HinesSight

Minimalist shoes get thumbs up from Nassim Taleb... and me

I'm slowly making my way through Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book (he's the author of The Black Swan, which has nothing to do with kinky ballet). 

Taleb's highly opinionated quasi-libertarian in-your-face writing style can be irritating at times, but in general I agree with most of his core theses, including: natural is more robust than artificial; stress is desirable when it strengthens us; things that last do so for good reasons.

A few days ago I came across Taleb's attitude toward shoes, which almost exactly mirrors mine. I've become a big fan of lightweight, barely-there shoes and sandals. 

In this post from late 2011 I shared a photo of my favorite shoes at that time, Teva's Zilch and Nilch, saying:

Most people like to be insulated from reality. After all, it hurts sometimes. So everybody puts on physical and mental coverings of one sort or another. Clothes, shoes, gloves, beliefs, hopes, imaginings. I used to do this much more than I do now.

...Currently these are my favorite shoes, Teva's Zilch and Nilch. I Zilch in warm weather; I Nilch in cold weather (with wool blend socks). They're wonderfully light: 7 and 7.5 ounces per shoe, respectively. By comparison, a pair of Columbia shoes I'd been wearing weigh 14 ounces per shoe.

So I've reduced by half the weight of what I carry around on my feet most days. 

...Along with lightness, I love how these shoes connect me with the earth in ways firmer, bigger, bulkier shoes can't. Walking across some rocks, like those in the photo, I really feel them through the soles.

So naturally I thought right on when I read Taleb's take on minimalist shoes. 

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. 

...Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology.

Recall my walk to the restaurant wearing shoes not too dissimilar to those worn by the ancient, preclassical person found in the Alps. The shoe industry, after spending decades “engineering” the perfect walking and running shoe, with all manner of “support” mechanisms and material for cushioning, is now selling us shoes that replicate being barefoot — they want to be so unobtrusive that their only claimed function is to protect our feet from the elements, not to dictate how we walk as the more modernistic mission was.

In a way they are selling us the calloused feet of a hunter-gatherer that we can put on, use, and then remove upon returning to civilization. It is quite exhilarating to wear these shoes when walking in nature as one wakes up to a new dimension while feeling the three dimensions of the terrain.

Regular shoes feel like casts that separate us from the environment. And they don’t have to be inelegant: the technology is in the sole, not the shoe, as the new soles can be both robust and very thin, thus allowing the foot to hug the ground as if one were barefoot — my best discovery is an Italian-looking moccasin made in Brazil that allows me to both run on stones and go to dinner in restaurants.

Then again, perhaps they should just sell us reinforced waterproof socks (in effect, what the Alpine fellow had), but it would not be very profitable for these firms.

Well, I have bought some waterproof socks, SealSkinz, feeling that these would allow me to wear sandals all year long here in often rainy-and-cold Oregon. However, I haven't used them much.

Mostly because my current minimalist shoe passion is the Teva Mush Frio Lace Canvas.

I have five pairs in different colors, including a nearly waterproof variant. The Must Frio is very lightweight, flexible, and comfortable. Amazingly, the Mush Frio weights only 6.5 ounces, less than the Zilch sandal shown at the beginning of this post.

I wear them year-round. They're stylish enough to wear in a nice restaurant (hey, I'm in Oregon) yet causal enough to look cool anywhere.

Most importantly, they feel natural to me. I hardly ever wear any other shoes, because I can't stand the heaviness and isolation from the surface I'm walking on. I used to put on rubber garden shoes to walk up our driveway and get the newspapers in the morning.

Now, I slip on my Teva Mush's, black, blue, and yellow version, as shown above. Big difference. The rubber shoes felt clunky, heavy, and artificial. The Mush's, flexible, light, and as natural as humanmade shoes can be.

With medium weight quarter-length wool socks, I've been totally comfortable wearing my minimalist shoes in sub-freezing weather. Seeing how many people wear shoes that strike me as hugely excessive -- heavy, clunky, uncomfortable -- I wish they would consider going a more natural footwear route.

It's made my walking around life a lot more pleasant. Go minimalist. I bet you'll like it.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild," a paean to soulful strangeness

I loved the movie, "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Yesterday I tried to explain on my other blog what the film meant to me. 

Don't feel like I succeeded. This try likely won't be much more successful. After all, what I love about "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is its -- no big surprise -- beastliness and wildness.

Guess I could roar. Or jump up on a table and scream "I'm the man! I'm the man!" like the marvelous Hushpuppy does in the movie. Or trample down buildings like the aurochs do.

Or... I can type away and try to say what I feel in words that are pale shadows of how the movie moved me. OK, I'll do that.

Watching the movie, I became aware of how judgmental I've been about rural southern rednecks, including the black equivalent, who obviously don't have red necks, nor the same political philosophy. 

My wife and I are card-carrying Chevy Volt-driving, Starbucks Pike Place-ordering, obsessively-recycling, vegetarian-eating, healthful habits-following Oregonians. I wasn't born in a bayou. I was born in freaking Massachusetts, and still feel the psychic influence of my comparatively prim and proper New England heritage.

Compared, that is, to the world of coastal Louisiana shown in "Beasts of the Southern Wild" -- which must be fairly close to reality, because I couldn't help but feel this is so real throughout the movie.

What those strange soulful denizens of a land perched between sea and land, between chaos and stability, between drunkenness and sobriety, have is what I want. Well, let's say that I want to really want what they have, since right now I talk strange soulfulness more than I practice it.

I was inspired by the movie. I was moved by the movie. I was attracted by the movie. 

My alcoholic consumption is pretty much limited to one glass of red wine per night, consumed not for purposes of intoxication, but for heart-healthiness. Yet I loved watching the human beasts of the southern wild clutch beers and other instruments of alcohol ingestion almost as often as not. I loved how they yelled, and screamed, and danced, and broke rules of all kinds -- safety, child protective, medical, environmental, whatever. 

Understand: I still love my green, organized, methodical, practical, reasonable lifestyle. But I must have a longing for more beastly wildness, or I wouldn't have loved watching "Beasts of the Southern Wild" so much.

Echoing Freud, I usually feel like I'm not really discontented with civilization. Until I'm exposed to another view of what "civilized" means, like what is shown in this movie. Wikipedia's summary of Freud's book does ring true.

In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual.

The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community.

As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such rules are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.

l don't long for lawlessness. Just more strange soulfulness. Not dancing naked under Oregon's fir trees on a cold wintry night while coyotes and wolves surround me with howls. But the everyday clothed wild-animal-free equivalent.

Lots of wonderfully human emotions were on exhibit in "Beasts of the Southern Wild." One wasn't: fear. Nor its cousins: anxiety, worry, tentativeness. (Well, maybe a tiny bit, but barely.)

I loved how people in The Bathtub really lived their lives in the movie. No one was just going through the motions, playing a role, doing what was expected of them, drawing completely within civilization's lines.

They screamed when they were excited, cried when they were sad, threw stuff when they were angry, fired shotguns at a hurricane when they wanted the storm to stop. Reasonable people could reasonably argue that a lot of dysfunction was on display in "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

Can't argue with that assessment. I just don't feel like being a reasonable person arguing reasonably. I loved the beastly wildness of the movie, and the people in it. If that's dysfunction, let's have more of it. 

(Tomorrow I might read this and want to add... "within reason." But I hope I don't.)

Oregon HOA's lose out on liens after foreclosure (probably)

I'm the secretary of our planned community's homeowners association (HOA). Our HOA has had to file liens on property owners who fail to pay their dues two years in a row.

The dues are only $185 a year. Payment plans are allowed. Volunteers do a lot of the work needed to maintain the common property (we also hire a contractor for mowing, spraying, bark mulching, and such). When dues aren't paid by some of our 90 property owners, the other owners have to make up the lost money.

