HinesSight

Here's why I loved The Queen's Gambit on Netflix

At first I doubted Jim Ramsey, a friend who I have coffee with most Sundays, when he said I should watch The Queen's Gambit -- a seven-episode Netflix mini-series about, yawn, a girl who plays chess. 

That unduly confident "yawn" was the reason it took me a week or two to say to my wife one evening, let's take a look at The Queen's Gambit to see if we might like it.

Well, we sure did. 

Every night after that we watched another hour-long episode. Yesterday we reached the end of our immersion into the ever-so-fascinating story of Beth Harmon, a woman in the man's world of competitive chess back in the 1960's.

So thanks, Jim, for the recommendation. 

If The Queen's Gambit were a movie, it would deserve consideration for the Best Picture award. Regardless, I consider it to be one of the best 3 1/2 hour productions I've ever seen.

It's rare to have a movie, which is what I'm going to call it, be both highly suspenseful and deeply emotional. Yet Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Beth masterfully, and the other fine actors grabbed the attention of my wife and me from the first minute and didn't let go until the closing credits. 

And damn, the movie is about chess. I couldn't believe that I could get so nervous watching chess matches, agonizing over moves by Beth and her opponents that I couldn't comprehend. 

Well, let's make that, barely comprehend, with the emphasis on barely. 

I learned to play chess in high school, when a math teacher made us play the game in 1965 or 1966, which happens to be about the time Beth is entering the world of competitive chess. 

And that's the only resemblance between Beth and me, chess-wise. I got serious about chess only to the point of checking out some books about it from the library. I'd play games and learn openings by copying moves from the books on an actual chessboard. 

Beth, on the other hand, was capable of playing entire chess matches inside her head, basically. There's a scene where she and another chess expert are driving along, calling out moves in their mental chess match. Wow. 

The movie shows the fine line between genius and madness. 

Beth develops a drinking problem after her tranquilizer problem. Some of those scenes were painful for me to watch, since my mother was an alcoholic. A divorcee, it was just her and me in the house during her heaviest drinking period when I was in high school.

Let's just say that things got really weird, really disturbing, really painful. Naturally I realized that I was just watching a movie, not real life, but The Queen's Gambit is so gripping, I found myself feeling at times like I was watching my (much older) mother as Beth hit the bottle.

Us baby boomers grew up in an era when women/wives often were driven to alcohol and tranquilizers by being second-class citizens who couldn't use their talents and intelligence as men/husbands could. The Queen's Gambit shows this convincingly. Younger viewers might wonder, were things really that bad for women in the 50s and 60s?

Answer: yes. 

Anyway, there's plenty of reasons to watch The Queen's Gambit: psychological, sociological, chessological. But the main reason is that it's a hugely entertaining movie. Here's the trailer.

DIRECTV back to its irritating channel-losing ways

I'd say that I have a love-hate relationship with DIRECTV, but that wouldn't be honest. My DIRECTV relationship is almost entirely based on hate.

I hate how much our monthly subscription costs. I hate how shows we've recorded mysteriously disappear from our DVR (digital video recorder). I hate that the Pac-12 Networks aren't carried. 

And I hate it when DIRECTV engages in a corporate pissing match with the owner of one of the channels that we've paid to get, yet is at risk of being taken off the DIRECTV lineup for reasons that are never specifically disclosed but which obviously involve corporate greed.

The current channel-losing irritation is the prospect of losing KGW, the Portland NBC affiliate, at 5 pm next Monday, November 30. 

KGW is owned by Tegna. DIRECTV and Tegna can't agree on how much the former should be paid by the latter for being able to offer the local station to subscribers.

I couldn't care less who is at fault here. Both corporations are money-grubbing assholes who don't care about ordinary people, just how much money they're making. 

DIRECTV says Tegna is doing them wrong. Tegna says DIRECTV is doing them wrong, 

My attitude is that both DIRECV and Tegna are wrong to threaten the removal of programming that us DIRECTV subscribers have paid for, yet won't be getting if KGW is taken off our channel lineup on Monday.

DIRECTV is losing customers at a rapid rate. So the non-geniuses at AT&T, which owns DIRECTV, are figuring that taking away channels from their diminishing number of subscribers is the way to increase profitability? 

Not going to happen. 

Sure, currently my wife and I are stuck with DIRECTV (or Dish, which is just as bad as DIRECTV) because we live in a rural area where cable TV doesn't exist and cell service is slow, leaving us with no TV alternatives other than satellite.

But I'm looking forward to the rollout of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service, which promises to give people like us a hugely faster Internet speed than the crappy 6-7 Mbps we get from CenturyLink now. 

