HinesSight

Amazon Pharmacy just worked well for me

I'm a big fan of Amazon. Almost am ashamed to admit it, given how huge Amazon is and the many tales of how it screws over employees and businesses it doesn't want competing with its brand products.

But there's no doubt that Amazon is amazingly efficient.

I have Amazon Prime. My orders arrive promptly, sometimes the next day, with very few errors. It's just so damn easy to get stuff from Amazon instead of heading into town, a 20 minute drive away, and looking for something that may or may not be on a store shelf. Plus, I get a lot of benefit from reading customer reviews of products I'm contemplating buying.

So I decided to give Amazon Pharmacy a try. 

At my last primary care doctor visit I left with a prescription for daily Tadalafil, the 5 mg generic version of Cialis. In addition to its well-known use for erectile dysfunction, Tadalafil is prescribed for treatment of an enlarged prostate, which I have. 

I got a paper copy of the prescription because I wasn't sure where I wanted to get it filled. I'd asked the small local pharmacy that my wife and I use to let me know what it would cost for a 90 day supply of Tadalafil. Never got a response to the text I sent, which made me think that the cost would be a lot.

My next step was to go to our nearest Walgreens. I showed the person at the pharmacy window the prescription, and they scanned it into their system. I said that I'd filled some other prescriptions there, so they have my Regence MedAdvantage insurance information.

After some clicking away, the Walgreen's staffer said that my insurance didn't cover Tadalafil. I asked what the cost would be if I paid for it myself. Can't recall the exact amount, but it was about $840 for a 90 day supply.

Wow. For a generic. I said I'd have to think about this and took the prescription back. The cost quoted by a Canada pharmacy was about $140 for a 90 day supply, which shows how crazily expensive drugs can be in the United States.

I then remembered that Amazon had a pharmacy. It was easy to sign up for Amazon Pharmacy given that I was already a regular customer with Amazon Prime. The cost of prescription drugs is easy to find since all you have to do is type it into the usual Amazon search box. 

This is what I found for daily Tadalafil, 90 day supply.

I decided to dip my prescription feet in the Amazon waters. I sent a message to my primary care provider asking that an electronic prescription for my Tadalafil be sent to Amazon, using the phone and fax numbers provided by Amazon Pharmacy.

That just took a few days. Amazon Pharmacy then notified me that the prescription had been received. Soon after I got an email saying that, not surprisingly, my insurance wouldn't cover the prescription. I was asked if I wanted to make an order and pay out-of-pocket. 

Sure. A few clicks later I'd completed the order and almost immediately got this message from Amazon.

That message came on January 30. The next day, today, January 31, the Tadalafil was delivered to my doorstep. The cost was $29.50 rather than the quoted $26.60, but that's no big deal. The bottle had an expiration date of January 30, 2025 and said that the manufacturer was Solco Healthcare, which appears to be a reputable distributor of generics.

So my first experience with Amazon Pharmacy was very positive. I looked at some reviews of Amazon Pharmacy and many of them were negative. However, quite a few of them were from the early days of Amazon Pharmacy, so I suspect some of those initial problems have been resolved.

My other prescriptions aren't nearly as expensive, which means I'll likely stick with a local pharmacy for them, at least for now. Amazon Pharmacy can sure save people a lot of money on certain prescriptions, though, that's for sure.

I like to watch TV with subtitles on. Half of Americans agree with me.

My wife, Laurel, and I agree about most things. That's one reason we've been married for 33 years. But we differ when it comes to watching television with subtitles (a.k.a. closed captioning) on. 

I enjoy subtitles considerably more than Laurel does. So when I'm watching on my own, I almost always turn subtitles on, especially with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. With sporting events and news programs, I usually leave subtitles off.

Though I'm 75, firmly in the Baby Boomer generation, not being able to hear dialog isn't why I like subtitles. I can hear what actors are saying just fine. It's not understanding what they're saying that drives me to tell the voice command on our Apple TV device "subtitles on."