Being the secretary, I have the not-so-fun duty of filing the liens with Marion County. I don't like doing this, especially if the person/people behind in their dues are having a tough time financially.

But I know that our HOA needs to be sure that even if dues aren't paid while someone is living here, when they sell their property the lien will have to be honored. Meaning, the HOA will finally get the unpaid dues.

I was wrong about being sure. Well, probably I was wrong.

We're still trying to figure out the legal ins and outs of what happens to a HOA lien in Oregon when a property goes into foreclosure. Currently it sure looks like HOA's get screwed (a non-legal but apt term) if a bank forecloses on a property that has a lien for unpaid dues on it.

I discovered this late last year after I got a phone call from a title company that would go nameless if I didn't call it AmeriTitle. A woman wanted to know what the annual HOA dues were, saying that the property was up for sale after being foreclosed on by a bank that also would go nameless if I didn't call it Wells Fargo.

I told her, adding "Of course, there is a lien on the property for unpaid dues, which I assume will be paid." That simple comment led to a series of complex back-and-forth exchanges between me, our HOA treasurer, AmeriTitle, and Wells Fargo.

In the end, we got stiffed (another non-legal but apt term). After several fruitless attempts to learn what the legal basis was for not honoring the HOA lien, I got a response from Amerititle that said:

Per Oregon Statute 94.709 ‘Whenever a homeowners association levies any assessment against a lot, the association shall have a lien upon the individual lot for any unpaid assessments…The lien is prior to a homestead exemption and all other liens or encumbrances upon the lot except:…(b) A first mortgage or trust deed of record.’ 

Per Oregon Statute 94.723 Common expenses; liability of first mortgagee, once a lot in a planned community is foreclosed upon the ‘mortgagee and subsequent purchaser shall not be liable for any of the common expenses chargeable to the lot which became due before the mortgagee or purchaser acquired title to the lot.  The unpaid expenses shall become a common expense of all lot owners including the mortgagee or purchaser.’. 

Per Oregon Statute 94.712 ‘An owner shall be personally liable for all assessments imposed on the owner or assessed against the owner’s lot by the homeowners association.’  Accordingly, the servicer on this property, Wells Fargo, paid the past due amounts owing against the lot according to the state statute, which is from the foreclosure sales date forward.  

So we got paid for the few months of unpaid dues that accrued between the time Wells Fargo foreclosed on the property. But not for the several years of unpaid dues prior to that date. Seems unfair to me. 

Our HOA lost out on about $300. However, another foreclosed property in our development owes considerably more. Those dues go to pay for maintenance of the common property, an asset of our community which increases considerably the value of homes and bare lots.

Sixteen states reportedly give HOA liens a "superlien" status, treating them as akin to property taxes: a bill that has to be paid by whoever forecloses on a property. I agree with this:

"The argument that HOAs should be senior to everything is like property taxes — they are part of preserving the collective value of the neighborhood," says Goodman, who represents servicers, HOAs and investors in distressed properties.

Confusing the issue, my Googling revealed quite a few references to Oregon being a superlien state. However, when I checked out the Oregon Statutes cited in the AmeriTitle letter (ORS 94.709, 94.723, 94.712), it sure seems like HOA liens get wiped out in a foreclosure.

Again, unfairly.

Wells Fargo is making plenty of money, along with other banks -- $4.9 billion in the third quarter of 2012. Billion. But they refused to pay our HOA $300 for dues that went toward increasing the value of the home and lot they foreclosed on, and recently sold. 

Our HOA board of directors will have to decide what to do in the future, if it turns out that our liens for unpaid dues indeed are wiped out in a foreclosure. We could go after the previous owner who failed to pay the dues. 

Collection Agency? Small Claims Court? Maybe.Since they refused to pay their dues while they lived here, almost surely a polite letter asking for the money is going to have even less effect after they've moved on following the foreclosure. 

It's a tough situation.

I can (sort of) understand why a bank or other mortage holder doesn't feel like they're responsible for dues incurred by the owner of the property being foreclosed on. However, the bank is reaping the benefits of our HOA's maintenance work on the common assets of our development. 

Oregon law may be on the banks' side. Right and wrong, though, often is different from lawful and unlawful. 

If anyone reading this knows more about the subject of HOA liens and foreclosures than I do, a highly distinct possibility, please leave a comment and enlighten me. Or email me (link in the sidebar). 

Oregonian wastes paper on global warming denier Gordon Fulks

Oregon's largest newspaper, the Oregonian, is not-so-slowly sinking into irrelevancy. That's my considered opinion, at least.

As noted in a recent post about a global warming story that downplayed scientific fact and played up a local meteorologist's unscientific denial of climate change, I've noted a distinct right-wing tilting in both the news and editorial sections during the past few years.

After reading an absurd January 19 op-ed by Gordon Fulks, "The Changing Climate of Climate Change," that was prominently displayed by Oregonian editors, I'm even more convinced that the newspaper has joined the Republican war on science.

It pains me to copy and paste even one word of Fulks' bullshit, but I'll force myself.

The evidence causing great grief is the refusal of the global temperature to increase for the past 15 years. It sloshes back and forth as one would expect on a planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in equilibrium, but does not warm as some claimed it would with slowly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Consequently, cracks are developing in the scientific facade supporting the dogma.

Reading the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is much like reading Pravda during the Cold War: You do not look for beliefs, but for hints of change. In a recent paper (not peer-reviewed), newly elected members touted their belief that they had found the "fingerprint" of greenhouse gases. 

Likely the Oregonian will start publishing op-ed screeds denying evolution and the big bang.

Why not?

Basically there's as much scientific evidence supporting human-caused global warming as there is for how life came to be as it on our planet, and how the universe came into being. Anyone who peruses the Climate Progress posts would know this.

For example: 

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) has finally published its findings on the cause of recent global warming. This Koch-funded reanalysis of millions of temperature observations from around the world, “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011,” concludes:

… solar forcing does not appear to contribute to the observed global warming of the past 250 years; the entire change can be modeled by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic [human-made] proxy.

...Muller further explained:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

The black line, with 95% confidence intervals on either side, shows the observed global temperature (more accurately measured since the early 1800s). The red line comes from a mathematical climate change model using only volcanic activity and human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.

Bingo. The two lines coincide closely, showing that Gordon Fulks is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

So the Oregonian wasted a lot of paper and ink on an op-ed that contained not even a scrap of valid opinionating, because Fulks denies a core fact: the Earth is rapidly warming, and human activity is the cause.

The editorial board should be embarassed.

There's plenty of room for different opinions about how the United States should deal with global warming, including how actively governments should act to reduce carbon emissions, versus leaving this to voluntary efforts.

But giving major op-ed "air" time to someone who is horribly ignorant about basic scientific facts, that should be a journalistic no-no. Several letters to the editor that were published a few days later (kudos to the Oregonian for that) showed how scientifically off-base Fulks is.

Here's one of the letters:

As a climate scientist who actively works and publishes in this field, I know what most of my colleagues also know. Temperatures and sea levels are rising, glaciers and sea ice are melting, and man-made greenhouse gases are to blame.

Gordon Fulks, however, in his Jan. 20 column ("The changing climate of climate change"), disagrees. Can he be right? Let's examine his arguments.

Fulks claims that global temperatures have not risen during the past 15 years. This is not true. Most heat trapped by carbon dioxide and other gases added to the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, as clearly seen in measurements available at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website. Could the warming observed during the past 100 years be from heat that "sloshes back and forth" between the oceans and the atmosphere, as Fulks claims, or changes in the sun? No.

Even former climate skeptic Richard Muller, who has recently re-examined the surface temperature measurements, comes to the same conclusions as other climate scientists before him: Humans are the main cause.

