HinesSight

I try ChatGPT. Asking about myself, I'm impressed.

It took me a while, but after hearing a lot about the marvels of ChatGPT, the online chatbot offered by OpenAI, a company whose goal is A.G.I. -- artificial general intelligence that can do anything a human can do -- I got around to trying out ChatGPT just now.


(All you need to do this is a free account with OpenAI.)

Because I have a significant online presence, and my ego is also significant, my first question for ChatGPT was about myself. I was impressed with the result, which took about five seconds to pop up.

Well, after reading that, I want to be ChatGPT's best friend. Its description of me was a bit over-the-top, but in my decidedly personal opinion, not hugely so.

ChatGPT did provide a profile of me that was kind of one-dimensional, since I'm also proud of my land use and political activism -- though I did ask Chat GPT about Brian Hines the blogger and author, and my Church of the Churchless blog has the largest Internet presence of my three blogs.

ChatGPT rapidly put together a description of me that was well written and accurate. My only minor quibble was that 2004 is 19 years prior to 2023 and ChatGPT said my churchless blog has been operating for "over a decade." But 19 years is over a decade, obviously.

I then tried to learn about Laurel Hines, my wife. But ChatGPT balked, telling me that it couldn't, or wouldn't, provide information on private individuals. I've urged Laurel to sign up with OpenAI herself to see if she has better luck learning about Laurel Hines. It could be that I have enough of a public presence to get a pass on the private person restriction.

Lastly, I recalled that ChatGPT is pretty good at poetry. So my curiosity, and ego, led me to ask it to write a poem about Brian Hines the blogger and author. Here's the result in two screenshots.

OK, this poem is more over-the-top than the prose description of me was. But I love it! Now I not only want ChatGPT to be my best friend, I want it to whisper sweet nothings into my ear about how much ChatGPT adores me. 

After I die, I definitely want ChatGPT to speak at the celebration of life held for me. Unless between now and then, ChatGPT turns sour on me, in which case it can go fuck itself, assuming a chatbot is capable of that.

On a more serious note -- not that I wasn't serious about what I just said -- it was both impressive and a bit creepy to see how well ChatGPT did with my two queries, each of which took only a few seconds.

We're only in the early days of artificial intelligence. There's reason for concern about it, but that's a topic for another blog post. For now, I'm content to bask in the warm glow of what ChatGPT said about me.

Caste is a marvelous book about our racial divisions

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn't heard of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, until I read a fairly recent TIME cover story by Wilkerson that provided an overview of Caste.

Somehow I'd missed the publication of the book in 2020. Making up for lost time, I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon. It took me a while to finish Caste.

For even though Wilkerson is a terrific writer with a smooth style that makes reading her a pleasure, her subject matter isn't cheery. So I'd read a short chapter on most days, rather than rushing through her book.

What blew me away in her TIME essay was the brilliant notion that caste, not prejudice, is a better way to understand the 400 year history of discrimination against African Americans in this country. 

Wilkerson makes her case for caste by not only describing how this means of maintaining power by a dominant class has been used in the United States, but also how caste has enforced hierarchies in India (no big surprise) and Nazi Germany.

This book opened my eyes to how caste explains a lot about social power dynamics that go beyond racial discrimination. For example, in a concluding chapter she speaks about a subject dear to my aging heart, how old people are treated in our country.

The challenge for our era is not merely the social construct of black and white but seeing through the many layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have. Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough.

They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death. A caste system spares no one. 

I'm not capable of doing justice to the book by attempting to summarize it. Others have done that hugely better than I could. Reading Caste, of course, is the #1 way to understand what Wilkerson has to say.

Here's a couple of lesser ways I found by some Googling: a NPR story, 'Caste' Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation is in Treatment of Black Americans, and a 6-minute PBS NewsHour episode on You Tube.

The book contains a lot that is disturbing. But we Americans need to be disturbed by how our homegrown caste system has caused so much pain and suffering and lost opportunity. One of Wilkerson's favorite metaphors, which I've heard her use on several interviews, is of an old house.

Old houses have many problems. She speaks from experience, being the owner of one. The roof may leak. The basement may have standing water. The electrical system may be outmoded. The porch may be rotting.

If a building inspector takes a look at the house and lists what's wrong with it, this doesn't mean that the current owner was responsible for the problems. But the problems are still problems. They don't go away just because someone says "I didn't cause them."

Likewise, those who want us to ignore the problems of caste and racial discrimination in this country -- I'm thinking Ron DeSantis and many other Republicans -- are like a homeowner who turns a blind eye to what's wrong with their house. We don't need to blame ourselves for the past. However, we have to take responsibility for fixing what's wrong with the United States that flows from our history.

Wilkerson ends up on a positive note. Here's how her book ends.

In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying aerobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute -- all of these should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe.

We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.

A world without caste would set everyone free.

Ozempic shows that obesity often is a medical problem

I wish Bill Maher was a reader of this blog, because this post was stimulated by him. For Maher, who I argue has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths, has an outdated view of people who are obese.

Here's how I put it in the above-linked post from last January.

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

The March 27, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has an article that indicates that I'm right and Maher is wrong about obesity. In the print edition it was called The Ozempic Era: Will new medications change how we think about being fat and being thin?

The subtitle of the online version is even more direct about what Maher gets wrong about obesity: A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices.

If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.
Download Will Ozempic Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? | The New Yorker

Some excerpts from the article by Jia Tolentino, along with the illustration that accompanied it:

The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.

Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction.

The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages.

Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.

Ozempic, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Ozempic is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes—a condition that accounts for ninety per cent of all diabetes cases—and has been available since 2017. Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections.

In 2021, Novo Nordisk received approval for Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic but comes with a higher maximum dose, as an anti-obesity drug. On a year-end earnings call in 2022, Novo Nordisk cited worldwide market growth of fifty per cent, with almost forty thousand new Wegovy prescriptions being written every week.

...A healthy body can generally signal to the brain when it has had enough food. But that signalling system can be faulty, or get injured. “One of the most important things about obesity, and something most people don’t understand, is that, in the process of gaining weight, the neural circuitry of the brain that regulates weight is damaged,” Dr. Louis Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center, at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me. (Aronne, like many other prominent practitioners of obesity medicine, has consulted on trials conducted by Novo Nordisk.)

“The hypothalamus shows signs of inflammation and injury,” he went on. The prevailing theory, he explained, is that “too many calories coming in too quickly damages nerves that respond to the hormones that control body weight.” One of these hormones is leptin, which is produced in body fat, and which signals to the brain that it’s time to stop eating. But, if you gain fat, the oversupply of leptin can cause your body to be desensitized to it, making your brain erroneously believe that you are starving.

“Your body tries to rebalance the system by slowing down the metabolism and increasing appetite,” Aronne said. After a person has gained enough weight to enter this cycle of metabolic misdirection, it becomes nearly impossible to lose that weight and keep it off long-term simply through diet and exercise. (About five per cent of people manage to do it.)

A well-known study followed contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” the weight-loss-competition show, and found that the contestants’ metabolisms slowed so drastically after their weight loss that nearly all of them regained what they’d lost. One contestant, who’d dropped an astonishing two hundred and thirty-nine pounds, soon regained a hundred, and then began gaining weight whenever he ate more than eight hundred calories less than the average amount recommended for a man his size.

...Omari, the Instagram-famous dietitian, is now off her compounded semaglutide, which she’d taken to shed some pandemic pounds. She was optimistic that she’d be able to maintain her weight, as she’d generally been able to do before. But, as I kept reminding Ozempic-curious friends, these medications were designed for chronic conditions, obesity and diabetes.

For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.

...Kaplan, a plastic surgeon, is better known on TikTok as @RealDrBae—in his videos, he wears navy scrubs monogrammed “dr bae” and talks to the camera as though it’s his partner in an absorbing conversation at an airport bar. He believes that more people—a lot more people—are going to start taking GLP-1 drugs soon.

He didn’t have in mind thin people who want to be thinner, he added; he was thinking about fat people who had been struggling with discomfort, with inconvenience, with social pressure all their lives, who might have lately felt encouraged to try to accept their heavier weight. He predicted that the Ozempic era would put an end to all that. “They’re no longer going to accept that they should just be happy with the body they have,” he said.

We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma

The memory is still sharp in my mind of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021.

Twelve days without electricity. Lots of tree damage. Many trips into town to get more gasoline to keep our Honda generator functioning. Having to keep our wood stove going to keep the house warm.

In short, not fun. So when some friends in our rural south Salem neighborhood told my wife and I that they were getting a Generac whole house generator, our ears perked up.

Turns on automatically when the power goes out. Capable of running a heat pump, hot water heater, well pump, and everything else in a house. Or at least, almost everything. 

Sure sounded good to us.

During the ice storm we had to take showers at our athletic club, since we didn't have a way to hook our hot water heater to the Honda generator. And while our wood stove worked fine, it kept the upper part of our house too warm, and left the lower part too cold. So being able to operate our heat pump was really appealing.

It took quite a while to arrange all the details of getting a Generac whole house generator through Northside Electric here in Salem, but yesterday the final work was completed. It wasn't cheap: $13,250, not including the cost of propane tanks.

However, I told Jeff Buyserie, the Northside Electric guy who handled some tricky final electrical panel work and educated us about the Generac yesterday afternoon, that my magical thinking leads me to believe that now that we've gotten the whole house generator, our electricity will never go off again.

Jeff's apt response: "So get some life insurance and you'll never die."

Here's the 24kW generator. We located it near our firewood stacks. The Generac has to be on almost level ground. Northside supplied the concrete pad the generator sits on.

The Generac can't be right next to a structure. We have it close to where the PGE power enters our house, and the circuit breaker boxes in our utility room. 

Eighteen inch deep trenches had to be dug for the propane and electrical lines feeding the Generac. We haven't had the trenches filled yet. The county inspection has been completed, so the trenches will be filled soon.

The Generac can be fueled by either natural gas or propane. Since our neighborhood doesn't have natural gas, propane was our only option. Given our hilly property, and where we wanted to locate the Generac, a 500 gallon propane tank was too large to be moved close to the generator. So Pratum Co-op installed four 120 gallon tanks, which together equal 480 gallons.

They're hooked together, so function as a single tank. Propane tanks can only be filled 80% full, so that gives us a maximum of about 384 gallons. Jeff from Northside Electric told us that likely the Generac would use around 2 gallons an hour on average. So that would equal 192 hours of run time if the propane tanks were full.

Which is eight days of constant generator operation. Four days if the propane tanks were half full. That's longer than most electrical outages last. And naturally the tanks can be refilled, so long as the roads are passable for a Pratum Co-op truck.

A lot of electrical panel work had to be done by Northside. We now have a Generac circuit breaker box that sits to the left of our old transfer box for our 7,000 watt Honda generator. So we could still use the Honda generator, though I hope we'll never have to. 

The main complication we encountered was getting the 3.5 ton heat pump for the 2,000 square foot main part of our house to work with the Generac. (We also have a smaller 2 ton heat pump for a 1,200 square foot "apartment" area; that part of the house isn't hooked up to the Generac.)

It turned out that the thermostat for the 3.5 ton heat pump was on a circuit that ran the furnace: air handler and heat strips for emergency heat, or when it is too cold for the heat pump to run efficiently. Jeff had to do some rewiring so the thermostat was on the Generac panel, but the heat strips weren't.

He said that the 3.5 ton heat pump heat strips probably took around 15,000 watts. So since we have a 24,000 watt generator, the heat strips plus the heat pump plus the extra wattage needed when the heat pump starts up likely would have sucked up the entire output of the Generac. 

So while we still have the heat strips available when PGE power is available, we'll have to make do with just the heat pump when the Generac is operating. If it's too cold for the heat pump to work without the heat strips (below freezing, basically), we'll have to use our wood stove.

I was grocery shopping when Jeff did the testing of how the Generac handled our house's electrical needs. When I got home, he and my wife told me that the Generac did fine with everything on: well pump, heat pump, hot water heater, lights, cooktop, etc., even the oven. It did strain the generator when the heat pump kicked on. Hopefully that won't be the case when we have a lesser load on the Generac.

I feel good about our Generac purchase.

The generator is set up to turn itself on every two weeks at noon for five minutes to keep the Generac "exercised." Northside Electric will do doing the maintenance on the generator, since I have no interest in doing this, in part because the Generac is much larger and more complicated than our Honda generator.

But we'll have to wait and see how the Generac does in a power outage. Well, unless my magical thinking is correct and we'll never have an outage now that we've spent so much money preparing for one.

LifeSource dumps my favorite veggie burger. I'm crushed.

It was the cheese that first set off the alarm bells in my brain. Up until then, my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping at LifeSource Natural Foods had gone as it usually does. 

Uneventfully.

I had no clue that my vegetarian life would be upended before I reached the dairy aisle, my habitual final stop before heading to a checkout register.

Glancing at my list to see what my wife and I needed there, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that something had changed in the alternatives-to-meat section.

Cheese had taken over several feet of that section, oozing over from the already large cheese department to the right of it.

My sometimes still sharp senior citizen mind jumped to a logical conclusion: The cheese must have displaced some items in the eggs/alternatives-to-meat area.

Jumpy, but not yet panicked, I scanned the shelves for what I usually buy in that section.

Tofurky Treehouse Tempe? Yes, still there. Tofurky Plant-Based Chick'n Barbecue? Yes, still there. Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger? Oh, crap! It's missing!

I peered at the labels under some empty areas of the alternatives-to-meat section. None said "Hodo Tofu  Veggie Burger."

My life didn't exactly feel like it was slipping away. Just markedly diminished.

For the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger is by far the best vegetarian burger I've ever eaten. And since I've been a vegetarian for over 50 years, I've eaten a heck of a lot of them.

I make a Hodo burger for lunch almost every day.

I love the taste. I love the simple ingredients: organic tofu, carrots, cabbage, onions, soybean oil, salt, dried shiitake mushrooms, garlic powder, white pepper. I love the nutrition facts: 200 calories, 9 grams of fat (just 0.5 grams saturated), 9 grams of dietary fiber, 19 grams of protein.

The Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger kicks the butt of every other vegetarian burger LifeSource carries, in my admittedly personal opinion.

If the Hodo burger was in a boxing match against, say, the LightLife burger that's still on the LifeSource shelf, the referee would stop the contest after the first round, declaring a knock-out. It not only tastes great, and has great nutrition, it looks great after being fried in a pan.

I don't put anything on the Hodo burger, just some salt. Ketchup disguises the taste of the burger, which is so good, I don't want anything coming between me and my beloved Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger.

That's why I stopped by the Customer Service desk at LifeSource and asked why it was discontinued. I didn't get an answer to "why," but was told that someone else also had asked about the Hodo burger, being disappointed that it wasn't available now.

When I got home, I sent a message to LifeSource via their web site. I expressed my dismay at their dumping such a fine upstanding veggie burger, while allowing lesser quality veggie burgers to remain.

It's been about a week. I haven't gotten a reply from LifeSource. 

I told LifeSource that Natural Grocers still carries the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger, along with three other Hodo products such as the Chinese 5-Spice Tofu Nuggets that I like a lot. LifeSource how has no Hodo products.

Last Sunday I stopped by Natural Grocers, where I rarely shop, and stocked up on the Hodo burger. I also bought some other things that I usually get at LifeSource, as long as I was in the Natural Grocers store. 

I'll ask LifeSource again why they discontinued the Hodo veggie burger. I've bought so many of them over the years, it seems like I should learn this. Maybe the Hodo burger, being tofu-based, fell prey to what I consider an irrational fear of tofu by many people these days. 

Regardless, they'll have to pry the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger out of my cold dead hands (leaving aside the question of who "they" is).

I just hope that Natural Grocers doesn't discontinue the burger -- which I doubt, since now they're the only place it can be bought in Salem.

Why I enjoy Tai Chi as a martial art

Tai Chi is viewed by most people as merely a gentle form of exercise. Which, it certainly is. But there's another side to Tai Chi -- the martial art aspect. 

I'm familiar with Tai Chi as a martial art because I'm fortunate to have an instructor here in Salem, Oregon who is highly adept at self-defense applications of Tai Chi moves.

Warren Allen came to Tai Chi after a lot of experience in hard style martial arts. So he is able to recognize how Tai Chi can be a soft style martial art like aikido, as contrasted with hard style martial arts like karate.

The Japanese Martial Arts Center has a good definition of hard and soft styles, which basically coincide with external and internal martial arts.

Hard Martial Arts

Hard martial arts are usually synonymous with external martial arts because both focus on physical power. When practicing a hard art, you meet an attack with a forceful opposing attack. Hard arts rely on overpowering the opponent, not just with strength, but also with timing, distance, and angles. That’s true whether you’re engaging in offense, defense, or a combination of both. When you’re sparring in karate and hit your opponent harder than they just hit you, that’s an example of a hard art.

Soft Martial Arts

Soft martial arts are often based on the concept of blending with an opponent’s attack. When you’re attacked, you don’t meet the attack with a block. Instead, you move with it to escape or to improve your position. To win against your attacker, you subdue them before they can attack again. To do this at a high level requires relaxation and a calm perception, qualities that are emphasized in internal martial arts.

I also started my martial arts training in a hard style, Shotokan Karate. After nine years of Shotokan, I started to train in a more eclectic form of karate with Allen at his Pacific Martial Arts studio.

So I have about 12 years of experience with karate, and about 19 years of experience with Tai Chi, which I started learning in 2004 with Allen and have pursued ever since.

Today I took part in a three-hour seminar taught by Allen. Along with four other students, we explored Tai Chi as a soft martial art. All of us had a lot of Tai Chi training.