British accents are the worst for me. For Laurel also, which is why we agreed that subtitles were a must for the Ted Lasso series, as it was set in England. 

I find that the main benefit of subtitles is being able to understand the plot much more easily. Too often actors either mumble their way through an important scene, or lower their voices almost to a whisper. I don't find subtitles to be a distraction, though my wife does.

It turns out that I have a lot of company when it comes to liking subtitles. About half of Americans say they use subtitles most of the time, according to a survey of 1,200 people. 

It's interesting that the younger you are, the more likely you use subtitles. Us baby boomers are the least likely to use them.

Here's the pros and cons of subtitles, according to survey respondents. 

Oregon needs to bury more power lines. But here's why we won't.

I have a friend who was born in Germany. She tells me that in Europe, almost all power lines are buried. She can't understand why here in Oregon, so many power lines are strung along wooden poles -- a "technology" dating from the 1800's when telegraph lines used the same approach.

After every major disastrous weather event in our area, such as the high winds and freezing rain that caused massive problems in the Portland area recently, along with freezing rain that decimated the Eugene area, there's calls for our power companies (PGE and Pacific Power, mainly) to do a better job of both preventing damage to lines and restoring service more rapidly.

Since my neighborhood in rural south Salem was without power for eleven days in 2021 due to a serious ice storm, I'd love it if PGE buried the power lines that supply electricity to the several hundred homes in our area that regularly lose power, usually due to tree branches, or an entire tree, taking a line down.

Today a letter to the editor in the Sunday Oregonian resonated with me, big-time.

When are we, as a society, going to decide to make it a priority to keep people safe by changing the codes and paying the price to bury power lines? (“Portland winter storm: Power outages, grounded planes, dangerous roads continue Wednesday,” Jan. 17). For now, I am living in a country and a city where each citizen is responsible for themselves. I am fortunate to have great neighbors and friends who look out for each other. I am thinking about the many people who are not as lucky as I am.

I am safe but angry. I have wood for the fireplace. I dug my camping stove out of the earthquake kit. In the days before the storm, I went grocery shopping and charged the lantern and the power bank. Unlike my neighbors, I still have water and no tree has landed on my house.

What makes me angry is that all of the above was expected, as it is the same playbook with each major storm. I am 71 years old and each storm is more difficult to bear than the last one. I have lived in Canada with blizzards and temperatures as low as -25 degrees Fahrenheit, but never lost power. I have lived in the Swiss mountains with blizzards and never lost power.

I have been without power since 9 a.m. on Saturday morning. I abandoned my house on Monday morning, when the temperature inside the house got down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit and even a day later, I still did not have an estimate for when my power would be restored.

Irene Vlach, Portland

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that very many existing above-ground power lines in Oregon are going to be buried anytime soon. A post-ice storm Willamette Week article from February 2021, "Why Don't We Put Our Electric Lines Underground?", provided the simple answer in response to a reader's question.

You'd think that if anyone would be motivated to put their power lines underground, it would be fire-ravaged California.

And yet it hasn't happened. It also hasn't happened in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina or, as you point out, in ice-storm-ravaged Oregon. The reason, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, is money.

Here's the problem: Building a mile of overhead transmission line costs about $800,000. Building a mile of underground power line, meanwhile, costs $3 million to $4 million. And, of course, leaving a mile of existing line right where it is and going out for a beer costs approximately $6, plus you get a beer. You don't have to be Elon Musk to see how the incentives pencil out in this situation.

Okay, so what's the next best option, if burying existing lines isn't going to happen? Well, PGE has been doing a decent job at trimming trees that pose a risk to power lines. Recently I was pleased to see crews from Asplundh doing their tree-trimming thing along Liberty Road, where our neighborhood's electricity comes from.

PGE should be even more aggressive in its tree management.