Fulks flunks climate science. He cherry-picks information that supports his conclusion and ignores the rest. That's not science. Could it be that Fulks is right and a new ice age is imminent and all the academies of sciences that predict further warming are wrong? Of course.

But it is similarly unlikely that smoking is healthy and all medical associations are conspiring to fool you with their "radical" views on tobacco.

ANDREAS SCHMITTNER 
Corvallis  
Schmittner is an associate professor in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. 

Obama's gun control plan supported by 52% of Americans

When it comes to gun control, the NRA likes to claim that it represents the American public. Not true. Obama does.

A national survey conducted January 17-20 among 1,006 adults found that 52% feel that Obama's are about right (39%) or do not go far enough (13%). 

By contrast, only 31% say Obama's proposals go too far. (No opinion: 17%)

Clearly Obama isn't a radical when it comes to gun control. He's got a majority of the country on his side. Hopefully this majority won't remain silent when it comes time for Congress to vote on requiring background checks for all gun purchasers, and other eminently sensible ideas.

Obama gets serious about climate change. Finally.

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

I could hear my brain screaming those words when I came across President Obama's strong statement about global warming in his second inauguation address.

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But American cannot resist this transition. We must lead it.

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

Or maybe my psyche was picking up similar sentiments from countless environmentalists who have been waiting for Obama to get serious about the most serious threat faced by humanity. Including a relieved, but still somewhat skeptical, Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm.

We will soon see if these words have any meaning whatsoever — since approving the Keystone XL pipeline would utterly vitiate them.

True. As would approval of exporting coal from mines in Wyoming and Montana through ports in Oregon and Washington. 

Many people here in the Pacific Northwest are concerned about the health effects of giant coal trains spewing coal dust across the countryside. However, a greater concern is how burning all that coal would affect global warming. 

An article in the October 13, 2012 New Scientist, "The Next Climate War," conveyed the uncomfortable facts.

PLANS for mega exports of US coal are poised to become the next flashpoint in the battle over climate change. The industry wants to massively increase shipments of coal to China and other energy-hungry Asian nations. Such a move would undo the environmental benefits of weaning US power plants off the carbon-rich fuel and lock developing countries into decades of dirty power.

So far, protests about the proposed exports have mostly been local affairs, led by those living along the railroads that will transport the coal from mines in Wyoming and Montana to planned ports on the Pacific coast. There's been nothing like the national controversy surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline - the plan to pump oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries in Texas. Yet according to New Scientist's analysis of calculations by carbon emissions specialists, the consequences for the global climate of allowing the coal exports could exceed those of completing the oil pipeline.

...According to New Scientist's calculations, based on emissions figures for Powder River Basin coal estimated by the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh, burning the exported coal, plus its extraction and transport by rail and ship, could cause annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 194 million tonnes of carbon dioxide if just the first three ports are built. That rises to as much as 266 million tonnes if all five come online.

To put these numbers in context, New Scientist asked Adam Brandt of Stanford University in California, who specialises in estimating greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel sources, to produce similar figures for Keystone XL. If the pipeline flows at its maximum capacity, he calculates that total annual greenhouse emissions resulting from the project, again including those due to extraction and transport of the fuel as well as its final use, would equate to 212 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

If the ports aren't built, much of the Powder River Basin coal would probably remain in the ground for the foreseeable future.

Stop the XL pipeline. Stop coal exports.

That's what the United States needs to do for future generations. And for ourselves. I hope President Obama puts his actions where his inaugural mouth was yesterday.

Pickpocket Apollo Robbins: so smooth at stealing

If you think you'd know if a skilled pickpocket was taking your watch, wallet, or cell phone, think again. That's the lesson I've learned from watching a video of theatrical pickpocket (meaning, a legal "stealer") Apollo Robbins.

I've watched the video several times, I'm so fascinated by Robbins. His physical skills are amazing, but its the smoothness of his whole persona that is particularly impressive. Without that, his pickpocketing would be much less successful.

Have a look. And a read, if you click on that link. 

Best planned community in Portland, Oregon area?

Like I said in my previous post about a planned community in Monmouth, Oregon, almost certainly someday my wife and I will want to leave behind the large house on ten rural acres that simultaneously drives us crazy and makes us happy.

There's a lot of people akin to us.

Baby boomers (we're in our 60's) who are in good health, have lived in a non-easy-care home for a long time, aren't interested in a traditional retirement community, and are beginning to think about where they'd like to live when "let's move" becomes not just a idle thought, but an urgent need or desire.

Reading about the Edwards Addition Master Plan, the community in Monmouth, got us thinking about what other planned communities are near Salem, where we live now.

Some Google searching today revealed... surprisingly few. Kind of disappointing.

We'd figured that the green, hip, cool, cutting-edge Portland area would have more planned communities where green, hip, cool, cutting-edge older folks like my wife and me could feel comfortable.

"Planned" is the key word.

Northwest Oregon has lots of wonderful neighborhoods. However, we're inclined toward communities with some sort of master plan, preferably with strong sustainable, environmentally conscious, outdoor activity, and dog-friendly components.

Currently we live in a 70's era planned community, Spring Lake Estates. There are easements behind most of the small acreages that allow quite a few miles of hiking/riding trails. We also have a nine acre lake on common property, and a neighborhood association. 

A planned community brings people together. It fosters more of a sense of, well, community. Without that, getting to know your neighbors and feeling like you belong is more difficult.

Though nowhere near ready to move yet, we've begun to explore options in our general area. Northward toward Portland, with all its amenities (yes, also headaches) draws us more than anywhere else in Oregon. We'd consider staying in Salem if a planned development didn't have the "blah" factor that curses this town.

Here's the communities I've found so far, along with my initial largely-uninformed snap judgment about each. If anyone has more suggestions, please leave a comment. 

Edwards Addition, Monmouth. Nice vibe. Pleasant town. Just fifteen minutes away, though. Put this sort of development in a different location, and we'd be more intrigued.

Pringle Creek Community, Salem. We've toured this development several times. A lot to like here. Small, though. On the right track; just not the development we're attracted to at the moment.

Villebois, Wilsonville. I've browsed the web site, but never been there. Like the sustainable, green angles. Seems to lack nature trails and has a "snooty" air; but maybe it's just the regrettable French'ie name. 

Fairview Village, Fairview. Quite interesting. Look and feel, based on web site, appeals to us. Proximity to I-84 and Columbia Gorge is worrisome. Windy? Plan to pay a visit one of these days.

Mountain Park, Lake Oswego. Beautiful area. Too country-club'y of a vibe, almost certainly. Strikes me as an old-style high-end planned community. We'd rather have a dog park than a staffed clubhouse.

Murray Hll, Beaverton. By and large, if a planned community web site features a photo of a stone wall with the development's name in big bronze letters, it's not for us. Enough said.

Orenco Station, Hillsboro. lt's won awards. Good place to live if you want to hop on a MAX light rail train and cruise into Portland. Seems overly urban for our taste.

As noted before, I thought there would be more choices. Maybe I've missed some planned communities. Perhaps Google failed me. Somehow I doubt it. Which means, there's a untapped housing market for a creative developer.

Could be wrong (an ever-present possibility). I just know enough baby boomers like us who don't want to grow traditionally old, yet realize that they are... growing old. 

Living in a large difficult-to-maintain single family home is becoming less attractive to them. Yet they're active, energetic and nowhere near ready to enter a dreaded "senior" housing situation. 

So where are the planned communities aimed, in part, at people like us?

We're not going to retire to a golf course community in Arizona. We want hiking, biking, and yes, skateboard/longboard trails much more than bingo and bridge in a social center. 

Build it, and we will buy it. 

