HinesSight

I loved the Olympics opening ceremony, including drag queen part

When I first heard that the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was going to be held on the Seine River, with boats carrying the parade of nations, I thought that this could be a big mistake by the organizers. Why not respect tradition and have the ceremony in a stadium, like it always has been?

Well, my thought was the mistake, not the decision to have the opening ceremony on the Seine. I recorded the lengthy ceremony. My wife and I are only partway through it, but we've loved what we've seen so far, and I know that we'll love the rest of it also.

France did itself proud. The opening ceremony was wonderfully bold, creative, innovative, breathtaking. I'll remember this one much more than all the other ceremonies I've watched, and mostly forgotten, over the years.

The boats passing by the cameras, filled with cheering, flag-waving, dancing athletes from around the world, was much more interesting than the usual march into a stadium. Being on a boat freed the athletes to express themselves more exuberantly. 

And the boats themselves were well worth watching. Each was unique. Some were large. Some were small. I expect that boat tours of the Seine are going to experience a big increase in ridership after the Olympics. 

The performance part of the opening ceremony held my attention to a greater degree than past ceremonies have. Being outdoors, with the "set" the banks of the Seine and other locations in Paris, gave the performances a vibrance that surpassed the performance part of previous ceremonies. 

As an open-minded liberal, the outrage of religious conservatives about the so-called Last Supper performance featuring drag queens made the opening ceremony even more appealing for me.

A NBC News story about the uproar showed how ridiculous religious fundamentalists can be. Aside from being bigoted, they lack both a sense of humor and appreciation of artistry.

PARIS — The extravagant opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics has caused fury among the populist and religious right in the United States and elsewhere, with critics especially unhappy about an apparent depiction of the Last Supper featuring drag performers.

A fashion show at the ceremony included a scene that resembled a modern re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, French actor and singer Philippe Katerine appeared as the Greek god Dionysus, painted blue and wearing little more than a bunch of flowers covering his modesty.

While some fans loved this unabashed display of French camp and kitsch, others — particularly those who espouse conservative or Christian beliefs — were not happy with it.

“In this scene from the Olympic opening ceremony, the famous painting of The Last Supper is recreated, but Jesus is replaced with an obese woman, while queer and trans figures (including a child!) depict her apostles,” Jenna Ellis, former 2020 campaign attorney to Donald Trump, told her 1 million followers on X.

She described the ceremony as containing “overt pagan and satanic symbolism.”

The Last Supper refers to the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his 12 apostles before he was crucified. It’s also a popular subject in Christian art, most famously depicted by da Vinci, who painted a scene that captured the apostles’ reaction to Jesus’ announcement of his betrayal.

Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening ceremony, defended the production when asked at a news conference Saturday about some of the backlash. Jolly said he was unaware of the criticism and wanted to display “inclusion.”

“When we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone, questions are raised,” he said at an International Olympic Committee media briefing.

“Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together,” he continued. “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that. In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

Right on, Mr. Jolly.

I'm sorry that you have to deal with the wounded feelings of our religious conservatives here in the United States -- who have no problem taking away the right of women to choose their own health care, and the right of LGBTQ people to express themselves as they wish, but get offended when the Olympics opening ceremony doesn't comply with their weird twisted sense of morality.

Just ignore them. And be grateful that you live in France, where you're an ocean away from the extreme religious nationalism of fundamentalist Christians in the United States, who are our homegrown American Taliban.

Bound Salem Weekly issues now can be seen at Willamette Heritage Center

Salem Weekly, our city's much-beloved (and for some conservatives, much-hated) alternative newspaper that published from April 2003 to October 2018 still lives on in a certain sense -- thanks to Jim Scheppke, a retired librarian who led an effort to have almost all of the Salem Weekly issues professionally bound, then donated to the Willamette Heritage Center, where they can be reviewed by the public.

Yesterday afternoon some people with ties to Salem Weekly and the binding project met at the Willamette Heritage Center to admire the volumes. We chatted about how much Salem Weekly meant to us, expressing thanks to Scheppke and A.P. Walther, the Salem Weekly publisher, for preserving the issues with the help of some donations from Mark Wigg and me.

Jim Scheppke and A.P. Walther

We had to wear archival gloves while thumbing through the Salem Weekly issues. They can be viewed by anyone. All you have to do is contact Kylie Pine, Curator of the Willamette Heritage Center: 503-585-7012, [email protected]

Kylie Pine (standing)

Helen Caswell, who died fairly recently after a bout with cancer, got much praise at yesterday's gathering. Helen wrote so many stories for Salem Weekly, she used at least four pseudonyms. She and Walther were the beating heart of Salem Weekly. Their hard work and dedication will aways be remembered by everybody who knows how much the paper contributed to Salem.

I wrote a Strange Up Salem column for Salem Weekly from May 2013 to May 2015. They're available in a Hinessight blog post, "Here's all of my Strange Up Salem columns." Naturally I perused the issue where a column first appeared, which merited a cover image.

Brian Hines

Until yesterday I didn't know who had drawn the hand holding a pen, which has a sort of nicely creepy Edgar Allen Poe feel to it. Walther told me that Sarah Torres drew the image, which wasn't used for its initial purpose, then was retrieved by Walther for the cover, which he designed. 

Here's a closeup of the cover. My first column was called "I Know What You Want." It started with:

At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach.

What I’m talking about is a stranger Salem. Meaning, a city with sights, sounds, people, places, and other delights that make us go ooh, ah, and give me more rather than ho-hum, so lame.

On November 23, 2018 I wrote a blog post, "Salem Weekly closes down. Sad day for our town." For sure. The Statesman Journal is a poor excuse for a hometown paper: few local stories, no letters to the editor, no opinion section. 

Wikipedia's Salem Weekly page describes how the publication got started, which originally was called Salem Monthly.

The Salem Monthly traces its origins to a coffee house in downtown Salem, Oregon known as the Coffee House Cafe. Dating back to the mid-1990s, the Coffee House Cafe served as a popular meeting place and hangout for Salem's youth culture. In its later years of operation, the cafe began publishing a newsletter to engage customers in Salem's community and cultural affairs. Inspired by the reaction to the cafe's newsletter, cafe owner A.P. Walther decided to start up a publishing operation for an alternative newspaper in Salem, Oregon.

I wish Biden could have heard what my Democratic group said about him

This afternoon the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of gathered in a member's living room. Right away, a topic of conversation sprang up, because it was at the top of everyone's mind.

Should President Biden withdraw from the presidential race? We spent about an hour talking about this. The discussion was vigorous. Everybody had something to say about the question. And in the end there was a clear consensus.

All eleven of us felt that Biden should withdraw. 

Everybody in the group is a Democrat, though naturally we disagree about many political subjects. The familiar saying about getting Democrats to agree about something is like herding cats -- absolutely true. But when it came to Biden getting out of the presidential race, we were all in agreement. 

Joe has to go. 

This image expressed our feeling. We all deeply appreciate what Biden has accomplished since he became president, as well as what he's done in his lengthy career in politics as vice-president and senator.

However, it was clear to us that while there are risks involved in Biden withdrawing and another Democrat taking his place, at least then we'd have a better chance of defeating Trump. With Biden at the top of the ticket, our group is convinced that Trump has a much easier path to victory.

 Biden has been wrongly claiming that it is only Democratic "elites" that want him to withdraw. Not true. He would have realized that if he'd been able to see our discussion today. We're all ordinary Democrats who are super-concerned about Trump getting another four years to wreak havoc on our democracy. 

We talked quite a bit about Trump's appeal. There was general agreement that human nature favors strong leaders. After all, that's how leadership works in most of the animal kingdom, and we humans obviously are animals -- just animals with highly evolved brains.

For all of Trump's failings, and they are way too many to enumerate, he does project an aura of strength and confidence. Biden doesn't. I noted to the  group that some political observers feel it isn't fair that Biden only has a 38% approval rating, given all that he has accomplished during his time as president.

But voters aren't machines that calculate the various accomplishments of Biden and Trump, then spit out an answer as to who is most worthy to be president. Voters base their like or dislike of a candidate on all kinds of factors, many of them emotional, irrational, and personal. 

And that's where Biden falls short.

We spoke about how much excitement and enthusiasm there would be among Democrats if someone other than Biden, someone younger and more energetic, replaced him. The malaise among Democrats would vanish in an instant, aside from the comparatively few Biden die-hards who would be sad to see him go.

The rest of us, who are a clear majority of the Democratic electorate, would be thrilled. We talked about how even if the replacement candidate lost to Trump this November, at least we'd feel good that the Democratic Party did its best to defeat Trump, rather than sticking with Biden, a highly unpopular candidate.

We didn't agree on who should replace Biden, should he decide to withdraw. I argued that Kamala Harris was the most obvious candidate. Some agreed, while others felt that Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg would be a better choice. One person liked Secretary of State Blinken. 

Regardless, the prospect of anyone other than Biden facing off against Trump filled us with optimism, while the prospect of Biden hanging on and refusing to withdraw was depressing. 

Along that line, I shared a metaphor I'd heard Chris Hayes discuss with a guest on his MSNBC show. I said that it was about a pitcher "losing his stuff" after doing well for a number of innings. Then he starts giving up hits and walks.

The manager goes out to the mound and talks things over with the pitcher. Then he motions to the bullpen to bring in a relief pitcher. The starting pitcher doesn't get to decide if he stays in the game. Most pitchers believe they're just going through a rough spot, and can get the next batters out.

This is akin to Biden saying in a recent interview, after being asked who he relies on to tell him whether he should stay in the race, "Me." I found that disturbing. Biden isn't qualified to assess his chance of beating Trump, just as a starting pitcher isn't qualified to decide whether he stays in the game.

Two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw. Everyone in our group felt that way. A majority of Democrats should be the "manager" who decides whether Biden stays in the race, not Biden -- though obviously he has to be the one to say, "I'm withdrawing." 

May that happen soon, for the good of our democracy, which hinges on defeating Trump.

If you don't like the record-breaking Oregon heat wave, don't vote for Trump

It's been a rough four days here in the Willamette Valley, as well as in much of the rest of Oregon. Record high temperatures have been set on multiple days in many locations, sometimes breaking previous records by not just a little, but a lot. 

Today it was 104 degrees in Salem, where I live, according to my car's thermometer. Tomorrow is expected to be just as hot, with temperatures in the high 80s and low 90s for the following six days.

This isn't normal. The average high for today in Salem is 82, so we were 22 degrees above average. Global warming plays a significant role in the heat waves that have been hitting Oregon much more frequently recently, according to the state climatologist, Larry O'Neill. 

I saw O'Neill make these remarks on the KGW 11 pm news a few days ago. They were extremely disturbing then, and even more so now, after I've been dealing with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees for the past three days.

I've boldfaced the scariest part of what O'Neill said. 

PORTLAND, Ore. —

If you think the weather in Oregon over the next week is going to be too hot, Larry O'Neill has some bad news for you.

"Right now, this is probably among the coolest climates we'll be in at the rate we're going," he said.

O'Neill is the state climatologist for Oregon, and he said climate change is amplifying heat waves in the state and across the globe.

"Heat waves are a natural part of our climate system, but when they do occur, now they're occurring in a warmer baseline," he said. "Any heat wave that we get, you can kind of think about it as being about 3 degrees Fahrenheit more intense than it would have been had we not been changing the climate."

Climate change has made extreme heat hotter, longer and more frequent.

There's no hard and fast definition of a heat wave, but regardless of what's used as a measuring stick, warm temperatures have been increasing in Oregon.

"The number of days over 90 degrees or the number of days over 100 degrees, whichever way you parse it, these days are happening much more frequently, especially over the last 10 years," O'Neill said.

According to records from the National Weather Service, between 1938 and 2014, Portland saw an average of 12 days per year with temperatures over 90 degrees.

Between 2014 and 2023, that number nearly doubled to an average of 23 days per year.

Over the past 86 years, Portland has recorded 105 days with temperatures over 100 degrees, but 16 of those days have come in just the last four years.

Portland’s current stretch of extreme heat is expected to be notable not just for its temperatures, but for its duration, with forecasts calling for five days of heat at or above 100 degrees. 

Wow. As hot as it has been the past few days, O'Neill says that soon we'll look back at this time in Oregon's climate history as one of the coolest in recent memory, because global warming is going to increase for quite a while no matter what we human do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously we'll be better off if those emissions are markedly lowered. That's why it's so important that President Biden's climate change initiatives be continued and, hopefully, increased. 

But Donald Trump has vowed to reverse the progress our country has made in combatting global warming. Trump wants to undo those policies and make things worse by increasing the consumption of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.

That would be amazingly wrong-headed. It would be a disaster economically, since renewable energy is an increasingly important part of our economy. And it would be a disaster environmentally, since we're already not doing enough to reduce carbon emissions, so moving backward under a Trump administration would be horrendous for both our planet and humanity.

There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Trump this November. His commitment to increase global warming, rather than combat it, is definitely a major reason. 

I've stopped using Grubhub and DoorDash after two restaurants asked me to

Live and learn. Until recently I'd never used restaurant ordering apps on my iPhone.

Old-fashioned guy that I was, I'd phone a restaurant and call in my order. But then I decided to join the 21st century, so I installed Grubhub and DoorDash. 

Not knowing any better, I figured that restaurants liked these apps. Or at least, they were okay with them as alternative ways of getting orders from customers other than their own web sites.

So for the past few months I've been using Grubhub and DoorDash to order from three restaurants in south Salem that I'd gotten into the habit of picking up food from on Friday afternoons, rotating my orders between them. 

No more. Because staff at two of the restaurants have told me they'd much prefer that I order from their own web site rather than an app.

This past Friday I learned from a restaurant employee that Grubhub jacks up the price of the dish that I'd ordered to $18 from the $15, I think it is, that the restaurant charges. And that's for a pick-up order, not a delivery order.

Curious about why the apps are disliked by restaurants, I Googled "why restaurants don't like grubhub doordash." Wow. A lot of horror stories popped up.

A Reddit post said:

Many restaurants hate the apps because the apps often list the restaurants without their consent, with inflated prices, overwork their staff and subject them to pushy, impatient drivers, and cause customer complaints about inflated prices on the platforms that aren't even the restaurants' doing. When you order directly from a lot of restaurant's websites, you get their actual price and their driver. Not saying it's always this way, but poke around on this sub and you will see what I'm talking about. This note is not from a restaurant that uses the Big 3 to fulfill their direct orders.

A CNN story said:

Restaurant operators complain that third-party delivery providers like Seamless, DoorDash and Uber Eats are prohibitively expensive. These platforms offer a way for customers to order from local restaurants, process restaurant payments and provide contract drivers to pick meals up from restaurants and deliver them to customers. For these services, they often charge restaurants around 30% per order. But profit margins in the restaurant industry are often razor-thin, so these fees can wipe out the restaurant’s profits or put them in the red. And if they choose to outsource delivery to these platforms, restaurants also hand off valuable customer data and control over how delivery orders show up at their customers doors.

But I wasn't using the apps for food delivery, just for ordering, since I'd pick up the food myself. Even so, the two Salem restaurants who asked me to stop using the apps said that they are hurt by Grubhub and DoorDash. 

 

I benefitted from my sessions at Salem's Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic

Today I had my eighth weekly treatment from Karen Kaufman at her Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic here in Salem (Oregon). This was my first serious dive into the acupuncture waters, having previously only waded in the shallow pool of single sessions with a couple of acupuncturists.

Karen Kaufman, Ph.D., L.Ac

I'm convinced that Kaufman helped relieve the sciatica pain in my right leg considerably.

Naturally I can't be sure of this, since I'm not a random controlled experiment, just one person who was drawn to try acupuncture after physical therapy didn't do much to relieve the pain, over the counter medications did next to nothing, and I had to wait quite a while to get an epidural steroid injection in my back.

I had two acupuncture treatments prior to getting the epidural injection from Salem Pain and Spine Specialists on May 13. By the time of the injection, the pain in my leg was considerably reduced. I ascribe that to acupuncture, since this was the only thing I'd done differently prior to the injection.