It's good to trim branches when an electrical line passes close to a tree, but even better is taking down an entire tree if it poses a significant risk to the line. Nobody likes to lose a tree on their property. But nobody likes to go without electricity for days, which can happen when trees topple because of freezing rain, heavy snow, or high wind.

If PGE and other Oregon utilities don't have enough money to bury power lines, then they should do a better job of preventing damage to above-ground lines. An editorial in today's Oregonian, "Oregonians must build a culture of resilience,"  makes some great points.

Last week’s winter storm took a tragic toll on our state. At least 13 Oregonians died due to hypothermia, falling trees, fire and electrocution from fallen power lines ­– brutal circumstances in which vulnerability and bad luck combined to horrific effect.

The misery did not end there as tens of thousands of people across western Oregon endured days-long power outages in subfreezing temperatures. Homeless Oregonians in the Portland area sought refuge in warming shelters only to be sent back out into frigid temperatures later in the week. With high winds and low temperatures, trees toppled onto houses while frozen pipes burst, flooding homes and businesses. A forecast of rain and 40-degrees never sounded so good.

Electric utilities, county officials and the many agencies involved in emergency services will be reviewing their response in the coming days and weeks. But on a local, regional and state level, from individual households to power companies, Oregon needs to significantly up its preparation game. With such extreme weather events expected to become more common in our changing climate, we are witnessing the limits of our infrastructure and the vast needs left unmet. And with significant risk of a massive subduction zone earthquake hitting the Northwest, we must use this storm as motivation to build a culture of resilience.

That should start with a robust evaluation by regulatory and emergency management agencies of utilities’ performance and vulnerabilities. For days, even as much of the country struggled with winter weather disruptions, Oregon led the nation in number of outages, based on poweroutage.us reports. The cause of outages, barriers to restoring service, difficulties in communication all require greater analysis of what, if anything, can be changed, as well as a focus on tree health and maintenance.

Statesman Journal screws up Salem's Tuesday ice storm forecast

I'm seeing a pattern here. Last Saturday I wrote a post, "Portland's Channel 12 gets Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong."

My gripe was that Channel 12's Mark Nelsen said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain on Saturday, January 13. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021. 

Actually, the National Weather Service was forecasting much less freezing rain for the Salem area.

That turned out to be correct, as there was little freezing rain in our area on Saturday, with no power outages, so far as I know. So Nelsen broadcast a sensationalized forecast that freaked people out, but didn't come to pass.

Fast forward to Monday, January 15, when another ice storm was being forecasted on Tuesday.

Basically the same thing happened with a Salem Statesman Journal story by Zach Urness. I made a screenshot of how the online story started out, because I suspected Urness also was sensationalizing the impact of the storm -- probably for the same reason Nelsen did, to garner more audience attention. You know, clicks, which generate advertising revenue.

As you can read below, Urness claimed that the National Weather Service was forecasting from a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of ice for the area from Salem/Corvallis up to Portland. The Statesman Journal headline spoke of a major ice storm being likely for the Willamette Valley on Tuesday.

Actually, that wasn't true. Urness should have checked more National Weather Service sources than merely talking with the National Weather Service forecaster quoted in the story and including a NWS graphic that was on the site formerly known as Twitter, and he should have included details in his story about the amount of freezing rain being forecast for Salem.

This is what the National Weather Service web site was forecasting for Salem on Monday, when the Statesman Journal story appeared online. The Tuesday ice accumulation was shown as 0.1 to 0.3 of an inch possible, with less than 0.1 of an inch added Tuesday night.

So there wasn't a quarter to three quarters of an inch forecasted for Salem, as the Statesman Journal story implied. The amount being forecasted was a bit more than a tenth of an inch to a bit more than three tenths of an inch. In reality, on Tuesday the Salem area got around a tenth of an inch, to my understanding. That was the case at our house in rural south Salem.