Salem needs an "Edwards Addition" like Monmouth has

OK, let's get past the name of this otherwise-cool housing development: Edwards Addition, which sounds like a boring afterthought, is anything but.

Today my wife and I met the developer, Eric Olsen, at the Mid-Valley Home Show (Americraft Building, State Fairgrounds, today through Sunday).

We'd just started to browse the show when I heard "Brian and Laurel!" Turning toward the Olsen Design and Development booth, which likely we would have walked right past otherwise, Molly Beecroft greeted us cheerily. 

Molly is a former neighbor, and current realtor, who works with Eric. Her charm and my desire for a free gift soon had me filling out cards which likely will guarantee that I'll be on the Olsen Development mail/email list forever, or for the rest of my life, whichever comes first.

And you know... I don't mind. 

Because Laurel and I ended up becoming genuinely enthusiastic about what Eric and his team have wrought in Monmouth. I knew next to nothing about Edwards Addition before today. Now I hope Olsen Development will bring similar housing to Salem, a distinct possibility according to Eric.

We like new old-style houses. Front porches, cars tucked in back, on tree-lined streets, modern inside with some "green" features. This is the Edwards Addition Flex House, an interesting concept for people who, well, want flexibility in their residence.

Seems reasonable at $299,000. Sq Ft: 2828 Bedrooms: 4 Baths: 3.5 

Currently Laurel and I aren't interested in giving up our rural non-easy-care home on ten acres, which I described to Eric as "a place that simultaneously drives us crazy and makes us really happy." But almost certainly that day will come.

Like lots of people in their 60's, we abhor the idea of growing old with bingo, bridge, and group visits to the mall. Yet the prospect of remaining enslaved to never-ending blackberry/poison oak control, yard maintenance, well water hassles, fallen tree chainsawing, and the like doesn't thrill us either.

When "that day" arrives, we'll be looking for a community like Edwards Addition (except with a cooler name, please). 

It's hard to put into words why we were so attracted to Eric's development style after talking with him and browsing around his web sites. I guess what struck me the most was his mention, after we quizzed him about Green building practices, that sustainability involves much more than just the "built environment."

Absolutely. We're looking for a sense of community when we move.

A place with people like us. Not exactly like us; that'd be boring. But people who like to sit on their porches and say "hi" to their neighbors, get involved in their neighborhood association, socialize together, help each other, be more than just barely recognizable "they're the ones who live three houses down."

I like how the Master Plan page on the Edwards Addition web site ends with:

Intangibles

Probably most exciting are the things you can’t master plan, but grow out of a diversity of people and concern for the built environment.  Book clubs, community gardens, holiday open houses and a Halloween parade are a few things we could have never designed, but organically formed from the desire to become a neighborhood beyond sticks and mortar.

Through the grace of Great God Google I came across a newspaper story about Eric Olsen and his wife, Eve. Starts out with:

Eric and Eve Olsen envision apple and pear trees fronting Martin Way in the Edwards Addition neighborhood in South Monmouth.

To the east is where potatoes, pumpkins and tomatoes might go -- or maybe something else. They haven't decided yet.

There would surely be an herb and salad garden ... and plots for carrots, beets and cabbage. If city ordinances allow it, there might be a place for a small free-range area for chickens.

Nice. Here they are in an acre of wheat they planted. Now the enterprise has evolved into a Village Farm maintained by Edwards Addition residents, complete with Facebook page (of course).

Laurel and I told Eric that he should bring his development philosophy to Salem. We need a mixed use, sustainable community like Edwards Addition here.

Yes, Pringle Creek Community is great. But more is better, and Pringle Creek (I hate to say this, but its true) is too cutting-edge Green to appeal to a large portion of the Salem market. We aren't Portland, Corvallis, Eugene, or Ashland -- though I sure wish Salem had a vibe a lot closer to those more cutting-edge cities.

But, hey, if Monmouth can embrace Edwards Addition, potentially 470 homes on 88 acres, it sure seems like Salem can do the same with a similar sort of development. 

Perusing the most recent quarterly Olsen Design and Development newsletter, I read a piece by Eric that showed his philosophically thoughtful side. "Awake at the Wheel" talked about the lessons of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, caused by improperly designed O-rings 

To think of those O-rings and how that system failed is to be reminded of how haunting the results of inattention can be. We all are entrenched in the routines of many communities — at home, at work and at play. For me, as part of a creative company dedicated to improving the built environment, the big challenge is to know when the status quo should be left to slumber, and when it could use a good wake up call. 

Believe me, Eric, Salem shouldn't be left to slumber. This city already is overly deserving of its nickname, So-Lame. I hope you ride into town on your developer horse and shake things up. 

One request, Eric: as I mentioned to you today, I'm into longboard land paddling. That's why I was pleased to hear that Edwards Addition has nicely flat streets. Sweet! Or as we skateboarders say, Sick!

So make sure that, if you ever build here in Salem, the CC&Rs have a section on skateboarding. They need to say "highly encouraged." Especially for those over 60. Like I said, us aging baby boomers are a different breed of retired folks. 

NRA disparages Secret Service protection for Obama's daughters

Despicable. Shameful. Outrageous. 

Until today I didn't think NRA executives could surprise me by acting more callous, tone-deaf, disrespectful, and unpatriotic than they've demonstrated in the past.

But now the NRA has put out a video insulting Obama and his daughters for using the Secret Service protection that has been uncontroversial in the past -- until the NRA decided that the best way to honor the deaths of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School killed by an assault rifle is to pick on Sasha and Malia. 

"Has the NRA lost it entirely?" asks Salon. Answer: absolutely.

It's fair game to target the president's daughters, says a gun lobby leader. Responsible gun owners should tear up their membership cards in the NRA and other like-organizations. Your dues are paying for crap like this video.

 

At the moment, the video has many more thumbs-down dislikes than thumbs-up likes. Excellent.

The NRA is its own worst enemy, because it is opposed to any and all efforts that would bring gun violence in this country down to levels in Canada, Australia, England, Germany, and other nations with cultures similar to ours, but with much stronger gun regulations.

One of the executive orders President Obama announced today would restore federal funding for research into the causes of gun violence. The NRA squashed this sort of research back in 1996, demonstrating how fearful it is of the truth.

If more guns are so great at protecting people, why is it that people are much more likely to die from gun violence (murder or suicide) if there is a gun in the home? The NRA is afraid Americans will learn the facts about guns.

Obama has put us on the path toward becoming a genuine culture of life by reducing the thousands of needless gun deaths that occur in this country every year because of lax regulation. Hopefully Congress will follow his lead.

Republicans should read an op-ed by John Howard, former center-right prime minister of Australia: "I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too." He oversaw the implementation of gun laws that banned assault weapons (bought them back, even) and instituted other regulations that worked.

In the end, we won the battle to change gun laws because there was majority support across Australia for banning certain weapons. And today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996.

The American Journal of Law and Economics found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.

Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control.

 

Oregonian story downplays global warming science

Yesterday I emailed a reporter for the Portland Oregonian that writing a story about global warming and including a mention about how some are skeptical the planet is getting hotter is akin to ending a story about a fossil discovery with "but some scientists doubt evolution is real."

That would be absurd. Evolution is a scientific truth. So is global warming. There's no doubt among the vast majority of reputable researchers in either field about these facts. 

So it bothered me when the reporter, Scott Learn, tossed in this sentence near the end of a story about how a national assessment shows the Pacific Northwest will be adversely affected by global warming.

Global warming skeptics note that temperatures in the nation and in the Northwest have remained fairly flat since 1998, a hot year, despite increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Well, creationist crazies also doubt that transitional fossils exist, but they do.