This will open up streaming possibilities that are closed to us at the moment. So the more DIRECTV offers up horrible customer service, the more likely it is people like us will bail on DIRECTV when we have the chance.

Which hopefully will be soon. 

If you can't be with the life you love, love the life you're with

It's Thanksgiving today. I feel like I should put a one-day hold on my usual inclination to write something snarky, critical, or in my better moments, only mildly negative.

So here goes with my modification to a song lyric that popped into my head when I woke up this morning and realized what day it was.

And if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with.

Stephen Stills performed the song, "Love the One You're With," in 1970. I turned 22 that year. Now I'm 72. The general sentiment still rings true to me, albeit with this modification.

This is firmly in a Thanksgiving theme, yet without the excessive sentimentality of the usual I'm so thankful for _____ that suffuses American households today.

Sure, it's wonderful to be thankful. However, life is difficult. And I hate to break this news to you younger folks, but life gets more difficult as we grow older. 

Not in all ways. In some ways.

Notably, when it comes to health and the pain that often accompanies our problems. Some pain is physical. Some is psychological, such as regret that one's life hasn't turned out as expected way back when.

So it's asking a lot to be thankful for things in your life that aren't welcome. I suppose my love the life you're with sounds similar, but I see some differences between thankfulness and love. Love of life is more inclusive than thankfulness for this and that. 

If our back is hurting so much we can't get out of bed, that isn't an aspect of life we want to have hang around. However, it's possible to view that pain as part of a larger life that we love. Which is sort of how we view our children when they're young.

They can be a pain to deal with, but we still love them for who they are, flaws included.

Acceptance of what is actually present in our life is a big step toward loving our life. Denial, which includes "this shouldn't be happening to me," isn't helpful, though it is temping to indulge in, since we would rather be with the life we love than the life we're with if the latter is lacking some things we value.

Via the Waking Up app on my iPhone, I've been listening to a series of short talks by William B. Irvine called The Stoic Path. One that resonated with me is called You Are Living The Dream Life.

How could this be, given all that is wrong with our lives? Well, Irvine says that out there in the world there are people who dream of living the sort of life that you or I have. Their lives don't contain what we have, being worse in those respects. Thus to them our life is a dream life.

Yes, our back hurts. But we can walk. And it doesn't hurt that bad all the time, just sometimes. There are people who can't walk at all and dream of being able to do this, even if it was painful. 

Closer to home, Irvine also says that later on in our own life, we may look upon the life we have now as a dream life. Meaning, our life might head downhill in some ways that we take for granted at the moment -- another reason to love the life we're with, since it may be the high point of the rest of our life.

Anyway, these are my Thanksgiving thoughts.

Our dog, Mooka, is lying under the small table I'm typing on, making it difficult to get my legs in a comfortable position. But I love Mooka. I'd rather deal with not being able to straighten out my legs than not have Mooka in my life. 

(Getting Mooka to move would be another option. Except, I like it when she lays under the computer table, though her motivation probably is to stay close to the person who takes her on a late afternoon walk, after which she gets dog dinner.)

My wife thinks I'm crazy. This is normal, right?

I have direct experience of being married to only two women, Susan and Laurel. In between Susan and Laurel I got divorced, to set aside any conjecture about polygamy. 

So I'm having to extrapolate from this small sample size to the much larger universe of wives.

Both Susan and Laurel thought I was crazy. Not clinically, but in the sense that sometimes, and maybe often, the way I looked upon the world baffled them. My strong suspicion is that this is normal.

Meaning, almost all wives look upon their husbands as crazy. I hope so, because otherwise I'm a husbandly aberration.

This came to mind today as I was going off to fight in the Leaf War. Since 1990 we've lived on a non-easycare property in rural south Salem. Our house is surrounded by large oak and fir trees.

The firs drop needles all year round to some extent. The oaks drop their leaves in the fall, of course. This being late November, I've been battling the leaves for some time.

But here's the thing: I enjoy the fight. Heck, sometimes I can even muster up admiration for the opposing force, as I wrote about ten years ago in "The Tao of leaf ranking." 

Last weekend I slipped into my old habit briefly when I interrupted my work for lunch, then said to Laurel, "Well, I'm back to the leaf wars." That was the old me speaking. The new me manages to mostly look upon the leaves as friends who simply need some nudging to get them into their proper places, since they aren't able to move purposefully on their own.

I actually look foward to dealing with the leaves.

Now that I have a system, albeit a constantly evolving one in accord with the ever-changing Tao, the three hours or so it takes me to do a complete run-through of our yard (which needs to be repeated several times in November) is a largely pleasurable opportunity to follow the Zen'ish adage "chop wood, carry water, rake leaves."