It also appears that Urness either didn't read the National Weather Service Ice Storm Warning issued at 2:26 pm on Monday, January 15 or he didn't pay attention to it. Though it came out before his story was published, the Ice Storm Warning said that Salem and other central/south Willamette Valley cities could expect total ice accumulations of one tenth to two tenths of an inch.

That's less than the quarter of an inch that Urness said in his story was the low-end of the National Weather Service forecast, which obviously wasn't true.

All in all, then, this was shoddy reporting by Urness. He created a lot of anxiety among the (thankfully few) Salem residents who still read the Statesman Journal by failing to present all the facts about how much ice was being forecasted by the National Weather Service for our area. Which is too bad, because I enjoy Urness' stories about the Oregon outdoors and he's a good writer.

Portland's Channel 12 got Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong

Being a weather geek of sorts, I'm well aware that forecasting is an uncertain science. It's about probabilities and models, not mathematical precision. 

All I ask is that professional weather forecasters recognize when they can be wrong, and communicate that to the public as clearly as possible. 

Which Mark Nelsen, the main KPTV weather guy at Portland's Channel 12, failed to do Friday night, the day before today's winter storm was to hit Oregon. This annoyed me.

After all, on Thursday I'd written this blog post: "Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct." It started out with:

I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick. 

Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes! 

I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge). 

I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.

Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.

That hope came true. With a bit over an hour left until the NWS Winter Storm Warning expires tonight, our home in rural south Salem has gotten about 1 1/2 inches of snow and quite a bit of sleet in the form of tiny ice pellets. Freezing rain accumulation was just about zero.

Which fit with this portion of the Thursday afternoon version of the Winter Storm Warning:

That forecast was right on, by and large. Salem, in the central Willamette Valley, got mostly snow and a small amount of freezing rain. Now, the Friday version of the NWS Winter Storm Warning did have a forecast for higher freezing rain amounts in our area, a quarter of an inch to half an inch.

This worried me, but I figured that since Salem was on the borderline of the freezing rain area, chances were we'd get closer to .25/inch than .50/inch. Bad, yet not horrible. 

However, Friday night my wife and I watched the 11 pm news on KPTV. We've been doing this most nights since DirecTV got into a dispute with the owner of KGW and took Channel 8 off the air. That was our favorite weather forecast. We enjoyed Mark Nelsen's forecasts on KPTV too, though.

Except for Friday.

That was when Nelsen went way overboard on KPTV's First Alert Weather Day schtick. For he said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021. 

Well, that was when our home was without electricity for twelve freaking days. My wife was shocked. I told her that an inch of freezing rain was way more than what the National Weather Service was forecasting, so I didn't think what Nelsen said would come true.

Of course, it didn't. However, that didn't stop me from lying in bed Friday night worrying about how we'd cope with another lengthy power outage. Heck, being in our mid-70s, some days we have difficulty coping with life (and our health issues) when the weather is just fine.

Saturday morning, today, Nelsen wrote a weather summary for the impending storm. It said in part:

• Today features mainly freezing rain and ice pellets south of the metro area down to Eugene. Expect power outages due to thick ice glazing. All models point to a destructive ice storm the next 12 hours in the Willamette Valley, Coast Range, and northern Oregon coastline.

Well, it probably is true that the weather models Nelsen looked at Saturday morning said that a destructive ice storm was going to hit the Willamette Valley. But Wednesday the National Weather Service had forecasted just a tenth of an inch of freezing rain, and on Saturday the amount was .25 to .50 an inch in the Willamette Valley, not the inch Nelsen was forecasting. 

At the very least, Nelsen should have told his viewers that there was considerable uncertainty in how much freezing rain would fall in the Salem area, with an inch being a worst-case scenario that had a good chance of not happening.

Look, I understand that local news on television is subject to the same pressures to keep viewers interested and engaged that social media like Facebook and Twitter are. Advertisers want as many eyes as possible on their ads. To get viewers, news outlets have to sensationalize things. As the old saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads" (the newscast). 