And all of us found the seminar challenging at times. That's because it is much easier to meet force with force than to respond to force with the above-mentioned blending with an opponent's attack that's the hallmark of soft martial arts.

This is one reason why soft martial arts like Tai Chi are termed "internal." Obviously there is an internal side to karate, just as there's an external side to Tai Chi. It's just a matter of degree. 

If someone attacks us, either physically or verbally, the natural initial reaction of most people, me certainly included, is to respond in kind. Thus karate training is more in line with our usual inclination: if a punch is thrown at our head, we deal with it via an equal or greater physical response.

But with Tai Chi as a martial art, the goal is to blend with the force of an attack to defuse and deflect it as smoothly and effortlessly as possible. 

I find this highly fascinating, intriguing, and, for sure, difficult. I've gotten fairly good at it, though I have to constantly keep in check my usual inclination to match force with force -- again, whether or not the attack is physical or verbal.

And life itself "attacks" all of us regularly, since problems with our health, work, home, relationships, and other areas need to be dealt with. We can't ignore these problems, but sometimes we react to them with more anxious force than is necessary, rather than handling them as gracefully as possible, seeing them not as a malevolent invading army but as troublesome guests deserving of gentle correction.

For me this is why I enjoy Tai Chi so much. It's essentially Taoism in motion, and I've loved Taoist teachings long before I started to learn Tai Chi. 

I have various translations of the Tao Te Ching. The 1972 translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English that I've had since my college days still is my favorite, maybe because it is so familiar to me. Here's a couple of passages that relate to Tai Chi as a martial art.

Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.

The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room.
Hence I know the value of non-action.
Teaching without words and work without doing
Are understood by very few.

Well, I've been trying to understand the Tao Te Ching for most of my life. I'm not sure if I'm any closer to that understanding than I was more than fifty years ago.

But I sure enjoy the searching for Taoist truth. And that's a big reason why I enjoy Tai Chi so much, both in its non-martial and martial forms.

Oscars 2023 was great, but I disagree about Best Picture

I always enjoy watching the Oscars show, and this year was no exception.

I liked having a host back on stage. The tag-team approach I recall from last year didn't work as well as Jimmy Kimmel providing a continuous presence -- for the whole 3 1/2 hours or so of the 3-hour show. One thing I've learned is to always add an hour to our DVR recording time, which came in handy this year.

The way I see it, watching the Oscars is a lot like watching sports. If you have a favorite team, you're going to root for them to win, even as you recognize that they may not be the absolute best team in the league. 

I'd only seen three of the films nominated for Best Picture: Top Gun Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I loved the first two films. I didn't like Everything Everywhere All at Once.

So I was pleased when All Quiet on the Western Front and Top Gun Maverick won a bunch of lesser awards.

It wasn't a surprise when Everything Everywhere All at Once walked off with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and a couple of other awards. But I felt that this film was overrated and the Academy went overboard on giving it so many awards. 

That said, I enjoyed the acceptance speeches of the Everything Everywhere All at Once winners. Jamie Lee Curtis gave appealing remarks when she won Best Supporting Actress. I just don't think that this film is going to be remembered as a marvelous bit of movie-making. 

It was quirky, creative, and trendy, given how the multiverse has captured people's attention, even though obviously there's no evidence it actually exists. A few years from now, I suspect Everything Everywhere All at Once will be viewed as a production that doesn't age well.

On the plus side, I was thrilled when Navalny got Best Documentary. The acceptance speech for Navalny was the only time Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine and his authoritarian rule of Russia was mentioned at the Oscars. 

And having watched and hugely enjoyed RRR, an Indian film, I was rooting for it to win Best Original Song, which it did for the catchy “Naatu Naatu.” The dancing that accompanied the song was as infectious as it was in RRR itself.

Jimmy Kimmel had some good jokes. Naturally I can't remember most of them. One that sticks in my mind came near the end of the show when he observed that whoever edited the voluminous footage of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol into a "film" that made the riot look like a tourist visit deserved an Oscar.

(It was Tucker Carlson of Fox News who fashioned that lie, of course.)

Lastly, my wife and I kept feeling sorry for whoever had to sit behind the woman wearing a large floppy white hat, or head covering. It seemed to us that this was a selfish thing to do, especially since no other people in the Oscars audience had anything comparable on their heads from what we could see.

Science says first humans had black skin and tightly curled hair

Racism is ridiculous for lots of reasons.

A big reason is that science finds no basis for concluding that physical differences between some members of our species, Homo sapiens, make those members inherently superior to other people.

In fact, there's no such thing as race, according to science.

More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.

Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like "white" and "black" being used as biological variables.

Unfortunately, racists who wrongly view White as being superior to Black rarely pay much attention to science. Too bad. Because an article in the February 18, 2023 issue of New Scientist would give them a lot to think about.

Here's excerpts from "Curly hair may have evolved to protect early humans from the sun." You can read the entire article via this PDF file if the New Scientist link doesn't work for you.
Download Curly hair may have evolved to protect early humans from the sun | New Scientist

Hair that is tightly coiled offers the best protection against the sun’s potentially damaging rays, which could explain why this trait evolved in early humans in Africa and straighter hair emerged as some humans moved into cooler areas.

It has long been suggested that the reason our body hair became so fine that it is sometimes barely visible, while our scalp hair remained thick, is to prevent our heads from overheating in the sun. In our bipedal ancestors, the beneficial shading effect of head hair may have outweighed its insulating effect.

Tina Lasisi at Penn State University wondered if the type of hair on a person’s head also makes a difference.

To learn more, Lasisi and her colleagues put three different wigs on a thermal manikin – a model of the human body with heaters and sensors that is used to measure the thermal effects of clothes.

All the wigs were made of human hair from people of Chinese descent. One wig was straight, one had moderate curls and one had tight curls. Lasisi says the tightly coiled wig was within the range of curl found in people of recent African ancestry.

In tests in a climate-controlled wind tunnel, the team found that the hair’s type made a big difference to how much heat the head of the manikin gained from simulated sunshine at 30°C (86°F).

The head with a straight wig gained less than half as much heat as a control head with no wig. The head wearing the moderately curled wig gained around a quarter as much heat and the head with the tightly curled wig gained less than a tenth as much as the no-wig control.

The researchers think that curls reduce how much heat reaches the skin by increasing the gap between it and the hair surface. Making straight hair longer doesn’t achieve this because it flops over and lies flat, says Lasisi.

What’s more, curlier hair appears to maximise the shielding effect from the sun while minimising an unwanted insulating effect. “It has this incredible way of bypassing this trade-off,” says Lasisi.

...“Any mechanism that could help cool the body, and at the same time save precious water, would definitely have been acted on strongly by natural selection,” says Joseph Graves at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.

When some humans left Africa and moved into cooler climes, the selective pressure for tightly coiled hair would have been lost, says Lasisi, allowing variations to emerge from generation to generation by random chance, but the trait may have re-evolved in some peoples.

The study’s findings are important because they could help change some people’s prejudiced views, says Graves, who is the co-author of Racism, Not Race. Research into the physical traits of the first humans can help to erode racist ideas, he says.

The first humans would have had black skin and tightly curled hair, says Graves. It was only relatively recently that other skin colours and hair types appeared, he says. Biologists have begun to study the evolution of skin colour, but this is the first study to look at hair type in an evolutionary context.

Every school child should be taught the persuasive hypothesis expressed by Joseph Graves, which almost certainly is true: The first humans would have had black skin and tightly curled hair.

Of course, this doesn't mean that African-Americans are superior to people in the United States with lighter skin and straight hair. Evolution simply selected for certain physical characteristics as our species left Africa for other parts of the world.

But I do think it'd be wonderful if everybody in our country realized that when early humans were living in Africa, they looked like many African-Americans do today, because those physical features helped them to survive.

This means that racists should be thankful to Blacks, because without black skin and tightly curled hair, our species might have died out early on in the history of Homo sapiens.

My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun

When I had surgery in 2021 to repair an inguinal hernia, my motivation was to have something wrong with me fixed so I could get back to living life as I did before the hernia popped up (literally).

But the glaucoma surgery I had today was tougher to get enthusiastic about. There's no way to fix damage that's occurred to the optic nerve. All that can be done is reduce the chance of further damage. 

However, Dr. Young, the glaucoma specialist in Portland I was referred to after some significant nerve damage was found in my very nearsighted right eye, felt that a Trabeculectomy surgery was the way to go, even though drops to reduce eye pressure (that's the main cause of glaucoma) had been working quite well for the last 18 months or thereabouts.

So despite some initial qualms -- I view all surgery as scary; eye surgery is extra scary -- after hearing Dr. Young's reasons for wanting me to have a Trabeculectomy, one was scheduled for 11:30 am today at Good Samaritan Hospital in NW Portland.

Here's why I was pleased with the surgery, though obviously it's too early to tell how successful it will be in further reducing the pressure in my right eye. (My left eye is only minimally affected by glaucoma.)

First, the Traffic Gods were with my wife and me.

I'd begged for the latest possible surgery time, because I told the scheduler that we live south of Salem and neither wanted to leave our house at a super-early time for the 75 minute or so drive to Good Samaritan, nor run the very real risk of getting stuck in morning rush-hour traffic heading into Portland.

Pleasingly, we encountered no backups at all today on either our drive to Portland or our drive home. That was a major stress reducer.

Another stress reducer was my surgery starting on time. My hernia surgery was delayed. I found it tough to be all prepped and ready to go, then be told that because a previous surgery took longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for an extra hour.

But today I was wheeled into the outpatient operating room a few minutes early.

And it was good to be awake through the eye surgery, though I'd told the anesthesiologist that I enjoy propofol when I've had it for colonoscopies. He said that he'd put a small amount in my IV tube. Don't know if that happened, though, since I felt pretty much the same during the surgery.

UPDATE: I need to change my "pretty much the same" claim after idly scratching my chest while watching TV last night and feeling a strange lump. A big lump. Checking it out, I found that it was a square of adhesive with a metal connector thingie on the top. And not just one, there were three of them on the top of my chest where they were hard to see without looking in a mirror. Must have been put there in the surgery room to monitor my heart. I have no memory of that happening, nor, as I thought more about it, of being wheeled into the recovery room. So now I believe that while I was conscious during most of the eye surgery, I wasn't for all of it, and the "pretty much the same" feeling I had while the eye was being operated on could have been a propofol effect where propofol reality feels more real than actual reality (and more pleasant). Also, I forgot to credit the anesthesiologist with a clever question. He asked me, "So what did you have for breakfast today?" Quick-witted senior citizen that I am, I replied, "Ha, trick question! I didn't have anything to eat after midnight, as I was told to do by the pre-op instructions." He must feel this gets a more honest answer than "Have you had anything to eat after midnight?"

Good Samaritan is a teaching hospital (maybe all are). A nursing student from the University of Portland accompanied the RN who did my pre-surgery workup. She asked if I was OK with the student inserting the IV tube.

I said, "Sure." I did have some qualms about this, but the student did a good job. I told him that I admired him setting out on a career in nursing, given that so many nurses retired or quit the profession during the high stress time of Covid. 

Having relaxing conversations with the nursing staff goes a long way toward making surgery as pleasant as possible, though in no way was it fun. 

It'll be interesting to see what Regence MedAdvantage is charged for my surgery. When I was wheeled into the operating room, I was surprised to see what appeared to be about a dozen people in the room. I'm sure they're all necessary. I just visualized dollar signs floating above the head of each person.

As with my hernia surgery, once again the anesthesiologist who talked with me just before the eye surgery said "You're really healthy." And once again I replied, "OK, but I'm about to be wheeled into surgery, so I'm not that healthy."

His point, he went on to say, is that I don't have diabetes, heart disease, cancer, a lung problem, an inability to walk, or other common problems that, I assume, he sees in many older patients he works with. So that conversation provided me with some perspective on my glaucoma.

Now I have to do the post-surgery thing. Three kinds of medicated drops that I have to use for several weeks four times a day. Wearing an eye shield while I sleep for a week. Not lifting more than ten pounds for a while. Going to Dr. Young's Tualatin office the next three Friday afternoons to see how the eye is healing.

Which is all fine with me. The best thing about having surgery is that it feels so good to have it over with. I'd worried about all kinds of things going wrong today. None of those things happened. 

I found that sometime last week my attitude toward the surgery changed from "Oh, no, I need to have this damn eye surgery" to "Oh, please, let's get the eye surgery done so I can stop worrying about it."

Mission accomplished. Now I can start worrying about other things that probably won't happen.

When life goes wrong, it can happen in bunches

Anticipating how some people are going to react to this blog post, I want to start off by making one thing clear:

While my wife Laurel, our dog, and I are going through a stretch of more problems in our lives than usual, we're fortunate to have a decent income, good health insurance, and a pleasant home.

Lots of people have worse problems than we do, with fewer resources available to deal with them. Like, anyone homeless.

Having hopefully defused the "privilege" objection to what I'm about to say, my main point is simple:

Life can be tough, no matter who you are, and when things go wrong, it's unfortunate that sometimes those problems occur in bunches.

Mooka is our 5-6 year old Husky mix. She came from a shelter, so we don't know her exact age. As I wrote about in January, her hip dysplasia diagnosis worried us. 

She's an active dog. We live in rural south Salem with hardly any flat areas. Our home has several sets of stairs. Long walks and trips to the Minto Brown dog park were favorite activities of Laurel and Mooka.

That was threatened by the hip dysplasia. But in February Mooka started limping badly after playing with a dog she encountered on a walk. At first she wasn't putting any weight on that paw, though now she can, at least when walking slowly.

However, today a vet told Laurel that Mooka probably has an ACL tear in her knee. There's treatments that we're pursuing. However, knee surgery would involve a lengthy recovery period, which for a dog like Mooka, who really enjoys her twice daily walks and other excursions, would be hard to take.

Laurel had to spend many hours dealing with a screw-up by Best Buy after she ordered an induction cooktop and got something else. Fortunately Kelly's came to our rescue, so that problem has been resolved.

But a few days ago Laurel had a lengthy dentist appointment to have a broken crown replaced, after getting a temporary crown about a month ago. Now she has a toothache in that tooth, which shouldn't happen after a crown replacement.

That tooth has been worked on a lot over the years, so Laurel is worried that the root is damaged, which could require an implant. Not a fun prospect.

As for me, I'm scheduled for eye surgery next Monday at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland. This is related to the glaucoma diagnosis I got about a year and a half ago. I'm very nearsighted in my right eye, which is where almost all of the optic nerve damage has occurred to my peripheral vision, which happened surprisingly rapidly.

So even though two types of eye drops have lowered my eye pressure from the low 20s to about 10 in each eye (lowering pressure is the only way to slow down glaucoma from progressing), the Portland glaucoma specialist I was referred to wants me to get a Trabeculectomy.

I'm pleased that I can spell the procedure. Not so pleased at having eye surgery, a first for me. It'll be good to get it over with, though, since I had to cancel a February surgery appointment when I got Covid last month.

Anyway, while the health problems of my wife, dog, and myself aren't as serious as many people have to deal with, it's been stressful for us to have to cope with them all at once. But that's the way life is: unpredictable.

We just wish life could have spaced out those problems. Sadly, life isn't a conscious being that demands can be made of. Even so, we look forward to life giving us a break as spring approaches.

We find that Best Buy sucks and Kelly's rocks

My wife has been going through Best Buy hell after an incompetent salesperson ordered the wrong cooktop.

Laurel had taken a Consumer Reports rating of induction cooktops into the Salem Best Buy store, pointed to the General Electric model that she wanted, and trusted that the paperwork she got was correct.

Sure, she should have double-checked the model number. Or I could have. We admit that we weren't completely blameless in the mixup that led to Best Buy taking out our current radiant cooktop and installing what turned out to be a newer model GE radiant cooktop.

We simply assumed that what Laurel had asked for was what we got.

Well, until the Best Buy installers left and I turned on a cooktop burner and said to Laurel, "Hey, it's getting hot. Induction cooktops aren't supposed to get hot." That's when the real Best Buy problem started.

Because we figured it would be easy to talk with someone at the Salem Best Buy store, explain that we didn't get the induction cooktop that was supposed to have been ordered, ask for a return of the radiant cooktop that we didn't want, and order the correct GE induction cooktop.

Actually that wasn't easy to do at all.

After several frustrating hours on the phone, Laurel discovered that it is completely impossible to talk with someone at the Salem Best Buy store using that early twentieth century invention, the telephone.

Instead, she got Best Buy "customer service" (the quotation marks indicate irony) people who gave every indication of being in China. Or at least somewhere else where English isn't spoken very well. Not that English was the main problem.

The problem was that even the simplest question or request involved Laurel being put on hold for long periods of time, which sometimes ended up with the phone call being terminated, which meant she'd have to call the Best Buy "customer service" number again, reaching a different person, who she'd have to describe the cooktop problem to all over again.

After each call to Best Buy I heard more swearing from Laurel than she usually emits in a week. To her credit, she'd tell the Best Buy "customer service" people that she wasn't mad at them; she was mad at the incompetence of Best Buy.

At long last, after maybe a dozen phone calls, an appointment was made for Best Buy to uninstall the mistakenly ordered radiant cooktop. But Best Buy even screwed that up. Because the two guys who came to our house didn't know how to remove the radiant cooktop. 

In halting English, one of them said, "You may need electrician." No, we didn't need an electrician. We needed someone competent.

This led Laurel to make more frustrating phone calls to Best Buy. Eventually she learned that Best Buy had sent out a pick-up crew, which is different from an uninstall crew, even though it seemed obvious to us that since Best Buy had installed a radiant cooktop that we hadn't ordered, it would be necessary to uninstall it for the cooktop to be returned.