Global warming crazies are equally deluded when they seize on some irrelevant aspect of the vast corpus of scientific evidence supporting human-caused climate change and claim this proves their otherwise unprovable point.

In my email I told Learn:

There simply is no place for "balanced" reporting in this area. As a reporter, you aren't reporting the truth if you imply that there is some scientific debate over the reality of global warming. 

l appreciated the reporter's prompt reply, where he acknowledged that my point about the limitations of short-term data is a good one. For sure.

That's why I can't understand why Learn mentioned the 1998-2012 time span at all, especially since this is the new battleline global warming skeptics have retreated to in their fight against the facts -- which keep on winning.

Last month Phil Slait, the Bad Astronomy blogger, wrote a great piece for Slate: "Doubling Down on Climate Change Denial." It starts off with:

Oh, those wacky professional climate change deniers! Once again, they’ve banded together a passel of people, 90 percent of whom aren’t even climatologists, and had them sign a nearly fact-free opinion piece in the Financial Post, claiming global warming isn’t real. It’s an astonishing example of nonsense so ridiculous I would run out of synonyms for “bilge” before adequately describing it.

The Op-Ed is directed to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has recently, and thankfully, been vocal about the looming environmental catastrophe of global warming. The deniers’ letter takes him to task for this, but doesn’t come within a glancing blow of reality.

The letter itself is based on a single claim. So let’s be clear: If that claim is wrong, so is the rest of the letter.

Guess what? That claim is wrong. So blatantly wrong, in fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone could write it with a straight face. It says:

“The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years.”

This is simply, completely, and utterly false.

Let's absorb that scientific saying again: "simply, completely, and utterly false." Yet that falsehood was repeated in the Oregonian's story about how global warming will affect the Northwest. It shouldn't have been.

Here's how the United Kingdom's official climate researchers responded to the false claim of no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years.

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.

As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16°C/decade (or 0.15°C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16°C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8ºC. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

Now, I realize that newspaper reporters are overworked and underpaid.

But it only takes a few minutes a day to follow the latest science on global warming through Climate Progress and other reputable scientific sources. If I can do that, Scott Learn and other reporters who write about this subject can also do it.

Knowing the difference between responsible scientific difference of opinion and climate change denying bullshit is key for anyone reporting on global warming. It's highly irresponsible to pretend there's a genuine controversy among climatologists about whether the planet is warming because of humans.

There isn't. The Earth is getting hotter. Because of greenhouse gases. End of story.

Yet Learn sent me a link to an earlier piece he'd written in April 2012, "Global warming hiatus in recent years spurs skepticism."

Now, 2012 turned out to be the hottest year in United States history. Even Oregon, which along with Washington missed most of the heat that scorched almost all of the other states, had its 13th hottest year in the last 118 years.

The skeptics quoted by Learn in his stories are simply wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They shouldn't be given any print space in Oregon's largest newspaper. Or any newspaper, except on the opinon and comics pages. 

Chuck Wiese, for example, is utterly unqualified to opine on global warming. He's a meteorologist with a B.A. degree. He's an accomplice of right-wing radio's Lars Larson, as I wrote about in "Lars Larson's lies about global warming."

I survived ten minutes or so of Larson a few days ago, but just barely. The combined scientific ignorance of Lars and a global warming-denying sidekick he had on, Chuck Wiese, was astounding.

And intensely disturbing.

Three years ago I criticized Larson for joking about how global warming is going to be good for Oregon. He's still up to his head-in-the-sand tricks. Now his brain-dead theory is that the Earth is cooling rapidly, so if big bad government limits our nation's carbon footprint, people are going to freeze to death when their furnace fuel is rationed.

Or something like that.

It was hard to follow the logic of Larson and Wiese, since they didn't use any in their blathering about how climate change/global warming science is a fraud.

I'll close with some opinionating which, unlike Wiese and other global warming skeptics, I'll admit rests only on my own subjective impression.

The Oregonian seems to have changed, both editorially and journalistically. I'm a long-time daily reader of the Oregonian. I used to view the newspaper as a highly credible news source, with a moderately liberal-leaning editorial stance.

Now the opinion pages have gotten much more conservative after the arrival of editor Erik Lukens, whose previous job was with the way-right Bend Bulletin. And I sense a similar change of tone in the news section. Perhaps not to the same degree as in the Oregonian editorials, but noticeable nonetheless.

My "conspiracy theory," which, again, I'll admit as such, is that the Oregonian (like most newspapers) is having a tough time making money in this increasingly digital age. It seems reasonable that Oregonian executives would conclude that expanding readership is necessary. 

Which means looking beyond fact-based liberals/progressives, and feeding right-wingers some unscientific, evidence-free red meat on both the editorial and news pages of the sort that excites Fox News viewers. 

Hey, I could be wrong. I just keep reading stuff in Oregonian stories and opinion pieces that make me think, "Wow, that doesn't make any sense." 

Like, there's a possibility global warming has stopped because of recent temperature data. Huh? Recently the U.K.'s "Guardian" newspaper editorialized, "Now no one can deny the world is getting warmer."

Except for a few crazies, who shouldn't be quoted in the Portland Oregonian. I wish Scott Learn and other reporters would take this excerpt from the Guardian editorial to heart:

From this perspective, it might be tempting to sneer at the US over its response to the challenge of climate change. Britain has little to be smug about, however, a point that was demonstrated last week by media coverage of the Met Office's updated forecast of likely global warming over the next five years.

In revising downwards, albeit slightly, its previous expectation for temperature rises from now until 2017, the Met Office found itself at the midst of a PR shambles. In their dozens, climate change sceptics charged forwards to claim this data showed that global warming has stopped, a completely misleading suggestion that was not properly challenged by journalists.

Videos of my longboard land paddling, at 64 years young

If you've been waiting to see videos of me pushing my way along on a longboard with a stick (not a foot, which distinguishes land paddling from regular longboarding)... I'm amazed. 

But sometimes people don't know what's been missing from their lives. (Which, of course, is the secret of Apple's success; don't give people what they want, give them what they will want once they know about it.)

Regardless, I'm pleased to share the first four videos made with my newly acquired GoPro Hero3, silver model.

I put it on a chest mount yesterday without really knowing what I was doing. The results turned out fine. Audio was pretty damn audible; I used the "skeleton" case with holes in it rather than the totally enclosed waterproof case.

The last two videos are more exciting than the first two, being of me going downhill rather than uphill or level. "Exciting," of course, is a word fraught with ambiguity.

I love watching point-of-view GoPro videos of people doing wild and crazy stuff. My land paddling is only mildly wild and crazy. But, hey, when you're 64, just getting out of bed can be an accomplishment.

And I'm rolling along on a freaking skateboard!

(Note: the GoPro camera has a wide angle lens which gives kind of a "fisheye" look to videos, and makes my staight stick look curved; it's a feature, not a problem!)

 

Aptly titled, above is my first GoPro longboard land paddling video. This is where I go early on in my usual Minto Brown Island Park route. Gets me warmed up with mostly mild uphills.

 

I turn left along a wider, smoother asphalt path once I reach the trail that runs along a Willamette River slough. The video above is on my return route which leads to the west parking area. 

 

I like this trail which runs through some open fields. Some aerobic uphill pushing pays off with this fairly lengthy downhill run. One advantage of land paddling on a longboard is that you can push with both feet on the board. Hard to push otherwise on a longboard at speed, especially if you need to be able to turn. At least, it was for me before I discovered the joy of land paddling.

 

Minto Brown Island Park is quite flat. There's a few sort-of-steep downhills on the trails, though. This is one of them, the flip side of the hill I pushed my longboard up at the end of the preceding video. On a longboard even moderate speed feels fast. I'm probably only going 10 miles an hour, or so. Maybe a bit more.

Felt faster.