However, I see local news weather people as needing to adhere to a higher standard. Accuracy should be job #1. Entertainment value should be a distant second priority. Really low temperatures (its 18 right now in Salem) combined with a lot of freezing rain producing power outages is a scary proposition. 

If that's a near-certainty, fine. Mark Nelsen should have spoken the truth. But it turned out that not only wasn't there an inch of freezing rain in the Salem area, there was very little. Nelsen's confidence in his forecast was misplaced. 

So today I shifted our DirecTV DVR to start recording the Channel 2 news at 11 pm. For it will take a while for me to forget how badly Nelsen botched the freezing rain forecast for our area.

Oh, almost forget to mention, for the benefit of other weather geeks, that after it was clear that the National Weather Service did the best job in forecasting the winter storm, I searched for an iPhone app that made use of NWS data and came up with the National Weather Forecast Data app.

It isn't the most attractive or well designed weather app, but it packages NWS data in an easy to use format and has lots of information that isn't available on other weather apps. For example, it has a "Discussion" section where detailed analyses written by regional NWS offices can be read. Geeky for sure, which is why I like this app and have paid $11 for a year's subscription to the Pro version.

Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct

I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick. 

Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes! 

I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge). 

I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.

Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.

That hope isn't unwarranted. After all, my understanding is that the National Weather Service is the data source for most private sector forecasts.

Those private forecasts, which include the apps on my iPhone, tend to overestimate bad weather, from what I've heard.

The reason is that people get more upset if they're planning an outdoor party, say, and an app says that day will be warm and dry, then it turns out to be cool and rainy, compared to the app saying the day will be cool and rainy and it turns out to be warm and dry. 

Here's the current National Weather Service forecast for Friday and Saturday in Salem.

No mention of freezing rain, which is way worse than snow. Total snow and sleet accumulation is 2 to 3 inches. Not a huge deal for me, especially since I drive a Subaru Crosstrek with winter tires.

This is the current Winter Storm Watch message for our area. It speaks of snow being the main precipitation type in the central Willamette Valley and freezing rain in the south Willamette Valley. Salem is in the central Willamette Valley. So that's good news if it comes true

By contrast, here's what the Apple Weather app is forecasting for Salem on Saturday: an inch of precipitation in the form of 13 inches of snow. Way different than the NWS forecast. 

This is the AccuWeather snow forecast: about 1.5 inches by Saturday afternoon, which is close to the NWS forecast.

But this is the AccuWeather ice forecast: over 6/10 of an inch by Saturday night. That'd be disastrous, and is hugely more than the NWS forecast.

Lastly, here's The Weather Channel forecast: it doesn't differentiate between snow and ice, simply saying that the total will be less than an inch. Which isn't helpful, since an inch of ice brings down trees, while an inch of snow is just a minor inconvenience. (Unless you have bald tires and live on a hill.)

Our Generac whole house generator worked great on its first outage

Well, like many things in life, we got what we paid for. It cost us quite a bit to have a Generac generator installed at our rural south Salem house last March, as I described in "We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma."

The ice storm was in February 2021, so we didn't exactly jump into the Generac decision, since it took us two years to decide on a generator upgrade from our 7,000 watt Honda generator that was a lot better than nothing, yet not nearly as powerful and convenient as the 24,000 watt Generac. 

I'd told Jeff, a Northside Electric guy who did the final electrical panel work and educated us about the Generac operates, that after getting this pricey device installed, my magical thinking leads me to believe that our power will never go off again. His right-on reply: "So get some life insurance and you'll never die."

Jeff was right. I'll die even if I get life insurance, and last night the power went off at our house for the first time since Genie, as I now fondly call our generator, was on the job. 

She, or maybe he, I don't know how to tell the sex of generators, performed great. As luck would have it, I was taking a hot bath when the bathroom lights went out and I found myself taking a bath in the dark. For a few seconds I wondered if Genie would live up to her nickname.