After the injection, I continued to get acupuncture from Kaufman every week, figuring that I didn't really care about what, exactly, was making the pain lessen, so long as I was feeling better. For several months I hadn't been able to go to my Tai Chi classes, the pain was so bad. After I started the acupuncture treatments, I was able to return to Tai Chi.

At my first session, Kaufman told me that her previous three patients all had sciatica. Not surprising, since nerve pain seemingly would be one of the problems acupuncture is best suited for. I'd found a review of the literature on this that suggested acupuncture benefits people with sciatica.

I liked that Kaufman was pure acupuncture with me. No mention of herbs or other aspects of Chinese medicine. Early on I told her that I was fairly well acquainted with the notions of meridians, qi, and such, as this gets discussed in my Tai Chi classes, which I've been taking for 18 years. But I'm agnostic as to whether these things truly are scientifically valid.

Kaufman has an interesting background, according to her web site. 

Karen is excited to be returning to Innerhealth where she worked a decade ago with founder, Angela Pfaffenberger.

An Oregon native, Karen grew up in Astoria and is a graduate of U of O.  After earning a doctorate in psychology at Claremont and teaching at a university, she decided to enhance her interest in Chinese Medicine by attending the International Institute of Chinese Medicine in Santa Fe, NM.  After earning a master’s degree in Chinese Medicine, she received funding to do acupuncture research and has taught in the acupuncture doctoral program at ACTCM in San Francisco.  She has been seeing patients in private practice for 13 years.

Karen uses a gentle approach, employing every skill she has acquired along the way, often with a dose of good humor.  She effortlessly combines her east/west training and is particularly attuned to psychological aspects of pain and illness.  She considers treating stress her major area of expertise, both in terms of addressing the everyday hassles that can grind a person down and result in pain, and in treating the fallout from major life stressors and trauma that can, of course, negatively affect health.

Today we agreed that it made sense for me to take a break from acupuncture for a while and see how my leg feels without it. My insurance, Regence MedAdvantage, covers 12 acupuncture treatments a year, if I remember the number correctly. So I have four sessions left in 2024 if I want to return for an acupuncture tune-up.

I find that cold remedies can be worse than the cold

I don't get sick very often. So at first I couldn't believe that I had a cold, irrationally thinking that even though I don't have allergies, my nasal congestion was due to that, rather than a cold. 

But a week ago, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. Not being able to breathe through my nose was annoying, as was breathing via my mouth. Propping my head up on a couple of pillows didn't help. Neither did spraying saline solution in my nostrils, my usual approach to mild everyday congestion. 

So the next day I headed off to Walgreens to get some Sudafed. The real stuff with pseudoephedrine, which Oregon used to require a prescription to get since it can be used to cook up meth. Now you can get it from a pharmacist by showing ID so repeated purchases can be tracked.

I decided to get the 12 hour variety, figuring (wrongly, it turned out) that I'd take one pill at 11 am, when I bought the Walgreens generic version of Sudafed, and another pill at 11 pm, which would keep my nasal passages decongested all night.

Good plan. But based on wrong facts. 

The first pill I took at 11 am did indeed start working soon. But when I got home, my wife reminded me that pseudoephedrine is a stimulant. I'd noticed that the box said "non-drowsy," but I figured this meant it wouldn't put you to sleep, not that it'd keep you awake.

Which, it did, even after more than 12 hours had passed since I took the first dose of generic Sudafed. However, once I got to sleep, I had a pretty good night, since I'd gotten some Kroger Daytime/Nighttime  Sinus Relief after realizing that the pseudoephedrine wasn't going to work for me given how sensitive I was to its stimulating effect.

I'd also gotten some Allegra, because I wanted an antihistamine after finding that the generic Sudafed worked so well after I took it at 11 am, now I had a runny nose. That, of course, wasn't surprising, since I'd just taken a decongestant. But it became annoying to constantly be using a facial tissue to wipe my nose.

I thought (again wrongly, it turned out) that I'd found a cold remedy sweet spot with Allegra and the Kroger Sinus Relief, which is generic Mucinex Sinus-Max Day and Night. However, the Allegra soon made my nose feel too dry, so I just relied on the Nightime generic Mucinex, which had an antihistamine for runny nose along with a decongestant and other stuff.

After a few days, though, I began to worry about the warning on both the generic Sudafed (which I'd stopped taking) and the generic Mucinex (which I was taking both day and night) to ask a doctor before taking if you "have difficulty in urination due to enlargement of the prostate gland." Along with a bunch of other conditions I didn't have, like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and such. 

I'd ignored that warning, because a urologist had told me that I didn't have a prostate problem, I had a bladder problem -- the reason I need to use a urinary catheter to pee most of the time. However, after taking the generic Mucinex for about three days, while it was keeping my nose decongested, I began to find that it was more difficult to insert a catheter into the bladder.

Some Googling revealed that this can happen when taking Mucinex, Sudafed, and similar products. I'd also noticed that for the nighttime generic Mucinex, the label said to ask a doctor before use if you have glaucoma, which I do.

So my simple desire not to have my nose congested had turned into a rather complex medical puzzle because of the side effects, either actual or potential, of what I was taking. That made me realize the wisdom of something I'd read in my Googling: try to only deal with the actual cold symptom(s) you're experiencing, which may mean not using multi-symptom products like Mucinex.

A few days ago I decided to use some saline solution in my nostrils before I went to bed, propped up my head and shoulders, and slept fine without any cold remedy. Live and learn. From now on I'm only going to use the smallest amount of a decongestant or antihistamine, instead of taking this stuff all through the day, like I'd been doing. 

But at least I'm prepared for the next time I have a cold. Assuming I can remember where I stored these boxes.

Photos of our yard and property, to remind me why we don't want to move

We bought our rural south Salem house, which was built in 1973, from a couple in their mid-60s who said they were selling because the house on five acres was too much for them to maintain anymore.

Well, 35 years later, Laurel and I now are in our mid-70s, taking care of the same house (extensively updated by us) and an additional five acres, for a total of ten, since we were able to buy an undeveloped neighboring lot quite a few years ago.

Someday, probably, we'll have to move. In case I ever wonder why it took us so long, I like to write periodic blog posts with photos of our yard and property, given that our surroundings are the main reason we love where we're been living since 1990.

Here's a tour of a walk I took this afternoon.

Outside our front door, we recently had the stone steps leading to our detached garage/carport improved to be more stable. More rock also was added on either side of the steps. 

We've also had the rock wall along a pathway to our yard improved. (In case you can't tell, we like rocks!)

This path is another recent addition. There used to be some grass here, but it didn't grow well, being directly under several large fir trees. So Norberto Flores' crew, who do great work maintaining and improving our property, installed a path with very fine gravel.

I like how the new path makes a big bend, kind of like a meandering river, to join with the end of the existing path.

The tracks in the grass were made by the John Deere lawn tractor I use to mow various fields and paths on our property. It used to take me much longer with a walk-behind field mower. Now I can do everything in just two hours. Power steering and four-wheel steering, and a heavy duty chassis, make the sometimes challenging mowing pretty darn easy.


This replacement Japanese Maple, which we planted after its much larger predecessor was crushed under a large oak limb in the Great Ice Storm of 2021, is growing nicely.

Our water feature adds some flowing liveliness and pleasing sound to the yard.

Leaving the yard, a path takes me to one of the fields I mowed today.

Below that is another mowed field.

Next to it, one more mowed field. I find mowing relaxing. It takes constant attention, to avoid large branches and to maneuver around the many trees, fallen logs, rocks, and such, but I'm so familiar with all of those things, mowing becomes a sort of mindful meditation for me.

A bench sits next to the path down to the spring-fed creek, which flows for most of the year. 

Laurel has added stepping stones and gravel to an often-slippery slope.

We've had two nicely designed bridges made to replace my decidedly amateurish bridges. This is the first bridge over one tributary of the creek.

This is the second bridge, over another tributary of the creek, nicely nestled between two trees, one of them a snag.

The barely visible creek is lined with lush vegetation.

More steps made by Laurel lead from the creek to the community trail, on an easement, that we use to get to our community lake, Spring Lake.

The easement trail goes up, then down to Spring Lake.

Daisies next to the lake.

Spring Lake is about nine acres. No motorized boats allowed. A blue kayak is on the left.

After walking around the lake, I return home. I like how our house is nestled under large oak and fir trees. We could be happy somewhere else, I'm sure, but we'll never find a place as close to nature as where we are now.

Oregon State and Oregon both in NCAA baseball super regionals. Exciting!

It's a tradition for me.

Since for many years I've been unable to watch the Pac-12 Networks due to their never-ending and hugely irritating pissing match with DirecTV, the only time I get to see the Oregon State baseball team play is if they either make it to the Pac-12 tournament championship game (didn't happen in 2024) or are selected to play in the NCAA tournament (which did happen in 2024).

So I was able to get to know the OSU baseball team this past weekend when they hosted the Corvallis regional. Three wins in four days -- Sunday's game got rained out in the fourth inning, I believe it was, so they finished up the deciding game against UC Irvine on Monday -- put them in a Super Regional against Kentucky in Lexington that starts next Saturday.

Beat Kentucky twice, and the Beaver baseball team will be one of eight teams in the College World Series. They've been ranked in the top ten for much of the season, though they dropped to a #16 seed in the NCAA tournament owing to some lost games at the end of the season. 

Oregon State sure looked good in the three games I watched. Kentucky should be nervous, notwithstanding the #2 seed that Kentucky earned because of a stellar season in the always-tough SEC. One thing that impressed the announcers who called the games for ESPN was how OSU hitters are a tough out all the way through the lineup.

In fact, the announcers gave an award to the 7-8-9 players in the hitting rotation for producing so many hits and runs during the regional matchup. And of course OSU has Travis Bazzana, one of the top players in the country who had a great season in the final year of Pac-12 sports as we know them, meaning, before Oregon State and Washington State become the only Pac-12 members, for a while.

Given that fact, it'd be poetic justice if OSU were to win the 2024 NCAA Baseball Championship.

No matter what the future of Oregon State baseball may be (I'm hoping for continued success), the team already has given OSU fans a lot to cheer for, which helps take away some of the pain of seeing OSU and WSU deserted by the ten members of the Pac-12 who left the league for a variety of reasons, none of which made sense to me.

That includes Oregon, whose baseball team also had a great season and will be playing in a Super Regional against Texas A&M, the #3 seed. I don't know much about the Ducks' team, never having seen them play, but I'll be rooting for them this weekend. Pretty amazing that the only Pac-12 teams who made it to a Super Regional are Oregon State and Oregon.

Take that, Arizona, who won both the regular season title and Pac-12 baseball tournament, yet was defeated in their regional.

Five recent streaming shows that I liked a lot

These days, on broadcast television I mainly watch news and political programs. For entertainment, it's almost entirely streaming shows that appeal to me. Here's five recent offerings that I liked a lot, or at least enough close enough to a lot that I was eager to watch all of the episodes in the series.

They're ranked in the order of my liking, with (1) being my favorite.

(1) The Veil - Hulu
Amazingly, this was my first real introduction to Elisabeth Moss, who does a terrific job playing an intelligence agent tasked with finding out whether an Islamic woman in a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syria border, if I recall the countries correctly, is a relatively innocent member of a terrorist organization, or the mastermind of a plot that could kill many thousands of people.

The relationship between the women is fascinating. Each is adept at showing themselves to be someone who may or may not be who they really are. I was so taken by Moss, I finally have gotten around to watching The Handmaid's Tale, a series that I passed on because it seemed too disturbing. Yes, it is, but Moss is so good in it, I'm enjoying the first season, which I've almost finished. 

(2) Hacks (season 3) - Max/HBO
My wife and I have enjoyed the first two seasons of Hacks. Season 3 is just as good, maybe even better. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder have great chemistry together. It's a pleasure to have a series about an aging female comedian and her bisexual young writer be both so funny and so touching.

Good comedy really goes a long way toward making life seem more bearable, because it lightens and brightens my spirits. It turned out that a couple of days before I was scheduled for a colonoscopy I watched an episode where Smart joins a group of elderly men who have an annual party where they drink and have a good time, then all go together to get a colonoscopy. Not exactly realistic, but the jokes made me feel better about my own procedure.

(3) Franklin - Apple TV+
An entertaining and informative look at Benjamin Franklin's efforts to entice France to enter the Revolutionary War on America's side. Michael Douglas is totally believable as Franklin. Even though we know how history turned out -- we won the war and gained our independence -- this series shows how things could have gone quite differently.

The dialogue is crisp and well-written. Franklin's wit and personality come though loud and clear. We did some Googling of the historical accuracy, and it appears that this series is mostly based on fact, though naturally there's some fiction mixed in.

(4) Sugar -- Apple TV+
Colin Farrell plays John Sugar, a Los Angeles area private detective who drives around in a classic convertible, loves old movies, and has secrets that eventually are revealed in what for me was an unsatisfying conclusion. But I still enjoyed the intrigue as Sugar tries to find a missing woman who is a member of a famous acting and movie-making family. Lots of twists and turns, as there should be in this sort of show.

(5) The Sympathizer -- Max/HBO
This tale of a double agent who was a communist sympathizer in the South Vietnam army, serving as an intelligence agent who rooted out North Vietnamese spies, appealed to my love of spy thrillers. And it was interesting as a reminder of the Vietnam War that was so instrumental in my baby boomer generation's formative years (I escaped being drafted by a high enough number in the "birthday" lottery).

But the episodes had too many ups and downs for me to love this series. I finished it, but more because I was curious to see how it was going to end than because I adored watching the series. Robert Downey Jr. plays several roles, none of whom looked like Robert Downey Jr. to me, so kudos to the costume and makeup people. The Sympathizer is worth watching for the Asian stereotyping back in this country during the 1970s, which thankfully has improved a lot. 

Be sure to take Plenvu rather than Gavilyte for your colonoscopy prep

I've had four or five colonoscopies, can't remember exactly.

Started when I was fifty, then, because unlucky me always has benign polyps, I'm scheduled for another colonoscopy 4-5 years later, while my more fortunate wife gets away with a 10 year repeat (she can even have the test for colon cancer that doesn't require a colonoscopy).

Tomorrow I'm having another one. So today was the preparation day: no solid food, with the colon cleansing prep starting at 4 pm, with a repeat at 11 pm, a couple of hours from now. 

I'm looking forward to the colonoscopy itself tomorrow morning, since that's the easiest part. I'm a fan of propofol that I've been getting for anesthesia.

When I wake up (or regain my memory, I'm not sure which) my first reaction always is disappointment, since the propofol puts me in such a peaceful, blissful state of consciousness -- which argues for me not remembering the procedure, rather than being unconscious.

Drinking the prep stuff, not a fan. But there's better and worse colon cleansing approaches. At first I was prescribed Gavilyte by Salem Gastro, even though the Colonoscopy Preparation Instructions I was given referred to Plenvu.

I learned about the switch only after my pharmacy said that the prep was ready to be picked up. I noticed that the container was really large, but didn't think much about this until I got home and realized that I'd gotten Gavilyte, on the right in the photo below.

When I phoned Salem Gastro to find out what happened, they said that Regence MedAdvantage, my insurance company, wouldn't pay for Plenvu, which uses the much smaller bottle on the left for two split doses. 

I told them that I'd pay out of pocket for Plenvu, since Gavilyte requires drinking 4 liters, or 135 ounces, of water mixed with the prep solution, while Plenvu requires only 32 ounces of water mixed with the prep solution, 16 ounces in two split doses. You're also supposed to drink another 16 ounces of additional clear liquids of your choice after each dose.

Fortunately, my pharmacist told me that Plenvu had a discounted price for people like me whose insurance company won't cover the cost of it. So I ended up paying $50, I think it was, for the Plenvu. The cost was worth it, since I would have add to drink over four times more prep solution with Gavilyte. 

Keep this in mind if you're scheduled for a colonoscopy. The colon cleansing process isn't pleasant, given that you have to stay near a toilet after taking any prep solution. But drinking 32 ounces of the stuff is way better than drinking 135 ounces of it.

Lastly, my even more important advice is to not put off getting a colonoscopy if your doctor says it's time for one. As unfun a colonoscopy is, it's hugely preferable to dealing with colon cancer. 