Fortunately, by this time Laurel had learned that working with Kelly's Appliances was heavenly rather than hellish.

We'd bought quite a bit of stuff from Kelly's over the years. So Laurel had the bright idea of giving them a call after the Best Buy "customer service" people had told her it would take quite a while to order the GE induction cooktop that we thought we were getting from Best Buy to begin with.

Laurel spoke with a Kelly's salesperson who told her that there were 27 GE induction cooktops available, and we could have one installed within a few weeks. Whenever she had a question about the order, Laurel could talk with that salesperson at the Salem Kelly's store right away, or get a different salesperson who was just as knowledgeable about our order.

Today a Kelly's employee took out the Best Buy radiant cooktop and installed the GE induction cooktop. He was pleasant, efficient, and competent -- three words that, sadly, don't describe any of the Best Buy employees Laurel dealt with.

Saturday Best Buy is supposed to pick up the radiant cooktop. We'll then get a refund, aside from the installation fee of $149, I think it was. 

The lesson we've learned from this is that it makes sense to buy appliances from a local company who has genuine customer service. Probably buying something from Best Buy is fine if you can walk out with it, get it working by yourself, and take it back to the store if you want to return it.

But for something fairly complicateed, like a cooktop or other appliance, trying to return something to Best Buy can be a nightmare. At one point Laurel was so frustrated with the "customer service" people in China, or wherever they were, she thought she might have to go the Salem Best Buy store and demand to talk to a manager.

We're very happy with Kelly's, though. Just something to keep in mind if you have a choice between getting something at Best Buy or at Kelly's. Our recommendation is to go with Kelly's. Unless you love to spend many hours on the phone getting nowhere with incompetent people.

Why Salem snow has been so much less than Portland snow

Last night on the 11 pm news on KGW, Matt Zaffino said that Salem and the rest of the central Willamette Valley would get the most snow on Wednesday and Thursday. 

At that time Portland wasn't even under a Winter Weather Advisory, which was issued only for the Central Willamette Valley and South Willamette Valley until 10 am on Thursday.

But if you've been watching the evening news on Portland television stations, you know that the Portland area has been getting a lot of snow. Here in Salem, hardly anything so far.

On the 6 pm news today, Zaffino explained that the weather system has unexpectedly stalled over the Portland/Vancouver area, with a counterclockwise circulation creating especially high snowfall in Multnomah County, while Washington County hasn't been getting as much snow.

Recently the Portland office of the National Weather Service issued some Twitter tweets that describe what is going on.

By contrast, at our home in rural south Salem it snowed pretty heavily early this afternoon, but only a little bit stuck to the ground, and it is all gone by now. This photo was taken around 1 pm today.

Nothing like what Portland has been getting. This precipitation map from my Clime weather app reflects what the National Weather Service tweets said. At the moment snow is falling well north of Salem, while Salem is in a rain zone. (Clime calls my location "Sunnyside" for some reason.)

But Salem could still get some fairly significant snow. My AccuWeather app is forecasting a total of about 1.4 inches through Thursday at 1 pm. If so, that's not a big deal, especially compared to what Portland is having to cope with. The app shows a 30% probability of 2-4 inches, though.

Schools should meet needs of both visual and verbal thinkers

Today our monthly Salon discussion group talked about a bunch of interesting topics, including the difference between verbal and visual ways of thinking.

I brought this subject up, saying that I've started to read a story in The New Yorker about Temple Grandin and how she uses her visual skills to come up with more humane ways of designing slaughterhouses. 

(As a vegetarian, I don't think slaughterhouses can be humane, but if there's ways to reduce the suffering of animals, that's a good thing.)

Here's an excerpt from Thought Process, the story title in the print edition, which became How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? in the online edition. Subtitle: Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize.

Grandin, who is on the autism spectrum, came to prominence in 1995, when she published “Thinking in Pictures,” a memoir that chronicled her years-long search for a way to put her visual and perceptual gifts to use.

She found a home in agricultural engineering, where she was capable of visualizing farm buildings from the animals’ perspective. Visiting a slaughterhouse where animals were often panicked, she could instantly see how small visual elements, such as a hanging chain or a reflection in a puddle, were distracting them and causing confusion.

“Thinking in Pictures” made the case for the value of neurodiversity: Grandin’s unusual mind succeeded where others couldn’t. In “Visual Thinking,” she sharpens her argument, proposing that word-centric people have sidelined other kinds of thinkers.

Verbal minds, she argues, run our boardrooms, newsrooms, legislatures, and schools, which have cut back on shop class and the arts, while subjecting students to a daunting array of written standardized tests. The result is a crisis in American ingenuity.

“Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors,” Grandin writes. “No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to understand, encourage, or appreciate their specific contributions.”

In “Thinking in Pictures,” Grandin suggested that the world was divided between visual and verbal thinkers. “Visual Thinking” gently revises the idea, identifying a continuum of thought styles that’s roughly divisible into three sections.

On one end are verbal thinkers, who often solve problems by talking about them in their heads or, more generally, by proceeding in the linear, representational fashion typical of language. (Estimating the cost of a building project, a verbal thinker might price out all the components, then sum them using a spreadsheet—an ordered, symbol-based approach.)

On the other end of the continuum are “object visualizers”: they come to conclusions through the use of concrete, photograph-like mental images, as Grandin does when she compares building plans in her mind. In between those poles, Grandin writes, is a second group of visual thinkers—“spatial visualizers,” who seem to combine language and image, thinking in terms of visual patterns and abstractions.

We talked about Grandin's observation that schools tend to favor verbal thinkers. One person said that when he was in high school, the students who took shop classes were looked down on by language-oriented verbal thinkers like him.

I agreed, saying that I felt the same way. Yet now my wife and I are thrilled if we can find a plumber or electrician willing to come to our house and fix something on short notice.

On the plus side, a discussion group member who does substitute teaching in the Salem-Keizer School District said that vocational education is getting more attention, and that the district is working to meet the needs of students who are more into visual thinking than verbal thinking.

What I find fascinating is how each of us only has directly experienced one style of thinking: our own.

So it's easy to believe that those who use a different style are either miracle workers or mentally deficient -- whereas the truth is that we're all just doing what our diverse brains lead us to do, no judgment required.

I remember a skilled woodworker who rebuilt our deck shortly after we moved into our house in 1990. I never saw him make a sketch or write down a plan. He had what seemed to me an almost magical ability to construct a structure intuitively, given what must have been his high visual skills.

Keith, a.k.a. The Garden Poet, could do the same thing with landscaping. Like the guy who rebuilt our deck, Keith didn't make any sketches or plans. He came up with design ideas in the course of doing the landscaping work.

My wife and I learned to be surprised, always pleasantly, when we'd return home and see what Keith had created while we were gone. His mind also was decidedly in the visual style of thinking.

Me, I'm strongly verbal. But I told our discussion group that I've always been able to visualize concepts as if they were objects floating in the sky of my mind, rearranging themselves into various patterns as I ponder some subject I want to talk or write about.

All kinds of thinking styles need to be valued by society. As Grandin said in the excerpt above, mechanics, builders, and other visual thinkers are just as important as scholars and writers who favor verbal thinking.

Though I suspect that almost everybody utilizes a blend of visual and verbal thinking. It's great that schools appear to be recognizing this to a much greater degree than in the not-so-good old days when I was in high school in the 1960s. 

Which brought up a distressing memory just now. I ended up being the salutatorian of my graduating class of 1966, thanks to Keith Glentzer who had much better math and science skills, becoming valedictorian for that reason.

When I took biology, the teacher took a special glee in bringing in wildflowers that we had to name. I was terrible at looking at a wildflower and coming up with its name -- even though I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains where most of the wildflowers came from.

I was verbally proficient, but visually handicapped. I almost got a "D" in biology because I simply couldn't remember the names of the wildflowers. (I still can't do this.) The teacher thought this was amusing, as did my classmates, since I had a reputation as a brainy student.

Which was generally true. But throw a verbal thinking person into a visual thinking pond, and they'll struggle. Same applies to visual thinking people thrown into a verbal thinking pond, which is what our schools have been historically.

2023 Super Bowl made me feel pleasingly united

Most seasons I watch one NFL game: the Super Bowl.

That was the case this year also. I enjoy football a lot, but the college game always has appealed more to me, probably because then I get to root for Oregon teams, and Oregon doesn't have a NFL team.

However, I do consider it my non-sacred duty to watch the Super Bowl. It's an American tradition. And because it's the most important NFL game of the year, I get excited watching it.

Partly that's because even though I don't have any favorite team during the regular season, I read enough on the sports pages to end up wanting one of the Super Bowl teams to win. In 2023 it was the Kansas City Chiefs.

For a couple of reasons. I follow an Oregon political guy on Twitter who is a massive fan of Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback of the Chiefs. During the past several years I've been exposed to tweets that make it sound like Mahomes is, if not a superhero quarterback, the closest thing to it. 

I also was aware that Mahomes played on a bad ankle in the division championship that got the Chiefs to the Super Bowl, gutting out a victory. So while Mahomes was the NFL most valuable player, I decided I wanted Kansas City to win because they seemed like underdogs given Mahomes's injury.

And I typically root for the underdog in the Super Bowl.

My biggest fear, of course, wasn't that the Chiefs would lose, but that either the Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles would run away with the game, making it one of those boring Super Bowl blowouts of 45-7 or whatever.

That fear sure didn't come to pass. The game was close throughout. Mostly I had the impression that the Eagles looked like the better team. However, the Chiefs answered whenever the Eagles scored and the game was tied with about five minutes remaining.

Mahomes then showed why he's the NFL MVP. He worked his magic down the field, even running for a good gain on one play where he looked to be in quite a bit of pain. 

It was kind of surprising to see the Chiefs doing their best not to score when they got close to the Eagles goal line with several minutes left on the clock. I understood the desire to not leave the Eagles with much time after a Chiefs score. 

Still it seemed risky when a Chiefs running back slid on the one yard line to avoid scoring. What if there was a fumble on a succeeding play? Then the decision not to score when the Chiefs had the chance would have looked like an all-time Super Bowl dumb move.

But the Chiefs kicker easily made a short field goal with eight seconds remaining. That made the final score 38-35 with Mahomes and company earning a well-deserved win.

I then watched my recording of today's Meet the Press show.

During the Data Download segment, Chuck Todd presented a couple of slides about the Super Bowl. The first made me feel good about being part of an American sports ritual that, unlike other sports, appeals equally to both Democrats and Republicans. 

I guess I'm included in the Democrats 44%, even though my NFL fandom usually consists of one game a year, the Super Bowl. Todd noted that it's only the NFL that attracts Democrats and Republicans equally, since other sports have a bias toward one political party or the other.

Good for the NFL. We need more things in the United States that bring us together, given how divided we are in many respects. 

This slide also was interesting, along with being a bit disturbing.

Wow, 29 of 30 most viewed television broadcasts in U.S. history are Super Bowls. Not a moon landing. Not a presidential debate. Super Bowls. The exception among the top 30 was the finale of M*A*S*H in 1983. 

Oh, well. Whatever brings us together is a good thing. Even if it is Super Bowls and the finale of a long-running TV show.

I get Paxlovid "rebound," but I'm OK with being Covid positive again

Six days ago I completed my 5-day course of Covid treatment with Paxlovid, which basically puts a brake on replication of the virus, giving your body a chance to deal with it before it gets up a big head of Covid steam.

I commemorated that event with a blog post, "My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid 'rebound.'" I said:

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

I still feel it isn't a big deal, even though last Wednesday, four days after I finished the Paxlovid treatment, I was dismayed to find that a rapid test I took showed I was positive for Covid again. So far (this is Friday) I'm still testing positive.

That's irritating, since I enjoyed my few days of post-Covid normalcy -- having coffee with a friend, going back to exercising at my athletic club, attending my Tai Chi class. 

On the plus side, my symptoms are milder than before, and they were pretty mild the first Covid time around. I haven't had to take a decongestant at bedtime, which I did during the first bout of Covid. And I came across a recent Scientific American story about Paxlovid rebound which indicates that my "contrarian take" on this actually is scientifically mainstream. 

A tweet clued me in to the story.

If you have doubts about Paxlovid because you've heard about the rebound effect, or if you know people who qualify to get Paxlovid because they're in a higher-risk Covid category (elderly, for example) and might be reluctant to take the drug, check out the February 8, 2023 Scientific American story by Lauren Gravitz, COVID Rebound Can Happen Even without Paxlovid.

Here's a PDF file if you have difficulty accessing that web page.
Download COVID Rebound Can Happen Even without Paxlovid - Scientific American

Some excerpts from the story:

Paxlovid gets a bad rap over concerns about COVID “rebound.” That’s the primary takeaway from a series of papers showing that whether or not people take the antiviral medication, many have symptoms that wax and wane before going away completely.    

Over the past few months a number of peer-reviewed and preprint studies have looked at patients with COVID in the placebo groups of clinical trials for Paxlovid and other treatments. As part of the trials, the patients in these groups were required to fill out daily symptom trackers. Researchers consistently found that as many as 30 percent of those who did not take an antiviral experienced a rebound in coughing, fatigue, headache or other symptoms after initially feeling better. 

...Despite Paxlovid’s proved efficacy at preventing severe disease and death in people considered high-risk, Smith found increasing resistance to it. “When Paxlovid rebound started to gain traction—I’m going to be blunt—I kind of got annoyed,” he says. Perhaps more worrisome, however, is the fact that some physicians have become hesitant to prescribe it. “The drug kept people out of the hospital and kept them from dying,” Smith says. “My patients started saying they didn’t want to take it,” he adds, and “I felt guilty because I’d started it all.”

Because he knew that respiratory viral symptoms have a tendency to come and go no matter the virus or treatment, Smith set out to better characterize the course of COVID itself. As chair of the U.S.-government-sponsored ACTIV-2 trial—a series of placebo-controlled studies that aims to assess new COVID treatments—he had troves of data at his fingertips, so he dove into the trials and gave the placebo groups extra scrutiny.    

...Smith wasn’t surprised by the results. “As an infectious disease doc, [I] know that respiratory disease viruses often have this waxing and waning,” he says, adding that it also happens with colds, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). “It’s just their nature.” This is likely because most symptoms are related to the body’s inflammatory response to the virus, not the virus itself, he says. The inflammation—which is different for everyone—generally lasts longer than the virus, and it ebbs and flows as viral remnants are cleared from the body.

Other infectious disease specialists agree. “In my view, the story of rebound was overblown,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and chief of the research and education service at the Department of Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. He notes that he frequently hears of physicians who resist prescribing Paxlovid to high-risk patients for fear of rebound or the much-lamented side effect of a bitter, metallic taste. And yet, he says, “rebound never killed anyone. But COVID can put you in the hospital or, even worse, could lead to death.”    

Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has heard similar reactions to Paxlovid. “I’ve heard many times from patients and from a fair number of physicians that ‘I don’t like to use it because of rebound,’” he says. “I kind of understand it viscerally, but it doesn’t make sense when looking at a dispassionate ledger sheet of the medication’s benefits and downsides.... It’s not that close a call.”    

...Until more data emerge, physicians must rely on their intuition and whatever solid information they can find. Existing data consistently point to the upside of Paxlovid. “In my world, people have looked at the data and believe the benefits of medication are quite probable,” Wachter says. “I’m certainly going to give it to high-risk people. Most of my colleagues who have gotten COVID have taken it.” And Wachter, who is 65 years old, adds that if he tests positive for COVID, he will absolutely take the drug himself.    

Physicians agree that COVID rebound after antivirals may be a nuisance, but it is far better than hospitalization or death. “Paxlovid is the best weapon we have right now for people who have COVID,” says Smith, who knows the treatment landscape better than most. “It keeps people out of the hospital, keeps them from dying and probably decreases the risk of long COVID. In short, I think it’s worth the bitter taste.” 

My somewhat contrarian take on Paxlovid "rebound"

After getting some Covid symptoms and testing positive on a rapid test last Monday, this morning I completed the 5-day Paxlovid treatment regimen. 

My symptoms (nasal congestion and a cough) have been gone for a few days. The rapid test I took this afternoon was negative. So things are looking good. 

And I'm not all that worried about Paxlovid rebound, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Nobody really knows how many people who take Paxlovid either get Covid symptoms after the 5-day treatment is over, or test positive after testing first positive, then negative, then positive again. A Scientific American story says:

The Pfizer clinical trial reported between 1 and 2 percent of those who received the drug tested positive for COVID after finishing the Paxlovid course; their illness rebounded. Those rebounds were not statistically different from rebounds experienced by people with COVID who received the placebo, however.

And a Los Angeles Times story strikes a cautionary tone.

This is a story about a COVID-19 medication, a nasty trick the coronavirus sometimes plays on its victims, and how the two became a pandemic couple called “Paxlovid rebound.”

It’s also a story about how looks can be deceiving.

Americans have been quick to embrace the idea that the antiviral drug is to blame for COVID-19 relapses in people just days after they’ve seemingly recovered. President Biden was said to have experienced Paxlovid rebound this summer, after White House doctors declared him coronavirus-free. The same thing happened to Dr. Anthony Fauci and Stephen Colbert, among others.

It’s tempting to presume a cause-and-effect relationship between two things that occur in quick succession. And even when events are completely random, we tend to see the patterns we expect to find.

But researchers are not so sure Paxlovid rebound is real. Relapses have occurred in COVID-19 patients who didn’t take the drug — they just didn’t get as much attention when there wasn’t a new medicine to blame.

Doctors fear some patients who could benefit from Paxlovid are skipping it in an effort to avoid a boomerang bout of COVID-19. That’s troubling because the medication has been found to powerfully reduce the risk of hospitalization or death in the unvaccinated, older people and those with compromised immunity. Preliminary research hints it may even reduce the risk of long COVID.