I'm riding a Norgeboards 60" Kalai longboard (made close by in Bend, Oregon) pushing with a 6-foot Kahuna Creations carbon fiber Big Stick. Nice combo.

DirecTV raises rates 5%. Still no Pac 12 Network.

Overly optimistic me actually was eager to open a recent email from DirecTV with a subject line, "Information about your DIRECTV account."

I hoped the big news was that, finally, DIrecTV had reached a deal with the Pac 12 Network, and that I wouldn't have to miss any more football, basketball, or baseball games shown only on that network.

But no. I learned that we're going to pay 4.5% or so more this year. For nothing that means anything to me. Disney Jr. channel has been added along with some other yawn-inducing programming. Whoopee.

Here's what I told DirecTV, using their email link. No doubt this message will be treated by DirecTV with the same attention and respect that my other communications with them about the Pac 12 Network have been.

Namely, they will ignore what their customers want. 

I just got your email that our DirecTV bill will be going up by about 4.5%. I also am painfully aware that you still don't offer the Pac 12 Network. After missing a bunch of Oregon and Oregon State football games, I'm now getting to miss a bunch of Oregon and Oregon State basketball games.

Can hardly wait for baseball season, when I'll get to miss more Pac 12 sporting events that DISH customers get to watch, but not me -- who stupidly switched from DISH to DirecTV because I thought you cared more about your customers.

Your main argument for not making a deal with the Pac 12 Network, as so many other "cable" companies have done, was that rates would increase with an unfair deal.

Well, now rates have increased. And you STILL aren't offering the Pac 12 Network.

If I'm going to pay more, I'd like to get more. Eventually people like me are going to dump DirecTV for one of your competitors. Please wake up and smell the lost-customer roses. Make a deal with the Pac 12 Network. 

NOW!

Diagnosing a water heater leak (for dummies)

If you know a lot about water heaters, stop reading. If you're like us -- water heater quasi-dummies, especially when it comes to leaks -- read on. 

Yesterday we spent $99 to get educated from a pleasant George Morlan Plumbing guy about why what we thought was a leak in our water heater, almost certainly wasn't. 

A few days ago my wife noticed water pooling around the tile floor in front of our water heater. Not a huge amount, but quite a bit. She put towels around the water heater.

When I got home, I had the bright idea of putting paper towels around the bottom of it, so we could identify where the leak was coming from. None of the inlet/outlet fittings, overflow tube, or drain valve were leaking.

And the leak wasn't constant. It came and went.

In fact, the evening before the day the George Morlan guy was going to come out and check the water heater, I told my wife "We should call them and cancel the appointment; we're going to look like fools, plus pay $99 for a service call, since there's no longer a leak."

But an hour or so later, some of the paper towels were wet again. Leak! I was happy, because now, when the doorbell rang the next morning, I wasn't worried about letting the guy in. We had a real problem!

Well, not really. What we learned in the next half hour, at that cost of $99 was...

(1) Water heater leaks don't stop and start. (Sort of obvious, but, hey, we're water heater dummies.) Once a leak begins, it'll continue.

(2) A leak will be obvious when the access panels to the temperature setting, etc. are removed. Because a tank always is full, a leak will distribute water all around the outer lining of the tank. The guy felt the insulation under both access panels. Bone dry. No leak.

(3) At first he thought we might have a drainage problem, water coming into that corner of the house from outside. But I peered over the top of the water heater with a flashlight. Also bone dry. Water wasn't coming through the wall.

(4) Last possibility, which probably was the culprit: condensation. The tank rests on a metal bottom. My wife was able to push a thin duster under the small space between the tank and floor. It came back damp. The George Morlan guy said there's a roundish opening in the middle of the tank, used in transport or something. Water could have condensed there and flowed outward to the utility room floor. Strange, because this had never happened in the twenty-two years we've lived here. Maybe a rare meteorological condition, combined with doing laundry, or whatever.

(5) As long as he was there, I asked another question that I'd been wondering about: should a water heater be drained regularly? He said, "No, there's no need." I told him that I occasionally hook up a hose to the valve at the bottom of the tank and drain a couple of gallons from it. Since we're on well water, usually there's some crud that comes out. He said newer tanks stir up the tank water in such a way, even that now isn't necessary.

So we learned some stuff about water heaters. Worth the $99, I guess.

Good news is that we have a 10 year warranty on our six year old water heater, so if there really is a leak (which seems unlikely), we'll get both the $99 back and a new water heater.

Anyway, the key tip was to check under the access panels for wetness if a leak is suspected. Somehow I thought the inside of a water heater had seams, but this isn't the case. Thus a leak anywhere leads to water all around the outside of a tank (under the outer cover, that is). 

Natural Grocers coming to Salem. We're not excited.

My wife and I love LifeSource Natural Foods, currently Salem"s one and only natural food store.

Health-minded eaters that we are, vegetarian and organic-leaning, we enjoy the friendly atmosphere and good selection of food at LifeSource.

However, we also lust after a Whole Foods, Market of Choice, New Seasons, or other larger natural food store with more choices and lower prices. Usually when we're in Portland, Corvallis, or Eugene, we stop at one of the stores that Salem should have, given its population, but doesn't.

So I was more than a little excited when I glanced at the front page of the Statesman Journal a few days ago and saw "Natural foods store set to open in June." 

Unfortunately, a few lines of reading knocked me back to reality. Salem wasn't getting a cool natural foods store, but a Natural Grocers store. Never having heard of Natural Grocers, I didn't know what the chain was like. 

Clearly, though, it wasn't a Whole Foods, Market of Choice, or New Seasons. 

A fast-growing organic foods retailer, which has sprouted 60 stores in 12 states, will soon compete for Salem’s grocery dollars.

Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage Inc. intends to open a Salem store by June, said Merredith Branscombe, a company spokeswoman. Branscombe couldn’t confirm the Salem store’s address, but city officials have approved a site plan for a 16,000-square-foot grocery store at 4250 Commercial St. SE.

...The retailer sells only organic products and bans anything with hormones, antibiotics, pesticide residue or artificial colors from its shelves. The full-service grocery also sells nutritional supplements, body care and pet products.

Anything owned by a "Vitamin Cottage" didn't sound like a cool, hip, cutting edge addition to Salem's (a.k.a. So-Lame) natural food scene. Checking out the Natural Grocers' web site, I came across a decidedly unexciting video tour of what they call a "real health food store."

 

This looks to me like a "Vitamin Cottage" that grew into a rather sterile natural food store. Meaning, without much charisma, energy, creativity, zest. My wife and I watched the video with a growing sense of...

LifeSource Natural Foods doesn't have a lot to worry about. 

Understand: we wish Natural Grocers success. I just don't see much, if anything, that the Natural Grocers store will offer that we need or want. Probably a bigger selection of some brands, especially in the vitamin area. 

Yawn. 

There's no deli in a Natural Grocers store. That's a deal-killer for us, and a big reason why we like Whole Foods so much. We don't like to cook, but we like to eat healthy, tasty, reasonably-priced vegetarian food. Takeout from the LifeSource deli section is a big part of our weekly diet.

Natural Grocers won't compete with LifeSource on that front. Which likely will make us occasional browsers in the Salem store, but not regular customers.

Salem still has a long way to go before it catches up to its much cooler sister cities to the north and south, Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene. Natural Grocers is a baby step in that direction, nothing more. And as long as I'm complaining...

Today I learned from a sign on the front what store is going in next to the south Salem Trader Joe's that opened last year. Ugh! A Tuesday Morning. Unbelievable. 

I've never been in one. My wife tells me it is a discount store, not even as nice as T.J. Maxx. I'd been envisioning a hip healthy restaurant to match Trader Joe's. Maybe a Cafe Yumm, which we love.