Which should have been called The Tao of leaf blowing and raking, because my weapon of choice always has been a blower -- raking alone, given our yard, being way more than the proverbial "bringing a knife to a gun fight." It'd be like bringing a toothpick to a gun fight.

Now that I'm 72, Laurel has been saying more often, Are you sure you don't want to hire someone to deal with the leaves? I always reply, No way, as long as I can physically do this, I want to keep on doing it.

Well, actually I'm going to still want to handle the vast amount of leaves in our yard even if I'm physically incapable of doing the job.

This is something wives find difficult to understand about their husbands -- again, I'm assuming that my experience is typical of many or most male-female marriages.

By and large, Laurel is eager to turn over a household chore, like carpet cleaning, to someone else who is wiling to do it for money.

I'm fine with this also up to a point. It just seems that my attachment to certain manly chores, such as spending several hours dealing with fallen leaves in our large yard, is greater than Laurel's attachment to certain womanly chores.

That seems to be the root of the question about how crazy I am. I am really reluctant to have someone come to our house and do something that I'm fully capable of handling, even if that thing takes a lot of time or is somewhat dangerous. 

Like, cleaning our gutters by walking along the edge of our roof with my Stihl backpack blower. 

In both cases, gutter cleaning and leaf removal, I explain to Laurel that it is simpler to do it myself, in part because the jobs are much easier when leaves and other debris is dry.

And it's hard to predict when dry days are going to occur in the fall, since this is Oregon. So I can leap into action on a dry day, while we'd need to schedule somebody else well in advance, most likely, so it could be raining when they come to do the job.

But that's not the whole story. If it was, I wouldn't seem so crazy, because that reason is rational. 

The truth is, I'm irrationally attached to certain chores that I've been doing since Laurel and I got married thirty years ago. I don't want to sit in the house and watch someone else do those things. To paraphrase Charlton Heston, they're going to have to pry my Stihl backpack blower out of my cold dead hands. 

Which admittedly could literally happen if I keep on blowing out the gutters past the time I'm able to balance on the edge of our roof.

Anyway, it doesn't bother me when my wife thinks I'm crazy. I think the same about her at times.

Men and women are different. Heck, all people are different. It's amazing that we understand each other as well as we do, given that the only mind we ever know directly is our own -- and that only partially.

Wake up to Covid reality, fellow Oregonians

I'll be blunt.

If you're wearing a mask every time you're in a public place, are physically distancing, wash your hands regularly, and aren't socializing often with strangers or with large numbers of people you know -- good for you! 

But if you're not doing some or all of these things -- shame on you! 

You are either clueless about the skyrocketing Covid cases and hospitalizations both in Oregon and the United States as a whole, or you're so selfish, you don't care if you're helping prolong the suffering of this pandemic.

Here's a chart of the depressing reality here in Oregon, courtesy of the Washington Post. 

Oregon did really well following the March 23 stay-at-home order by Governor Brown. But the order only lasted for about six weeks. After that, there was a mid-summer spike in cases, then a moderate decline. 

Cases started rising again in mid-September. In late October they began to skyrocket far above anything seen since the beginning of the pandemic. Today Oregon had the all-time record of new cases, 1,122. Here's the Oregon Health Authority report.

It looks like a Covid vaccine will be widely available sometime in the first half of 2021. So this is a horrible time to be letting down our guard against the virus. 

I've read stories about how many American soldiers were killed in the last few days of World War I. It was painful to visualize people being so close to celebrating victory, only to die needlessly. 

Equally painful is reading about the Covid deaths in Oregon.

These are the most recent deaths. They include a 62-year-old man without underlying conditions. I'm 72. This man easily could have lived to my age, and likely beyond. Yet his life was cut short, as was the 35-year-old man who died from COVID-19. Think about this: almost everybody would do whatever they could to save the life of someone drowning. We value life. We fight premature death. Yet a disturbing number of Oregonians refuse to wear a mask and do the other things necessary to save lives from COVID-19.

Yes, deaths in Oregon haven't risen as rapidly as cases. But deaths lag cases and hospitalizations by several weeks. That's why Governor Brown said this today.

Here's the Washington Post Covid death chart for Oregon.

Note at the bottom of the chart that new daily reported cases rose 49% in the past week, while the number of tests reported rose only 16%. This shows that more testing isn't the reason for more cases being reported. Also note the high positive test rate of 13%. It should be below 5%.

Salem progressives go (mildly) wild for Biden's victory

Saturday, around the country and indeed the world, people danced in the streets after our country's major news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden. 

A monthly discussion group my wife and I are part of had scheduled a Covid-aware outdoor meeting for yesterday afternoon in the back yard of Russ and Delana Beaton in northeast Salem.

Laurel, my wife, did a little dance at one point.