The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation

Thanks to a story in the Statesman Journal, I learned that Salem's first psilocybin service center has opened on State Street. It's aptly named The Psilocybin Center. 

Husband and wife Sammy Kahuk and Dina Odeh have opened Salem’s first psilocybin service center, and a second location is being licensed.

The Psilocybin Center at 2585 State St. offers personalized “psychedelic mushrooms” sessions to anyone over the age of 21 for behavioral or physical health conditions or for spiritual or recreational purposes.

It took me a while to find the web site for The Psilocybin Center, but once I did, I was impressed. 

So much so, this afternoon I made an appointment to talk with Sammy Kahuk next Tuesday via an online video chat that takes fifteen minutes. I'm assuming he'll ask me some questions, and I can ask some of my own. 

Like, how much the sessions cost, information that I didn't notice on their web site. My leaning is to go with the middle Moderate-High Dose option below. Microdosing seems too little for me; a Hero Dose session seems a bit too much for me at the moment.

I say "at the moment," because like many people my age (I'm 75, a baby boomer), I had quite a few psychedelic experiences during some of my college years -- 1967-68 -- with LSD, mescaline, and, yes, psilocybin. 

Some of those, most of them, really, were in the "Hero Dose" range, especially when I took LSD. Walls would melt and shimmer with color. Reality was transformed into a magical mystery tour, to not coin a phrase. 

But I'm kind of wary of jumping into a really intense psychedelic experience right off the bat, since doing this at my age could be considerably different from doing it at 19 and 20.

My primary motivation now is what Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind refers to as shaking up the snow globe. My mind has fallen into some senior citizen habits that I'd like aid in revising, which psychedelics are great at. In college, everything was fresh and new, so my psychedelic experiences just added fuel to that already flexible fire.

The Google reviews for the center are all highly positive. Here's a sampling.

 

Elon Musk has become an annoying genius

There's no doubt that Elon Musk is a brilliant guy, arguably a genius, who deserves a lot of credit for his accomplishments with Tesla, Space X, and other business pursuits.

I've been a happy Starlink customer (a Space X offering) since it's early beta days, and it's enabled us to trade our crappy 7 Mbps copper phone line DSL for a snappy 250 Mbps satellite broadband here in rural south Salem, Oregon.

But Elon Musk has gone from being fascinating to annoying.

Not to everybody, because a big cause of my annoyance with Musk is what he's done with Twitter after buying the company and renaming it X. Though X is still a social media platform that I use and enjoy numerous times a day, under Musk it has become much more of a haven for right-wing crazies. 

Fortunately, X still allows users to only see posts from people and organizations that they follow. That walls my X account off from extremists and conspiracy theorists. But I follow Elon Musk, so I'm "treated" to his frequent posts about politics, which are decidedly in accord with the wacko wing of the Republican Party.

This is a dumb move given that liberals and Democrats have been much more likely to buy Teslas that conservatives and Republicans. Now, surveys have found that this group is turned off by Musk's right-wing antics, which hurts Tesla sales.

Another thing that's going to hurt Tesla is Musk's temper tantrum that led to him firing the entire staff of the department in charge of the vaunted Supercharger network, which has been a key reason to buy a Tesla rather than a different electric vehicle. 

Today I came across a Reuters story that describes how the firing happened. Here's excerpts from "The inside story of Elon Musk's mass firing of Tesla Supercharger staff." 

The day before Elon Musk fired virtually all of Tesla’s electric-vehicle charging division last month, they had high hopes as charging chief Rebecca Tinucci went to meet with Musk about the network’s future, four former charging-network staffers told Reuters.

 

After Tinucci had cut between 15% and 20% of staffers two weeks earlier, part of much wider layoffs, they believed Musk would affirm plans for a massive charging-network expansion.

 

The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.

 

The departures have upended a network widely viewed as a signature Tesla achievement and a key driver of its EV sales. Tesla Superchargers account for more than 60% of U.S. high-speed charging ports, federal statistics show, and the company has been the biggest winner so far of $5 billion in federal funding for new chargers.

 

The charging-team layoffs mark the latest drama in a tumultuous year for Tesla as Musk has shut down or delayed several core efforts meant to drive the rapid EV sales growth that investors have expected. Instead, Musk now says Tesla will shift its main focus to self-driving cars, a fiercely competitive and riskier business that could take years to develop.

 

The company posted its first decline in auto sales since 2020 in the first quarter amid fierce competition from Chinese electric-vehicle makers and sagging worldwide EV demand. Reuters reported in April that Tesla had scrapped plans for a long-awaited affordable car known as the Model 2. That has thrown into doubt Tesla’s plans for new factories in Mexico and India, where Musk had been expected to travel last month to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, before canceling at the last minute. And a host of executives have departed amid deep companywide layoffs.

I'm disappointed about Tesla's decision not to offer a lower cost, and smaller, electric car.

My last three cars have been subcompacts: a Mini Cooper S, a VW GTI, and a Subaru Crosstrek. I much prefer that size car over larger sizes. A Tesla "hot hatch" priced around $25,000 to $35,000 would be very popular both in the United States and elsewhere. 

But Elon Musk appears to have scrapped the Model 2, choosing to instead build updated versions of the Model 3 and Y, both of which have been around for quite a while and look similar. His intention to focus on self-driving cars/taxis strikes me as a mistake, though maybe it will pay off in the end.

After all, like I said, Musk is both annoying and a genius. I just wish he manifested more of the latter quality and less of the former. 

After five months, I finally get medical treatment for my severe sciatica

If you've ever had severe sciatica pain, you'll find this blog post a heck of a lot more interesting than if you haven't. Usually that nerve pain is produced by problems with the spine, either degenerative or following an injury. 

I wrote about my current bout with sciatica back on March 23 in "If you're wondering about my absence, the answer is sciatica." An excerpt:

It can be an extremely annoying pain. My worse moments have been in the middle in the night when I need to use the bathroom, or when I get up after sleeping. A few times I was almost unable to move from my bed. When I tried, the pain was so intense I'd cry out uncontrollably, and needed help from my wife to just put my pants and shoes on.

Now I can do that on my own, though I use a single crutch to hobble into the bathroom, the pain is so bad. When I'm asked to rate the pain on a scale from 1-10, I say that at its worst, it's a 10. 

Given the occasional high intensity of that pain, which otherwise is just really annoying (though I'm doing better now, perhaps thanks to acupuncture), I've been highly motivated to get the health care system moving as quickly as possible toward treatment for the sciatica. 

However, aside from physical therapy, which I got after only a 5-week wait, and acupuncture, which I got on my own with less than a week's wait, it took me a bit over five months from when I first contacted my primary care doctor about the increased discomfort from the sciatica that I've been dealing with since 2020, until today, when I got two epidural steroid injections. 

In pain time, it felt a lot more than five months. But in health care system time, this is all too typical. Maybe even better than typical, since I have a Medicare MedAdvantage plan that is fairly generous and pretty responsive to referral requests.

Still, there are annoying hoops to jump through all along the way. For example, my wife has had three epidural injections that have helped her sciatica pain a lot. For me to get one, my primary care provider said that I needed a Lumbar Spine MRI. And in order to get the MRI, I needed six weeks of physical therapy, a Lumbar Spine X-ray, and something else that I've forgotten.

After that, of course, it took more time to be seen by several specialists. Some of them were clearly understaffed and overworked. In one case, I was shocked when I was told that it would take a week and a half to two weeks to schedule an appointment. Not to be seen at an appointment, just to schedule an appointment. That was a first for me. 

And our health care system isn't under the stress of Covid as it used to be. When I first got severe sciatica in 2020, I could understand why it wasn't possible to schedule a lumbar spine MRI, given that so many resources were going to care for Covid patients.

Now, though, the health care system seems to be under "normal" continual stress. My aging baby boomer generation must be partly to blame, given our increased medical needs. But my wife and I are both finding that now it takes much longer to get doctor appointments. Something is stressing the health care system, and i'm not sure what it is.

Here's my chronology.

December 8, 2023. I ask via MyChart for a referral from my primary care provider to Salem Health Rehabilitation Center, saying:

Dr. Gyuricska, sorry to hear that you're leaving Salem Health soon. I'll miss you. Wish you the best for your new course in life. I'm messaging you because I'd like a repeat referral to Salem Health Rehab Center for my right leg problem. The sciatica continues. What concerns me now is a different sensation in the right leg, some transitory unsteadiness/weakness after sleeping or sitting in a soft chair. Sort of weirdly, the sciatica pain is a bit less. The new problem might go away soon, but with the holidays upon us I figured that a physical therapy referral now would mean I could be seen after the first of the year. If I wait until January, naturally the wait to see a physical therapist, hopefully the same one I saw before, would be even longer.

December 11, 2023. Referred to Salem Health Rehabilitation Center for physical therapy.

January 5, 2024. Medicare wellness exam. Got advice to use BioFreeze to reduce stronger sciatica pain, which, sadly, isn't "going away soon" as I'd hoped on December 8.

January 15, 2024. Had first physical therapy session.

February 23, 2024. Primary care appointment about sciatica. Referred for Lumbar Spine X-ray which I got on same day.

March 9, 2024. Had Lumbar Spine MRI. Numerous problems found, including spinal stenosis. 

March 12, 2024. Referred to Salem Health Spine Center by primary care provider.

March 13, 2024. Had last of six physical therapy sessions.

March 14, 2024. Notified by Salem Health Spine Center to make appointment with Capital Neurosurgery Specialists neurosurgeon.

March 14, 2024. Referred to Salem Pain and Spine Specialists by primary care provider. 

March 18, 2024. Had scoliosis X-ray at request of neurosurgeon. 

March 26, 2024. Had appointment with neurosurgeon. Epidural steroid injections at two spine locations were recommended as first therapeutic step, which also would have diagnostic value.

April 8, 2024. At my request, referred by primary care provider to Portland doctor who performs MILD (Minimally Invasive Lumbar Decompression) for consultation about this possibility.

April 10, 2024. Had appointment with Physician Assistant at Salem Pain and Spine Specialists. It was agreed that I should get epidural steroid injections.

April 16, 2024. Had appointment with Portland doctor's Physician Assistant. 

April 29, 2024. Had first acupuncture treatment, which I chose to do.

May 9, 2024. Had second acupuncture treatment.

May 13, 2024. Had two epidural steroid injections at Salem Pain and Spine Specialists.

July 1, 2024. Follow-up appointment scheduled with neurosurgeon. 

Stormy Daniels, porn star, is more moral than Donald Trump, ex-president

We live in strange times.

Sure, all times are strange in their own way, but 2024 in the United States is shaping up to be among the strangest years, politically speaking, in my more than a half century of following political issues closely.

No cameras are allowed in the courtroom, so we have to rely on sketch artists

Yesterday and today the news was full of how Stormy Daniels, porn star/adult film actress, testified for the prosecution at the criminal trial of Donald Trump, ex-president. That in itself is damn strange. 

For it's the first time an ex-president has had to defend himself in court against criminal accusations. In this case, that he falsified business records in furtherance of a deception that a $130,000 "hush money" payment to Daniels was for legal expenses rather than a contribution to Trump's presidential campaign -- since if news about his affair with Daniels had come out just before the 2016 election, this could have tanked his chances given the uproar over the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy."

The reason for the payment was that in 2006 60 year-old Trump had sex with 27-year-old Daniels. It creeped Daniels out, but she climbed into bed with Trump anyway, in part (or in whole) she says because of the power imbalance between a rich guy with a bodyguard standing outside the hotel suite and a female porn star.

This was four months after Trump's wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. By contrast, apparently Daniels was in between marriages in 2006, given what this Daily Beast article says:

Daniels has been married four times. Her first marriage was in 2003 to Pat Myne, a fellow adult-film star, just as her career in the industry was taking off. The couple divorced after two years, and Daniels quickly remarried to Mike Moz, an art director, in 2007.

So that's one reason I consider Stormy Daniels to be more moral than Donald Trump. (In truth, I consider almost everyone to be more moral than Trump.)

Another reason is that despite the best effort of one of Trump's attorneys to undermine Daniels' testimony via cross-examination, her story of their sexual encounter held up well. Sure, there were some minor differences between the way Daniels described this over the years, but 2006 was 18 years ago. It makes sense that her memory would fade some with time.

But not to such a degree that Daniels would confuse not having sex with Trump, with having sex with Trump. This is the sort of thing that would be hard to forget. Yet Trump has denied they had sex. Not in court, though, because that would open him up to a perjury indictment.

Daniels had to go into considerable detail about the hotel suite where she met Trump and other descriptions of that evening because his defense team is strongly implying, though not explicitly saying, that the sexual encounter never happened.

This is another reason why Daniels is more moral than Trump.

By no means is she a perfect person (who is?). However, she comes across as someone who is doing her best to speak the truth, while every day Trump speaks to reporters with lies cascading from his mouth. Something he is practiced at, since he lied incessantly during the four years of his presidency, just as he is doing at every campaign event in his hopefully quixotic attempt to be re-elected in November.

A son's love and hospice supported a Salem woman during her last days

There's a lot of negativity floating around these days. I fall prey to it. I also contribute to it. So to be able to share a 100% positive story of how an old friend and hospice workers made a Salem woman's last days before she died as comfortable as possible -- that's a pleasure.

Jim Ramsey is the friend. I've known him since the early 1970s. When he was part of Ramsey Real Estate, Jim was the realtor who found a house for my wife and me in 1977, enabling us to move from Portland to Salem when I got a job with state government.

For quite a while, more years than I can recall, Jim and I have gotten together every Sunday for coffee and conversation. Part of that time, Jim's mother, Virginia (Ginger) Hager -- she got remarried after Jim's father died -- would join us at the West Salem Starbucks.

Last Wednesday Ginger died at the age of 97. She suffered from severe dementia.

That led Jim to stop sleeping in his apartment and move into his mother's West Salem home in May of 2023, about a year ago. Every week, with a few exceptions, Jim was able to continue to meet with me at the Urban Grange coffeehouse where I'd always ask, "How are things going with your mother?"

The answer always made me think, Wow, Jim is displaying such love and devotion. Because caring for anyone who is elderly with a serious health problem is difficult. When the person has dementia, which steadily worsened as the months passed, caring for them is hugely more difficult. 

I won't attempt to describe the specific problems Jim had to deal with.

All I can say is that hearing his stories of what he had to do in caring for his mother brought to mind "saintly" and "selfless." These certainly aren't qualities that I feel I possess, but I felt inspired to be a more compassionate person after each of our coffee shop conversations.

Basically, it's difficult to care for someone over a long period of time who is mentally normal but needs help with many activities of daily living: eating, getting into and out of bed, going to the bathroom, all that stuff. In Ginger's case, not only did Jim have to help with these things, he wasn't able to get much assistance from his mother. In fact, she often opposed him. And naturally Ginger wasn't capable of expressing any real appreciation for everything Jim was doing. 

Jim had support, thankfully. A caregiver who was a friend of the family was hired to come to Ginger's house for four hours almost every day, giving Jim time off to handle things at his apartment and do necessary errands like grocery shopping and coffee-house-conversation-time. She was viewed as a "grandma sitter." Jim's brother and sister-in-law lived nearby and helped out also.

But Jim was the primary support for his mother. As the months passed, I began to ask if he and his family had considered having Ginger enter a memory care home or institution.

They had, but Ginger was becoming increasingly argumentative as her dementia progressed. It was clear that she wouldn't want to leave her home, and there was no power of attorney for medical care decisions -- nor, obviously, any ability to have one signed by Ginger, given her dementia. So a court order would have been needed to admit her to an institution. 

Jim was stressed, but he persevered. Again, I found this astoundingly admirable. I'd keep telling him, "You are accumulating so much good karma for what you're doing, you should be reborn in wonderful circumstances." And I don't even believe in karma, or reincarnation. 

In January 2024,  Jim and his family had Ginger admitted to  a hospice services provider, Serenity Hospice. Great decision. This resulted in a caregiver coming two days a week for an hour each time to check blood pressure, oxygen level, temperature, and such. The hospice also provided expert advice about how to handle Ginger's declining condition, such as her reluctance to eat. 