Today I shared some thoughts with a friend about the subject of Paxlovid rebound. She also took Paxlovid, but is still testing positive about a week after the treatment ended. She shared an email from her doctor, which I cited in my own message. 

The way I see it, your doctor and my pharmacist are saying the same thing. Paxlovid doesn’t cause any virus lingering in the body after the 5-day treatment regimen to somehow pop back up and reinfect the person. It’s the Covid virus that caused the initial infection and it’s the Covid virus that causes any negative test result at the end of treatment to turn into a positive test result later on.

As your doctor correctly noted, Paxlovid puts a brake on replication of the virus during the 5-day treatment period. If a person’s body/immune system wasn’t able to clear all of the virus during that period, or if the person for one reason or another didn’t respond properly to the Paxlovid treatment, then any residual virus can emerge after the Paxlovid brake is turned off after the 5-days.

So if a positive test result occurs after Paxlovid, as has happened with you, this doesn’t mean Paxlovid is responsible. Paxlovid did what it should. And the Covid virus is doing what it does so well, replicate if given the chance. 

I look at the situation this way. Without Paxlovid, you or I might well have spent several weeks suffering from moderate symptoms. That was the case with a woman I know, somewhat younger than me, who got Covid and emailed me, “I hope you get over it more quickly than I did.” I recall she was sick for a couple of weeks.

So we take Paxlovid. It puts a brake on the virus replicating in our bodies. We have mild symptoms. If after the brake is released, some residual virus causes a positive test result some days after the end of Paxlovid treatment, we’re still considerably better off than if we hadn’t taken Paxlovid at all, because of the 5-day brake period, which enabled our bodies to better fight the comparatively small amount of virus that the Paxlovid brake couldn’t stop.

Like you said, it seems to come down to word choices. The word “rebound” conjures up an image of something happening that shouldn’t, whereas actually a positive test result after the 5-day course of treatment isn’t surprising, if some residual virus remained in the body after the five days. Some people seem to view “rebound” as meaning that Paxlovid caused two Covid infections rather than just one, which makes them reluctant to take Paxlovid. Of course, there was just one Covid infection.

They don’t realize that if they qualify to get Paxlovid, they should take it, since whatever happens with the course of treatment, they’ll be better off than if they just let Covid run its course in their body without Paxlovid. I took another rapid test about an hour ago: negative. So that’s good news. Of course, I’ll re-test myself every few days to see if a positive test result emerges.

I couldn’t tell from your message whether you took a rapid test after the 5-day course of treatment. If so, I’m curious if it was negative. 

I test positive for Covid. And feel positive about Paxlovid.

Well, it was a good run without ever getting Covid -- about three years since the nasty virus came to the United States in early 2020. 

After I had trouble sleeping last Saturday night, feeling on edge for no discernible reason, I took a rapid Covid test Sunday morning, which came back negative, even though my voice was a bit hoarse.

But Monday morning I had some nasal congestion and increased hoarseness, so I tested again. Yikes! A positive result. 

That kicked off a flurry of phone calls. First, I called my Salem Health family physician's office. I talked with someone who described my treatment options after I told her that I'd like to get Paxlovid given my age (74) and understandable desire to avoid a serious case of Covid.

She explained that a complication was that Paxlovid interacted with several prescription medications that I was taking. OK, I told her, no problem. I just won't take the medications while on the five-day Paxlovid course of treatment.

I then was told that they use the Salem Health pharmacy and that I'd be getting a call from a pharmacist. Probably the same day. Around 2:30 in the afternoon I got that call.

The Salem Health pharmacist was wonderfully clear.

He had me repeat what the person in my doctor's office had told me (which probably was in my chart): stop taking all of my other prescription medications for the five-day Paxlovid treatment, plus three days afterward, waiting another two days to restart the most problematic medication, Lovastatin (10 mg).

Again I said, no problem. I told the pharmacist I wasn't going to suffer much, if at all, from not taking the other medications. I'd much rather shorter the course of my Covid infection and lower the risk of getting Long Covid, which a VA study indicates is about a 25% risk reduction. 

Laurel, my wife, picked up the no-cost Paxlovid prescription for me. I took my first dose of three pills late Monday afternoon on the same day I tested positive for Covid. So I felt good that it was possible to get going with Paxlovid so soon (Paxlovid needs to be started within five days of having Covid symptoms). 

Here's how Paxlovid works.

Paxlovid is an antiviral therapy that consists of two separate medications packaged together. When you take your three-pill dose, two of those pills will be nirmatrelvir, which inhibits a key enzyme that the COVID virus requires in order to make functional virus particles. After nirmatrelvir treatment, the COVID virus that is released from the cells is no longer able to enter uninfected cells in the body, which, in turn, stops the infection. The other is ritonavir, a drug that was once used to treat HIV/AIDS but is now used to boost levels of antiviral medicines. 

As a COVID-19 treatment, ritonavir essentially shuts down nirmatrelvir’s metabolism in the liver, so that it doesn’t move out of your body as quickly, which means it can work longer—giving it a boost to help fight the infection.

At the moment I'm 3 1/2 days into the 5-day treatment. Starting today, Thursday, I'm almost symptom free.

My nasal congestion is just about gone. I cough occasionally, but way less than before. The only annoying side effect is some diarrhea, along with a bit of a metallic taste in my mouth for several hours after taking a dose.

Regarding the oft-heard Paxlovid "rebound effect," where Covid symptoms recur after going away, the Salem Health Pharmacist told me that this isn't due to Paxlovid, but to Covid. I believe he's right, after some Googling of this subject. For example, see here and here.

Not everyone with Covid is eligible to get Paxlovid. Based on my experience, I recommend that if you have Covid, ask if you can be prescribed Paxlovid.

I didn't like "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie.

Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime.

After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little.

Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters and interested in the plot, I felt like turning off the TV numerous times while suffering through what I"m pretty sure was the least enjoyable Best Picture nominee I've ever seen.

A review in The New Yorker describes how I felt about the movie, albeit in much clearer and more sophisticated language. (Its subtitle is "There's no there there."

The movie world is awash in fantasy, and that’s a problem, because fantasy is the riskiest genre. There’s no middle ground with fantasy because there’s no ground at all. Even a middling work of realism inevitably rests on experience, observation, and knowledge, but a mediocre fantasy is a transparent emptiness, a contrivance of parts that aren’t held together by the atmosphere of social life.

It’s the triple axel of cinema: when successful, fantasies are glorious, seemingly expanding the very nature of experience by way of speculative imagination. Some of the best movies of recent years—“The Future,” “Us,” and “The French Dispatch”—are fantasies, and their artistic success is doubled by their very resistance to the corporatization of fantasy in the overproduction and overmanagement of superhero franchises.

But a failed fantasy is a wipeout, and that’s the simplest and clearest way to describe “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a new film (opening Friday) by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a duo called Daniels). Were it not for the appealing and charismatic presence of its cast, it would leave nothing but a vapor puff that disperses when the lights go on.

Couldn't agree more.

For most of the film, there's a lot of cheesy Kung Fu'ish fighting scenes, interspersed with shots of people screaming loudly. The multiverse plot, such as it is, was confusing to follow, in part because I like to use subtitles, but when I asked Siri to turn on subtitles, the response was that they're already on.

Which was true as regards the subtitles shown when  Chinese was being spoken. But my problem was understanding the main characters when they spoke in English about what was going on in the fantasy world of the multiverse.

Of course, since it didn't take me long to realize that I really didn't care what the movie was all about, after a while the fact that the "failed fantasy" of Everywhere failed to interest me fit with the fact that I never got all that interested in the movie's realistic scenes either.

That said, I started off enjoying the portrait of a Chinese-American family trying to manage a laundromat while dealing with their intergenerational problems. But once the movie veered off into multiverse fantasies that seemed way too confusing to me, I realized how Everywhere could have been a better film with just a bit of fantasy and a much larger dose of realism.

A review in The Guardian says it well. (It also has a good subtitle: nothing nowhere over a long period of time. 

This hipster hypefest is an adventure in alternative existences and multiverse realities from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the “Daniels” – who in 2016 gave us the Jonzeian comedy Swiss Army Man.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcerting to find it frantically hyperactive and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdetermined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.

There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe.

But this mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there.


I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions.

I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity.

Last Friday's Real Time show was a good example of this.

His guests were Bari Weiss and Tim Ryan. I guess you could call them centrists. Ryan, a Democrat, ran for Ohio Senator against JD Vance in the 2022 midterm election. Weiss was recruited by Elon Musk to make a big ado about not much in the recent Twitter Files saga.

A central theme of Friday's show was how the American people are fed up with the woke positions of Democrats. (This has been a theme of previous shows also.) 

So there was a lot of tut-tutting about how in many parts of Ohio, and rural areas generally, having a "D" after your name can be a death knell for your election chances. OK, an obvious point, but fair enough. But I keep waiting for Maher, Ryan, or Weiss to bring up an equally valid point.

In virtually every large big city in the United States, having a "R" after your name pretty much dooms your election chances.

So why doesn't Maher spend as much time asking what Republicans need to do to win back urban voters as he does asking what Democrats need to do to win back rural voters? I also couldn't understand why Maher and his guests didn't bring up the 2022 midterm results.

There sure wasn't much of a sign that voters were fed up with Democrats because of their excessive wokeness. The Dems picked up a seat in the Senate, maintaining control of that chamber. And the Dem losses in House races was hugely below expectations. They took control of some Governorships and state legislatures.

Rather than House Republicans having a 30-40 seat majority as many pundits predicted, the GOP just has a narrow four seat majority.

Thus it seems clear that the Democratic Party is alive and well in the United States, contrary to all the doom and gloom about Dem popularity expressed by Maher and his guests.

Another thing that irritates me whenever Maher brings it up is the notion that all across the country, young children are being indoctrinated by teachers in the supposed Liberal Commandment of gender fluidity.

Maher keeps claiming that rather than teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and other core competencies, liberal elementary school teachers are spending much of their classroom time talking about how wonderful it is that some children have two mommy's or two daddy's.

Bill Maher loves to cite individual anecdotes as if this proves anything. Actually, it doesn't. If Maher presented solid data on how frequently teachers of young children are bringing up gender issues, and used an anecdote to back up those data, that'd be fine.

Instead, Maher likes to talk about a single anecdote that he or his staff dredged up, then uses that anecdote to draw broad-brush conclusions about how wokeness is destroying our educational system. 

That's a lousy way to make an argument. Maher should know better, but he appears to have entered a largely fact-free zone on his show. 

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

When Maher and his guests talked about the horrible food in the school meal program, they didn't mention that during the Trump years, it was Republicans who stood in the way of making school breakfasts and lunches more nutritious. 

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Arcimoto seems to be going out of business

I've been a long-time fan of Arcimoto, a company based in Eugene, fifty miles south of Salem, where I live.

Arcimoto makes the FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle), a three-wheeled semi-enclosed electric sort-of-motorcycle. In Oregon you don't have to wear a helmet while driving it, so it's a unique blend of a car and motorcycle.

I've been following the fortunes of Arcimoto for a long time. Heck, this blog even has an "Arcimoto" category with ten posts in it, including this one. As I said in my first post back in July 2018, I've got both Arcimoto anticipation and anxiety:

I've been following the saga of Arcimoto, a three-wheeled electric FUV (Fun Utility Vehicle) for a long time. So long, I can't remember when I plunked down $100 for a pre-order reservation. 

I must have been among the first to do this, since my reservation number is #129, and I believe they total more than 2,700 now.

Over the years I've come close to ordering a FUV, but I never did. Something always bothered me about Arcimoto. 

Lack of usable real-world driving range, since I live six miles from Salem in a rural area with some large hills between me and town, and the FUV range is 102 miles in the city and considerably less in non-city driving. Lack of local servicing. Lack of long-term reviews. Lack of free delivery (last I knew, I'd have to pay $1,000 to get a FUV delivered). And crucially, lack of evidence that Arcimoto was a viable company.

I wanted to see some solid evidence that Arcimoto was going to survive before plunking down around $20,000 for a FUV, a large increase from the $12,000 that the FUV originally was supposed to sell for. I had no interest in being one of the people who bought a FUV just before Arcimoto went out of business.

Which looks like it could happen fairly soon. 

On January 17, Arcimoto announced a $12 million public offering at $3 a share. Not surprisingly, since Arcimoto stock was trading around $6 at the time, the price of Arcimoto sank like a stone to well below $3. 

Now, maybe the $12 million will buy Arcimoto time to figure out how to make the company survive. But the offering prospectus said that production has halted at the newly constructed Eugene manufacturing facility, and lots of employees have been laid off. An Oregonian story tells the sorry tale.

Shares in electric vehicle manufacturer Arcimoto plunged Wednesday after the company announced it has shut down production at its Eugene factory because it is nearly out of money.

Arcimoto moved to sell $12 million in additional shares at $3 each – less than half of Tuesday’s closing price. The stock plunged nearly 60% in morning trading, to $2.51.

“We have halted our production of vehicles and will require substantial additional funding to resume production,” Arcimoto warned in a regulatory filing accompanying the stock offering. The company warned that financing may not be available on any terms, and if not, “we will be required to cease our operations and/or seek bankruptcy protection.”

Arcimoto makes a three-wheel electric motorcycle it calls the Fun Utility Vehicle, or FUV. It was briefly among Oregon’s most highly publicized young companies, with a market value that peaked above $1 billion in 2021. The company is now worth less than $7 million.

Arcimoto struggled against supply chain issues as its new factory opened last year, and it’s never been clear that its FUVs have mass-market appeal.

Arcimoto laid off 50 and furloughed another 66 employees last fall to cut costs. But that hasn’t been enough. Subsequent financial filings revealed the company’s bank account has frequently been close to empty and it’s had to sell additional shares to stay afloat, diluting existing investors’ stake. Arcimoto had 250 employees at the end of 2021, the last period for which it has reported workforce figures.

Among the tumult, the company abruptly replaced founder and CEO Mark Frohnmayer last year after his arrest for driving one of Arcimoto’s vehicles while intoxicated.

The company produced just 252 over the most recent six months for which Arcimoto reported results and delivered just 115 to customers.

For the third quarter, which ended in September, Arcimoto reported $2 million in revenue. The company lost $17 million during the period.

Arcimoto said in October it was seeking “strategic alternatives,” employing a euphemism companies use when they put their business up for sale. But no buyer has emerged for the rapidly dwindling business.

So $12 million isn't going to last very long when the company has been losing $17 million a quarter. I still like the looks of the FUV. If someone gave me one, I'd happily drive it around. But there's no way I'd buy a FUV when Arcimoto is on such a shaky financial footing.

I'm just glad that I wasn't one of the people who bought Arcimoto stock when the shares were flying high. Now they've come back to earth with a resounding thud. This is the one year price history.

Our dog's hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child.

So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing.

But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease. 

What shocked my wife, who has owned several purebred German Shepherds, a breed prone to hip dysplasia, is that a mixed breed dog who is only about five years old (she was adopted from a shelter, so we're not sure exactly how old Mooka is) would have hip dysplasia at such a relatively young age.

And not only that. Mooka also may have herniated discs in her spine, because she got a IVDD diagnosis too. That's Intervertebral Disc Disease. 

There's treatments for Mooka's problems. So we're hoping she still has quite a few years of happy running around in her future. At the moment we're just dealing with the unpleasant news that arrived this evening. 

Mooka is still the same dog she was before we got the report from our vet.

It's my wife and I who are changed, because we love Mooka and had been visualizing her being healthy for much longer, since mixed breeds/mutts tend to have fewer health problems than purebred dogs. But life is full of surprises, often unwelcome ones.

Apple Support hindered and helped my iPhone 14 setups

This tale of my three phone calls to Apple Support a few days ago has a happy ending. My wife and I are enjoying the iPhone 14 Pro Max devices that we decided to get after using iPhone 8's since 2017.

So we were six freaking iPhone generations old, something that hasn't come close to happening since we joined the iPhone cult way back when. (Too long ago for me to remember.)

When the new phones arrived in the mail after ordering them from Verizon, our cellular carrier, I waited a day before taking the plunge into setting them up. That had gone well the last time we got fresh phones, but like I said, this was over five years ago.

I decided to set up my iPhone 14 first. 

It didn't take long for a problem to pop up. All I'd done was choose English for my language and United States for my location. Then a message appeared that said, I'm pretty sure, "It may take a few minutes to activate your iPhone."

OK. No big deal. Except after fifteen minutes I began to get worried. After 45 minutes I was really worried and Googled the message. Various pieces of advice popped up, such as this one. 

I was reluctant to restart the iPhone 14, though, in part because while I thought the message meant that the phone was activating my Verizon account, I wasn't absolutely sure about this. Out of an abundance of caution I decided to phone Apple Support.

Having had Apple products since the Apple II+ computer debuted in the 1980s, I've had many encounters with Apple Support, almost always really positive. My wife and I buy AppleCare with every device we get -- computers, iPhones, iPads, AirPods -- because the technical support people solve our problems so easily.

That made what happened when I phoned Apple Support both surprising and disturbing. After I explained that my new iPhone 14 was stuck on the activation screen, the woman I was talking to asked how many apps I had.

"A lot," I told her, adding that I'd deleted quite a few apps before starting the Quick Start process of transferring data and settings from my old phone to the new one. "Well," she said, "that can take a few hours."

Not a great answer, but I assumed that she knew what she was talking about. So I went back to waiting and periodically staring at the message on the phone that activation could take several minutes. After several hours, and some additional Googling, I was convinced that more help was needed.