But mostly the nine of us stood around a fire expertly started by Russ, when we weren't sitting around it. Here's photos of the mildly wild celebrating by a bunch of progressives who were thrilled that the Age of Trump had come to a screeching halt.

Though there had been showers earlier in the day, by our 2 pm start time the rain had stopped.

The sun even came out for a while, proving that Joe Biden's presidency will be marked by a radiant return of democracy, civility, and idealism to a nation that has suffered under Trump's mean-spirited authoritarianism for four long years.

Russ and Delana, shown here, thoughtfully provided some champagne and a non-alcoholic alternative for toasting purposes. Each of us got to say something about why we were happy with the election results.

I'm glad that we were able to have an in-person meeting on the Saturday after election day. Thank you Rain Gods! Getting together in this fashion seemed much preferable to a Zoom get-together, our backup plan, which lacks the intimacy and communal feeling of a physical face-to-face gathering.

Biden's election was a big deal for all of us, much more so than other elections.

The reason is obvious: no previous president has posed such a threat to American democracy. Trump is a wanna-be authoritarian, maybe even a dictator. If he had been re-elected, there would have been no bounds on his efforts to make the federal government a tool of his personal power.

Not surprisingly, post-election Trump is acting just as horribly as pre-election Trump. Even more so, in fact, since the Liar-in-Chief is asserting with zero evidence to back him up that the election was stolen from him. He can't say how, because there is no how to speak about.

Thus his pie-in-the-sky court cases are going to go exactly nowhere, as election law expert Marc Elias pithily points out.

Maureen Down, a New York Times opinion columnist, has this to say in her piece, "We Hereby Dump Trump."

We expected more of Donald Trump.

An epic, Jack Nicholson-in-the-Overlook-Hotel meltdown, not just Rose Garden-variety mewling. A conspiracy with grandiosity, not merely pathetic blathering about pointless lawsuits from his entitled children and oddballs Rudy Giuliani and Richard Grenell.

The president has had all this time to hatch a spidery plot to ruin democracy on the way out the door, and this is the best he can come up with?

The election has been stolen!

What’s your proof?

Because I’m losing.

At yesterday's discussion group meeting I talked some about the deliciously absurd press conference Rudy Giuliani held on Saturday at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia. 

Yes, not the Four Seasons Hotel, but Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

The Independent (a United Kingdom publication) has a must-read story about this fiasco. Here's some excerpts from the beautifully written "I saw Donald Trump's presidency come crashing down at Four Seasons Total Landscaping."

It began, as all good 2020 capers do, with a tweet from the president of the United States. It ended with his personal lawyer in the parking lot of a landscaping company, struggling to be heard over a man in his underpants shouting about George Soros.

They say a star burns brightest just before it dies, and this was the Trump presidency in all its flaming glory.

...I arrived to see a media scrum around a chain link fence that led into the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The building itself was one-storey, with a neat lawn and a row of hedges at the front. It was in that part of town that every town has, where businesses which have no right being grouped together nonetheless gather due to one reason or another — usually the cheap rent.

Across the street from Four Seasons Total Landscaping was a crematorium. Next door to it was an adult book store with a bright yellow sign that displayed its offerings: DVDs and lotions, novelty gifts, viewing booths. It was called Fantasy Island. In retrospect, it was an omen of what was to come.

...Private security guards hired by the president’s lawyers began to call in media outlets by name so they could enter the parking lot. When a media outlet was called, the gathered Trump supporters booed those which they felt had been unfair to the president. “Washington Post”.. “Boooo.” “Fox News”.... “Boooooo!” “CNN” “BOOOOOOOO!”

This was an American pantomime.

In the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot the cameras were assembled, the sound levels checked, the pens were poised and the gates were closed. The world’s press waited for the evidence that would blow this big scam wide open. The sun shone brightly.

Then, out of nowhere, a journalist with a European accent announced the news: “CNN called the presidency for Biden!”

The assembled journalists were paralysed for a moment. Phones started to ring and calls were made. Some were given instructions to leave and started to do so.

Soon after, the sound of car horns honking and cheers in the street began to drift into the backlot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

...Just a few minutes later Rudy Giuliani appeared. This was the second press conference Mr Giuliani had called in Philadelphia in a matter of days, both to make unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. The first took place at an airport hangar.

...Amid all the drama of the last 30 minutes, it appeared no one had told him that Joe Biden had been projected the winner of the election. A member of the press asked him how these lawsuits would overturn the call for the former vice president.

“Who was it called by?”

“All of them,” came the response.

Mr Giuliani took a moment before erupting in mock incredulity: “All the networks? Wow! All the networks!” He raised out his arms and looked to the sky, for a moment looking and sounding like Larry David doing a bit. But the wind had been sucked out of him. The smile had gone.