I was much impressed with how the hospice caregivers anticipated the needs of Jim and his mother in Ginger's last days, when a caregiver came every day during the week or so before she died. Jim told me that on Monday, I think it was, several days before his mother's death, a hospice worker contacted him and said that she'd be spending the night at Ginger's house for a few days so Jim could get some much-needed sleep.

(His mother was needing almost continuous care and attention, including at night.)

Then, on Wednesday, a hospice caregiver arrived at the house at 10 am to give Ginger a bath in bed, including washing her hair, following a rough night where Jim's mother was having breathing problems that sounded like a "death rattle." 

That allowed Jim to leave the house and attend to some errands. When he returned, Jim learned that his mother had died. 

Death of a parent, or anybody, is sad for loved ones. However, given Ginger's condition and her being 97 (a few months from being 98), the sadness was mixed with relief that Ginger's suffering was over -- and that she had died relatively easily at home, after being bathed and cared for by a hospice worker. 

I've never heard anything but positive stories about hospice services. This is rare in health care, where gripes abound. Serenity Hospice was a great aid to Jim and his family, along with his mother, of course. I salute everyone who works for a hospice. It must be a difficult job, though a rewarding one.

For as the oft-heard saying goes, it isn't death that scares most people, it's the dying that precedes death. Hospices help to relieve that fear. 

I'll accept the praise of my writing, even though it's a bit over-the-top

I have to be honest. As much as I aspire to humility, in truth I really enjoy being praised. That was evident to me today when I read a comment on my Church of the Churchless blog by a regular reader of my posts, who calls himself Appreciative Reader.

An apt name, since in the comment he praised my writing on the blog in a fashion that would have embarrassed me if I wasn't so much in agreement with this Noel Coward quote.

I've shared the comment below. It means a lot to me, so I wanted to make it more visible to my future praise-loving self, rather than having it languish in the comment section of a blog post that I may soon forget about.

As a bit of background, I started my Church of the Churchless blog in late 2004 after George W. Bush was re-elected president with the aid of Christian fundamentalists. That bothered me so much, I set out to write about the dangers of religious dogmatism. 

After twenty years, 3,566 posts, 72,888 comments, and 7,236,888 page views, I'm still at it. My usual routine is to write a post for Church of the Churchless every other day, and write a post for either this HinesSight blog or my Salem Political Snark blog on the non-churchless days.

Sometimes I think that I've done more than enough writing about churchless subjects. However, after reading what Appreciative Reader had to say, I'm inspired to keep going. That's the power of praise. It energizes. 

Here's the comment. It starts off with a quote from a Church of the Churchless post I wrote last night, "Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel." That's the name of a book I was sent by Rabbi Brian, who shares both my first name and a distaste for organized religion.

“This isn't a religion bashing book in the style of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, or Brian Hines. (I don't belong in the company of these noted authors; just couldn't resist seeing my name in the same sentence as theirs.)”

I’m afraid I’m going to disagree with that opinion of yours, Brian, and in the strongest possible terms! Without a shadow of doubt your name does belong squarely in that august company.

Dawkins and Hitchens and the rest of them may have sold gazillions of books, and may have influenced a much larger number of people with those books and with their lectures; and your reach, when measured in terms of those specific metrics, may well be less than theirs, sure; but it seems to me you completely understate to yourself the value of this lovely blog you’ve set up and maintained over all of these years.

This blog is a priceless resource; and in my opinion the worth and influence of the whole of it adds up to far more than any single book or even any single multi-volume set of books.

I can attest from my own personal experience how very much I’ve learned, and gained, from your blog. Given my starting point in this journey of self-discovery, I’ve found your writings perfectly aligned to help me with my exploration. Among the names you mention there, it is Richard Dawkins whom I admire the most, and whose books and lectures have guided and influenced me the most.

And yet I have no hesitation in stating unequivocally that I’ve learned from your blog, and been helped by your blog, far more than even Dawkins. (That is, it is silly I suppose to compare one person or writer with another like this; but still, if we must compare the one with the other, then that’s my personal estimate of that particular comparison.)

I suppose it is a question of where one’s at in one’s journey. I myself started out from a POV that was fundamentally skeptical (that is, I don’t think I’ve ever been given to unquestioning blind faith), but nevertheless to begin with theistic.

Given that, your (ongoing) journey resonated with me; and while I’ve always made up my own mind about things, but the discussions in your blog have played an invaluable role in helping me to better navigate and explore these waters. And I’ve no doubt that many who are situated as I have been, have been similarly helped, and going forward will continue to be helped, by this unique blog of yours, taken as a whole.

I’ve said this a few times before over the years, but now seems a good time to once more thank you, Brian, for this untiring labor of love of yours.

Ukraine aid bill passes in House. Bad news for Russia.

I'm happy for Ukraine.

This embattled nation, which has been bravely fighting the unprovoked Russian invasion since February 24, 2022, has been waiting for more American aid for months due to dithering by House Republicans. 

But today Ukraine had something to celebrate: $60 billion in aid. It took Democrats to get the aid bill across the House finishing line, first by supplying votes needed to have the bill move out of the Rules Committee, then by supplying votes needed to have the bill approved by the full House.

The vote breakdown is a mark of shame for the 112 House GOP members who said "no" to helping Ukraine remain a democratic nation, thereby saying "yes" to Putin's autocratic desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union by force.

It's shocking that a majority of House Republicans, the party which used to be staunchly against Russian authoritarianism, voted against the Ukraine aid bill. This shows how deeply the GOP has embraced Trump's love of Putin and other dictators.

Which is scary. Trump aspires to be a dictator himself. That's bad enough. When a good share of the politicians in the Republican Party are willing to go along with that unconstitutional aspiration, the stakes are much higher for the November election.

In Russia the state-run television channels have been praising our House of Representatives for holding up aid to Ukraine. Thankfully, that aid should soon start reaching Ukraine, since the Senate is poised to pass the House bill and Biden will eagerly sign it. 

This is bad news for Russia and good news for the many friends of Ukraine in the world. Hopefully the aid will include much-needed additional anti-missile systems to stop Russian attacks on civilian targets like apartment buildings.

The Ukrainian people deserve to have their own version of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Sure, Ukraine is much larger than Israel, so protecting that country will be more difficult that protecting Israel is. 

But saving the lives of Ukrainians is just as important as saving the living of Israelis. Too bad a majority of House Republicans don't agree. 

Here's a post on X that moved me. 

Iran's attack on Israel shows urgent need for military aid to Ukraine

It's time. Way past time, actually.

For the good-for-almost-nothing House Republicans to show that they're not completely useless by finally getting off their GOP butts and passing the Senate bill that has much needed aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan this coming week.

A lot of damage already has been done. Ukraine is running out of artillery shells, ammunition, air defense missiles, and other essential military gear needed to fend off the Russian invasion of their country.

All because of Republicans.

The GOP used to be the party that stood up to Russia and wanted the United States to defend liberty wherever it was threatened. But under the incompetent leadership of Donald Trump, many Republicans have become spokespeople for Putin and his authoritarianism. 

Hopefully yesterday's attack by Iran on Israel will spur the House of Representatives to pass an aid package that supports Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. 

After all, Iran has been supplying drones to Russia, and perhaps other weaponry, that are used to attack Ukraine. About 300 Iranian drones and missiles were fired from Iran into Israel. Almost all were destroyed without causing any damage, thanks to Israel's Iron Dome air defense system and the American military in the Middle East. 

That's good news. But Ukraine has been battling Iranian drones for many months. It's disgusting that House Republicans have failed to approve the military aid package that would go a long way toward protecting people in Ukraine from the Iranian drones.

Ukraine actually is more deserving of military aid from the United States than Israel is. For one thing, Israel appears to be guilty of war crimes in its fight against Hamas. Over 30,00o people have been killed in Gaza by Israel, an estimated two-thirds women and children.

Also, Israel provoked yesterday's attack by Iran when it struck an Iranian consulate building in Syria, killing several top leaders of the Revolutionary Guard. It's against the rule of war to attack embassies and consulates. 

Iran retaliated. But with advance warning and in a fashion designed to make it easier for the Iranian drones and missiles to be shot down. As a Politico story says, Iran's attack seemed designed to fail.  It was a message to Israel more than a serious military retaliation. 

Yet there are reports that some right-wing ministers of Netanyahu's cabinet want to use Iran's attack as an excuse to destroy Iran's oil refineries, ports, nuclear research facilities, and such. This is how major wars start: a provocation is retaliated against; then there's retaliation for the retaliation; followed by retaliation for the retaliation for the retaliation.

And so it goes, a war born from unthinking desires for revenge. President Biden is absolutely correct when he tells Israel, don't do something you'll regret. 

In the case of Israel, doing nothing right now is better than doing something. Iran doesn't want a war with Israel. The United States doesn't want a war with Iran. And if Israeli officials are smart, they'll take Biden's advice: stop and think. 

What worries me is that Netanyahu clearly wants Trump to beat Biden this November. So he might start a wider war in the Middle East to reduce Biden's chance of winning another term as president. Oil prices would spike, causing gasoline to cost more. The United States might even be drawn into an Israel-Iran war, which would be unpopular with Americans. 

Support for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan is popular, though. Way more popular than war.

This is why the House would be wise to pass an aid package for those countries ASAP. Voters will look kindly at those who vote to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, Israel against Hamas/Iran aggression, and Taiwan against Chinese aggression -- no matter if they have a D or R after their name.

I enjoyed women's Final Four more than the men's

It was a slogan for a cigarette brand, Virginia Slims, way back in 1968, but it still seems an appropriate way to describe the state of women's basketball in 2024: You've come a long way, baby.

(OK, calling a woman "baby" may not be appropriate to some. However, that's part of how far women have come, both off and on a basketball court.)

Yesterday I watched the women's NCAA championship game between Iowa and South Carolina.

It was the most watched basketball game, men or women, college or pro, since 2019. For good reason. South Carolina was undefeated. Iowa had Caitlin Clark, the all-time women's NCAA scoring leader, shown below.

Clark is an exciting player. Fearless. Makes 3-pointers from almost half court. Great passer. Strong will to win. I came to admire the other players on her Iowa team also, especially Hannah Stuelke. Aside from her basketball skills, Stuelke has a pleasing demeanor: calm, almost serene, big smile. Here she is with Clark.

But South Carolina eventually had their way with Iowa. Easy to see how the team went undefeated this season. Athletic. Quick. Relentless. Strong bench. Dominating 6' 7" post player. The national championship game lived up to its billing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Tonight's men's championship game between Connecticut and Purdue, not so much. I'd recorded the game, and found myself fast-forwarding through it in the final minutes. Partly because it was clear Connecticut was going to win; partly because I wasn't into the game as much as the women's championship.

It's kind of hard to describe why I found the women's Final Four games more enjoyable than the men's. Here's my attempt.

The women's style of play seems more interesting to me. Sure, both the men and women have set plays. There's just something more basketball'ish with the women. A bit less individualism; a bit more teamwork. 

Vibe-wise, the women are just as competitive as the men. They just aren't as annoying with their competitiveness. I see more smiling with the women. I see more tense looks with the men. It's sort of akin to the difference between a pleasingly mellow cup of coffee (women) and an over-caffeinated energy drink (men).

Both beverages have their place. I just feel that watching women's basketball is more pleasurable for me than watching men's basketball. I'm talking college hoops here. I don't enjoy pro basketball. 

A story in USA Today, "Why women's March Madness feels more entertaining than men's NCAA Tournament" helped me understand other reasons why I prefer women's college basketball. 

The women’s game has had moments before, but this is something different and transcends star power. The games (most of the time) are enjoyable to watch because it’s a free-flowing game with creative offensive sets and players who can execute those plays.

This is not a novel thought. Nearly 30 years ago, John Wooden, the great UCLA men’s basketball coach, said, “To me, the best pure basketball I see today is among the better women’s teams.”

Today, there is an unprecedented amount of talent in women’s college basketball.

...The women’s game also benefits from rules that are not employed in the men’s games such as four quarters instead of two halves and advancing the ball to halfcourt on a timeout. Because of two halves, the men’s game gets mired in too many free throws, interrupting the flow. The women’s game resets team fouls after each quarter, and James said the men’s game needs to go to quarters and consider lowering the shot clock from 30 to 24 seconds.

Is the women’s game more entertaining than the men’s game? Aesthetics are subjective. But the growth and enjoyment in the women’s game is undeniable in TV viewership and ticket demand. It’s rooted in a style that appeals to basketball fans, and that’s a credit to the coaches, and most of all, the players.

Why I didn't buy a Can-Am Spyder after my test drive

At the age of 75, I figured my motorcycle and scooter days were beyond me.

After owning a little Honda 55 in high school, which I took to college, I got my motorcycle endorsement in my 40s, owned one for a year or so, then limited myself to cars until I bought a Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter in 2009.

I liked it a lot. Rode it for about three years.

I might still be, except I succumbed to my wife's dislike of the maxi-scooter, since every time I rode it, she was convinced I was going to die riding it. (Actually I had zero accidents in the three years; never even put a scratch on the Burgman.)

Since, I'd had numerous urges to get another scooter. I enjoyed the Burgman's antilock brakes, adjustable windscreen, large underseat storage, and automatic shifting, All I had to do was twist the throttle, steer, and brake. 

That left my attention free for enjoying the open air and watching out for what people in their cages, otherwise known as cars, were doing around me.

But the older I got, the less eager I was to ride around on two motorized wheels again. I'm still fit, but painful sciatica in my right leg, likely caused by some degeneration in my spine, now made it more difficult for me to maneuver a scooter lacking reverse gear,

Plus, Suzuki no longer sells the Burgman 650, in the United States at least, so the next best option was a Burgman 400 -- which lacked some of the features that I really liked on the 650.

That led me to think more seriously about a Can-Am Spyder RT. I missed the fun of open-air riding, but wanted something safer and more stable than a two-wheeled scooter. Over the years I'd window shopped Spyders and enjoyed seeing them on the road once in a while (they aren't all that common).

I liked the lockable storage of the RT. I liked the heated seats and grips. I liked the antilock brakes and traction control. I liked the adjustable windscreen. I liked the reverse gear. It struck me as having many of the benefits of a motorcycle or scooter without many of the drawbacks.

So last weekend I took a test drive at our closest Can-Am dealer. My wife wasn't thrilled with this, but I promised her that I wouldn't buy one on the spot.

Well, it turns out that I'm strongly leaning toward not buying a Can-Am Spyder off the spot either. Here's why, based on my test drive and watching numerous You Tube reviews of the 2024 Can-Am Spyder RT Limited, which appealed to me most. In no particular order, my reasons are:

Cost. At about $32,000, the RT Limited is almost as expensive as my 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Limited, which has almost every option. That's a lot to spend on a vehicle that isn't as versatile as my Crosstrek.

Lack of driving fun. I realized that the Spyder wasn't going to handle like my scooter, since it has three wheels and doesn't lean. But I thought it would have a go-cart sort of agile handling. Not so. During my test drive, right away I didn't enjoy how the front wheels seemed jittery, reacting to slight imperfections in the pavement.

Some video reviews made the same observation, so this wasn't just me. Sure, I would have gotten used to how the Spyder handled if I bought one, but I was worried that my first impression would be a lasting one. The Spyder RT may be a good touring machine. However, it didn't strike me as a fun drive in town and on the two lane twisty roads in our rural neighborhood. 

Not fully automatic. it's baffling why Can-Am would make the Spyder automatically downshift, but not automatically upshift. That has to be done with a paddle shifter. Yes, there's no clutch, a plus. It just seemed crazy that a $10,000 (or less) scooter is fully automatic, while the $32,000 RT Limited is only semi-automatic. 

Rain is an issue. Living as I do in Oregon, rain is common here, aside from the summer months. I avoided riding my scooter in the rain, given the reduced traction on two wheels. But I figured the Spyder would handle rain well with its three wheels. Yes, better than a motorcycle or scooter. However, the single drive wheel in the back makes for some slippery moments in the rain, based on videos I watched about how the Spyder does in wet stuff. 

Safety is inconvenient. I recalled how, even though I enjoyed my Burgman 650 a great deal, I didn't like putting on and taking off safety gear every time I rode it. Full face helmet. Gloves. Jacket and pants. Boots. I took the advice of my Team Oregon motorcycle safety course: all the gear, all the time. Good advice, but on a hot summer day, I came to enjoy riding in my car in shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals after I sold my scooter. 