But no, Salem gets another blah store selling blah stuff. Which doesn't quite describe how Natural Grocers looks to me. Disturbingly close, though.

I count the irritations, waiting in line at the post office

Oh, irritating irritations, I had plenty of time to count you up during my lengthy wait at Salem's Vista Station post office today.

(1) Walking in the door at about 2:30 pm on a Tuesday, a time I figured would be pleasingly low key busy-wise, and finding about a dozen people lined up in the small lobby. I only needed to pick up a package that required a signature. Didn't want to come back; didn't want to run the risk of having our mailhuman try to deliver it again at a day we weren't home.

(2) So I decided to do the Post Office Wait Dance. I'm good at standing still. First thought, though, was to see whether any P.O. employee was at the mail dropoff counter on the right. Occasionally when lines are long at Vista, someone will stand there and handle package/mail pickups that don't involve a financial transaction. But, nope, two regular registers were staffed. Nobody else in sight.

(3) After a few minutes, a woman walks in with a young girl. She strides right up to the mail dropoff counter, ignoring the lengthy line. Standing there, she looks at the P.O. employee at the register to her left: "I need to pick up my mail. Can someone help me?" She's told, "No, sometimes a person is available to do that; not today; you'll have to wait in line."

(4) Her child says, "I have to go potty!" The mother says, "You'll have to wait; there's no bathroom here; I thought there might be; that's why we came in." Jeez. How could anyone think a United States Post Office would have restroom facilities for the general public? For one thing, I've never seen a post office with a restroom. For another thing, it's a great idea, so naturally it will never happen.

(5) A guy near the front of the line is called up to the counter. "Good," I think. "I've just moved up a spot." Then I notice the stack of large envelopes he's carrying. "Not good," I think. I've seen this game play out before: a self-employed guy mailing a bunch of his daily whatever's which take forever to process because each has to be individually weighed, stamped, return receipt requested, etc. etc. 

(6) I ponder getting my iPhone out and playing with it, check my email, New York Times, Twitter feed. But I'm engrossed in my increasing irritation. Somehow I feel that if I stare sullenly at the two P.O. employees working at the counter, they'll get the message to call for help to deal with the now even longer line of waiting people.

(7) I picture how, at LifeSource Natural Foods and Trader Joe's, staff will ring a bell when just three or four customers are in line, and staff will stop what they're doing and open up another register. I can hear voices in the back of the post office. What the hell are those servants-of-the-public doing that's more important than serving the not-very-patiently-waiting public? The woman with the kid is still having to tell her daughter, "There's no bathroom here; you'll just have to wait; no, I won't put you down, you'll run away."

(8) The guy with the stack of envelopes is still being served at the counter. Quite a few other people have been helped by the only other P.O. employee. I now see that mailing each and every envelope of his requires an astonishing amount of typing into a computer terminal by the employee serving him. I shift my irritated eyeballs to the guy's back. "Why the hell did you choose the busiest station in south Salem to mail your hugely time-consuming stuff?" I mentally beam into his inconsiderate brain. "Pringle Station is just a few minutes away; it's almost always nearly empty." 

(9) I do some quick calculations. The guy could have driven to Pringle Station and back in less than 15 minutes. By the time I reach the front of the line, the guy is still standing there, watching the P.O. employee enter hugely complicated codes for sending restricted items to Somalia, or whatever the heck is taking such a long time to do. I swear to Zeus: at least ten people were served by the other P.O. employee staffing the counter during the twenty minutes or more it took this guy's stack of envelopes to be mailed. Each wasted ten minutes or so of his/her life, since the line would have moved twice as fast without the guy's counter blockage. Ten times ten is 100 person-minutes. If he'd driven to Pringle, he would have incurred an extra fifteen minutes himself. Where's your compassionate Buddha-nature, jerk?!

(10) I then get irritated at how irritated I am. Where's my own patient Zen acceptance of How Things Are? 

Anyway, another fun day at the post office.

Waiting in line, I fantasized about having the whole damn outfit taken over by UPS or Federal Express, with all of the idiots currently running the USPS fired. But the small part of my brain not consumed with irritation thought: "That'd be no better, most likely. And surely more expensive."

I actually like and appreciate the USPS most of the time. They just need to figure out how to handle lines a lot better. (It's likely, though, that staff cutbacks and foolish interference in post office operations by Congress has made this almost impossible to do.)

Grocery stores have self-checkout, twelve items or less, and regular checkout areas. Sure seems like the post office could figure out something similar, and have some employees ready to jump in and help when the line is going out the door, as happens disturbingly often at the Vista Station.

Starbucks' new Blueberry Oatmeal worth the extra buck

Today Starbucks started off by disappointing me, but ended up deliciously surprising me. Love your new Blueberry Oatmeal! It's a winner.

Once again, the West Salem Starbucks didn't have any multigrain bagels by the noon'ish time I arrived for my regular Sunday get-together with some friends.

That always irritates me, since the only stuff health-conscious me likes to eat at Starbucks are the multigrain bagels and the oatmeal. But since I have oatmeal for breakfast every day but Sunday (when I make a gigantic whole grain pancake), I prefer the different'ness of the bagel.

Sounding as pathetic as possible, I told the barista, "Well... since you don't have any multigrain bagels, I'll take some oatmeal."

He cheerily replied, "Do you want to try the new blueberry oatmeal?" "Sure," I told him. I'd added freshly unfrozen blueberries to my pancake just a few hours earlier. But, hey, I like blueberries.

And I sure liked Starbucks' Blueberry Oatmeal. So does this other reviewer.

The steel cut oats, now blended with rolled oats, must account with the new let-sit-for-five-minutes instructions on the container, up from three minutes (after hot water is added). I dutifully checked my watch and waited the requisite time.

I enjoyed stirring in the whole blueberries, pouring the agave nectar over the oats, and sprinkling on the fruit, nut, and seed medley package. This is a big improvement, both health- and taste-wise, from the brown sugar, dried fruit, and a different nut mixture in the old rolled oats oatmeal.

Having paid with my iPhone's Starbucks app, I had no idea what the Blueberry Oatmeal cost. Overly optimistically, I sort of assumed it'd be the same price as the original oatmeal offering.

Checking my app just now, I found that a grande Pike Place and oatmeal cost me $1.10 more today than last Sunday. So that must be the price difference between the new and old oatmeal.

Almost certainly I'll continue to pay it. The Blueberry Oatmeal is worth an extra buck.

Good going, Starbucks. Hope you keep on adding healthier food choices. Your breakfast pastries could benefit from more whole-grain items than the single multigrain bagel. How about a whole-wheat scone?

More guns equals more killing. Obvious equation.

Thank you, Elisabeth Rosenthal, for reminding us of an obvious truth that, sadly, is ignored by a disturbingly large percentage of the people in our gun-crazed country: nations with more guns have more gun deaths. 

Duh... 

But sometimes those duh... truths which seemingly shouldn't need to be said so often, do need to be repeated over and over -- when there's a willful attempt to ignore the truth.

The thousands of needless gun deaths in our country, including the recent twenty-six at Sandy Hook Elementary School, scream out Don't ignore me!

So read Rosenthal's "More Guns = More Killing."

She's a physician and science reporter who speaks the truth about what happens in countries where guns are on almost street corner, like the NRA wants to have happen in the United States. Excerpt:

IN the wake of the tragic shooting deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, the National Rifle Association proposed that the best way to protect schoolchildren was to place a guard — a “good guy with a gun” — in every school, part of a so-called National School Shield Emergency Response Program.

Indeed, the N.R.A.’s solution to the expansion of gun violence in America has been generally to advocate for the more widespread deployment and carrying of guns.

I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

“A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia.”

As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.