Calling Apple Support again, this time I got a woman who told me I should restart the iPhone 14. Since the iPhone came with zero instructions, I asked her how to do this. She told me to hold down the top left button while pressing the button on the right side.

That, of course, is not how iPhones restart, ever since the iPhone 10. Actually you hold down either volume button on the right side while pressing the right side button. In fact, the top left "button" isn't a button at all, but a little switch that silences the phone.

When I told the woman that the phone wouldn't restart, she put me on hold to research what every Apple Support person should know: how to restart an iPhone. That gave me time to do my own Googling, so by the time she returned with the correct approach I'd already restarted the phone.

Now it truly did take just a few minutes to activate my iPhone 14, and the rest of the setup process went smoothly.

That evening I decided to setup my wife's iPhone 14.

The activation went fine, but after apps had been transferred to the new phone, after a while I realized that none of them were downloading. That perplexed me, until I noticed that there was no wi-fi symbol at the top of the screen, just one bar showing our crappy Verizon signal strength, since we live in a rural area with no line of sight to a cell tower.

I restarted my wife's phone. I turned wi-fi off and on. Nothing worked to get our Starlink satellite broadband recognized by the iPhone 14. It showed up in Settings, but a spinning ball showed that even though the password was correct, the phone wasn't connecting to Starlink.

This time when I phoned Apple Support, perhaps because it was around 9 pm, I got a woman with an Indian accent, which I viewed as a positive omen. 

At first she had me do what I'd already done: restart the phone and turn wi-fi off and on. Then she asked if it would be OK to do the Screen Share thing. Sure, I said. Soon a red arrow appeared on the iPhone 14, but she said that she was unable to view the screen.

That caused her to ask if I could use the camera on my wife's iPhone 8 to show the screen on the iPhone 14. That took some doing, since I had to hold the old phone in one hand while doing things on the new iPhone with my other hand.

At one point I turned the front facing camera on, which briefly showed my face/head, causing the woman to say emphatically, "No, just show the screen on the new iPhone!" I got the impression that in Apple Support it is a no-no for a Screen Share to show the person asking for help, which makes sense, given the potential for weird customer behavior.

Anyway, she also needed to put me on hold and apparently seek help from a higher power in Apple Support. When she came back on the line, she told me to do something that I've forgotten, but am pretty sure was to reset the network settings. 

That got the Starlink wi-fi working. I was thrilled. I said, "Thanks so much for solving the problem. Well, thanks to you and whoever you talked with. And for Apple Support in general." So after a bad experience with Apple Support, I had a good experience. 

And our phones are a joy to use.

Another reason to hate what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter

It wasn't so long ago that I looked upon Elon Musk with admiration. Maybe even with a bit of adoration.

After all, his Space X Starlink satellite internet system had rescued me and my wife from the hell of 7Mbps CenturyLink DSL, bringing our rural south Salem home into broadband heaven. 

And I visualized owning one of his Tesla cars someday. Though they have their downsides (don't like relying so much on a touchscreen rather than normal controls), Tesla jumpstarted the electric car revolution that's bringing the internal combustion engine closer to a well-deserved global goodbye.

When he bought Twitter, I figured he wouldn't screw it up too much. After all, Space X and Tesla are successful companies, offering innovative products and services. 

But from what I've read, the difference between them and Twitter is that competent managers stood between Musk and goings-on at Space X and Tesla -- whereas so far Musk has been very hands-on with Twitter, making a string of questionable decisions that harm both Twitter and users of Twitter.

Like, me. I love Twitter. But I hate what Musk is doing to Twitter, the latest outrage occurring yesterday.

That's when third-party Twitter apps stopped working, including Tweetbot, which I've been using because it is hugely better than the official Twitter app and web site. Here's the disturbing message that now appears on Tweetbot when I try to use it on my iPhone to access my Twitter feed.

This is so typical of Elon Musk's crappy mismanagement approach. Tweetbot and the other third-party Twitter apps have been widely popular. They enable more people to use Twitter. Users of the apps generate content for Twitter.

If Musk knew what he was doing, he would have scheduled an online Zoom meeting with the people who head up the third-party Twitter apps, most or all of whom are running small businesses with just a handful of employees.

I'm sure they'd be willing to listen to whatever concerns Musk has with the third-party apps, including the fact that they don't share ads that appear on Twitter. I'd be willing to pay more for my monthly Tweetbot subscription if Musk demanded that some money go to Twitter to compensate for the lack of ads.

But no, it looks like Musk decided to just shut down the apps without notice, and so far without explanation.

Some of them are still working, including the Apple version of Fenix, which I'm using at the  moment because I found the "native" Twitter app to be so horrendous, I'd rather stop using Twitter if that was my only option.

I have company. 

I agree about the official Twitter app being a terrible experience. I gave it a try yesterday before I discovered Fenix. 

Lots of ads. Many tweets from people I don't follow and aren't interested in following. Really confusing layout. No way I could see to tell which tweets were new and which I'd already read. All in all, a vastly less enjoyable experience than what Tweetbot and the other third-party apps offer.

After forcing myself to use the official Twitter app for a while, I got fed up and felt that if this is the only way I could use Twitter, I'd give up on Twitter. Hard to see how that benefits Twitter, but maybe Elon Musk doesn't care if he turns many off from the company he bought.

Hopefully, though, Musk will realize that making it impossible for third-party apps to access user accounts, he's harming himself and Twitter. But I'm not counting on this.

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did.

Here they are.

Slow Horses - Apple TV+
This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in a dingy backwater building. 

Gary Oldman is terrific as the cynical leader of the group. He casts off humorous insults to his team in a marvelous fashion, though deep down (very deep down), his character loves them. Or at least likes them. Season 2 was better than Season 1, which was very good itself.

The Recruit - Netflix
Another fresh look at the world of spying, this time from the American side of the Atlantic. We follow the ups and downs of a young 20-something lawyer newly hired by the CIA. He quickly learns that in an organization dedicated to scheming, the people he works with can't be trusted because they're schemers.

Just as he is. Like Slow Horses, The Recruit is a pleasing blend of action, humor, and personal relationships. I don't know if it's a realistic reflection of what it's like to work at the CIA, but it rings true to me. I look forward to a Season 2, though I found the final episode of Season 1 to be unsatisfying.

Fleishman is in Trouble - Hulu
A doctor with marriage problems who lives in New York City. Seems like a familiar premise for a show. That's why my expectations for it weren't very high. But Fleishman is in Trouble was enjoyable viewing. Mostly.

I found the darker episodes of the series to be kind of difficult to watch, since they were such a contrast with the lighter, humorous episodes. Clair Danes plays Dr. Toby Fleishman's wife. I'm a big fan of Danes, having loved her in Homeland. Here she's another mentally disturbed character who's fascinating to watch as she emotes her struggles.

What I liked the most about this show was how skillfully it portrayed all the characters as both flawed and virtuous. Just when I thought I knew who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were, I was surprised to learn that the good were also bad, and the bad were also good.

Social media reform is needed, but the market mainly should decide

Today NBC's Meet the Press devoted its Sunday morning hour entirely to a discussion of social media: what's wrong with the way things are now on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and such, along with what needs to be done to fix those problems.

It's a complicated subject with no easy answers. Here's what stuck in my mind after watching the program.

Algorithms. Social media sites typically use computer algorithms to determine what gets shown to users. (Twitter is an exception, at least if a third party app is used to access Twitter, which I do. I only see tweets from the people and organizations I follow, and I see all of their tweets, in chronological order.)

This encourages anger and divisiveness, since negativity generally draws more views than positivity, cute animal videos notwithstanding. Several Meet the Press guests called for more transparency in how the algorithms work. But it's unclear what this means.

A Republican congressman, who made good sense, argued that government regulation of the algorithms could cause more problems that it solves. Who decides what is divisive or misinformation? Even hate speech, while easy to decry, is difficult to pin down. Stand-up comedians often make jokes about "sacred cows" in our culture. Are those jokes hate speech or free speech?

Maybe I have a libertarian side when it comes to social media, but I'm wary of regulations that tell social media companies what content to prioritize to their users. So what's the alternative?

Market forces. I agree with several people on this special Meet the Press program who said that if social media companies don't operate in a fashion that users like, many of those users will head elsewhere. To some extent this has happened with Twitter after Elon Musk took over and mostly dismantled company efforts aimed at curbing extreme hate speech and harmful disinformation.

The woman who was a Facebook whistleblower in 2021, I think it was, tried to make an analogy between government requiring seat belts and other safety equipment in cars and regulation of social media companies. 

However, it's a bit of a stretch to do this.

Cars are an essential part of life for most people. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter aren't. Sure, they're addictive, useful, fun, and entertaining. But social media doesn't kill tens of thousands of people a year. And many social media users enjoy them just the way they are.

If someone finds Facebook, or whatever, distasteful, they can stop using it. When enough people do this, the social media company will realize that the market has spoken and changes need to be made.

Section 230. This is the part of the Communications Decency Act that prevents social media providers from being responsible for content put up by users. Here's how the Electronic Frontier Foundation describes Section 230.

Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.

The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish.

Most of the Meet the Press panel members seemed to think that keeping Section 230 is a good idea. I agree. It would be a nightmare if social media companies were legally responsible for all of the content uploaded by its users. This likely would lead to increased censorship of that content, since social media companies would want to be sure that they couldn't be sued by someone upset with user-generated content.

A better approach, someone said, is what happened with Alex Jones. He was successfully sued by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre after Jones repeatedly and loudly claimed the children weren't really dead. And Fox News is being sued by Dominion voting machines after hosts on the network said that the machines produced fraudulent election results. 

So in egregious cases the legal system can be used to punish libel. There's no need to make social media companies watchdogs over everything users upload on their platforms. 

Section 230 is meaningful to me because I'm an extremely small social media platform, having three blogs, two of which date back to 2003 and 2004. I've always allowed comments on my blogs. I go back and forth on moderating comments. Mostly I haven't moderated them, though occasionally I'll delete a comment that doesn't fit with my comment policies.

Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about blogs and Section 230.

CDA 230 also offers its legal shield to bloggers who act as intermediaries by hosting comments on their blogs. Under the law, bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers, the work of guest bloggers, tips sent via email, or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.

Thus I'm very much against Congress messing around with Section 230, unless the changes were minor and didn't alter its free speech provisions. 

Oregon pulls out a nail-biter over North Carolina in Holiday Bowl

After Oregon lost to Oregon State in the last game of the regular season, dooming Oregon's chance to play USC for the Pac-12 championship and potentially earn a Rose Bowl berth, going to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego struck me as a crappy consolation prize.

And for most of today's game against North Carolina in the Holiday Bowl, that assessment seemed right-on. I was totally prepared for Oregon to lose, end up 9-4 on the season, and look forward to better times next year, since this season would have ended in a disappointing fashion.

Then the fourth quarter happened. Bo Nix, Oregon's quarterback, played great, even though he didn't appear to be 100% after suffering a leg injury near the end of the regular season. Oregon scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, knotting the score at 27-27 with less than 30 seconds remaining.

The extra point seemed anticlimactic. But Camden Lewis pulled his kick to the left, hitting the upright with an audible "clunk," momentarily causing gasps from Oregon fans like me. Which turned to sighs of relief when the ball bounced off the upright and through the goal posts.

Whew: 28-27 Oregon. Drake Maye, the talented North Carolina quarterback, still had 19 seconds left to pull out a win. Thankfully, his pass into the end zone with one second left was knocked down by Oregon players.

It turned out that the Holiday Bowl was highly entertaining. That would have been the case no matter which team won. I'm just glad that it was Oregon. And that Bo Nix has decided to return for another year of being the Oregon quarterback. 

I'm now quite confident that diet affects how easily I can insert a urinary catheter

A bit over six months ago I theorized in a blog post, "Diet could play a role when having a problem inserting a urinary catheter." 

I asked my urologist if he thought diet could play a role in the difficulty I sometimes have inserting a catheter. His answer: "Maybe." Not very helpful, as that left it to me to figure out my own answer. 

After a lot of experimenting with different foods (I'm a health-minded 73 year old vegetarian), I'm pretty confident that yes, at least for me, diet does affect how easy it is for me to insert a catheter into my bladder.

I seem to have found that "gassy" foods are bad for my catheterizing. I'm not sure of this, but it makes some sense, since the prostate and colon are close together, and in men a catheter has to pass through the prostate on the way to the bladder. Thus a distended intestine could affect the passage of a catheter.

Now I'm even more confident that this is the case.

I'm not saying that my experience is common, since as I noted in that first post, some Googling revealed that basically the only foods people using intermittent self-catheterization are told to be cautious about is caffeine/coffee and alcoholic beverages, since these are bladder irritants.

In August of this year I learned that my 50 year-old daughter has been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. That got me to thinking that maybe my digestion issues could be described with that rather catch-all term.

My daughter was having stomach pain, though, while my primary problem was diarrhea in the mid to late afternoon. That indicated to me that certain foods probably were causing the loose bowel movements, since it didn't happen all the time.

So I started to study the FODMAP diet, downloading the FODMAP app for my iPhone developed by Monash University. I cut quite a few foods out of my diet: soy milk, apples, applesauce, oats, tomatoes, broccoli, pizza, soft cheese -- basically everything that the FODMAP app said could be bothersome.

I've been sticking with this FODMAP diet for several months. It could be a coincidence, but I've been having fewer problems with inserting a catheter five times a day now. It feels to me that as my digestive tract has calmed down, so has the difficulty I used to have getting a urinary catheter into my bladder.

Obviously I'm not conducting a scientific experiment. This is just my personal experience. I wanted to share it in the hope that perhaps some other catheter user would find that experience helpful, or at least interesting, to them.

After Oregon's great ice storm of 2021, I'm glad the 2022 version was milder

If I didn't know what post-traumatic stress felt like before, I sure do now. Because as soon as I heard that a significant freezing rain event was headed our way, I couldn't get thoughts and feelings of the Great Ice Storm of February 2021 out of my mind.

Along with hundreds of thousands of other Oregonians, our home got about 5/8 of an inch of ice in that horrendous weather disaster. We lost lots of trees, including two big branches from an ancient white oak.

And our electricity was out for 12 days. Not fun, obviously. 

It's difficult to forecast freezing rain, since it requires a special atmospheric setup: a layer of warm air that melts frozen precipitation, which then freezes when it hits cold surfaces. I'd seen estimates that the Salem area, where we live, could get as much as four-tenths of an inch of ice from freezing rain.

Not as much as in 2021, but enough to cause problems with falling limbs/trees and power outages. So foe days I doom scrolled my iPhone's weather apps, along with perusing the National Weather Service web site for our location and the weather news on Portland TV stations.

In the end, we only got a few tenths of an inch of ice. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot. Believe me, it is. Our driveway in rural south Salem became a solid sheet of ice, impossible to walk or drive on, even with my Subaru Crosstrek and its winter tires.

That dark dot in the driveway is a stuffed wolf. More about that in a bit. Above is a photo of the upper part of our driveway, where I'd parked the Subaru close to Lake Drive. This is what just a little bit of freezing rain can produce: virtually impassible roads.

Also, very difficult to walk on walkways, like the one leading to our front door. Take one step on the walkway without temporary cleats on shoes and you'll be on your butt. I know, because that almost happened to me this morning.

Freezing rain isn't nearly as attractive as snow. It gave our yard a sort of snow-like feel, but it's easy to walk on snow. You can play in it. You can throw it. With freezing rain, you struggle to deal with it. It's the nastiest form of winter precipitation.

Still, since our electricity didn't go off -- my biggest worry with this 2022 ice storm -- I was in a pretty buoyant mood this afternoon. So I did engage with the ice on our driveway in a playful fashion. 

My scientific quest was to determine what would slide furthest: a shoe, a banana, or a stuffed wolf? After the experiment, I then attempted to rescue the wolf from the middle of the driveway, which didn't go so well, as shown in the video. Nonetheless, I await my senior citizen scientist award.

The video shows the lighter side of white ice. Black ice is scarier, being clear, so a roadway can look fine when it really isn't. I wrote about this in "Black ice story in New Yorker brings back some slippery memories."

I'm hoping that a story in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, "Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91," will make people more aware of the dangers of black ice, and also reassure people like me who live in areas that don't get a lot of snow, but do regularly get black ice, that we aren't winter weenies.

Our 2022 Christmas Letter has a theme of falling (not in love, on the ground)

Given our age, somewhere between 40 and 100, like almost equidistant, it becomes more difficult with every passing year to find a Christmas Letter theme that doesn't sound like it was written by a couple as old as we are.

So in 2022 I embraced my inner geezer and chose to write about our unexciting senior citizen lives. A central theme is falling. But there's also a paragraph about our dog, Mooka. Something for everyone! Well, assuming you're somehow interested in the things we are.

If this Christmas letter doesn't push a Wow button for you, click here for a compilation of our letters going back to 2005. I've shared the 2022 letter in both PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2022 Christmas Letter PDF

Oregon State football, thanks for a great season

It felt wonderful to watch Oregon State play Florida in today's Las Vegas Bowl and have the most worrisome part of the game be whether the Beavers would hold the Gators scoreless, thereby ending Florida's NCAA-record 435 game scoring streak.

I was rooting for this to happen, but Florida kicked a 40 yard field goal with 37 seconds left. Oh, well, that was about the only thing that didn't go right in Oregon State's 30-3 victory. A missed extra point was no big deal.

I've got to admit that early in this year's football season I was more of an Oregon fan. But with every Oregon State game that I watched, I came away increasingly impressed with the character and style of the team.

Sure, Oregon has snazzier uniforms, and when playing well, a more exciting style. Oregon State, though, gradually won me over with its solid blue collar approach to the game of football. Not super flashy. Just tough hard-nosed play with fewer mistakes than the more mercurial Ducks.