So I came to the conclusion that it didn't make a lot of sense to spend $32,000 on a Spyder RT Limited that wasn't nearly as safe or convenient as my Subaru Crosstrek, yet didn't have the fun factor of a scooter or motorcycle. I was getting the worse of both worlds: the high cost of a car, and less safety features than a car, without the riding enjoyment of a two-wheeled scooter or motorcycle. 

Understand: a Can-Am Spyder is a good fit for many people. It just isn't for me. 

Woman in wheelchair brought tears as I watched So You Think You Can Dance

There's a lot of crap on television. There's also beautiful, unforgettable, highly emotional moments. That's why I watch. A single moment of that sort makes up for all the crap.

My wife and I have watched every episode of every season of So You Think You Can Dance. The show took a hiatus during the covid years. It reappeared recently. So far this season has had a lot of memorable auditions, as the three judges select contestants for a Top Ten competition, if I recall the number correctly. (It's varied somewhat over different seasons.)

The audition that has stuck in my mind most strongly came from a 27-year old woman, Kaylee Bays, who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome at the age of 21. Watch this video of her performance, which begins and ends in a wheelchair. 

It brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. 

I can't stop thinking about what she said to the judges. That last sentence, "As I lose pieces of myself, I will dance until I am dancing with my eyes," is amazingly beautiful and inspiring.

My doctors predict that I only have about five years left of mobility at this level. I feel more connected to myself as a human than I ever have. As I lose pieces of myself, I will dance until I am dancing with my eyes.

I've had painful sciatica in my right leg, hip, and butt for more than four years. In December of last year it got quite a bit worse, though initially in 2020 the pain was so bad I frequently had tears in my eyes for that reason.

I can't walk very far now. I can't go to my Tai Chi class now. I can't exercise without enduring some intense pain. I feel sorry for myself, even though I try to be as positive as possible about the prospect of finding some relief once my appointment at Salem Pain & Spine Specialists arrives in ten days.


The example of Kaylee Bays, who is much worse off than I am, yet has a much bigger smile than I'm able to manage most days, makes me feel that no matter how bad my pain is, and no matter how little I may be able to benefit from treatment, I can still fight as hard as I can to keep on doing the things I like to do and need to do.

For Bays, that is dancing. However she fares in the So You Think You Can Dance competition, she's clearly a winner. CrippleMedia describes some reasons why in "Breaking Barriers: Kaylee Bays' Triumph for Disability Representation on So You Think You Can Dance." Excerpt:

In the realm of performing arts, individuals with disabilities often encounter barriers to showcasing their talents. Kaylee Bays, a dancer hailing from Los Angeles who performs on wheels, etched her name in history as the first wheelchair user on So You Think You Can Dance. Her poignant and deeply passionate jazz solo, set to Pink’s “Never Not Gonna Not Dance Again,” embodied Bays’ journey as a disabled dancer.

The song serves as a potential anthem for disabled dancers, Highlighting that disabled dancers can still enjoy their passion, even after diagnosis or as their disability progresses, by adapting moves to what is accessible to them. At three, Bays embarked on her dance journey and pursued a professional career until her diagnosis intervened.

At 21, she received a life-altering diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, after enduring years of unexplained pain. This syndrome causes joint dislocations, stretchy and fragile skin, and hypermobility. She was informed that she had to stop dancing, a prospect that left her heartbroken.

However, Bays was determined and taught herself to dance from her wheelchair. On the show, she candidly shared her feelings of isolation and expressed a desire for a fearless role model when she first became disabled. Now, she fulfills that role for her community.

If you're wondering about my absence, the answer is: sciatica

There's lots of painful medical conditions. In my 75 years, I'm only become intimately acquainted with one of them: sciatica. 

If you're unfamiliar with the term, I'm glad for you. Because sciatica pain, which for me is in my right leg, hip, and buttock areas, can range from mild to excruciating. I'm familiar with the whole range. 

Injury or pressure on the sciatic nerve creates the pain of sciatica. So sciatica is a symptom of an underlying medical problem. However, that can be tough to figure out. Thus I tend to view sciatica as the problem, though I realize to be rid of it, whatever is causing it needs to be identified.

I've had sciatica since early 2020. It was extremely painful back then, which led to me getting physical therapy. This was at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. That prevented me from being able to get a MRI of my lower spine, which often is the culprit when it comes to sciatica.

Eventually I got better, though the pain in my right leg never went away completely. For four years, whenever I was on my feet, I felt the pain. But it didn't stop me from doing what I wanted to do and needed to do.

In December of 2023, though, it started to get worse. The pain from Sciatica 1.0 was just in my right leg. Once Sciatica 2.0 emerged, pain was added in my right hip and buttock. That made it quite a bit more painful to stand, walk, or otherwise move around.

I got more physical therapy. I do those exercises twice a day, twenty-five minutes or so in the morning, then the same in late afternoon or early evening. At first I could keep going to the Tai Chi classes that I've enjoyed since 2005. For about a month now, I've been unable to go to the classes. Too much pain.

Same with going to meetings of the Salem City Club and other gatherings. If I sit on certain chairs for too long, the pain worsens when I stand up. I'm fairly stoic about my sciatica pain, but sometimes it is difficult not to groan. So I've been avoiding gatherings where my pain could disrupt things.

That's my basic explanation of why I haven't been going to places I usually am at. I wanted to write a blog post about this in part to let people know the reason for my absences, and in part to express my sympathy/solidarity with other sciatica sufferers.

It can be an extremely annoying pain. My worse moments have been in the middle in the night when I need to use the bathroom, or when I get up after sleeping. A few times I was almost unable to move from my bed. When I tried, the pain was so intense I'd cry out uncontrollably, and needed help from my wife to just put my pants and shoes on.

Now I can do that on my own, though I use a single crutch to hobble into the bathroom, the pain is so bad. When I'm asked to rate the pain on a scale from 1-10, I say that at its worst, it's a 10. 

On the plus side, I've gotten a lumbar MRI, though I haven't learned from a doctor what it means yet. I have an appointment with a Salem neurosurgeon, Dr. Kafka, next Tuesday. Then I should learn what treatment options are open to me. 

In case you've never experienced nerve pain, it's very different from muscle pain. Much worse, in my experience. It's sort of akin to the difference between being sad, and being clinically depressed (which I was, in 2017). Nerve pain and depression simply exist on a different scale of suffering from muscle pain and sadness. 

So to those who suffer from sciatica, I feel for you. May we all find relief. I just wish I'd bought stock in whoever makes the generic Tylenol and Advil I've been using copiously. Those substances help some with the pain, but not a whole lot.

By the way, a Regence advice nurse gave me a good tip for using Tylenol and Advil. She advised alternating between Tylenol and Advil every four hours, using two 500 mg Tylenol capsules and one 200  mg Advil capsule each time. That produces 3,000 mg of Tylenol every 24 hours and 600 mg of Advil, both within the recommended daily limit.

Masters of the Air -- a moving series about the bravery of WWII aviators

Having just finished watching Apple TV's nine-part series, Masters of the Air, I can heartily recommend it to anyone who would enjoy a deeply moving portrayal of the American aviators who flew B-17 Flying Fortress bombers into Europe from bases in England during World War II.


It's based on a book with the same name about the 100th Bomb Group. At the conclusion of the final episode, some of the main characters are shown along with photos of the real-life aviators, plus a description of where life took them after the war ended. 

I found that highly emotional.

Partly because while I barely knew anything about my father, John Hines, as my mother and he divorced when I was too young to remember him, and I only was able to spend one hour with him in my entire life, a newspaper clipping my mother saved of her post-war engagement notice said that he served in the Navy for three years and "was overseas two years as instructor with the 17th Marine Regiment, engineers, attached to the First Marine Division." 

That Wikipedia link says that the First Marine Division saw heavy fighting in the Pacific. I have no idea what experiences my father had, but watching Masters of the Air, I felt that even though he was a Marine, not an aviator, and a jerk, I had to give him a mental salute for the sacrifices he and everyone else who served in the Armed Forces during World War II endured.

Over and over, while watching this series, I'd think, "No matter how badly my day is going, it's a hell of a lot better than being in a Flying Fortress flying into Germany before the allies had air superiority." Because in many respects those were suicide missions. Sometimes half or more of the planes were shot down.

Yet the crews were eager to keep flying, notwithstanding the extreme danger they faced, because it was so important for them to obey their orders and do their part in defeating Nazi Germany. 

Masters of the Air starts off sort of slowly. The first few episodes are devoted to getting to know the characters, two of whom are rather confusingly named "Buck" and "Bucky." After that, the bombing missions are realistic and tense. It takes amazing courage to keep flying through flak, antiaircraft fire, and fighter attacks in a lumbering Flying Fortress that has to be kept on a steady course during a bombing run.

Obviously it isn't giving anything away to say that Masters of the Air has a happy ending. The allies win the war! To see the B-17s used to drop food via parachutes at the very end of the war to desperately hungry people in the Netherlands echoed the air drops the United State is doing in Gaza now.

Health care workers, it's the system that bothers me, not you

Way back when (to be more specific, the 1970s and 1980s), I was, in order of my career moves, a research associate in the Oregon Medical School Department of Family Practice, a manager with the State Health Planning and Development Agency, and the executive director of Oregon Health Decisions, a pioneering community-based bioethics effort.

As I like to say, I must have done a terrific job, because now our state's health care system is running perfectly smoothly with no problems.

Of course, that's a blatant falsehood. Oregon, along with the rest of the United States, has a disjointed health care system marked by inefficiency, inequality, and crazily high costs.

However, most people are satisfied with their health care providers. I know I am.

The dissatisfaction is mostly with the system that these providers have to work in, and under. Often this doesn't become obvious until someone has a medical problem that is causing them a lot of distress, so speedy treatment is desired, and the health care system moves with decided unspeediness.

As you probably have guessed, one of those someone's is me. After suffering from sciatica in my right leg that started off very painful in 2020, when I was a youthful 71, then got better though it never went away, the sciatica has morphed into being very painful again now that I'm 75.

So I've been seeing my primary care provider, a physical therapist, and the staff who have gotten me a lumbar X-ray and MRI. I like all of these people. It's the system that isn't working so well.

On the most basic level, there's a disconnect between a person with a medical problem, me in this case, and policies that are a buffer between what people and their providers want, and the insurance that pays for most of health care.

I don't mean to burst the bubble of those who are looking forward to becoming old enough to get Medicare, having tired of the B.S. private insurance companies engage in. I used to be in that bubble myself. I couldn't wait to rid myself of my Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance.

However, when I became eligible for Medicare, I decided to sign up for a MedAdvantage plan, as that seemed, well, advantageous. Kind of amazingly, I chose Regence MedAdvantage -- you know, the same corporation that offered the private insurance I detested for so many years.

It seems to me that with every passing year, Regence MedAdvantage introduces more barriers to getting needed care, probably due to cost containment pressures. What particularly irritates me is how third-party contractors are used by Regence MedAdvantage to assess referrals made by my primary care provider.

This doesn't happen with every referral, but often enough. For example, today I had an appointment with my physical therapist. He'd given me exercises to do over about five visits, and offered some great advice about how to manage my sciatica. 

Since it seemed time to stop our visits, he started to suggest a plan for how to maintain an ability for me to see him again if I needed to.

Then he glanced at his computer screen and said, "Oh, but you have _______ as an intermediary. If we don't close out your case, and I see you again, they'll only approve half the visits they did this time, like from eight to four. And after that, they'll keep cutting the visits, like from four to two. But if we close your case, after 60 days they'll treat you as having a new problem and grant the original number of visits."

OK, I got what he was saying. However, it seemed strange that we weren't talking about what would be best for treating my sciatica problem; we were talking about what would be the best approach to dealing with my insurance problem.

Again, I have Medicare. I'm much better off, bureaucratic B.S. wise, than people who have private insurance.

But "much better" doesn't equate to pleasant. It bugs me when my primary care provider orders, say, a lumbar MRI to find out what is going on with my spine, then I have to wait for an approval from either Regence MedAdvantage or whoever Regence contracts with to decide if an MRI is warranted.

I realize this is a crazy idea, given how our health care system (actually a non-system) is set up, but it sure would be great if health care providers were the ones making the decisions as to what is appropriate care, with outsiders getting involved only if there's an obvious problem with what has been ordered for a patient.

Currently I'm waiting for a referral to a pain and spine clinic to be processed. I've been told that the referral has been approved. It just hasn't been processed, whatever that means. So I bug my providers, asking them what's taking so long, and they've been patient with me. I try to assure them that I'm not unhappy with what they're doing.

It's like when I hear my wife calling her MedAdvantage company when there's a problem with a prescription or care being denied. After explaining the problem, she always says, "I'm not irritated with you; you just work at ________; I'm irritated with management and your company's system."

 

Starlink Gen 3 pipe adapter is horrible. Here's how mine got fixed.

I became a Starlink beta tester in January 2021. While this Space X satellite internet system was buggy in the beginning, it's gotten increasingly reliable. And the download/upload speeds are better also. At least, they are here in western Oregon.

However, the pipe adapter that Starlink is selling to attach the Gen 3 (third generation) dish to a variety of mounts -- I'm using the Ridgeline Mount for my Gen 3 dish -- is, to put it bluntly, a piece of crap. It's hard to believe that Starlink let this poorly designed piece of equipment that replaces the fold-out legs that come with the Gen 3 dish ever be sold to customers.

I got the Gen 3 rectangular dish even though our Gen 1 round dish was working fine. But the Gen 1 dish has a fixed cable that can't be replaced, and I figured that after more than three years of constant use, it was going to fail at some point. So I left the Gen 1 dish up on our roof as a backup for the Gen 3 dish.

I'm not hugely mechanical. However, as soon as I got the Gen 3 pipe adapter from Starlink, I knew it was going to be a problem.

My Gen 1 dish came with an attached pipe that clicked neatly into the Ridgeline Mount (one with the red bricks for ballast in the photo above). The dish has been immovable through three years of Oregon storms.

Since the Gen 3 pipe adapter was so flimsy, with just a set screw holding the dish to a pipe, I contacted a friend, Frank, who is a blacksmith and skilled metal worker. He made me a short pipe with a "telescope" feature in an attempt to mitigate the pipe adapter's shortcomings. See: "A blacksmith made this for me to fit in screwy Starlink Gen 3 pipe adapter."

This is how the pipe turned out.

A short pipe with a notch on the bottom that would fit over a plastic bulge in the Ridgeline Mount to prevent the pipe from rotating in strong wind, and a larger top that would fit nicely in the Gen3 pipe adapter. This photo taken from above shows how Frank welded two pieces of larger pipe to form the "telescope" feature.

Here's how well the pipe fits into the pipe adapter, which is on the back of the Gen3 dish. This allows the set screw to be tight with just a few turns. But you can see that the round receptacle on the pipe adapter into which a pipe goes is very shallow, and the set screw relies solely on friction to hold the dish to the pipe.

That explains why not long after I installed the Gen 3 dish on our roof with the pipe adapter and Ridgeline Mount, one morning I woke up, looked at the Starlink app on my iPhone and saw that the dish now was something like 65 degrees off target, whereas before it was 8 degrees.

Going outside to look at our roof, the reason was obvious. The Gen 3 dish had blown off the pipe and was lying on the roof. Thankfully, it only fell about a foot and was undamaged. Working fine, in fact. I got a ladder out, climbed up on the roof, and reattached the dish to the pipe, tightening the set screw as firmly as my 75 year old hand could do it. 

(I'm in good shape, so it was tight. Of course, it was tight before.)

Well, a few days ago we had some winds gusting to the 40-45 mpg range, or thereabouts. Nowhere near a hurricane, for sure. But the same thing happened: the dish was blown off the pipe again. This time I called Frank for some advice. I'd gotten a comment on one of my blog posts about the Gen 3 pipe adapter that advised using zip ties around the set screw.

That seemed like a good idea. However, Frank had an even better idea.

