HinesSight

Photos of Chintimini Wildlife Center in Corvallis releasing Great Horned Owl

Last Friday my wife, Laurel, and I attended a Wings and Wine event at Cubanisimo Vineyards in West Salem.

The main focus of the "wings" part was the release of a Great Horned Owl that had finished its rehabilitation and was ready to be returned to the wild by the folks at the Chintimini Wildlife Center in Corvallis.

Join us for a memorable and unique opportunity to witness the remarkable journey of a rehabilitated Great Horned Owl as it takes flight and returns to the wild! This patient arrived at our center from West Salem, orphaned, hungry, and in need of help. We were unable to reunite this nestling owlet with its parents, so the journey of raising them to be wild began! Want to learn how we accomplished this patient’s successful rehabilitation story? On Friday, June 23rd at Cubanisimo Vineyards, 1754 Best Rd NW, Salem, OR 97304, you and your family can witness his return and learn how from 5:30 – 8:30 PM. 

Before I share photos of the release of the owl, here's some photos I took prior to the release when Chintimini staff showed off a couple of falcons and answered questions about the birds and their care.

I can't remember the name of this little falcon, so let's just call it Little Falcon. However, when it opened up its wings, it looked a lot more falcon'y.

The other falcon brought to the event was a peregrine falcon. It was much larger than Little Falcon. Wikipedia says that peregrines can achieve speeds over 200 mph when they dive, making them the fastest animal on earth. Its talons were scary looking. I asked if it needed to have them clipped. The answer was yes, since while a falcon is being rehabilitated, it isn't landing on rocks and such that keep talons shorter in the wild.

After drinking wine and admiring the falcons, it was time for the release of the Great Horned Owl. Since the orphaned owlet had come from West Salem, we were told that it was appropriate to release it in West Salem.

The owl had been put in a large cage as it grew up, which enabled it to fly around and practice hunting skills. Nonetheless, a Chintimini staff member said that it was impossible to predict what would happen when its cage was opened, as sometimes a bird will just sit there rather than fly off.

Us viewers of the owl release were given one task to do: stay silent. No talking before the release. No cheering after the release. The Great Horned Owl didn't need any distractions. Here we all are waiting expectantly.

The carrying case had to be unsealed, which entailed some cutting of zip ties, or whatever was holding the case shut.

The staff didn't need to worry about the owl remaining in its cage. It flew off like a rocket as soon as the door of the container was opened. You'll have to imagine a Great Horned Owl in rapid flight, as my iPhone 14 and my reflexes were utterly incapable of capturing the moment.

Since there were so many avid bird watchers at the event, that explained the impressive cameras I saw some people carrying. Perhaps an expert photographer caught the owl in flight.

Here's where the Great Horned Owl headed off to so quickly, one of the tall fir trees adjacent to the vineyard. Interestingly, as soon as the owl landed in the trees, a blackbird flew from the vineyard to the owl's location. I recall that staff said blackbirds are territorial. But since the owl is much larger than a blackbird, it wasn't going to feel threatened.

Videos and photos of 2023 Salem World Beat festival

The World Beat festival is always one of my favorite events in Salem. This year it didn't disappoint. I went this afternoon, Saturday. There's another day to the festival, so go on Sunday if you can.

It's a marvelous celebration of diversity.

I love how the booths -- and the people attending to them -- run the gamut of the world. Asia Pacific, European, Africa and Middle East, Americas. There's food, crafts, clothing, and performances representing each of these festival areas.

The Main Stage Amphitheater is where the biggest performances are. I happened by when an Aztec Dance group, Ameyalmatzatl Citlatonal, was just entering the stage. Here's a video I made of the colorful smoke-filled ceremony that preceded their true dancing.

I also took some photos with my iPhone 14 which turned out pretty well, given that I wasn't super close to the stage.

I also enjoyed watching the Miz La Fontaine Bollywood dancers. I love the music, energy, and style of Bollywood. This routine that I made a video of has a bit of disco feel mixed in at one point. I can't embed it in this post for some reason, maybe because the music was copyrighted. You can watch it on You Tube.

This booth caught my eye. Some kids were enjoying it also.


lt seemed like there were more people at the World Beat festival this year. But I recall that last year it was hotter, while today it was very pleasant, around 80.

I rarely eat crepes, but near the end of my World Beat visit I couldn't resist trying the Red Berry from this Eugene-based food truck. What I learned is that when a just-made crepe is handed to you all folded up in a cardboard cone, it's damn hot. Also, that eating a rolled up crepe can be messier than consuming one on a plate. Fortunately, the red berry stains on my lime-green t-shirt came out after some scrubbing when I got home .


l enjoy walking through this red structure that contrasts so nicely with the green trees. Reminds me of how my t-shirt looked after eating the crepe, now that I think about it.