Jonathan Smith is an impressive coach of the Beavers. I wondered what was up when Tristan Gebbia replaced Ben Gulbranson at quarterback early on in the game when the score was only 7-0. But an Oregonian story explained this move.

Gulbranson has become a culture setter in Corvallis, and I’m not sure what is more important to the Beavers program than culture.

Don’t forget that on Saturday, Smith pulled Gulbranson for the Beavers’ third and fourth series, with his team leading only 7-0, to give senior Tristan Gebbia a meaningful opportunity to play before his career ended.

Two years ago, Gebbia was the Beavers’ starter. He shredded his hamstring on the goal line against Oregon, then spent the next two years working back from injury. His teammates voted him captain three consecutive years, despite the injury.

“It was more than a tip-of-the-cap,” Smith said. “If he wasn’t close to Ben, we wouldn’t have put him out there. We’re trying to win the game.”

But that’s the kind of program Smith is running.

I don’t know how many other coaches are pulling their starting quarterback after he had just executed a 65-yard touchdown drive, as Gulbranson did in the first quarter, just to take a look at a backup who had barely played in 24 months.

“I look at his influence of being a captain on this team,” Smith said, “guys really rallying around him. The way he continued to support Ben.”

Smith rewards players who are about the right things. Who buy into the program and are selfless.

Really refreshing. Smith is a class act as a coach, as are his players. His team's 10-3 record this year is testament to his steady approach to building a quality program.

I recall that Gebbia entered the game on the last play, a quarterback knee-down as time expired. The post-game video showed Gebbia trying to hand the game ball to Gulbranson, who was named the Most Valuable Player of the game.

Gulbranson shook his head and left the ball with Gebbia. That image will stick in my mind. It personified the selflessness mentioned in the Oregonian story. In this age of big egos among many athletes. the Oregon State football team is a welcome exception thanks to the example of their coach.

Elon Musk's Twitter antics are hurting Tesla's image

Until Elon Musk bought Twitter and started acting like a right-wing maniac, I had a favorable opinion of Musk. Sure, he had some annoying quirks. That comes with being one of the richest people on the planet.

But overall I viewed Musk as an eccentric genius who was doing good things for the world. He made Tesla into a great company, jumpstarting the electric car revolution sorely needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

And his SpaceX company has made great strides in developing innovative advances in rockets, including booster stages that can land themselves and be reused. SpaceX also is responsible for getting my wife and I out of internet hell, a.k.a. dismally slow CenturyLink DSL, when we were able to become beta testers for Starlink satellite internet, which has worked great for us.

Now, though, I'm seeing Musk very differently. What really pushed me over the edge from like to dislike was this recent tweet of his about Dr. Fauci, who I respect greatly.

It's incredibly dumb for Musk to be so blatant about his extreme political views. I follow him on Twitter. These days Musk sounds more like a QAnon crazy person than a CEO. 

Look: I realize that corporate CEOs tend to be politically conservative. But usually CEOs don't throw those views in the face of current and prospective customers. I love my Subaru Crosstrek. I have no idea who the CEO of Subaru is, and obviously also am clueless about what this person's political persuasion is.

That's the smart thing for a CEO to do. You don't want to antagonize a big share of your customer base by trashing their politics. Yet this is what Elon Musk is glorying in doing, and it's hurting the image of Tesla among those who buy a big share of Tesla cars: Democrats.

It used to be cool to drive a Tesla. Now I see a Tesla and think, "There goes someone who helped Musk buy Twitter and say that Dr. Fauci should be prosecuted." I may end up owing a Tesla someday. However, there are ever-increasing choices in electric cars. I'd rather that my money not go to benefit Elon Musk, so I'll look more closely now at other brands.

(The situation is different with Starlink, since we have no other choice for high-speed internet out here in the "wilds" of rural south Salem, a mere six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital.)

I found quite a few stories about how Tesla's image is going downhill now that Musk is preoccupied with kissing up to right-wingers on Twitter. Here's some examples, along with excerpts from the stories.

Tesla's approval rating sinks into negative territory, survey finds
Tesla’s approval rating has fallen fast, according to one survey. Yes, like politicians, automobile makers have approval ratings.

...The electric-car maker started 2022 with a net-positive score of 5.9%, then peaked in May at 6.7%. In early November, it fell to a negative -1.4% reading.

YouGov found a political divide in the numbers. As the Wall Street Journal explains, “self-described liberals now view Tesla more negatively than conservatives, though conservatives also have a negative view of the brand on average.”

What changed to influence opinions so radically? Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously bought the social network Twitter at the end of October and has been a prominent figure in the news for reshaping its operations.

Elon Musk is about to learn that liberals -- not his new deplorable pals -- buy Teslas
I drive a Tesla. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sometimes it feels like a third of people around me drive Teslas. I see lots of Teslas in New York City, Austin, and Seattle. I don’t see many of them in Alabama, or the Florida Panhandle or mid-Pennsylvania or Idaho, or anywhere else that’s mostly conservative. 

Yet Elon Musk has decided to literally destroy his personal brand—and Tesla’s along with it—in his bizarro turn toward the QAnon dark side. As I’ve been saying for a while (on Twitter), this was never going to end well for Tesla.

...Looking at where electric vehicles are registered in Texas, just 10.12% are registered outside of the state’s four big liberal centers: Dallas-Fort Worth (35.75%), Houston (23.45%), Austin (21%), and San Antonio (9.68%). The vast Texas conservative hinterlands have little interest in Musk’s product. Woke California buys 42% of all electric vehicles—the vast majority in its urban liberal centers—while making up just 12% of the country’s population. 

Tesla is becoming a partisan brand, says survey
Tesla is becoming a partisan brand – losing the support of Democrats and gaining support from Republicans, according to a survey.

Leaders of large companies selling consumer products, like automakers and tech companies, generally refrain from showing direct support to any political party, especially in the US.

Due to the polarizing nature of politics in the US and its two-party system, it’s better to stay away from definitive statements of support one way or the other since you risk alienating large parts of the population.

That’s why it was so surprising to see Elon Musk tell his over 100 million followers on Twitter to vote Republican during the midterm elections last month and going as far as calling the Democratic Party the “party of hate.”

Regardless of your political affiliation, from a business standpoint as the leader of a company selling consumer products, it was a questionable move, and the impact is starting to be felt.

A survey from Morning Consult reported by the Wall Street Journal has been tracking changes in opinion about Tesla from people with different political affiliations. It shows that the number of Democrats with a positive view of Tesla has been tracking significantly down, while it’s up for self-described Republicans:

Tesla’s net favorability among self-described Democrats in the U.S. fell to an average of 10.4% this month through Nov. 27, down from an average of 24.8% in October, according to Morning Consult. It rose to 26.5% from 20% among self-described Republicans during the same period.

Jordan Marlatt, tech analyst at Morning Consult, went as far as saying that Tesla is becoming a partisan brand:

It seems like Tesla is on its way to becoming a partisan brand.

Salem City Club examines struggles of local journalism

Today's Salem City Club program featured two local journalists, Les Zaitz, editor of the Salem Reporter, and Dick Hughes, who used to be the editorial page editor for the Statesman Journal and now is a freelance journalist.

The title of the program was "The Truth -- An Endangered Species?" But since journalists deal in the truth, and local journalism is struggling, Zaitz and Hughes made clear that the question really is whether local newspapers and other news sources are endangered.

Hughes started off by sharing some disturbing statistics. (Hopefully I've got them mostly right, since I'm just a blogger with terrible handwriting who now has to try to read his scribbled notes.)

Fifty-six percent of people say they aren't willing to pay for online news. Since 2005 a quarter of the nation's newspapers have been lost. Oregon has lost a lot; I recall it was a third. The Statesman Journal recently laid off education reporter Natalie Pate, having cut newsroom staffing by two-thirds. The pages of the Statesman Journal are laid out in Phoenix, Arizona. The Statesman Journal is printed elsewhere, which helps explain why our daily newspaper contains news that is mostly a day late.

Zaitz began his remarks by saying, "We're all in trouble. Any questions?" Thankfully, he expanded on that conclusion. 

Zaitz noted that media are a check on government power. When government controls information, it controls the people. Sadly, though, only 34% of the public trusts the media, with 38% not trusting the media.

There's a political divide here. Seventy percent of Democrats have some trust, while five-sixths of Republicans don't trust the media. Gosh, I wonder how they came to that conclusion. Methinks it has a lot to do with the guy Biden defeated in 2020.

Another reason this number is so low, Zaitz theorized, is that cable networks have betrayed America. Their mission is to present our country as being in a constant state of crisis, as that keeps people returning for their latest dose of gotcha journalism, which is always looking for scandals and corruption.

Zaitz sees the New York Times and Washington Post as contributing in their own way to the downfall of journalism, since he considers that opinions enter into their news stories. I subscribe to both the Times and Post, and sort of see what he's getting at, but I find that the line between a reporter engaging in wise analysis (good) and biased opinionating (bad) to be blurry.

There are fewer journalists than ever in this country, Zaitz said. That means fewer editors also, and reporters need to work with editors for a quality product. This is one reason journalists are making more mistakes now. 

Since journalists believe in truth, accuracy, and fairness, mistakes bother them. Journalists should be transparent, admitting to mistakes when they occur. Zaitz urged people to let a reporter know if they got something wrong. 

In the question and answer period, Zaitz and Hughes agreed that it's a problem when Google, Facebook, and other internet news sources borrow stories from newspapers and other media without paying for them. 

Zaitz noted in response to a question about the Salem Reporter's effort to get documents from the City of Salem about a payment made under suspicious circumstances to a retiring police department employee that charging an exorbitant amount for public records is almost the same as denying the request.

I asked a question of Hughes about why the Statesman Journal did away with the opinion section completely, even though seemingly that section would largely write itself through letters to the editor and guest opinions.

Hughes said that the newspaper's reasoning could have been that people don't want to be told what to think, though this strikes me as an exceedingly lame excuse, given that no one is forced to read opinion pieces, just as my wife never reads the sports section.

I find the lack of an opinion section to be a huge loss for the Statesman Journal. I still pay $10 a month for an online subscription, since 33 cents a day seems about all the Statesman Journal is worth these days.

As Hughes said in response to another question about reading things you disagree with, sometimes you agree with what you read on an editorial page and sometimes what you read makes your blood boil. Which is as it should be.

But not in Salem, since neither the Statesman Journal nor the Salem Reporter has an opinion section. That's one reason why I have an online subscription to the Oregonian.

A core message of Zaitz and Hughes is that when it comes to news, basically you get what you pay for. Journalists can't work for free. I'm pleased to pay for a subscription to the Salem Reporter because it does a good job with local news. I'm less pleased to pay for an online subscription to the Statesman Journal, because it falters with local news.

So whenever possible, pay for the news you're getting. If everyone comes to think that they should be able to get news for free from the internet, that really will be the death knell for local journalism.

Saffron Supply Company lives on in new location

A few days ago the Salem Reporter had a story about demolition beginning on the building that used to house the Saffron Supply Company and Union Gospel Mission. 

That saddened me. At the time I'd forgotten that Saffron Supply wasn't going out of business, but had moved to 1450 Front Street NE. Indeed, the Saffron Supply web site now shows their new location. 

That makes me happy. 

I first started going to Saffron Supply after my wife and I moved in 1990 to a house in rural south Salem. It needed a lot of work, including drainage from the gutter down spouts. 

That required multiple trips to Saffron Supply, where the helpful staff pointed me to the flexible plastic pipe, both perforated and non-perforated, plus connectors, that I needed to accomplish my rainwater flow improvement job.

This photo I found on the Saffron Supply Facebook page of their old location captures the wonderful spirit of this pleasantly old-fashioned hardware store. 

In 2004, soon after I started this blog, I wrote about a plumbing-related visit to Saffron Supply in "I'm the king of the world!" I called it that because my handyman skills are limited, so when I'm able to accomplish a repair, I get excited!

This is how the post started out. 

King of the world, that’s who I am all right, in my own mind at least (where it counts). For I have replaced a rusted-out leaking drain on our laundry room sink, notwithstanding my normally plumbing-challenged handyman skills. There was something tremendously fulfilling about successfully dismantling the decrepit parts and installing the fresh new parts, adding the dollop of plumber’s putty, tightening the, um, whatever-you-call-its that needed to be tightened, turning on the water, and hearing the water run down the drain with nary a drip.

The list of those I’d like to thank for enabling me to achieve this marvelous accomplishment is short: the great guys at Saffron Supply in downtown Salem, that’s the beginning and end of it. This is the sort of place that can’t be allowed to disappear in the shadow of all the Lowes, Home Depots, and the like. I shamefully admit that I have a fondness for the bright lights, neatly stocked shelves, and cheerful employees at the Lowe’s store here in Salem.

But when you don’t know much about plumbing, and are carrying a plastic bag filled with a bunch of dirty, broken plumbing parts that no longer are plumbing for you, a place like Saffron Supply is where you want to be. It looks like it hasn’t changed much in decades. Wooden bins are filled with mysterious plumbing and electrical parts. When you pay, a pad is pulled out and you get a handwritten paper receipt. No women were in evidence, either staff or customers. I was careful not to wear a batik shirt last Wednesday, knowing that I would be entering the plain denim world of Saffron Supply.

Like a real man, I forthrightly admitted my ignorance right off the bat. I held up my bag of parts and said, “Whatever all this stuff is, it isn’t working any more.” I then made a concise plea for help, making sure that I threw in the phrase “plumbing-challenged” several times. The Saffron guy then took over. He walked over to one of the wooden bins, pulled out a shiny new thing-a-ma-bob and said, “This is what you used to have.” Wow! So that’s what it used to look like thirty-three years ago when our house was built! He then grabbed various other connectors, seals, and what not, and put together a perfect replica of the drain that used to drain before it stopped draining.

So thank you, Saffron Supply, for staying in business. The helpful expertise of your staff is what Salem needed in the past, needs now, and will need in the future. Your history is impressive. Wow, since 1910, 112 years. Here's a screenshot from the Saffron Supply web site. 

I love Twitter. Elon Musk, not so much.

When people ask if I'm going to cancel my Twitter account now that Elon Musk is in charge of the company, I say, Absolutely not. Then I explain why.

I love Twitter. It's one of the first things I check on my iPhone when I wake up in the morning. It's one of the last things I check before I go to bed. 

But I rarely use Twitter directly. I use a third-party app (Tweetbot) that collects tweets from the individuals and organizations that I follow, then presents them in a clean easy-to-use format.

I never see tweets from anyone I don't follow. I never see ads.

All I see is topical, interesting, provocative content from a wide range of knowledgeable commentators, mostly liberal in their politics. I also get tweets from organizations, including the Portland office of the National Weather Service, TripCheck (problems on Oregon highways), and the Kyiv Independent for up-to-date news about the Ukraine War.

Twitter is a marvelous way to keep informed on just about any subject that you're interested in. When economic news breaks, like a fresh inflation report, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman shares tweets in my feed about how he sees that news.

I could give many more examples of why I adore Twitter. Now, I realize that people who use Twitter itself, not a third-party application, probably encounter more annoyances, such as ads.

But for me Twitter is very similar to Facebook. Apart from ads on Facebook, I don't see content from anybody that I don't choose to follow. So the argument that I should give up on Twitter because some Twitter users engage in hate speech or misinformation makes no sense to me.

The same thing happens on Facebook. Or any other social media platform. Since I don't follow people on Twitter who engage in hate speech or misinformation, I never encounter tweets with those qualities.

Well, with a few exceptions. When Donald Trump was on Twitter, I followed him off-and-on just to keep up on the crap he was tweeting about. It's easy to unfollow people and organizations, so when Trump got too annoying, I'd ditch him. Then I'd follow him again when I felt like it.

Since I'm a happy Space X Starlink satellite internet customer (was fortunate to be a beta tester of the service, which works great for us), I've followed Elon Musk on Twitter for quite a while. He's always been quirky, along with brilliant.

After buying Twitter, Musk has become irritating in many of his tweets, but I still follow him for the entertainment value. 

There's been a lot of discussion among the people and organizations I follow about whether they should stick with Twitter or migrate to a different platform. Most are staying put, for pretty much the same reasons I am. 

I have to admit, though, that Elon Musk runs the risk of ruining Twitter.

His politics seems to have tilted decidedly rightward. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. However, if Musk persists in allowing Twitter to be a haven for bigots, racists, and militant extremists, I worry that Twitter could enter a death spiral as advertisers jump ship and Musk's investment stops being financially viable.

What's perplexing is how someone as obviously intelligent as Elon Musk can be so ignorant about basic facts. Like the nature of the First Amendment and freedom of speech. 

Recently Musk got pissed off at Apple for suspending the company's advertising on Twitter. He viewed that action as anti-free speech, whereas actually it was very much in line with free speech. As an excellent story by David French in The Atlantic says, the First Amendment only speaks about government, not private actors.

Here's an excerpt from Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson don't understand the First Amendment. If you aren't familiar with the reference to "Twitter files," this relates to today's release of internal Twitter communications regarding a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop.

The First Amendment regulates government conduct. It does not regulate private actors. The text of the amendment itself says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” That restraint on Congress has since been extended to apply to the U.S. government at all levels—local, state, and federal.

Activists have tried to argue that large social-media companies essentially function as the government, citing a line of cases that treat private parties as government actors when the private parties perform functions that are “traditionally and exclusively governmental.” Examples include running elections, private prisons, and so-called company towns.

But, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently explained, “hosting speech on a private platform … is hardly ‘an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed.’” Social-media companies are not the government.