We went up on the roof and Frank drilled a hole through the outside layer of the two-layer "telescope" feature of the pipe he made for me. After some fiddling and grinding, the set screw fit through the first layer (a short piece of pipe) and butted up against the second layer (another short piece of pipe with smaller diameter).

That way, if wind tried to lift the dish off the pipe, the set screw wouldn't allow it, since the outer layer of the "telescope" feature would keep the pipe in place. Frank used a zip tie around the raised notch on the pipe adapter and the set screw as insurance, to prevent wind from lifting up the side of the dish on the opposite side of the set screw.

As a bonus, the two of us got the Gen 3 dish aligned perfectly. The Starlink isn't showing any problem with where the dish is pointing. (It lacks a motor to align itself, which the Gen 1 and Gen 2 dishes have.)

So far the dish has stayed on the pipe through some decent wind, though not as strong as what blew the dish off twice. And the speed is good: at the moment (10 pm), 302 Mbps down, 30 Mbps up. I'm confident Frank's fix is going to keep the Gen 3 dish secure.

I've complained to Starlink about the crappy Gen 3 pipe adapter. Haven't gotten a response yet. By the way, I have the pipe adapter that was sent after the first version was recalled. Apparently the only change was to the set screw.

Again, I was fortunate because the dish didn't fall very far when it blew off the pipe adapter. Some Starlink customers have their dish high up to avoid obstructions. They'd be advised to have a tether to catch the dish if they're using the Gen 3 pipe adapter. 

As I said in a previous post:

What bothers me is that Starlink leaves it up to purchasers of the Gen3 kit, which is now the standard residential kit, to figure out how to best attach the dish using the poorly designed pipe adapter. I was fortunate to have a blacksmith as a friend. But what does a single woman, say, do? 

Sure, she could go to her local hardware store and get a one inch pipe, hoping that it would be sturdy enough in the pipe adapter to hold the dish in windy/stormy conditions. It just seems to me, though, that Starlink should have made available a pipe similar to the one Frank made for me for customers who want to use the Ridgeline Mount to hold their Gen 3 dish. 

Again, the Gen1 and Gen2 dishes came with an attached pipe. For some reason Starlink decided not to do this with the Gen3 dish. That's fine, but it seems strange that after paying $600 for the Gen3 kit, a customer then has to search for a pipe that fits well in the pipe adapter and Ridgeline Mount.

I like my Starlink Gen 3 dish (even though it fell off the pipe adapter)

Here's a report on my installation of the Starlink Gen 3 dish, which I bought so our Gen 1 dish could serve as a backup. First, some background.

This is how I started off a post about needing to have a blacksmith make me a pipe to fit in the poorly designed pipe adapter for the Gen 3 dish. I called the post, "A blacksmith made this for me to fit in screwy Starlink Gen 3 pipe adapter."

I've been a happy Starlink customer since January 2021, when I reported on the installation of the first generation round dish that I was chosen to be a public beta tester for. I described my tale in "Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount."

Since, that Gen1 dish has worked flawlessly, though Starlink has had its reliability ups and downs, with recent experience being much more on the upside, probably due to the much larger number of Starlink satellites in orbit now.

But nothing lasts forever, and my wife and I are heavily dependent on the much faster broadband we enjoy with Starlink compared to the crappy 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL brought to us via the non-cutting edge technology of copper phone wires.

So when Starlink sent me an email last year saying that as a beta customer I could purchase the new third generation dish, getting several months of service free if I bought it now, I decided to buy the Gen3 kit.

My plan was to use the Gen3 dish, router, and power supply, leaving the deactivated Gen1 dish up on our roof as backup if something went wrong with the Gen3 kit and we had to wait a while before replacement equipment could arrive.

I ordered the new version of the Ridgeline Mount, as I wanted to put the Gen3 dish next to the Gen1 dish.

Here's a photo of the rectangular Gen 3 dish on our roof nestled next to the round Gen 1 dish. The Ridgeline Mount now has a different design. And you don't have to supply your own weights (I used bricks for the Gen 1 mount). The gray weights are supplied by Starlink.


This photo shows the angle of the Gen 3 dish. It doesn't have a motor like the Gen 1 and Gen 2 dishes. I gather that the fixed angle works because there are many more Starlink satellites up now.

The installation went quite smoothly. The 50 foot cable that comes with the Gen 3 kit looks like it will be able to follow the path of the 75 foot cable that the Gen 3 dish came with. I got a 150 foot cable just in case it didn't.

Pleasingly, both cables fit through the hole in the side of the house leading to our living room, where the router and power supply are. (The Gen 1 cable is permanently attached to the dish, so I had to leave it up, which is fine, since like I said, the Gen 1 dish will be a backup in case of problems with the Gen 3 dish.)

It was a bit of a pain to have to get back on the roof when the Starlink app told me the dish needed adjusting. That's the downside of not having a motor that turns the dish.

I believe the app said that the dish was 16 degrees off. I took my iPhone up on the roof and fiddled with the Gen 3 dish. It was kind of frustrating to rotate the dish, check the app to see if it was aligned correctly, then see that Starlink wanted it rotated back the other way.

The best I could do was get the dish just 8 degrees off. One reason is that I had to loosen the set screw on the pipe adapter, then turn the dish with one hand while looking at the Starlink app that I was holding in my other hand. The download speeds seem higher than the Gen 3 dish was giving us, so I'm not going to worry about the dish not being in the precisely correct position.

(The speeds vary a lot. Usually they're between 75 Mbps and 200 Mbps.)

A bigger aggravation was the dish falling off the pipe adapter when the wind was just 40 mph or so, maybe higher with gusts. That isn't exactly a hurricane. As noted in my post about the pipe adapter, the set screw just relies on friction to hold the dish to the pipe adapter. I thought I had the screw firmly tightened. Here's a photo.

But one morning the Starlink app said that the dish was 36 degrees off. Figures, since the dish was lying on the roof. We'd had about 40 mph winds the night before, maybe a bit higher with gusts. Not a hurricane, though.

You can see that there's not much room for a pipe to fit into the adapter. I was fortunate that the dish only fell a foot or so, landing on the back side. (We still had a decent internet connection even while the dish was lying on the sloping roof.) Some Starlink owners have to put their dish on a tall pipe/pole to get above obstructions. In that case, the dish falling off would be a bigger deal.

I can't understand why Starlink is shipping the Gen 3 dish with such a messed-up way of attaching it to a pipe. This is a photo from my previous post about having a blacksmith make a pipe that fit as snugly as possible into the adapter. Without the "telescope" feature welded on to the end of the pipe, which couldn't be any larger and still fit into the Ridgeline Mount, the set screw would have needed to be screwed in much further, with more ability for the pipe to loosen in a high wind.

Hopefully the dish won't fall off again. I've tightened the screw as much as I could.

A blacksmith made this for me to fit in screwy Starlink Gen3 pipe adapter

I've been a happy Starlink customer since January 2021, when I reported on the installation of the first generation round dish that I was chosen to be a public beta tester for. I described my tale in "Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount."

Since, that Gen1 dish has worked flawlessly, though Starlink has had its reliability ups and downs, with recent experience being much more on the upside, probably due to the much larger number of Starlink satellites in orbit now.

But nothing lasts forever, and my wife and I are heavily dependent on the much faster broadband we enjoy with Starlink compared to the crappy 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL brought to us via the non-cutting edge technology of copper phone wires.

So when Starlink sent me an email last year saying that as a beta customer I could purchase the new third generation dish, getting several months of service free if I bought it now, I decided to buy the Gen3 kit.

My plan was to use the Gen3 dish, router, and power supply, leaving the deactivated Gen1 dish up on our roof as backup if something went wrong with the Gen3 kit and we had to wait a while before replacement equipment could arrive.

I ordered the new version of the Ridgeline Mount, as I wanted to put the Gen3 dish next to the Gen1 dish.

Our roof has a mostly unobstructed view of the northern sky, with just a few tall fir trees and oaks in the way. For quite a while Starlink hasn't reported any obstructions, again probably because of the increased number of satellites in the sky. 

Only problem was, the Gen3 dish doesn't come with an attached short pipe, as the Gen1 and Gen2 dishes did. So I ordered a pipe adapter that replaces the flipout legs that come with the Gen3 dish, legs that obviously would be useless for placing the dish on the ridge of our roof.

When the pipe adapter arrived, before the Gen3 kit did, I was hugely unimpressed.

It was very shallow with just a set screw to hold the pipe in place. The pipe adapter seemed sufficient for a 10-12 inch pipe that would fit in the new Ridgeline Mount, but I sure wouldn't trust it if the dish was twenty feet or more  in the air, as some Starlink owners have to do to get a clear view of the sky. 

Further, the Ridgeline Mount could only hold a pipe a bit over an inch in diameter at most, while the pipe adapter could hold a pipe about two inches in diameter. That meant the set screw would have to be tightened almost all the way to hold a one inch pipe.

My brilliant move was to call a neighbor who is much more mechanical than I am, and a blacksmith to boot. Frank came to our house and took a look at the pipe adapter. He agreed that it would be much better to fashion a pipe that had a "telescope" large end to fit in the pipe adapter, with the rest of it being able to fit into the Ridgeline Mount.

I had to wait for Starlink to send a replacement Gen3 pipe adapter after the original one was recalled. I was hoping that a major redesign would have been made for the screwy pipe adapter, but apparently all that was changed was the set screw. And even that seemed the same to me. 

Anyway, I finally was able to take the Ridgeline Mount and pipe adapter up to Frank's shop so he could do his thing. It could Frank about a hour of measuring, cutting, and welding, but the end result was just what I needed.

A short pipe with a notch on the bottom that would fit over a plastic bulge in the Ridgeline Mount to prevent the pipe from rotating in strong wind, and a larger top that would fit nicely in the Gen3 pipe adapter. This photo taken from above shows how Frank welded two pieces of larger pipe to form the "telescope" feature.

Here's how well the pipe fits into the pipe adapter, which is on the back of the Gen3 dish. This allows the set screw to be tight with just a few turns.

I was able to successfully install the Gen3 dish today. It seems firmly in place. I'll report on how the installation went in another blog post, as I wanted to focus on the pipe needed to fit into the pipe adapter here.

What bothers me is that Starlink leaves it up to purchasers of the Gen3 kit, which is now the standard residential kit, to figure out how to best attach the dish using the poorly designed pipe adapter. I was fortunate to have a blacksmith as a friend. But what does a single woman, say, do? 

Sure, she could go to her local hardware store and get a one inch pipe, hoping that it would be sturdy enough in the pipe adapter to hold the dish in windy/stormy conditions. It just seems to me, though, that Starlink should have made available a pipe similar to the one Frank made for me for customers who want to use the Ridgeline Mount to hold their Gen 3 dish. 

Again, the Gen1 and Gen2 dishes came with an attached pipe. For some reason Starlink decided not to do this with the Gen3 dish. That's fine, but it seems strange that after paying $600 for the Gen3 kit, a customer then has to search for a pipe that fits well in the pipe adapter and Ridgeline Mount.

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.

Streaming shows I've liked recently

This is the third, and last, installment of my hit blog post series (in my own mind, at least) about streaming shows I've liked in 2023. First two posts are here and here.

Billions -- Various streaming services
Yeah, I know. This series, which had seven seasons, kicked off in 2016 and concluded this year. But I came late to the Billions party. I started watching it in 2023, can't remember exactly when. Once I started, I was completely and utterly hooked on Billions. I couldn't watch anything else during my Me Time for streaming. (My wife and I watch some shows separately, then together late at night.)

I loved the theme of greedy financial types jousting for power and money, with a federal attorney in the Southern District of New York battling not only his own demons but the financial guys/gals. Note: Laurel, my wife, has a strange distaste for Paul Giamatti's face. When we'd fire up Apple TV for our together TV watching time, usually an image of Giamatti would be on the screen, left over from my viewing of Billions. I had to rush to switch to a different screen before my wife had a nervous breakdown. 

A Murder at the End of the World -- Hulu
Very creative and unique take on the rather familiar plot of a brilliant "detective" straining to discover who the murderer is among a group of people in an isolated setting where all the suspects are known and can't escape the premises. Great acting with a pleasing didn't-see-that-coming ending. The stark snowy scenery is gorgeous. Show is set in Iceland, though I don't know if that's where it was filmed.

The Buccaneers -- Apple TV+
An engrossing period piece set in the 1870s. However, the music and general vibe is contemporary, at least when it comes to the five female friends who embark from the United States to find good times, and husbands, in Britain. It was easy to get hooked on this show. Lots of opportunities to think stuff like "Oh, no, he isn't right for her" and "Why can't the two of them get together?" Thankfully, there apparently will be another season -- though this seemed pretty obvious from the ending of the first season.

Lessons in Chemistry -- Apple TV+
This is a show about a strong independent woman held down by the mores of 1950's America. And, of course, her own hangups. There were times when I felt like giving up on the series when her plight seemed hopeless. Of course, that was just the bottom of a narrative arc, so I was glad when I kept watching and saw her triumph over adversity. It's a love story with unpredictable twists. And quite a bit of science.

Reacher -- Amazon
I'm enjoying Season 2 of Reacher just as much as Season 1. The best thing about the show for me is that Reacher isn't played by Tom Cruise, which he was in the movie version. That was so wrong, so out of touch with the Reacher I came to know through the books featuring this character by Lee Child, I could barely watch little Tom Cruise trying to act like a 6' 2" 250 pound muscular Jack Reacher.

Who, we learn in Season 2, can set off an air bag in a car by delivering a powerful kick to the front of the vehicle. (Don't try this at home; at least, if you don't want a broken foot.) Reacher is a nice guy who, believe me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of, because then he's not nice at all.

A message for those having a hard time during the Christmas season

Many people, well, most people I'm sure, enjoy the Christmas season. Vacation. Gifts. Relatives. Eating. Drinking. Football. And for Christians, the birth of Jesus.

But for others, and I'm largely in your camp, all of these festivities, well-wishing, and positivity grate on their nerves, because for reasons unique to each person, the Christmas season isn't a time for celebration.

After all, as the Buddha pointed out, life is suffering. Or at least, full of disappointment. Sure, it's possible to put on a happy face and ignore this truth, but ignore it or not, that truth remains. 

Many people are lonely. Many people are in pain -- physical, emotional, or both. Many people struggle for a lack of money. Many people deeply feel the sorrow of those beset by war, starvation, oppression, discrimination. There's a myriad of reasons why merry-making feels wrong around Christmas.

So I just want to say to anyone who feels that way, know that you're not alone. Since I'm one of you, by and large, here's a couple of things that made me feel better on this Christmas Eve.

First, someone shared this video by Michael Shermer in a comment on my Church of the Churchless blog. It's just a few minutes long. I liked what Shermer had to say. Basically, be here now. Enjoy the small things of life to the extent that you can.

This morning I picked up my copy of a book by a Buddhist monk, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English. These passages from the first chapter resonated with me. I'd read them several times before, but I needed a reminder of the Buddhist message.

The essence of our experience is change. Chance is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by, and it is never the same. Perpetual fluctuation is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and then that is gone too.

A sound strikes your ears, and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and go. Friends leave, relatives die. Your fortunes go up, and they go down. Sometimes you win, and just as often, you lose. 

It is incessant: change, change, change, no two moments ever the same.

..."Suffering" is a big word in Buddhist thought. It is a key term and should be thoroughly understood. The Pali word is dukkah, and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It means that deep, subtle sense of dissatisfaction that is a part of every mind moment and that results directly from the mental treadmill.

...Sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? Luckily, it's not -- not at all. It only sounds bleak when you view it from the ordinary mental perspective, the very perspective at which the treadmill mechanism operates. Underneath lies another perspective, a completely different way to look at the universe.

It is a level of functioning in which the mind does not try to freeze time, does not grasp onto our experience as it flows by, and does not try to block things out and ignore them. It is a level of experience beyond good and bad, beyond pleasure and pain.

It is a lovely way to perceive the world, and it is a learnable skill. It is not easy, but it can be learned.

I'm still a beginner at learning mindfulness.

But I get glimpses of what this Buddhist monk is talking about. Accept your feelings, whatever they are. Embrace your suffering, however it appears. Flow with life as best you can, even when this is difficult. Don't expect perfection of yourself, or of others, or of life. Be grateful for small pleasures.