Titanic submersible tragedy shows need for regulation

Today we learned that the five men who were on the Titan, a submersible craft that was on its way to the wreck of the Titanic, are dead after the Titan imploded under the tremendous pressures in the ocean depths.

The good news is that the five men must have been killed instantly. I and countless others had been having waking nightmares about their slow death from lack of oxygen as they sat on the ocean floor 12,500 feet from the surface.

Now it appears that the submersible imploded at the same time its mother ship lost contact with the Titan, about an hour and forty-five minutes into its two and half hour descent to the Titanic. So there must have been some kind of structural failure that led to the Titan breaking into pieces and creating a large debris field near the wreckage of the Titanic. 

The United States Navy is reporting that secret Navy sensors detected the implosion at about the time communication with the Titan was lost. 

The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.

But with no other indications of a catastrophe, one of the officials said, the search was continued.

The data from the sensors was combined with information from airborne Navy P-8 surveillance planes and sonar buoys on the surface to triangulate the approximate location of the Titan, one of the officials said. The analysis of undersea acoustic data and information about the location of the noise were then passed on to the Coast Guard official in charge of the search, Rear Adm. John Mauger.

We shouldn't view this catastrophe as akin to climbers being killed on Mt. Everest or people dying in the course of undertaking some other dangerous activity. That way of looking at it ignores the important differences with the submersible disaster. 

For one thing, it's a big stretch for OceanGate, the company that owned and operated the Titan, to call those on the submersible "mission specialists." Though several had extensive experience with deep sea dives, including the CEO and co-founder of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, who was the pilot of the submersible, two were simply tourists who paid $250,000 each to take the trip.

It pains me to see their photo. The father and son must have viewed this as the biggest adventure of their lifetime. Instead it turned out to be the last thing they'd ever do in life: die almost instantly as the Titan burst apart.

Shahzada and Suleman Dawood surely recognized that the descent to the Titanic was risky. But probably they weren't aware that OceanGate and Stockton Rush had constructed the Titan without going through usual procedures for testing and certifying a submersible of this sort.

A CNN story describes the unnecessary risk-taking with the lives of paying passengers.

The focus on the vessel has renewed criticisms of OceanGate’s approach to safety from employees and other industry leaders. The 23,000-pound deep-sea vessel was made of an experimental combination of carbon fiber and titanium and relied on decidedly low-tech parts, such as a video game controller.

...The implosion of the Titan and deaths of those on board has put its operator’s safety procedures under the microscope.

Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, told a Mexican travel blogger in 2021 he wanted to be known as an innovator who broke the rules.

“I think it was (US Army) Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’” Rush told Alan Estrada, who documented his trip to the Titanic, including an aborted attempt in July 2021 before a successful visit in 2022.

“And you know,” Rush added, “I’ve broken some rules to make this.”

At least two former OceanGate employees years ago expressed safety concerns about the vessel’s hull, including the thickness of the material used and testing procedures, CNN has learned.

OceanGate Expeditions strayed from industry norms by declining a voluntary, rigorous safety review of the vessel, according to an industry leader. If the company had pursued a certification review “some of this may have been avoided,” Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society told CNN on Wednesday.

The company also faced a series of mechanical problems and inclement weather conditions that forced the cancellation or delays of trips in recent years, according to court records. The scuttled excursions led to a pair of lawsuits in which some high-paying customers sought to recoup the cost of trips they said they didn’t take. The complaints alleged that the company overstated its ability to reach the Titanic wreckage.

OceanGate did not respond to the claims in court and could not be reached for comment.

Some expeditions were delayed after OceanGate was forced to rebuild the Titan’s hull because it showed “cyclic fatigue” and wouldn’t be able to travel deep enough to reach the Titanic’s wreckage, according to a 2020 article by GeekWire, which interviewed the company’s CEO.

Several reporters who boarded the Titan noted some of these issues.

For one, Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown” host Josh Gates and his team decided after a 2021 test dive of the Titan against filming a segment on the vessel as it “became clear to us at that time that there was a lot that needed to be worked out with the sub,” he said.

A lot of the systems worked but a lot of them really didn’t. We had issues with thrusters and issues with computer control and things like that. Ultimately, it was a challenging dive,” Gates told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday.

“We were inside Titan for two or three hours, and there were a lot of things that weren’t really ready for prime time, it seemed,” he said.

If Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who was so proud of breaking rules when it came to deep sea exploration, had been the only person to die in the submersible that almost certainly imploded because of design/construction rule-breaking, we could say that he died as he lived -- taking risks.

But Rush's rule-breaking caused four other people to die with him also. And that should tarnish Rush's legacy big time. If a climber on Mt. Everest falls to their death after attempting an unnecessarily risky climbing move, fine, they died doing what they loved. But if that risky move causes four other people roped to them to die also, then the climber deserves a huge amount of criticism.

Hopefully this tragedy will lead to greater regulation of submersibles, especially those being used to take paying customers to ocean depths. Those who say that government regulation isn't necessary are dead wrong. 

In this case, five deaths wrong.

Just as I thought, the 1970s were wet in Oregon and recent years dry

Having reached the age when I'm inclined to talk about the "good old days" as if they were truly good (usually they weren't), I'm understandably cautious about claiming that Oregon was much wetter when I moved here in 1971.

That's sort of like us old folks blabbing on about walking to school in the snow while those dang young'uns nowadays get driven in heated vehicles. OK, I grew up in a part of California where it never snowed, so that's a bad example for me.

But I do have distinct memories of much more intense rain here in western Oregon during the 1970s and 1980s compared to now. Storm after storm would roll in from the Pacific, causing it to rain for weeks on end sometimes.

That happens rarely now. Not at all in recent years. At least, that's how I recall things. So to check my memory, I fired up Google and asked "has Oregon weather changed since the 1970s." Here's what I found out.

Regarding precipitation, the section on drought in the Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment report of January 2023 contained this interesting chart.

It shows how precipitation in Oregon compares to the 1901-2000 average for every water year from 1895 to 2021. (I'm pretty sure the water year is from October to September.)

A green bar means precipitation in that year was above the long term average. A brown bar means precipitation in that year was below the long term average. The 1920s and 1930s were decidedly dry. This coincides with the dust bowl in the midwest, a horrendous drought.

The 1970s were quite wet in Oregon. Seven of the ten years were above the long term average. The 1980s had six years above average, and the 1990s six years above average, with 1996 being the wettest year ever. I remember 1996 well, as the very heavy winter rain caused two very large oak trees on our rural property to topple over.

By contrast, the 2000s were very dry in Oregon, with only one year out of ten having above average precipitation. The 2010s saw six wetter than average years. But so far in the 2020s, both 2020 and 2021 were drier than average, with 2021 being the fourth driest year since 1970, over 50 years ago.

The report says, "In 17 of the last 23 water years, Oregon’s precipitation was below average." So yeah, Oregon has been getting drier.

Regarding temperature, not surprisingly the Stacker web site shows Oregon as warming 1.8 degrees since 1970. However of the 48 states that have state-level temperature data (Hawaii and Alaska don't), Oregon ranked 46th in temperature change.

Meaning, every other state in the lower 48 other than Washington and Idah0 has experienced a greater increase in temperature than Oregon. So that's a benefit of living in the Pacific Northwest. We're getting hotter, but not so much comparatively. Salem, though, apparently has been experiencing more of an increase in temperature than Portland or Eugene.

A queer girl talks about being mistreated in Keizer

Thanks to the Salem-Keizer Proletariat substack writer, who on June 8 published "Keizer marks Pride Month with powerful call to do better," I learned about a moving example of speaking truth to power by McNary student Nevaeh Music -- who addressed the Keizer City Council at the invitation of Mayor Kathy Clark.

Below is an excerpt from this post.

Music is Clark’s youth appointee to the city’s Community Diversity Engagement Committee - the only youth position in Keizer city government with committee voting power.

Clark indicated Music was invited to speak to the Council about Pride Month. But it was clear Music intended to use her time to instead tell an uncomfortable truth about Keizer, and a stern reminder to do better. 

Here’s what Music said: (linked here and transcribed below)

You can read what Music said on the Salem-Keizer Proletariat post. The link above will take you to a YouTube video of the city council meeting that begins with Music's remarks. I've embedded the video below.

It's clear from Music's remarks that homophobia isn't just a vestige of our country's bigoted past, but is alive and well in Keizer. And not only there, but just about everywhere. Dislike of the LGBTQ community just isn't as obvious in Oregon as it used to be.

That's progress. Yet Nevaeh Music reminds us of how much more remains to be done. By all of us.

I wrote about this yesterday on my Church of the Churchless blog in a post I called The beauty of "We don't not care" rather than "We don't care."  Here's an excerpt, along with the video I shared.