She did. The Generac automatically turned on after it sensed the power outage, which probably was related to high wind in our area.

After so many years (we've lived here since 1990, which means we've endured a lot of outages) of needing to wheel a generator from our garage into the carport, drag a heavy cable from the garage to the side of our house where the cable connected to a transfer panel in our utility room, make sure there was enough gas and oil in the generator, and start it, then turn it off when we went to bed, it was great to do absolutely nothing after our power went off.

Plus, before we had to start a fire in our wood stove to keep the house warm, and we didn't have hot water.

Now the Generac keeps almost everything in our house on, including our main heat pump (but not the heat strips, which use too much power) and hot water heater. The only things that aren't powered by Genie are the heat pump for our "apartment" area and a tankless hot water heater in that area.

I sleep in the apartment bedroom, so it got kind of cold during the night. But having all the lights work and running water available all night in the bathroom (we have a well) was way better than dealing with battery powered lanterns and a flashlight, as I did in our pre-Generac days. 

Fortunately, PGE restored our neighborhood's power this morning, so the outage lasted about 12 hours. It was a good initial test of Genie. We started off with our propane supply at about 73% full, though I'm not absolutely sure about that figure. This morning the gauge was at 70%. So that's not bad, since the Generac was on all night until the power was back on. 

Anyway, a Generac or similar whole house generator is something to consider if you have a need for one. Today I chatted during my teeth cleaning with the dental hygienist. She lives in Salem proper and said a neighbor has a Generac because one of the family members has a medical condition that requires a device powered by electricity.

Yes, it's fairly noisy, so if you live in a city your neighbors may not appreciate the Generac when its running. However, if you invite them over to enjoy your lights, warmth, and hot water during a power outage, I predict that all will be forgiven. 

Here's how our (not so) wild New Year's Eve went

If you think that your New Year's Eve was mild, not wild, in comparison to how others celebrated the last day of 2023, take heart: likely our night was just as unexciting.

We did go out. To a neighbor's house. Which took a whole three minutes of driving. (They have a really long driveway out here in rural south Salem; otherwise it would have been quicker.)

The get-together started at 6:30 pm. Most of the attendees were old, so there's no way we were going to party on until midnight. 

After snacks and conversation, Pictionary took center stage. Laurel, my wife, had played Picitionary, while I couldn't recall doing so. During the short drive I got tips from Laurel about the game. "You're given a word, then you draw a picture of it and your team tries to guess what it is."

Okay, pleasingly simple. Here's a photo of Laurel drawing her word. I'm visible over her shoulder studiously ignoring her (it was girls versus boys, so I wasn't involved in guessing her word).

When it was my turn, I uttered an expletive when I saw the word I'd gotten. "Pope." I would have been even more distressed if I hadn't had a glass of wine that relieved to some extent my first-time-player Pictionary anxiety.

Since there were red and black markers, I drew a stick figure with a red triangle meant to represent a Pope's fancy headgear. That elicited exactly zero decent guesses from my team. With my mind frantically racing, I came up with an idea: add a cross! 

Now the stick figure with a red triangle on its head had an arm with fingers holding a large cross. This elicited "Bishop," which became after some nonverbal encouragement from me, "Pope." Yes, I screamed, feeling like the King of the World. 

I blurted out, "Now I love Pictionary." But not enough to stay past 8:30, because I wanted to return home and compose a New Year's Eve post for my Church of the Churchless blog, plus save our dog from a lonely evening. 

When Laurel got home via a ride from a neighbor, we settled in for our traditional New Year's Eve watching of CNN where Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen hold forth in New York at Times Square. Thankfully, after last year's alcohol-free event, Cooper and Cohen had shots of smuggled tequila. 