Oregon State and Washington State get a $255 million Pac-2 settlement

Santa Claus came early for the two remaining members of the Pac-12 conference, Oregon State and Washington State. For yesterday there was an announcement that $255 million will be under their metaphorical Christmas trees, courtesy of a settlement agreement with the ten departing members of the conference.

Sports writer John Canzano described the agreement in his Bald Faced Truth substack column that I subscribe to.

Jayathi Murthy called me at 6:30 a.m. PT on a Saturday in Week 2 of the college football season. The Oregon State president was ticked off about what happened to the Pac-12 and the attempts by the departing members to blow up the 108-year-old conference on their way out the door.

“We’re ready for the fight,” she told me.

Oregon State and Washington State announced that they have reached a settlement with the 10 departing schools. The financial piece of the agreement gives the two schools protection against liabilities involving ongoing lawsuits, $190 million in future conference revenue and $65 million from the departing schools that will be spread out over the next two years.

The total war chest: $255 million.

Said one source: “We have a term sheet. We still don’t have a definitive final agreement. It will be a month or two before this thing gets papered, but we’re close enough that everyone feels comfortable.”

The departing schools get closure and an assurance that OSU and WSU won’t try to withhold all the revenue this year. But it also amounts to a victory in the fight Murthy spoke about in September. At the time, she expressed disappointment that TV market size was driving college football realignment.

“The presumption of it gets me,” Murthy told me. “We are a land-grant university. It was this amazing, visionary thing that happened 150 years ago. It was amazing and deliberate. It put universities in small towns. Now, everything is tied entirely to eyeballs and TV ratings? To do that is to disenfranchise students.

“It’s not the way it should be.”

This is great news for Oregon State and Washington State.

They were treated badly by Oregon, Washington, and the other Pac-12 schools who left them in the lurch in a self-centered effort to get more money out of media deals, even if this meant heading off to distant conferences like the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten.

So now I view OSU and WSU as underdogs. Since I usually root for the underdog in sporting events, the news that the Pac-2 have a $255 million war chest to ease their way into either rebuilding the Pac-12 or finding ways to cobble together agreements with other conferences made me smile. 

Canzano reports that things are coming along fairly well on this front.

Washington State and Oregon State’s football teams will play a scheduling partnership with the Mountain West Conference in football in 2024. Men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s golf, cross country, volleyball, women’s rowing and softball will be affiliate members with the West Coast Conference. And Oregon State announced that gymnastics, wrestling, indoor/outdoor track and field and men’s rowing will continue competing as members of the Pac-12.

The departing schools will be off to their new conferences in August. Oregon State and Washington State now have control of the Pac-12 and $250 million in assets. They have a plan for 2024. Beyond that, things remain uncertain.

I appreciated the Oregon State University president reminding me through her quote in Canzano's column that her school and Washington State are land grant universities, which were designed to be in small towns. Somehow that had escaped me until now.

That makes the media rights greed of the ten departing members of the Pac-12 even more obnoxious. Corvallis, Oregon only has about 60,000 people. Pullman, Washington only has about 33,000 people.

Obviously their fan base is much larger, but still, there's no way these land grant schools can compete in a bidding war for media rights with universities in much larger markets: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco area, Los Angeles area, and such.

I'm still going to be an Oregon Ducks fan. However, it's going to be a while before I get over my irritation at how the University of Oregon jumped ship for the Big Ten just because they expected to rake in more money from media rights in that conference.

I suspect that in coming years, there's going to be some regret expressed by the ten departing members of the Pac-12  when they realize that things aren't so rosy halfway, or all the way, across the country. Hopefully OSU and WSU will prosper and be able to say, "Hey, you're getting what you deserve."

Why I prefer Chroma Coffee drops to other acid reducers

I like coffee. But the acidic aspect of coffee causes me problems. As noted below, I've tried several acid reducing products. After learning about the Chroma Coffee drops, they've become my favorite.

Yesterday I received another order from the Chroma Coffee owner, Jack. As with my initial order, a handwritten note was included with the drops. Hey, you won't get that with any acid-reducing product you order from Amazon. 

Jack referred to a review I left on his web site. 

Pleased to find these drops

I'd been using acid reducing drops from another source, which went out of business. That led to a search on Amazon and elsewhere to find something similar: simple ingredients, easy to use, good customer service. Eventually I discovered these drops. They arrived very promptly with a nice handwritten note from Jack, the Chroma Drops owner. Great value, compared to my previous source of acid reducing drops. They're working well for me.

Here's what I tried before I discovered Chroma Coffee Drops.

The Caffeo drops were fine. However, when I ran out and tried to order more, I found that Caffeo had gone out of business.

That led me to try Coffee Tamer. I used it for a while, but I didn't like the ingredients and having to stir the packets for 30 seconds after adding them to coffee. Plus, Coffee Tamer says the granules are not designed to totally dissolve.

I find the Chroma Coffee drops much more convenient. The Chroma Coffee web site says only two drops will reduce acidity over 30%. Since I'm so sensitive to acidity, I've been putting eight drops in a 16 ounce cup. That's how many Caffeo recommended. 

The Caffeo drops came in a 15ml bottle, while the Chroma Coffee drops are a 60ml bottle. Given that there are 1,200 drops in 60ml, at eight drops per 16 ounce cup of coffee, I'm getting 150 cups of acid-reduced coffee for the $11.99 cost of the drops -- 8 cents per cup. 

So if someone uses only two drops per cup, that's 2 cents per cup. (Kind of cool that the Chroma Coffee drops cost almost exactly one cent per drop.) This is what led me to say in my review that the Chroma Coffee drops are a great value.

I keep a bottle in my car so they're available when I buy coffee when I'm out and about. The bottle fits easily in a coat pocket. After adding the drops, I just stir the coffee for a few seconds, since drops dissolve so rapidly compared to granules.

Our 2023 Christmas letter is about cars that act like old bodies

Here's our 2023 Christmas letter, hot off the press of my mind this afternoon after I decided that I really wanted to write it, notwithstanding my wife having said that we shouldn't send one out this year, because there's nothing interesting to report on in our lives.

To which I thought, What?! How could that be, given all that happened with us in 2023? What she meant, I think, is that we haven't gone on any exciting trips or done anything noteworthy. That may be true, but exciting and noteworthy is in the eye of the beholder.

Plus, that's not the point of a Christmas letter. Or Holiday Letter, as we prefer to call it.

The point is to give people a glimpse into our lives that they wouldn't have otherwise. Also, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, and I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2023 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2023 Christmas Letter PDF

Hearing "Hey, Old Man!" got me thinking about people treated as an object

Above is the short version of what happened to me yesterday in downtown Salem (Oregon). But since I'm a wordy Old Man, I'm going to share a longer version. 

As background, I am indeed old, 75. And a man. 

So it doesn't bother me when my Tai Chi instructor, whom I've known for about 22 years, beginning with his instruction in a hard style martial art, refers to me in class as Old Man. For I'm the oldest man in the class, though my instructor is 70, just five years behind me.

But it did bother me when I was crossing Court Street at the mid-block crosswalk, heading for the Pacific Martial Arts studio where my Tai Chi class was about to begin, and a young guy who was part of a small group of teenagers yelled at me from the sidewalk.

"Hey, Old Man!" 

My instant reaction was irritation, because his attitude wasn't friendly, even though I'd never met the guy. I felt like saying something back at him. But within a second or two I decided to ignore him and keep on walking.

That spurred the guy to say something else. I can't remember what it was. Something along the lines of "I'm talking to you!" Which I also ignored.

I then spent the first part of the Tai Chi class conjuring up things I could have said, but didn't. Not that I had any doubts that I did the right thing by walking away. That's the first rule of traditional martial arts training: walk away from a fight if at all possible.

However, I enjoyed coming up with alternative scenarios. Like, "Sorry, man, I'm on my way to where I earned my karate black belt quite a few years ago. No time to talk. Just want to point out that while it may be fun to insult old men, keep in mind that some of them might be able to kick your butt. Have a good day."

Later I thought more calmly about what had happened to me. This was the first time in my life that I'd been treated negatively as an Old Man Object by a stranger. Driving home, I realized how common it is for other people to have the same thing happen to them.

Meaning, being treated negatively as a Woman Object, a Person of Color Object, a LGBTQ Object, a Muslim/Jewish/Other Religion Object. Or Whatever Object. Being a white male, I wasn't used to being insulted by someone I didn't know just because I had a characteristic they didn't like.

Now I know how it feels. Not good. For as I first learned from my reading of Sartre way back in my college days, we are subjects to ourselves and objects to other people, since no one else has direct access to our feeling of what it's like to be us.

That's what makes ageism, or sexism, or racism, or any other sort of prejudicial "ism" so disturbing. It strikes at the heart of a person's humanity, that which they have in common with every other person, by reducing them to a caricature of who they truly are.

So I guess I should feel sorry for the guy who yelled "Hey, Old Man!" at me. I don't know why he said this. Maybe he'd had too much to drink. Or was inebriated by something other than alcohol. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he was simply a teenager acting like a jerk (something I remember doing, for sure).

Anyway, the lesson I'm taking away from this little episode is to be more considerate myself both toward people I don't know, and those I do. Life is difficult enough without me getting irritated at someone whose turn signal has been on for blocks, or who is taking forever with a banking transaction as I wait in line. 

I did the right thing by not reacting to the guy who yelled at me. If it happens again, perhaps I won't even get irritated. Perhaps.

CASA of Marion County helps children in an inspiring way

Last Thursday CASA of Marion County had their annual luncheon in downtown Salem's Reed Ballroom. Vanessa Nordyke, CASA Executive Director, invited my wife and me to the event, which is both a fundraiser and an opportunity to showcase what CASA does.

I was somewhat familiar with CASAs (Court Appointed Special Advocates) because my daughter, Celeste, had served as one in Orange County, California. But I didn't even know what CASA stood for until the luncheon.

I came away highly impressed. A page in the event handout describes how CASA of Marion County helps foster children.

A You Tube video I found on the CASA of Marion County web site shows how important a CASA volunteer can be in the life of a foster child.

At the luncheon, I was deeply moved -- almost to tears -- when a girl who had been helped by CASA of Marion County spoke. She started off by saying that this was the first time she had spoken to a group outside of school. 

That got a big round of applause from the luncheon attendees, which was followed by more applause during her talk, and then a standing ovation at the end. Pretty cool response for the girl's first public speaking experience. 

I can't remember all of the details of her lousy upbringing by a dysfunctional mother, so I won't attempt to describe them. What stuck in my mind was when she said that her mother didn't believe it was important for her to go to school, so her mother would pull her out of school for months at a time.

Eventually she was adopted, something that scared the girl at first. However, her foster parents treated her well for the first time in her life, and the CASA volunteer helped make her foster experience even more positive.

Even with all the problems she faced prior to being adopted, the girl said she ended up with a 3.96 high school GPA, I think it was, and because the first person in her family to go to college. What really got to me, and the other luncheon attendees, I'm sure, was the girl's statement that her tribulations ended up making her stronger and more resilient.

Listening to her talk, I couldn't help but think of my own struggles as an adolescent caused in large part by my divorced mother's alcoholism. It was just me and her facing her demons, and I didn't know how to deal with that. A supportive girlfriend with a normal family helped me through some tough times.

So while my situation in high school wasn't nearly as bad as the girl's, I could relate to her struggles caused by a mother who wasn't capable of being the parent the girl deserved. Growing up is tough enough without parental dysfunction making it much more difficult.

It was wonderful to learn how CASA of Marion County is helping foster children in our area. My wife and I, along with so many others at the luncheon, were pleased to make a donation to the organization. Consider doing so also.

A kitchen faucet problem reminds me of the wisdom in "I could be wrong"

I don't like to be wrong. But I dislike problems that defy fixing even more, whether these be personal, political, or any other sort.

And what I've learned from painful experience is that when I believe I'm absolutely right, yet that rightness isn't resulting in progress at resolving a problem, the best thing I could do is tell myself, "I could be wrong."

This morning, when I emerged from a separate bedroom where I sleep, my wife told me that our kitchen faucet that we'd gotten earlier this year had stopped working. It's a Delta faucet with Touch2O technology. Meaning it can turn off and on with a touch once the water is running.

Pretty handy when I'm washing dishes and don't want the water running all the time. I scrub a pan with soap, touch the faucet, and rinse the pan. Another touch, the water is off. One more touch, and the water runs again at the same temperature and strength.

But today not only didn't Touch2O work, the faucet wasn't working at all. Laurel, my wife, had bought the faucet. She also was home when a plumber installed it. I asked her if she was sure that the plumber had connected the faucet to our home's electrical system rather than using a battery pack to power the faucet.

Yes, Laurel said, I'm quite sure.

So when I looked under the cramped area under the kitchen sink (we've got reverse osmosis equipment that takes up most of the space) I focused on troubleshooting tips other than replacing batteries that I'd found on a Delta Kitchen Faucet with Touch2O Technology support web page.

Those tips didn't get the faucet working. I then watched several YouTube videos about getting a Touch2O faucet working again, each of which said that if the light at the base of the faucet is blinking red three times (ours was), by far the most likely reason was that batteries needed to be changed.

But Laurel was sure we didn't have a battery pack. Since my wife is usually right, I also was sure about this. Until Laurel started moving things around under the sink in preparation for a visit from a plumber we'd contacted, who was going to bring a replacement faucet, which revealed a hidden...

Battery pack. We changed the batteries. The faucet worked fine. Happy ending. 

Except I wasn't so happy about how both of us had gotten locked into an erroneous assumption about what could be wrong with the faucet. With all the stuff under our sink, I couldn't tell what was at the other end of the faucet's power supply cord. So why didn't I move things around right away? That would have led to a discovery of the battery pack.

Because I never thought, "I could be wrong." Admittedly, that's hard to do when you feel like you're right. Not that I knew what was wrong with the faucet. I just figured that whatever it was, it couldn't be the battery pack, since we didn't have one. 

But we did. 

On the plus side, though at the moment I don't take a lot of comfort in this, after the faucet was working again I recalled a piece that I wrote in 2013 for my Strange Up Salem column in Salem Weekly, our city's alternative newspaper at the time. Here's an excerpt from "Keep Fighting, Good Citizens of Salem."

One determined person can make a difference. I tear up from the Man of La Mancha lyrics:

“This is my quest, to follow that star... No matter how hopeless, no matter how far... To fight for the right, without question or pause... To be willing to march into Hell, for a Heavenly cause.”

Keep fighting, good citizens of Salem. Remember: your opponents aren’t evil.

Often they suffer from Groupthink, a malady diagnosed by someone who testified at a recent City Council meeting. It is exacerbated by an isolation from outside influences.

The treatment? Opening up flows of information, discussion, collaboration, decision-making. Transparency. Listening to both sides. Considering creative alternative options. Doing this sincerely, not with lip service.

Huston Smith quotes a Zen friend. “I have a new koan: I could be wrong.” Beautiful. The best revolutions happen when people in power revolt against their own dogmatic attitudes and actions.

Often, though, they need the aid of a citizen activist pin to help puncture the Groupthink balloon in which they have encased themselves. City leaders, don’t fear this.

Well, I guess I should do better at practicing what I preach, since today I fell prey to my own dogmatic attitude about what was wrong with our kitchen faucet. If I'd listened to an inner voice saying, "I could be wrong," I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.

Live and learn.

Next time I have a problem that is resisting being solved, hopefully that voice will be louder and more insistent. While I'm at it, I might as well also hope that our nation's political and religious leaders hear the same voice of I could be wrong because we sure could use more humble cooperating and less vitriolic competing.

2023 Oregon football: so close, yet so far

After Oregon lost to Washington by three points earlier in the football season, with Coach Lanning inexplicably choosing to not attempt several short field goals on fourth down, followed by a field goal miss in the closing seconds that would have tied the game, I was super excited when Oregon earned a rematch with Washington in the Pac-12 championship game.

After all, Oregon had been winning by large margins since the Washington loss, while Washington looked beatable in most of its games, winning by just a few points while still remaining undefeated. Oregon was favored by about ten points.