Sometimes a television program can get a moral point across in a few minutes of entertainment that is more clear and convincing than a lengthy ethical treatise.

That happened to me last night when my wife and I were watching an episode of season 3 of Ted Lasso on AppleTV+.

Before I share a clip of that scene, a bit of background. 

Colin, one of the soccer (football, to most of the world) players on the professional team Lasso is coaching, inadvertently revealed that he was gay, homosexual, to the team captain, Isaac, when Isaac saw some photos on Colin's phone.

Isaac then gave Colin the cold shoulder, ignoring him and even acting nasty toward him during the first half of their soccer match. I thought Isaac was being homophobic. Not true. We later learn that Isaac was upset that Colin hadn't told him he was gay.

At halftime, after the team had played poorly, a fan yelled that they were all a bunch of faggots -- a derogatory term for a male homosexual. That set Isaac off. He charged into the seats, accosting the fan, which led to him getting a red card and being ejected from the game.

During the team's halftime meeting, Lasso asked why Isaac acted that way. Someone said that maybe it was because Isaac was gay. But Colin then revealed to the team for the first time that he was gay.

The reaction from team members: "We don't care." That spurred Ted Lasso to relate one of his folksy stories in order to convey a message to his team.

What struck me about this little speech was how while "We don't care" was supposed to express support for Colin, that actually was a weak gesture for their gay teammate. 

Sure, we don't care that you're gay is much better than we dislike that you're gay, but it's way worse than we care about you and will support you. Which is why Lasso put it as "We don't not care." Because they actually do care about Colin.

The meaning I took away from this is that we shouldn't sit on the sidelines when someone or something we care about is being attacked or threatened or denigrated or ignored.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has screwed up Hollywood

I'm no superhero fan when it comes to movies. I can't understand their appeal, though I readily admit that I've only seen the first Wonder Woman movie, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Black Panther movie.

When someone in my Tai Chi class asks me if I've seen the newest Guardian of the Galaxy movie, what goes through my mind is, Good god, no; if I was confined to solitary confinement and had a choice between seeing Guardian of the Galaxy or staring blankly into space, I'd choose the blank stare.

But instead I just say, "I'm not into superhero movies. Is this one any good?" That stimulates an excited description with names of characters like Thor I've vaguely heard mentioned, but couldn't care less about. 

After all, I'm 74, not seven. I grew up watching Superman on a black and white television. I enjoyed his exploits. Until I became old enough to appreciate different sorts of TV shows and movies. So it baffles me how so many adults these days are obsessed with comic book characters.

A story in the June 12 issue of The New Yorker both explained the appeal of one set of superhero movies, the Marvel variety, and the deleterious effect these movies have had on other kinds of movie-making. Here's some excerpts from Michael Schulman's How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood.

Whether you have spent the past decade and a half avoiding Marvel movies like scabies or are in so deep that you can expound on the Sokovia Accords, it is impossible to escape the films’ intergalactic reach.

Collectively, the M.C.U. [Marvel Cinematic Universe] movies—the thirty-second, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” opened in May—have grossed more than twenty-nine billion dollars, making the franchise the most successful in entertainment history. The deluge of content extends to TV series and specials, with an international fan base that scours every teaser and corporate shakeup for clues about what’s coming next.

As in the comics, the M.C.U.’s chief innovation is a shared fictional canvas, where Spider-Man can call on Doctor Strange, and Iron Man can battle Thor’s wily brother. Hollywood has always had sequels, but the M.C.U. is a web of interconnecting plots: new characters are introduced, either in their own movies or as side players in someone else’s, then collide in climactic Avengers films.

In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” gave Hollywood a new model for making money: the endlessly promoted summer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied the formula, so that each blockbuster begets another. David Crow, a senior editor for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a “roadmap for a product that never ends.”

Twenty years ago, few people would have bet that a struggling comic-book company would turn a bunch of second-string superheroes into movie icons—much less swallow the film industry whole.

Yet the Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes. The shift has come at a perilous time for moviegoing.

Audiences, especially since the pandemic, are seeing fewer films in the theatre and streaming more from home, forcing studios to lean on I.P.-driven tentpoles like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine, which studies audience behavior, pointed to Marvel’s sense of “elevated fun” to explain why it gets people to the theatre: “They’re carnival rides, and they’re hefty carnival rides.”

Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked the air out of” more human-scaled entertainments. Whole species of movies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have become endangered, since audiences are happy to wait and stream “Tár” or “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” or to get their grownup kicks from such series as “Succession” or “The White Lotus.”

