into my bladder.

I seem to have found that "gassy" foods are bad for my catheterizing. I'm not sure of this, but it makes some sense, since the prostate and colon are close together, and in men a catheter has to pass through the prostate on the way to the bladder. Thus a distended intestine could affect the passage of a catheter.

Now I'm even more confident that this is the case.

I'm not saying that my experience is common, since as I noted in that first post, some Googling revealed that basically the only foods people using intermittent self-catheterization are told to be cautious about is caffeine/coffee and alcoholic beverages, since these are bladder irritants.

In August of this year I learned that my 50 year-old daughter has been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. That got me to thinking that maybe my digestion issues could be described with that rather catch-all term.

My daughter was having stomach pain, though, while my primary problem was diarrhea in the mid to late afternoon. That indicated to me that certain foods probably were causing the loose bowel movements, since it didn't happen all the time.

So I started to study the FODMAP diet, downloading the FODMAP app for my iPhone developed by Monash University. I cut quite a few foods out of my diet: soy milk, apples, applesauce, oats, tomatoes, broccoli, pizza, soft cheese -- basically everything that the FODMAP app said could be bothersome.

I've been sticking with this FODMAP diet for several months. It could be a coincidence, but I've been having fewer problems with inserting a catheter five times a day now. It feels to me that as my digestive tract has calmed down, so has the difficulty I used to have getting a urinary catheter into my bladder.

Obviously I'm not conducting a scientific experiment. This is just my personal experience. I wanted to share it in the hope that perhaps some other catheter user would find that experience helpful, or at least interesting, to them.

After Oregon's great ice storm of 2021, I'm glad the 2022 version was milder

If I didn't know what post-traumatic stress felt like before, I sure do now. Because as soon as I heard that a significant freezing rain event was headed our way, I couldn't get thoughts and feelings of the Great Ice Storm of February 2021 out of my mind.

Along with hundreds of thousands of other Oregonians, our home got about 5/8 of an inch of ice in that horrendous weather disaster. We lost lots of trees, including two big branches from an ancient white oak.

And our electricity was out for 12 days. Not fun, obviously. 

It's difficult to forecast freezing rain, since it requires a special atmospheric setup: a layer of warm air that melts frozen precipitation, which then freezes when it hits cold surfaces. I'd seen estimates that the Salem area, where we live, could get as much as four-tenths of an inch of ice from freezing rain.

Not as much as in 2021, but enough to cause problems with falling limbs/trees and power outages. So foe days I doom scrolled my iPhone's weather apps, along with perusing the National Weather Service web site for our location and the weather news on Portland TV stations.

In the end, we only got a few tenths of an inch of ice. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot. Believe me, it is. Our driveway in rural south Salem became a solid sheet of ice, impossible to walk or drive on, even with my Subaru Crosstrek and its winter tires.

That dark dot in the driveway is a stuffed wolf. More about that in a bit. Above is a photo of the upper part of our driveway, where I'd parked the Subaru close to Lake Drive. This is what just a little bit of freezing rain can produce: virtually impassible roads.

Also, very difficult to walk on walkways, like the one leading to our front door. Take one step on the walkway without temporary cleats on shoes and you'll be on your butt. I know, because that almost happened to me this morning.

Freezing rain isn't nearly as attractive as snow. It gave our yard a sort of snow-like feel, but it's easy to walk on snow. You can play in it. You can throw it. With freezing rain, you struggle to deal with it. It's the nastiest form of winter precipitation.

Still, since our electricity didn't go off -- my biggest worry with this 2022 ice storm -- I was in a pretty buoyant mood this afternoon. So I did engage with the ice on our driveway in a playful fashion. 

My scientific quest was to determine what would slide furthest: a shoe, a banana, or a stuffed wolf? After the experiment, I then attempted to rescue the wolf from the middle of the driveway, which didn't go so well, as shown in the video. Nonetheless, I await my senior citizen scientist award.

The video shows the lighter side of white ice. Black ice is scarier, being clear, so a roadway can look fine when it really isn't. I wrote about this in "Black ice story in New Yorker brings back some slippery memories."

I'm hoping that a story in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, "Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91," will make people more aware of the dangers of black ice, and also reassure people like me who live in areas that don't get a lot of snow, but do regularly get black ice, that we aren't winter weenies.