Shoulder-fired missiles don't bring down aircraft, people do. Huh?

Oh, yeah! I'm almost a writer for The New Yorker! My dream.

This might be as close as I get, parallel thinking about gun control between The New Yorker's hugely talented Hendrik Hertzberg and way-less-talented me. 

But, hey, we're on the same track when it comes to making fun of the absurd contention, "Guns don't kill people, people do." Which is so, so, so wrong.

Here's what I said in a blog post on December 29, 2012.

Why don't we legalize surface-to-air shoulder fired missiles? After all, people shoot down airplanes; shoulder fired missiles don't shoot down airplanes. If terrorists don't have a missile, they'll just find some other way to destroy an airplane.

How comfortable would you feel flying on a commercial airliner if you knew that anyone could legally stand along its flight path holding a shoulder fired surface-to-air missile?

If you're an NRA member, logically you should be just fine with this, since your organization favors allowing assault rifles to be owned by just about anyone.

And here's a quote from Hertzberg's "Shots" piece in the January 7, 2013 The New Yorker.

But, for Hobbesian gun nuts of Gohmert’s ilk, the essence of the Second Amendment, when all is said and done, is not about any of that. Its real, irreducible purpose is to enable some self-designated fraction of the American people, in a pinch, to make war against the American government—to overthrow it by force and violence, if that is deemed necessary.

If that’s the line you draw, then where, logically, do you stop? In Georgian times, when the amendment was ratified, the most fearsome weapon anyone, soldier or civilian, could carry was a single-shot musket. And today? “Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles don’t shoot down black helicopters, people with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles shoot down black helicopters”?

We think along the same lines, but differ on what sort of aircraft we mention. Surface to air missiles are commonly used to shoot down helicopters, but also other aircraft.

I was picturing a crazed Tea Party patriot standing under the flight path of a commercial airliner as it takes off, about to exercise his Second Amendment rights with a shoulder-fired missile. Hertzberg refers to those dreaded imaginary black helicopters that the U.N. will send in with Obama's help to take our freedoms away.

Same difference. Anyone who thinks assault rifes or shoulder fired missiles are needed by ordinary citizens to defend themselves against the government is so crazy, any example of their insanity works to ridicule them.

Hertzberg makes other excellent points in his essay.

It is indeed disturbingly weird that all those politician gun nuts who want their assault rifes and high capacity magazines didn't have the guts to defend their point of view after the Sandy Hook killings. I guess lies can't be defended when the spotlight of truth is too bright.

Within hours of the unspeakable massacre of twenty first graders and six teachers and staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, December 14th, bookers for the television networks’ Sunday-morning political talk shows hit the phones, trolling for guests.

They were seeking, among others, politicians, public officials, and prominent citizens willing to defend the proposition that military-style munitions—high-powered semiautomatic assault rifles and pistols that can fire a round every second, use magazines holding as many as a hundred bullets of a type specially engineered to liquefy the insides of human beings, and be outfitted with accessories like grenade launchers, flash suppressors, bayonet lugs, pistol grips, and collapsible stocks—should continue to be readily available to all comers, with or without minimal background checks or waiting periods.

The bookers came up empty.

“We reached out to all thirty-one pro-gun-rights senators in the new Congress to invite them on the program to share their views on this subject this morning,” David Gregory, of NBC, told his “Meet the Press” audience. “We had no takers.”

The National Rifle Association, which had instantly deactivated its Facebook page and silenced its Twitter feed, refused all interview invitations and issued a statement explaining—admitting?—that it was shutting its big mouth “as a matter of common decency.”

When it finally opened that mouth, a week later, out came a demand for N.R.A.-trained guards in every single American school: a hundred thousand schools, a hundred thousand guards, a hundred thousand guns, a hundred million dollars in new business for the N.R.A.’s “corporate partners” in the gun industry.

"One Pound Fish" hasn't taken over my brain. But is trying to.

I suppose there's worse ways to go crazy than have your mind repeat the "One Pound Fish" ditty incessantly. So far, that hasn't happened to me. But it could...

Be warned. If you're prone to catchy songs playing uncontrollably in your head, don't watch these videos.

(Assuming you're one of the few people in the world, which included me up until a few days ago, who hasn't seen them yet.)

Background story here.

This is the original video of the fish seller.

 

And this is the jazzed up post-viral video version.

 

 

U.S.A. has more gun violence because it has more guns

There's a simple way to save thousands upon thousands of lives needlessly snuffed out by gun violence in the United States: reduce the availability of guns. 

This is so obvious, it's difficult to understand why so many people say, 'the problem is complicated."

No, it isn't. That's a lie, mostly spread by people who aren't interested in saving the lives of innocents -- including the twenty children and six adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month. 

So says, Fareed Zakaria, one of this country's clearest-sighted fact-based commentators in The Solution to Gun Violence is Clear.

Read the whole piece, which I've copied in below. It's essentially unarguable. But you can bet that gun fanatics will argue against the unarguable facts. 

Announcing Wednesday that he would send proposals on reducing gun violence in America to Congress, President Obama mentioned a number of sensible gun-control measures. But he also paid homage to the Washington conventional wisdom about the many and varied causes of this calamity — from mental health issues to school safety. His spokesman, Jay Carney, had said earlier that this is “a complex problem that will require a complex solution.” Gun control, Carney added, is far from the only answer.

In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious.

People point to three sets of causes when talking about events such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings. First, the psychology of the killer; second, the environment of violence in our popular culture; and, third, easy access to guns. Any one of these might explain a single shooting. What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.

To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year — 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people. Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.

So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area than do many peer countries.

Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.

The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.

There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide — a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)

There will always be evil or disturbed people. And they might be influenced by popular culture. But how is government going to identify the darkest thoughts in people’s minds before they have taken any action? Certainly those who urge that government be modest in its reach would not want government to monitor thoughts, curb free expression, and ban the sale of information and entertainment.

Instead, why not have government do something much simpler and that has proven successful: limit access to guns. And not another toothless ban, riddled with exceptions, which the gun lobby would use to “prove” that such bans don’t reduce violence.

A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife. Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.

The problems that produced the Newtown massacre are not complex, nor are the solutions. We do not lack for answers.

What we lack in America today is courage.

Debt limit fight: will GOP pay the bills it voted for?

I'm glad that President Obama is vowing to stand firm on not negotiating over an upcoming increase in the federal debt limit. 

“I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed,” the president said Tuesday night after he successfully pushed Republicans to allow tax increases on wealthy Americans.

This is the Obama that progressives hoped we'd see after his re-election victory.

He's a lot more realistic about how you negotiate, or don't negotiate, with unreasonable fanatics who care much more about their own political asses than the wellbeing of their country. And Obama is speaking more clearly, in simpler sentences.

Absolutely correct: the choice for Congressional Republicans is whether they pay the bills for spending they voted for. That's what every other Congress has done, until the last dysfunctional GOP debt limit fight that led to a downgrading of our nation's credit rating.

As noted before, raising the debt ceiling should be automatic.

If Congress and the President pass legislation that increases federal spending, and there isn't enough cash on hand in the Treasury to pay those bills, obviously the money has to be borrowed. The GOP controlled House knew that when it voted to pass the legislation.

So its the height of arrogant hypocrisy for the GOP to now hold the United States' "full faith and credit" hostage by throwing a temper tantrum and threatening to not pay bills that Republicans were pleased to incur.

This is like someone refusing to pay their credit card bill after buying a bunch of stuff, knowing full well how much money they had in the bank. Such is today's Republican Party: unethical deadbeats who don't want to take responsibility for their spending.

Obama is taking the right position: you don't negotiate over whether the United States should pay its lawful bills. Now he needs to hold fast to that position when the Tea Party crazies threaten to trash our country's economy.