Plus, there was a lot at stake in the championship game.

The winner likely would be in the four-team national playoff since Oregon was ranked #5 and Washington #3. And a Heisman Trophy could be had by either Oregon quarterback Bo Nix or Washington quarterback Michael Penix depending on how well they played in a high stakes game in front of a national audience.

So I settled in to my television-watching chair at 5 pm yesterday with a reasonable hope that in a few hours I and other Ducks fans would be celebrating a victory that would be remembered over the years as one of the most important and memorable in the history of Oregon football.

Sadly, it was not to be. The image that sticks most in my mind was Nix sitting hunched over on the sideline with a towel draped over his head after Oregon had lost to Washington 34-31.

So close, yet so far. That's been a theme for Oregon football. Teams have enjoyed a lot of success in recent years, yet just when you think they're ready to hit the next level needed to win a national championship, something happens.

Quite a few somethings happened in yesterday's Washington game. What stands out is a horrible first quarter that put Oregon in a hole that they struggled to dig themselves out of for the rest of the game. Sports writer John Canzano spoke about this in a Bald Faced Truth column (I'm a subscriber.)

UW dominated the opening period, taking a 10-0 lead. The Huskies ran 27 plays and had 118 yards of offense. Oregon’s offense ran six plays and had only nine yards.

Think about that.

In the biggest game of its season, Oregon’s prolific offense moved the ball only 27 feet in the entire first quarter. A week earlier, the Ducks did better than that on the first two plays of the game — getting 11 yards against Oregon State’s defense.

Canzano noted the pregame difference in intensity between Washington and Oregon.

During pre-game warm-ups, I watched Oregon’s players on the field. The Ducks came out more than 90 minutes before kickoff (much earlier than Washington). Oregon’s players stretched. They got loose. It felt like a business trip. But I immediately noted to others on the sideline that the Ducks were far less emotionally charged than they were in Week 7 at Husky Stadium.

I was there in person for that pre-game scene, too. Oregon’s players shouted and whooped it up that day. UO center Jackson Powers-Johnson, pulled together a group of teammates about to take the field in Week 7 and shouted, “When we step on the f**king field, it’s ours! Wherever we roll, it’s ours!!”

Were the Ducks flat on Friday? More focused? Distracted by the glare of the big stage and the College Football Playoff pressure? Something else?

Oregon was oddly quiet in the warm-up. Almost muted, compared to their earlier matchup with their Pacific Northwest rival. Across the way, the Huskies were barking, and getting ready to play. At one point, JaMarcus Shephard, UW’s receivers coach, turned toward the Oregon sideline in defiance and shouted: “We ALL want it! We ALL want it!”

How is it that Oregon could be so flat in the first quarter given how important this game was? Maybe it was the fault of the players, but seemingly the coaching staff deserves some blame also. Regardless, when I turned off the television after this disappointing loss, the most reassuring thing I could say to myself was, "The better team won."

There weren't glaring mistakes as occurred in the first loss to Washington. It just seemed that Washington had more of a will to win, and its players were more tuned in to the game that Oregon's players. Washington made more key plays at key times than Oregon did, leading to another three point loss that could easily have been an Oregon win.

After Oregon's bowl game, which will be a prestigious one given their high national ranking, the team will either be 12-2 or 13-3. That's a really good season, the last for Oregon in the Pac-12 before they and Washington head to the Big Ten.

It's just frustrating that a really good season wasn't an insanely great season, because of the two three-point losses to Washington. As Canzano said:

Experience isn’t everything. Nor is it an excuse. Oregon has to play better and make the opportunities count. It just didn’t do enough to win the title. But Friday was game No. 114 for DeBoer as a head coach. It was game No. 26 for Lanning.

In league play, Lanning’s record is 15-4.

0-3 vs. Washington and 15-1 vs. everyone else.

What I’m saying is, there’s a growth curve at work here and the most important thing now — the only thing Lanning can actually control — is whether he wants to do a deep self examination and figure out where it went wrong. Great leaders make difficult decisions. Lousy ones ignore them.

Does Lanning need to examine his coaching staff and make changes? His team’s pre-game preparation? Does he need better defensive backs and pass rushers? Or was Friday’s loss simply part of the progression of an eventual champion, sniffing around big-time success before a breakthrough?

Bummer! Trader Joe's Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast discontinued for 2023

Oh, Trader Joe's, I'm so disappointed that you have put a piece of metaphorical coal in my vegetarian stocking this 2023 holiday season by discontinuing your marvelous vegan Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast -- which is the favorite meatless alternative of its kind for my wife and me.

I bought several extra last year and put them in our freezer. Here's a photo of one of the last survivors of the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast purge before I took it out of the box and put it in an oven for Thanksgiving dinner. Now we're down to zero. Sob...

The roast still appears on the Trader Joe's web site, which at first gave me hope. But then I noticed this note. I appreciate the humor. However, I was smiling through the sadness of the roast's demise.

Well, I'd done just that a few weeks ago, spoke to several staff at the Trader Joe's store here in Salem, Oregon. I did this after searching for the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast in the parts of the store where it has always appeared close to Thanksgiving.

The first staff person I talked to knew nothing about the status of the roast. Neither did the second person the first person went up to. Then all three of us spoke with a knowledgeable person in the frozen foods aisle.

She said that the roast wasn't being offered this year because of poor prior sales. I expressed surprise at this, saying that my wife and I have tried every other vegetarian/vegan roast, such as Tofurkey, and the Trader Joe's roast was our favorite. 

When I repeated my lament to the checkout person, she said, "I agree; it was a great-tasting roast." Also nutritious. Here's the nutrition facts and ingredients.

The serving size, 1/6 of a roast, is substantial. The roast I made this year has served six people so far and there's still quite a bit left. I don't know how many calories there are in a serving of turkey and gravy, but I bet it's more than 360 calories. And the protein in the Trader Joe's roast is plentiful, 26 grams per generous serving.

But all is not lost. In a November 8, 2023 story, VegNews reported on the much-beloved Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast being discontinued by Trader Joe's. There's hope.

VegNews reached out to Trader Joe’s and the company has confirmed that the product is discontinued and they will not have a meat-free roast offering this year. 

The cult-favorite holiday product will not return to shelves this holiday season because “it wasn’t meeting expectations,” according to one Reddit user. Some commenters suggested the reason might be because the recipe changed at some point and it was never as good as the original. 

However, store managers have told customers that a replacement could come to stores in 2024. 

“The notes in the internal system do say we are sourcing a replacement for 2024, it just didn’t come together this year,” another Reddit user confirmed. 

LOVERS OF THE ROAST, TAKE ACTION! Head to the Trader Joe's Product Feedback page. Tell them that you adore the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast more than life itself. Or if you prefer life to the roast -- my personal view, since if I'm not alive, I can't enjoy the roast -- tell Trader Joe's that you hope so much for a return of the roast, or a new and improved version, in 2024.

Sad to see last Pac-12 Oregon-OSU game. Glad Oregon won.

I had conflicting emotions this evening as I watched the Oregon football team defeat Oregon State 31-7 in what I've always thought of as the Civil War game, but now is the more politically correct Rivalry Game.

The traditional name sounds more fitting to me, because I'm so used to it.

But so does the longstanding tradition of the Pac-12 conference, which has been around in one form or another since 1915. That's 108 years of athletic history about to end, thanks to every school except Oregon State and Washington State departing for other conferences.

Since I moved to Oregon in 1971, I've enjoyed the annual football rivalry between the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. I'm an avid fan of both teams. Now, though, the Oregonian reports that there's no firm commitment for those football teams to play each other in future years.

There is no scheduled game beyond Friday’s 127th in the Ducks-Beavers series, which began in 1894. The schools continue to talk about playing a game as soon as 2024, but nothing official has been announced heading into the weekend.

This feels sad and wrong. Also, unnecessary.

After USC and UCLA announced they were leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, it seemed like the Pac-12 could continue on with minimal disruption. However, the Pac-12 fell apart when a media rights deal with Apple was rejected by several schools who wanted more than the $30 million or so annual payment per school that the deal provided.

Now it turns out that $30 million is close to what Oregon and Washington are going to get in the early years of their move to the Big Ten conference, leaving me and many other frustrated people to wonder, was a somewhat imperfect media rights deal really a reason to kill the Pac-12 conference?

Regardless of the answer, the reality is that today's game was the last in the Oregon-OSU Pac-12 series, and nearly the last football game to be played in a Pac-12 regular season, aside from the upcoming conference championship game. 

That's what made the game so filled with conflicting feelings for me. 

I wanted Oregon to win, because their sole loss of the season was to Washington and a tantalizing rematch with Washington in the Pac-12 championship game next Friday in Las Vegas was in their future if they beat Oregon State. Which happened.

So I was happy that Oregon won in a convincing fashion. This keeps quarterback Bo Nix in the hunt to win a Hesiman Trophy, and it keeps alive Oregon's chance to play in the four-team national championship playoff if they beat Washington and become the Pac-12 champions.

All through the game, though, I found myself rooting for Oregon State to make a comeback. It just seemed fitting that OSU's last game with Oregon as a Pac-12 rival be as evenly fought as possible. Yeah, I realize that this conflicts with what I just said about being happy that Oregon won in a convincing fashion.

That's the way conflicting feelings work: they aren't logical, but emotional.

Oregon simply was the better team. No doubt about it. Oregon State will play in a bowl game, but otherwise the future of OSU football is uncertain. Will Coach Jonathan Smith stay or leave? Will the current Pac-2 be able to add more members to the conference? If not, where will Oregon State and Washington State end up?

I admired the fight shown by Oregon State, which was without some key players due to injuries. The running game, normally the strongest aspect of their offense, was held to only about 50 yards. So not only did Oregon State lose, this game didn't show them at their best. 

That disappointed me.

Still, Oregon State had a good season. losing three games by just a total of eight points, with this 31-7 defeat the only blowout. Now I'm hoping Oregon defeats Washington next Friday. That will take some of the sting out of the Pac-12 conference's demise. Not all of it, though. That will hurt for quite a while.

I'm thankful for a 98 year old guy I barely know

With thankfulness in the air, given that Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I feel a push to make this a theme of my daily blog post (I have three blogs and write something for one of them each day.)


I don't want to run through a litany of all the things in my life that I'm thankful for. That's boring, and I'd end up feeling that to balance things out, I should also mention all the things in my life that I'm not thankful for.

Which also would be boring. So here's one short, simple moment of thankfulness that happened to me this afternoon.

Whenever I go to our athletic club, almost always three times a week, I see an elderly man who is there about the same time I am. When our paths cross in a machine circuit training weight room, I say hello to him. And that's basically been the extent of our interactions for quite a few years.

Sometime this year I noticed that a friend was accompanying him during his workouts. I assumed this was because the elderly man (meaning, he looked quite a bit older than me -- I'm 75) couldn't drive any more.

Today the elderly man, whose name I don't know, had gone into the cardio/aerobic room to ride a stationary bike while I and a few others, including his friend, were still in the weight room.

I overheard part of a conversation between an older woman and the man's friend. The woman was asking about the elderly man. I thought I heard the friend say, "He's 98." Wow, I thought, is that really correct? He looks much younger to me.

Becoming part of the conversation, I asked the friend if I'd heard correctly. "Yes, he's 98. And in good shape. Very sharp mentally." He went on to tell us some things about the elderly man.

"He served in the Pacific during World War II. While there he got a disease. Doctors told him to exercise every day. He's kept that up his entire life. He comes to the club every day. He used to work for a state agency. He walked to work every day from his home."

I found this deeply inspiring. I don't like getting old, and I'm 23 freaking years younger than this man -- who uses a cane when he walks, but otherwise moves quite well. 

When I went to my Tai Chi class in downtown Salem after exercising at the athletic club, I told the instructor and fellow students about the man. Warren, the instructor, said, "I hope I'm able to still do chores on our rural property when I'm 98."

Me too. Learning how old this man is, and how he's made exercise a daily part of his life for a very long time, made me feel thankful that his friend shared some information about him. He's now someone I look up to and want to emulate.

And I'm going to tell the man that next time I see him. There's unsung heroes everywhere. We just need to recognize them.

I rejected getting an Apple Watch. Now I'm a big fan.

Well, I guess this shows that I have truly joined the Cult of Apple. Before, I only had a MacBook Pro laptop, an iPhone, an iPad, Apple TV, AirPods, and HomePod speakers. 

That speaks of abject devotion to all things Apple, but isn't quite cultish. However, now that I also have an Apple Watch, Series 9 variety, I believe that I qualify for membership in the Cult of Apple. (Don't need an invitation; I'm self-selected.)

For a long time I looked down on people with an Apple Watch, or indeed any sort of smart watch, as being techno-snobs. I proudly wore my Casio watch that was solar powered and kept time via transmissions from the atomic clock in Colorado, I think it is. That was plenty high tech for me.

Bu then my interest was piqued when Apple released some new products, including an updated Apple Watch. Since this happened near my birthday, I figured it wouldn't hurt to check out the Series 9 as a potential present from Me to Me.

I'm glad I did. Because I've come to know and love my Apple Watch, even though I haven't learned more than a small percentage of all the things it can do.

My first revelation was that it's marvelous to be able to choose what sort of display a watch has. When the Apple Watch arrived, I switched between several watch faces that appealed to me. Soon, though, I settled on the colorful and informative face shown in the photo above.

The globe at the top left shows where I am. OK, that's not informative, since I'm aware of being in Oregon. Next to it is the easy-to-see date and time. Naturally the time is always correct. It was pleasant to not have to fuss with changing a watch when Daylight Saving Time ended, as my Casio usually required me to get out the manual and refresh my memory about how to do this.

The Apple Watch is waterproof, by the way, as was my Casio. One difference is that sometimes when I take a shower with the Apple Watch, a warning pops up that my hearing could be endangered by high decibels, which must be the result of shower spray hitting the watch.

In the second row is a weather summary that I assume comes from the Apple Weather app. It shows the current temperature in Salem along with the high and low temperature for today. Now and the next four hours are shown with the forecasted temperature and whether it is expected to be sunny, cloudy, or rainy. Or, dark.

The left side of the bottom row is an exercise indicator. The red circle shows movement (calories burned, steps, miles walked) in relation to a goal, 10,000 steps a day, I recall I set it to be. The green circle is exercise. The blue circle is standing (which I nail every day, because I made the goal just three hours, I believe).

My Apple Watch sends me periodic messages to stand when I've been sitting for a while, and praise when I hit a fitness goal. I used to find this kind of annoying, but now I view the messages as my watch trying to make me healthier, instead of being a nag.

I haven't made use of the compass yet.  I do enjoy checking the elevation, though (368 feet at our rural south Salem home) and the offer to record my route in case I get lost.

The temperature info on the bottom right is the same as what's shown above. However, I like how the color of the semicircle indicates how cold or hot it is. This Apple Watch face comes in a wide variety of colors. I've stuck with this multi-colored option in part because it provides more information than a single color would.

Like I said, I haven't delved much into other tricks my Apple Watch can do. It will tell me if my heart rate is much too slow or much too fast, or I guess if my heart has stopped. I didn't get a watch with a cellular connection, figuring that since I almost always have my iPhone with me, I don't need that.

At first I wondered how I'd time 60 seconds, which is how long I use mouthwash twice a day. Then I realized that if I made the Apple Watch apps appear in alphabetical order rather than as icons, it was easy to have the Timer near at hand, where I could set timers for various lengths.

One benefit of timing with the Apple Watch is when whole wheat spaghetti is cooking for 11 minutes while I'm watching TV with my Apple AirPods in my ears. I couldn't hear the timer on our microwave with the AirPods in, but the Apple Watch vibrates when a timer is completed, so now I have no problem knowing when the spaghetti is ready.

The band I got is very comfortable and easy to fasten. It's great to be able to easily change a watchband, though I haven't needed to do this yet, rather than having to fiddle with those little pins on traditional watchbands.

So I'm pleased with my Apple Watch. It charges every night, though it looks like it could go several days without charging. Thus I don't have it with me when I'm sleeping. I put it on first thing in the morning, looking upon it like a friend I haven't seen for a while -- which I never did with my Casio watch.