This means the First Amendment protects Twitter, the Biden campaign team, and the Democratic National Committee. The “TWITTER FILES” released so far do not describe a violation of the First Amendment. Instead, they detail the exercise of First Amendment rights by independent, private actors.

One can certainly agree or disagree with the way in which they exercised those rights. Twitter’s decision to delete pornographic pictures of Hunter Biden was entirely justified and appropriate. Its actions to suppress the New York Post story about Hunter’s laptop were far less defensible. But they were Twitter’s decisions to make, and no amount of misguided rhetoric can transform a Twitter story into a government scandal.

Oregon's football loss to Oregon State hurt a lot

In sports, as in other aspects of life, there are losses that sting more than others. When a team you want to have win loses, the pain of that loss depends on various factors.

For me, it has much to do with the familiar adage, "They left everything on the field." Meaning, the team did all that it could to win. Maximum effort. Minimum mistakes. Playing hard. Playing smart.

If both teams leave everything on the field, I view that as a great game, one that neither side deserved to lose, but one team had to (unless the game is soccer, which sometimes ends in a tie).

But yesterday the University of Oregon football team lost to Oregon State in a fashion that left a lingering bad taste in my fan-mouth. They did leave something on the field: energy, wise decisions, good coaching, a will to win.

ESPN describes the ugly (if you're an Oregon fan) conclusion of the game.

CORVALLIS, Ore. -- — Isaiah Newell ran for the go-ahead touchdown with 8:11 remaining, and No. 22 Oregon State took advantage of critical mistakes in the fourth quarter by No. 10 Oregon to rally for a 38-34 victory Saturday.

The Beavers (9-3, 6-3 Pac-12, No 21 CFP) trailed 31-10 late in the third quarter and 34-17 early in the fourth, but the Ducks (9-3, 7-2, No. 9 CFP) gave their rivals a short field on three consecutive possessions. Oregon State converted all three drives into touchdowns without attempting a single pass.

"I felt like we won the Super Bowl," Oregon State receiver Tyjon Lindsey said.

Oregon missed out on a spot in the Pac-12 championship game when No. 12 Washington beat Washington State later Saturday. No. 14 Utah won a tiebreaker and will face No. 5 Southern California on Friday for the league title.

I started watching the game in a balanced frame of mind. I'm a fan of both the Oregon Ducks and the Oregon State Beavers. At first I had the attitude that I'd be equally happy no matter which team won. 

But as the game went on, I realized that emotionally I was more attached to an Oregon win. After all, that way Oregon would play in the Pac-12 championship game against USC. Oregon State narrowly lost to USC in the regular season. I wanted to see how Oregon would fare against the Trojans.

And even if Oregon lost to USC in the championship game, there was a good chance USC would be in the national playoff top four teams. This meant Oregon could play in the Rose Bowl on January 2, which would be way cool.

So I found myself hoping that Oregon would manage to eke out a win against Oregon State even as the Beavers were mounting a furious comeback that I found inspiring.

The blame for the loss falls on a lot of Oregon shoulders. However, sports writer John Canzano singled out Coach Lanning for some special blame, and athletic director Rob Mullens for some extra-special blame.

Oregon did a lot wrong on the way to losing this game. The Ducks had a punt blocked, they botched a second punt attempt, and Lanning decided in the fourth quarter that going for it on fourth down and 1 from his own 29-yard-line was a good idea.

It was a lousy idea.

Especially when you consider Lanning made a similar error from his side of the field, just two weeks earlier in losing to Washington. This time, he wasn’t doing it against a porous defense. He was trying it against the Pac-12’s best run defense, while holding a three-point lead, and with his quarterback hobbling.

Bo Nix was tossed for a one-yard loss.

The play foreshadowed another bad loss — the game itself.

...I’m still trying to wrap my head around what we saw at Reser Stadium. Oregon State deserves big-time credit. I wrote about the Beavers unthinkable path to victory in my post-game column.

Smith’s team demonstrated exceptional resilience. It overcame terrible officiating and three turnovers. It endured a horrendous start to the second half and walked off winners. But the focus now is on the hand-wringing currently going on at Oregon.

The Beavers overcame that massive second-half deficit against the youngest coaching staff in major college football. They did so with only 60 passing yards. Blame Dan Lanning for some of it? Sure. He was reckless. But the big-dollar donors at Oregon did not. Instead, they turned their post-game ire toward the athletic director who hired him — Rob Mullens.

It wasn’t just a lost football game on Saturday. The Ducks let a potential Rose Bowl slip through their fingers. They saw millions in revenue evaporate. They lost recruiting advantages, took a brand hit, and were embarrassed on television.

The donors don’t really blame Lanning. They expected growing pains. It’s not his fault he was put in charge. One of them compared the Oregon football operation to a $200,000 Bentley, handed to an inexperienced driver. Do you blame the young driver for dinging up the car? Or the person who gave him the keys?

“It was fraught with risk,” said one booster.

The donors are instead focused on Mullens, the AD, for hiring a coaching staff that looked in over its head on Saturday. They blame him.

Said a second long-time UO donor: “I’m not even mad about the game. I’m mad that it was predictable and the person in charge allowed it to be.”

Well, both Oregon and Oregon State have one more bowl game to play. One projection has Oregon in the December 28 Holiday Bowl against North Carolina, and Oregon State in the December 30 Sun Bowl against Louisville. 

Not bad. But for Oregon, way worse than what would have been if they'd left everything on the field yesterday.

My liberal defense of Yellowstone, the Paramount show

When it comes to my TV watching, I care a lot more about entertainment than political correctness.

This explains why liberal me, who was unalterably opposed to the Bush administration's use of torture during the so-called War on Terror, could cheer on Jack Bauer in the 24 series when he'd use the cord of a table lamp to shock a suspected terrorist into divulging details of a dirty bomb threat.

It also explains why I'm a huge fan of Yellowstone, the Paramount series now in Season 5, even though a TIME magazine story asked a pertinent question in its title: "Is Yellowstone a Red-State Show? According to Fans, the Answer Is Complicated."
Download Is Yellowstone a Red-State Show? It's Complicated | Time

Well, not to me, for the same reason 24 wasn't a right-wing torture-loving show.

Yellowstone is a gripping tale of a ruthless ranching family who use means both fair and foul to protect their property from developers who want to make Montana into a playground for wealthy people with few ties to the state.

It's a lot like Succession. But Succession is about well-off urban people engaging in devious behavior and family disputes, while Yellowstone is about well-off rural people engaging in devious behavior and family disputes.

That one word difference, urban vs. rural, seems to be a factor in the reaction to the two shows by media elites. The TIME story says:

Since 2018, Yellowstone has become one of the most-watched scripted dramas on cable, often out-drawing shows on major networks. January’s fourth-season finale had over 9 million viewers the night it aired (excluding those who streamed it later), nearly double the number that watched the Season 3 finale.

By comparison, the Emmy-winning, critically acclaimed HBO drama Succession,which tells a similar story about a wealthy family fighting to hold on to its place in the modern world, drew 1.7 million on all platforms (including some 600,000 watching on cable) for its third-season finale a few weeks earlier.

But who is watching Yellowstone? That’s a question that tends to perplex people who write about TV for a living.

When the show’s fifth season debuts on Nov. 13, it will likely dominate the ratings yet again, all while drawing little attention from major media outlets or the people who hand out awards (it has been nominated for one Emmy.) Rotten Tomatoes links to 10 critic reviews for its fourth season, versus 141 for Succession’s third.

Recently I saw a post in my Facebook feed from someone who said that they'd watched the first episode or two of Yellowstone Season 1, but didn't like how violent it was and what a jerk Rip, the ranch foreman, is.

I left a comment on the person's post saying that I've watched every episode of the first four seasons and love Yellowstone, noting that I hope they'll give it more of a try, because the characters are complex. How they appear in the initial episodes isn't how they look as we learn more about them.

This excerpt from the TIME story resonates with me.

While it’s true that a lot of big hit shows have only a minimal presence in the larger popular culture—no one’s handing out Emmys or writing weekly think-pieces about NCIS: Hawaii, after all—it sure feels like Yellowstone should be discussed more.

Its star, Kevin Costner, is an Oscar winner. Co-creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan wrote the critically acclaimed movies Sicario and Hell or High Water. His stories tackle corporate greed, class conflict, racial identity—all topics that usually get cultural commentators excited.

Republicans who support candidates vowing to protect faith, family, and the Second Amendment could certianly be drawn to Costner’s John Dutton, a rugged Montana ranching magnate who pines for the good old days and uses brute force against his political enemies. But the show does not seem to be trying to actively court that crowd.

Yellowstone’s premise is in line with classic nighttime soaps like Dallas, in which nearly every character has a little bit of angel and a little bit of devil in them, and where the stories sometimes dispense with logic to get to the next cliffhanger.

The issues Yellowstone raises about land stewardship and big business are relevant, but the plots are more about romance, violence and feuds—all played out against a gorgeous Montana backdrop.

One reason I find Yellowstone so refreshingly different is its seemingly mostly accurate portrait of life on a giant ranch. My wife largely likes Yellowstone for the horses. There's an amazing scene of the cowboys rounding up hundreds of horses, galloping full speed with the herd down a steep slope.

Directing Yellowstone requires a different set of skills than directing Succession, for sure. Ditto for the actors. The men and women who display some astounding riding skill, not to mention the skill of the horses they ride, aren't going to be found in a typical Hollywood casting call.

I also admire how multi-talented the ranch hands are. They can hunt, fish, train horses, mend fences, drive huge horse trailers, rope, fight, cheat, lie, play poker, murder, and a heck of a lot more besides. Those men, along with a few tough women, are the sort you'd want to have on your side.

Sure, they do a lot of nasty stuff. But that's a positive feature of Yellowstone, not a reason to dislike it. I enjoy shows where every character is a mixture of good and bad, light and dark, morality and immorality. 

Because that's human nature. It's just a matter of degree. We're all the conniving yet admirable characters of Yellowstone, even if we aren't starring in our own TV series.

Yesterday Oregon's Bo Nix inspired everyone hobbled by a problem

My wife doesn't like watching sports. I've tried to explain to her that what makes a game especially interesting to me isn't what's happening on the field, but what's going on in the lives of certain key players.

So a football game, say, isn't just a bunch of guys running around bashing each other. It can also be a drama of sorts if you follow the teams closely enough to understand the main characters.

Yesterday's game between Oregon and Utah was a great example of this. Sure, I was pleased that Oregon pulled out a 20-17 victory. But it was how the win came about that made it so compelling and satisfying for me.

The hero of the drama was Oregon quarterback Bo Nix. He'd gotten injured the week before in a disappointing loss to Washington. Details of the injury were lacking. Something to do with his leg or foot.

It was unclear whether Nix would be able to play in the Utah game -- an important game, since the winner would have a clear path toward playing in the Pac 12 championship, which likely would mean a Rose Bowl berth.

As soon as I stared watching the game it was clear that while Nix was the starting Oregon quarterback, he wasn't his usual self. Unable to run at all well, Nix was limited to either handing the ball off or standing almost stationary as he looked for a receiver on a pass play.

The announcers said that Nix looked like he was at about 50%. He couldn't plant himself on his injured right foot, which made it tough to pass with his usual accuracy. Still, Nix led the Ducks on several scoring drives and they ended the first half leading 17-3.

I recall the announcers saying that if Oregon ended up winning the game, Nix's gritty performance while injured would go down as one of the best of any quarterback this season, maybe even deserving Heisman Trophy consideration. 

Watching Nix hobble around on a cold night in Eugene, keeping Oregon ahead as Utah staged a strong second half comeback, I found myself rooting for him to tough out a win in part because he was showing how someone can have an injury, or health problem (physical or mental), and perform their duties well in the face of that adversity.

Sports writer John Canzano said it well in a post-game column emailed to his readers, of whom I'm one. Some excerpts:

I don’t know if you saw Bo Nix play football on Saturday night. The University of Oregon quarterback wasn’t his typical, mobile self. He rushed for -3 yards, in fact.

On one play, UO offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham sent Nix in motion out of the backfield.

I watched.

The Autzen Stadium crowd watched.

Nix was a decoy. The plan was to snap the ball to a running back. But as the quarterback with an injured foot trotted in motion toward the sideline, Utah’s defenders didn’t move. They turned their heads and watched like the rest of us.

Nix looked like guy making his way across an icy crosswalk on a cold winter night. I half expected a Boy Scout might run on the field and help him across the formation.

It was Oregon 20, Utah 17 on Saturday night. Nix was gutsy, playing with one bad wheel. He threw for 287 yards, a touchdown and one interception.

...We’ve seen a lot of great things from quarterbacks over the years at the University of Oregon.

Justin Herbert, throwing missiles.

Marcus Mariota, slipping linebackers.

What we hadn’t ever seen was Ducks’ quarterback pretty much stand stationary for four quarters, throwing darts around the field. Then, late in the fourth quarter, needing to ice the game, Nix faked a hand off, ran, and dove two yards for a first down.

Said Lanning: “We asked Bo right before that play if we could run the play knowing that the two options were to hand it off or for him to keep it and he said ‘absolutely.’ That guy’s got heart.”

...We’re all in a struggle against our limitations. That’s life, isn’t it? The Ducks were resilient on Saturday. We watched Oregon stumble around the field, exploring the edges of those limits. Nix’s performance wasn’t smooth and easy. It was gritty and authentic. It was essentially a wince. I suppose that’s why I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Beautifully said. Being 74, with several annoying health problems that limit me somewhat, I resonate with what Canzano said: We’re all in a struggle against our limitations. That’s life, isn’t it?

For sure.

After being able to easily run around a track, sometimes we reach a point where diving two yards is all we can do. But then we can get up, maybe with the help of a friend, and dive two more yards. Metaphorically speaking, I mean.

Thus when we see someone like Nix do so well in his own struggle, that encourages the rest of us. Yesterday I felt like I wasn't watching just a football game. I was watching life play out on a football field.

If you can't read this blog post, it's Typepad's fault

I was one of the first people to start blogging with Typepad, way back in 2003 or 2004. Definitely 2004, but I sort of remember using a different blogging service in 2003, and that I copied those first posts into my HinesSight blog on Typepad when I switched to it.

Now I'm super-frustrated with Typepad for the first time in those 19 or 18 years. Until now Typepad has been quite reliable. There have been brief outages when it was offline, none lasting more than half a day or so to my best recollection.

However, at the moment Typepad has been offline for all practical purposes for three freaking days. With no end in sight. By "all practical purposes," I mean that I just timed how long it took this HinesSight blog to load incompletely. (The title and right sidebar aren't showing up at all.)

Answer: 3 minutes and 45 seconds. If this wasn't my blog, I would have given up after just 30 seconds or less, since I would have figured that the blog had been deleted or wasn't available. No wonder that my page views have taken a big tumble.

This debacle started with an innocent sounding October 19 message on Everything Typepad, the blog Typepad uses to communicate with its customers.

On October 22nd, Typepad is going to be migrating data to a new data center. At the time of migration, we will have approximately a four-hour maintenance window starting at 12:30AM United States Eastern Time. During this time, your blogs and photo albums will not be available online, but you will still be able to access your Typepad account.

Typepad support will be available during the maintenance period to answer any questions, and we will be posting updates to Twitter - https://twitter.com/typepad - and on Everything Typepad - https://everything.typepad.com.

Note that Typepad staff don't update their customers via email, just via Twitter and Everything Typepad. Downside of that is most people don't use Twitter (I do), and the Everything Typepad blog is only accessible if Typepad is functioning, which it hasn't been all the time lately.

On October 22 an optimistic Everything Typepad blog post appeared.

Typepad's planned migration has successfully been completed. We appreciate everyone's patience during the maintenance window. If you feel you may be encountering an issue related to the migration, please reach out to us by opening a ticket within your Typepad account at Help > New Ticket.

For problems accessing your Typepad account, you can email [email protected] or use the form here.

Again, note that the support email address, [email protected], obviously only works if Typepad.com is operating. Which, soon it wouldn't. Because...

On October 28 this Everything Typepad blog post appeared.

Typepad will be conducting further maintenance this coming weekend to address lingering issues as part of the continued migration to the new data center. During a window from 9:30 pm U.S. Eastern Time on Saturday, October 29 (01:30 UTC on Sunday, October 30) to 9:30 am U.S. Eastern Time on Sunday, October 30 (13:30 UTC on Sunday, October 30), there may be periods where Typepad blogs are down. The Typepad Support team will be monitoring throughout the maintenance period and will post updates on Twitter at https://twitter.com/typepad and here on Everything Typepad.

OK, that didn't sound too horrible: a 12 hour window from 9 pm on Saturday, October 29 to 9 am on Sunday, October 30 when there could be periods that Typepad blogs were down.

Problem is, that 12 hour window has become a 72 hour window, with no end in sight, since it's now 9 pm on Tuesday (PDT) and I'm gambling that I'll be able to publish this blog post, and that other people will be able to read it.

Typepad hasn't updated their Everything Typepad blog since October 28, so I have no idea what, exactly, went wrong with the migration to the new data center. All I know is that based on many Twitter comments, lots of bloggers in addition to me are deeply irritated on how this mess has been handled.

Late on Sunday, Typepad tweeted that the migration had failed and it was being undone.

So that's the sad tale as it stands now. Typepad's Twitter person is doing the best they can, but it seems like they're handicapped by not getting reliable information from the technical engineering staff, or they're not allowed to communicate what is really going on, or nobody on Typepad has a clue about where to go from here.

Either way, it's a tough situation all around. 

On my end, this episode has shown me that while at times I toy with the idea of giving up writing a post for one of my three blogs every day, now that I haven't been able to do that, I realize how much I miss it. That's why I'm taking a gamble on writing and publishing this post, even though I'm unsure how many people will be able to read it, given Typepad's problems.