Yet even prestige television has become overrun with Marvel, “Star Wars,” and “The Lord of the Rings” series, which use the small screen to map out new corners of their trademarked galaxies. Hollywood writers, who are currently striking over the constricted economics of streaming, also complain of the constricted imaginations of TV executives: instead of searching for the next “Mad Men,” they’re hunting for Batman spinoffs.

Marvel’s fanciful house style has rubbed off even on Oscar winners. This year’s Best Picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” had a Marvel-ish meld of walloping action, goofy humor, and multiverse mythology; it could have easily functioned as the origin story for a new Avenger. Marvel, meanwhile, has colonized nearly every other genre.

“WandaVision” was a pastiche of classic sitcoms; “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” was a feminist legal comedy. Detractors see the brand’s something-for-everyone approach as nefarious. An executive at a rival studio, who called the M.C.U. “the Death of All Cinema,” told me that the dominance of Marvel movies “has served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie.” His studio’s comedies had been struggling at the box office, and he groused, “If people want a comedy, they’re going to go see ‘Thor’ or ‘Ant-Man’ as their comedy now.”

This is sad for movie lovers like me who aren't into comic books adapted for the big screen. The only good news I could find in The New Yorker story came near the end of it.

All this followed Iger’s comments, at an investor conference, that Disney would reduce its content, including endless Marvel retreads. “Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance?” he said. With all the oversaturation, palace intrigue, and brand deterioration, the M.C.U. juggernaut finally appeared to be showing cracks.

The release, last month, of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”—which grossed twenty-eight million dollars less on its opening weekend than the previous installment—did little to dispel the feeling that Marvel fatigue is real, and that Feige is spread too thin for the avalanche of content.

“The one downside to Marvel is that it all bottlenecks at Kevin,” the former executive said. “I think everyone’s agreeing that this is not the optimal amount of stuff.” Scientists predict that our own universe will begin to contract in the next hundred million years; the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having reached its outer limits, may be subject to a similar law of nature.

Hoping for some Oregon State magic in NCAA baseball playoffs

Once again, I've become an Oregon State baseball fan now that the NCAA playoffs have begun. I would have started my fandom earlier, but DirecTV still doesn't carry the Pac12 Networks, so I've got no way to watch most the games in the regular season.

Well, I've also become an Oregon baseball fan, since they too are in the playoffs.

And at the moment, faring better than Oregon State -- which lost to LSU today, so that means Oregon State has to beat Sam Houston tonight (score is 3-1 in OSU's favor at the moment), then beat LSU twice tomorrow to make it to the super regionals.

Oregon just has to beat Xavier to be in the super regionals. With the score 10-1 in the 7th inning, things are looking good for Oregon.

But I'm not counting Oregon State out. Back in 2018 OSU lost the first game in the College World Series, which put it in the loser's bracket. But as I wrote about in "Watching the Oregon State baseball team is better than watching a thriller," they won four games in a row to make it into the World Series final.

This year, Oregon State won its first game in the regional series, so all OSU has to do, as noted above, is win three games in a row over about 24 hours to get into a super regional matchup. Tough to accomplish, but not impossible.

I quickly discovered that most of the playoff games featuring Oregon State and Oregon are only being shown on ESPN+. Because I'm not a huge sports fan, most of the sports I want to watch is shown on channels I get on DirecTV, aside from the Pac12 Networks.

Because I wanted to follow Oregon State and Oregon in the baseball playoffs, I finally paid attention to ESPN+, which I always thought was another free channel in the ESPN lineup. Nope. It costs, even if you already have a subscription to ESPN.

I didn't feel like forking over $99 a year just for ESPN+. Then I remembered that we have Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions. Disney owns ESPN and offers a package deal for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+.

After a bit of difficulty figuring out how to sign up for that package, I was able to log into my Hulu account and change it to the Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ package. I kept our ad-free subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu. ESPN+ only comes with ads.

It turned out that after our annual subscription to Disney+ was factored in, I'll be paying $9 a month for the package. That's less than what it cost just for ad-free Hulu, so I'm getting ESPN+ for free. Or actually less than free.

Even so, as soon as I started watching the first Oregon State playoff game, Sam Houston scored two runs in the top of the first inning, briefly making me wonder if Oregon State was going to get blown out. Pleasingly, the opposite happened, with Oregon State scoring the next 18 runs, winning 18-2.

Tonight Oregon State is still leading 3-1 in the bottom of the 7th. Hopefully their lead will hold up, as I'd like to see them beat LSU at least once tomorrow. Twice would be amazing.