Geez, CNN. Loosen up. They aren't driving. Seeing Cooper and Cohen get steadily more tipsy as the clock draws closer to midnight has always been one of the best things about watching CNN on New Year's Eve.

They were entertaining this year, as always. A memorable humorous comment came when Cohen was taking the lead in talking with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, I think it was, and the conversation turned to movies the three of them liked.

Observing the exciting talk about movies I'd never heard of either, Anderson Cooper said something like, "I'm used to being the Gay Guy in a group, but I've got to say, I have no idea what you three are talking about." Meaning, they were acting much gayer.

Paul Anka sang "Imagine" this year as the Times Square ball dropped at midnight. Laurel and I thought he did great, after we got over the shock of Paul Anka still being alive. He's 82, which isn't that much older than my 75. 

I was shocked to see on Facebook that some people trashed Anka's singing, saying it was way off-key. I'm a lousy singer, but I feel like I can tell if someone is singing well, and Anka seemed to do just that. See what you think.

Bo Nix and Oregon football end on a high note

Us Oregon fans needed today's 45-6 victory over outmatched Liberty University in the Fiesta Bowl after two narrow losses to Washington prevented the Ducks from winning the Pac-12 championship and having a chance to make the four-team national championship playoff.

I was confident that Oregon would defeat Liberty, notwithstanding the fervent prayers that folks at this deeply conservative Christian school must have been directing at the Big Guy Upstairs to aid them in staging an upset victory over the team from dissolute Eugene.

Didn't happen. The only religious mention I heard at the Fiesta Bowl was when Oregon quarterback Bo Nix said "God is good" in the course of thanking the Lord in post-game comments for what he and his team had been able to accomplish. 

Those were gracious comments by Nix. He didn't grandstand. He didn't rub the loss in Liberty's face. He simply spoke about how grateful he was to have been able to play football at Oregon with his teammates. Nix is a class act.

This is Nix raising the trophy for the most valuable offensive player in this year's Fiesta Bowl with his coach, Dan Lanning, smiling by his side.

After Liberty scored first, Oregon dominated the rest of the game. By the fourth quarter, with the outcome obvious, the announcers drummed up some drama by talking about what Nix needed to do to break the NCAA record for the single season record of the percentage of passes completed. Which, he did.

Sports writer John Canzano said this in his substack column about the game.

A few of the Nix records got lots of attention.

For example:

• Marcus Mariota had the finest season by a quarterback at Oregon in 2014. Mariota threw 42 touchdown passes and had 4,454 passing yards. Both were school single-season records. By the end of Monday’s bowl game, Nix had 45 touchdown passes and 4,508 yards this season.

• Nix entered the game with a completion percentage of 77.2 percent. He trailed the NCAA record held by Alabama’s Mac Jones (77.4 percent) in 2020. Nix threw only seven incomplete passes on 35 attempts in Monday’s Fiesta Bowl. (I counted at least three drops by his receivers.) And Nix still finished the season at 77.44 percent, a new NCAA record.

The television broadcast referenced those records often, but I wonder if the more impressive feat was the fact that Monday’s game marked Nix’s 61st college start — the all-time NCAA record for a quarterback.

It was an emotional moment when Nix left the game, leaving a backup quarterback to finish the rout over Liberty. He was an immensely likable guy. Humble, personable, solid, dedicated. Nix could have passed up a bowl game as so many top players do, not wanting to risk an injury when the NFL beckons.

But Nix didn't do that, because that's the sort of guy he is. A selfless team player. He'll be missed. I wish him the best in what promises to be a exemplary professional career.

Washington beat Texas a few minutes ago. This means that Oregon's only losses this season were to a team that will now play for a national championship against Michigan. It's a great way for the Pac-12  era to end, with Oregon State and Washington State left as the Pac-2.

Oregon and Washington playing in the Big Ten will seem strange. This season, though, was a terrific way for the Pac-12 to take a final bow before the curtain falls. And Bo Nix was a big part of that.