Maybe you're wondering why I don't move to another blogging service. Here's the reason. 

In my 19 years of blogging I've written 7,403 blog posts that have gotten 82,093 comments. Yeah, I'm addicted to blogging. When I started, I never thought about using my own domain name/URL. So all of those posts are attached to a Typepad domain name/URL.

Even if I could copy all those posts and comments into a new blogging platform, Google would have the posts under the Typepad URL. So I'd lose 19 years of Google indexing, which I find extremely valuable, since Googling my own blogs usually is the only way I can find what I've written on some subject. 

So I'm tied to Typepad, even as it frustrates me big-time with the botched migration to a new data center. I just hope things get back to normal with Typepad soon.

The good news is, I feel better tonight having written this post. Which is why I love to blog: it's therapy for me, getting what's inside of me outside, where I can deal with it better.

Why this blog didn't show up for 36 hours

From about 9 pm my time last Saturday night to around 9 am today (Monday) Typepad, my blogging service, was offline due to scheduled maintenance that had problems. Typepad has undone the changes, but some images and the name of this blog still aren't showing up. Hopefully things will be completely back to normal soon.

How a single stink bug cost us $430 today

Bloggers like me have to choose our subjects to write about with care.

Until noon today, I was pondering between a $300 million Salem bond measure, advice on who to vote for in the midterms, and the increased risk of nuclear war due to Putin's Ukraine threats.

But after Tim Paquin of Precision Garage Door Service diagnosed what had caused our garage door opener to stop working, I realized that this was my chance to contribute to the accumulated store of knowledge regarding garage door opener repairs.

In short, consider that a stink bug is the culprit. Here's what Paquin found after taking a look inside the opener in a quest to learn why it had no electrical power.

That stink bug must have really had a grudge against my wife and me, because the repair guy said that the bug managed to fry itself on the part of the circuit board that controls the power supply. 

At first I thought this was funny.

When I learned how much this damn stink bug was going to cost me, the hilarity of the moment was considerably reduced: $75 service call + $304 Linear circuit board + $99 operator service and programming - $48 senior discount = $430.

Sadly, there was no discount for a stink bug committing suicide on the very worst part of the circuit board to die on (from my perspective; maybe the stink bug had a glorious final exit).

Stink bugs have been an annoying part of our life here in rural south Salem, Oregon for quite a few years. It seems like forever, but a Wikipedia article says that they reached Oregon only in 2009. Mostly they cluster on our windows on warm days in late summer or early fall.

Some get inside. We've found that the BugZooka bug catcher, a wonderful invention that lets us suck stink bugs up with ease (unlike flies, they are easy to sneak up on) is the best way to deal with them. A BugZooka is kept handy in a corner of our house.

Stink bugs are adept at getting inside a house or garage. My wife had gotten rid of lots of them in our garage, but obviously we missed the one that cost us $430.

I guess I could ask our State Farm agent if they offer insurance for stink bugs that cause fatal damage to a circuit board, but I suspect their underwriting department doesn't have enough data to calculate the minute odds of this happening. 

Unfortunately, it happened to us.

Deep thoughts about OSU's last minute win over Stanford

My wife, Laurel, like lots of non-sports fans, can't understand the appeal of watching football games.

Or any games, for that matter, aside from the Puppy Bowl that's held every Super Bowl day for those who are more interested in watching young dogs run around on a playing field than grown men.

What I try to convey to Laurel, with decidedly mixed success, is that sports becomes as fascinating as a engrossing novel, movie, or TV show if you follow a team closely enough to know what a game means, and who the main characters in the drama are.

Drama is precisely the right word to describe yesterday's Oregon State University vs. Stanford football game held in Palo Alto. OSU was favored, but looked out of sorts for most of the game, while Stanford was playing great.

When the score was 24-10 at the beginning of the fourth quarter, I figured that the only reason I should keep watching was to see how bad the final score would be. However, OSU made a good comeback, trailing only 27-22 with 58 seconds left. 

So now I thought that I'd watch OSU come up just short, which would have felt worse to me than losing badly. I was tempted to stop watching the game and turn to the evening Portland news, but decided to stick it out until the very end.

Good decision. Because this happened. (The highlights video starts with the crucial pass play.)

An Oregonian story describes the amazing catch by Tre’Shaun Harrison. 

With the Beavers down by five points with just seconds remaining, quarterback Ben Gulbranson fired a pass toward the right sideline, looking for receiver Tre’Shaun Harrison.

As Harrison tried to haul in the pass, he snared it off of Cardinal defender Ethan Bonner’s helmet. Bonner and Stanford safety Patrick Fields, who was also covering on the play, seemed momentarily stunned that Harrison had made the catch, and by the time they started after him, Harrison was racing to the end zone for a 56-yard touchdown.

Here's a blurry screenshot from the video of the catch. Harrison is way up there in the air, grabbing the football off of the helmet of #13 Stanford defender Bonner.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post that mentioned sports writer John Canzano saying that Oregon State snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in their disappointing game against USC. 

And yesterday OSU snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Same team. Way different outcome. In each case, all because of a single play. 

I felt amazingly good as soon as Harrison ran untouched into the end zone. Moments like this one are what make sports a great reflection of life, which obviously isn't all that surprising, since sports are part of life.

A back-up quarterback, Ben Gulbranson, was playing for OSU. The ESPN announcers said when he took over with 58 seconds to go that this was Gulbranson's chance to go down in Oregon State history as staging one of the great all-time comebacks for the football team.

When I heard that, I thought, yeah, right, not much chance of that happening. 

Yet it did. Which goes to show that just when things are darkest, it's possible that light will dawn. But the flip side is that just when things are brightest, it's possible that darkness will fall. In other words, we just can't tell what the future will bring. 

For most of the game, ESPN showed shots of really happy Stanford fans. After Harrison's touchdown, their demeanor changed markedly.

I felt sorry for them. A little bit. Mostly I felt joy that the team I wanted to have win, did, in such an astounding fashion with 13 seconds left to go in the game.

But there's always another game. Next time us OSU fans could be the ones with sad faces. That's the attraction of watching sports for me. You just never know. Just like life.

Silvertongue Apple-peal is a delicious Silverton satire

If you're looking for humor in all the wrong places -- I sure am -- rejoice!

For the 2022 edition of the highly entertaining Silvertongue Apple-peal has hit the streets of Silverton with a satirical nuclear bomb (tactical warfare variety, to avoid complete devastation of the populace due to excessive funny bone tickling).

Fortunately for those of us who aren't anywhere near a Silverton street, the Apple-peal is available for download on the newsletter's web site. Or by clicking on this ever-so-handy PDF file.
Download Apple-peal 2022

To whet your appetite for the Apple-peal, here's a screenshot of the front page headline story.

Gus Frederick is the creative genius behind this satire, though I didn't see him on the staff directory.

Legally, the Apple-peal may be covered by this disclaimer. With an emphasis on may. 

This being an election year, there's some hard-hitting campaign ads in the Apple-Peal.

Since Nike co-founder Phil Knight recently gave $2 million to Betsy Johnson in support of her hopefully ill-fated quest to be Governor of Oregon (Tina Kotek is the person to vote for), I hesitate to say about downloading and reading the 2022 Apple-peal, just do it.

But since I just did it, do it.

I just chose Pfeifer Roofing and Leaf Blaster for gutter protection

Like me, probably you've seen ads for gutter protection systems. There are quite a few of them: Leaf Filter, Gutter Shutter, Leaf Guard -- to name a few. 

I've looked into some of them over the years.

Since we moved into our non-easy care house in rural south Salem that's surrounded by large oak and fir trees, for about thirty years I've been cleaning our gutters via a leaf blower.

Even though parts of our house are two level and so quite a ways off the ground, I've been comfortable with using a backpack Stihl blower, walking judiciously along the edges of our roof. My wife isn't so comfortable with me doing this, especially now I'm a youthful 73.

When I've considered a gutter protection system, two things have stopped me from even getting an estimate.

First, they all seem to have drawbacks. The cheapest and easiest to install systems have the most problems. Second, every gutter protection system that runs an ad in our local newspaper has a bunch of horrible reviews from unsatisfied customers.

Sometimes people don't like how the system worked. Often, though, it was sleazy sales tactics that ticked people off. 

Today an employee of Pfeifer Roofing, Sam Randolph, came to our house to give us an estimate for some fairly minor roof repairs. Pfeifer installed a new roof for us quite a few years ago. We were pleased with the work they did then, and since we've had Pfeifer find and fix some leaks.

After I answered the door, I asked Sam if Pfeifer recommended any gutter protection systems, and if they installed them. I went through my problems with the systems that advertise, saying that I trust Pfeifer more than any of them.

Sam told me that they install a micro-mesh system, the Leaf Blaster Pro.

He had a sample with him, which looked great. Stainless steel. Very fine mesh. A ridge on the outside to direct heavy rain into the gutter.

He noted that the system requires new gutters. But since our gutters are fairly old, that seemed fine. And Sam said they'd use our current downspouts, which have a debris diverter installed on them. So I asked for an estimate, which Sam sent to me within a couple of hours.

The cost for new gutters with the Leaf Blaster Pro system on our 3,200 square foot house and detached garage/carport is estimated to be $4,920. Seems reasonable to me, though I have no idea what other gutter protection systems would cost.

I just really like the idea of having new gutters and Leaf Blaster Pro installed by Pfeifer, a company my wife and I trust. I'll have more to say about the system once it's installed and we've gotten some decent rain. 

If you're thinking about a gutter protection system as the leaves begin to fall, check out a local roofing company like Pfeifer before committing to one of the other systems. 

"Pushing the pile" rule doomed Oregon State against USC

While yesterday's Oregon vs. Washington State football game had an emotional arc for Ducks fans like me that went pre-game optimism - most of second half despair -- last few minutes elation (amazing comeback by Oregon), the Oregon State vs. USC game was pretty much the opposite.

John Canzano, the Oregonian sports columnist who now opines in a freelance manner, shared an email with his followers titled "Oregon State snatches defeat from the jaws of victory." Canzano singled out four interceptions thrown by OSU quarterback Chance Nolan as a key reason for this.

But what grabbed my attention as the almost-end-of-game reason for Oregon State's defeat was USC getting a fourth down conversion when six yards were needed on a quarterback run after Caleb Williams was pressured on a passing play and had to scramble for a first down.

Two screenshots of game highlights on a You Tube video tell the pushing the pile tale.

Oregon State leads USC by four with 2:45 left to go in the game. If they stop USC on 4th & 6 there's an excellent chance Oregon State wins the game, garnering national attention by beating the #7 team in the country and setting themselves up as a top competitor in the PAC 12.

At this point in the play two Oregon State defensive players have the USC ball carrier wrapped up short of the first down line shown in yellow. It looks like they're about to bring him down. But...

A few seconds later, a mass of USC players have pushed the ball carrier forward across the first down line. Now two USC players are (correctly) signaling first down. Not long after, a long pass play gives USC a touchdown, putting them ahead 17-14, which was the final score after another interception of a Nolan pass snuffed out Oregon State's last gasp attempt at a field goal or touchdown.

Talking with a friend today about this pushing the pile play that saved USC from a likely defeat, I noted that while I hadn't thought about the fairness of this practice before, my irritation at Oregon State's loss made me wonder how it is that a ball carrier being tackled by defenders can gain additional yards not by their own effort, but by being propelled forward by teammates.

Just seems more like rugby than American football.

Some Googling this evening revealed that according to Wikipedia's "Helping the runner" article: 

The official NCAA rule book in 1950 stated, "The runner shall not grasp, or be pulled by, any teammate, nor shall any teammate push the runner or lift him from the ground while the ball is in play. Penalty for 'helping the runner' is 15 yards from the spot of the foul."

...The penalty in college and high school was later reduced to 10 yards, and finally 5 yards. The NFL and CFL continued with the foul as 10 yards. In 2005, the National Football League made the penalty only for pulling and carrying, removing the flag in cases of pushing. The NCAA followed in 2013. Pushing still remains illegal in high school games.

So if the Oregon State - USC game had been played in 2012, USC would have been penalized for pushing the pile. Small comfort for us Oregon State fans, since this is 2022, not 2012. 

It still seems like allowing pile pushing could lead to some bizarre consequences. My Googling revealed how one person thought back in 2015 that pushing the pile could be used in a strange way.

Until Saturday, I hadn't realized they changed the rule so that it is now okay to push a ball carrier forward. This seems like something that a big team could use often, and maybe even build an offense around.

Most running schemes try to find a gap and run through it. Usually, the running back gets tackled, not stood up. When they do get stood up, they sometimes push forward with success. KSU did this to us several times.

But what if your goal was to get stood up every play, then push forward in a coordinated effort, kind of like a tug of war? You'd line up with five beefy OLs and two TEs, all shoulder to shoulder, with a RB under center surrounded on 3 sides by O Linemen. Snap to the running back, and have everyone muscle forward slowly, in a tight bunch. The RB has 7 linemen in front of him and 3 behind him, all pushing forward. Like in a tug of war, the surges could be timed, with the guy in the back yelling "push... push... push... push".

On some plays you could push straight forward, on others at an angle to the left or right. You could even push one way for a predetermined number of times, then switch to another direction. The defense would be resisting at the wrong angle, which would be a huge edge to the offense.

When I first thought of this, I thought it was stupid. But the more I think about it, the more I think it could actually work -- assuming you are bigger and stronger than they are.

Can you tell I don't like this rule change?

I'm not an economist, but isn't unemployment worse than inflation?

Usually my response to bad economic news is to ignore it as much as possible. After all, what goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up.

So freaking out over short-term worries about inflation, unemployment, the stock market, gas prices, or whatever generally isn't justified. Typically, when things look to be the darkest, the economic sun is about to turn brighter.

Thus even though I find it difficult to look at my iPhone's stock market app first thing in the morning, because I don't want to get depressed before I've had breakfast (might as well wait for lunch to feel bad), until recently I was feeling pretty much OK about where the American economy was heading.

But now I'm wondering if Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, and his organization know what they're doing.

Economics isn't exactly a science like physics. In my perhaps overly cynical opinion, it strikes me as being akin to psychology -- a discipline that aspires to hard science precision, yet falls way short when it comes to being able to accurately model and predict reality.

Currently Powell says the Federal Reserve is deeply committed to fighting inflation. OK, inflation is a big problem, for sure. 

However, the rapid rise in interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve is threatening to produce a recession and high unemployment. Today Politico ran a story, "Dow hits 2022 low as markets sell off on recession fears." Excerpts:

Stocks tumbled worldwide Friday on mounting signs the global economy is weakening just as central banks raise the pressure even more with additional interest rate hikes.

...Energy prices closed sharply lower as traders worried about a possible recession. Treasury yields, which affect rates on mortgages and other kinds of loans, held at multiyear highs.

...The Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world aggressively hiked interest rates this week in hopes of undercutting high inflation, with more big increases promised for the future. But such moves also put the brakes on their economies, threatening recessions as growth slows worldwide.

Besides Friday’s discouraging data on European business activity, a separate report suggested U.S. activity is also still shrinking, though not quite as badly as in earlier months.

So even though the United States and world economies are looking more feeble,  the Federal Reserve and other central banks are planning to raise interest rates even higher because inflation is viewed as a more serious problem than a recession.

I guess that makes sense if you're a professional economist who isn't worried about losing their job, or a Wall Street type who makes money no matter what happens on Main Street. 

But since a recession will cause millions of Americans to be unemployed, it seems clear that if those future unemployed people were asked whether they'd prefer to have a job or to pay higher prices, they'd say that having a decent regular income is more important than having to spend a bit more of that income due to inflation.

Plus, higher interest rates hurt those with credit card balances, people needing a mortgage to buy a house, construction companies hit by lower demand for homes due to more expensive mortgages, and applicants for other sorts of loans.

Maybe the Federal Reserve will be able to pull off the "soft landing" that's a sweet spot where rising interest rates lower inflation to a tolerable level while the economy avoids a recession.

I'm just getting a sinking feeling that the Federal Reserve interest rate hikes are going to make us wish for more inflation and less unemployment before too long as the United States heads into a recession (which some argue is already here, at least in a mild form).

Elemental is a film with wildfire lessons for Oregon

It was purely coincidence, but there was still something wonderfully strange to have Ralph Bloemers, the Executive Producer of Elemental, a gripping documentary about wildfires, talking last Friday night in our living room with my wife and I about the film while we and other neighbors were worried about the Vitae Springs wildfire in south Salem that started that day and had led to a Level 2 (Get Set) evacuation order that extended almost to our neighborhood adjacent to the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge.

Bloemers parked his camper van at our house Friday night since he had to be both at a Friday 7 pm premiere showing of the film at Salem Cinema and a Saturday 10 am showing for survivors of the Santiam Canyon fires. Ralph was a lead attorney for our neighborhood's lengthy fight against a Measure 37 subdivision some years back that Laurel and I led, which is how we came to know him so well.

 

Bloemers talked with us before he headed off to sleep in the van. So while worried about a nearby wildfire, we heard a lot about wildfires. Mostly reassuring messages, since I told Ralph that while we'd done quite a bit of clearing of brush and trees around our house that sits on ten mostly natural acres, we didn't want to cut down some beautiful large firs and white oaks fairly close to the house.

 

Echoing one of the messages of Elemental, Bloemers told us that creating defensible space around a structure is less important than hardening it against wildfire. Key to that hardening is not having bark or other flammable material within six feet of the structure, having fireproof vent screens in place if a house has a crawl space, and either not having gutters or keeping the gutters clear of debris.

 

The movie shows that even a very hot wildfire won't ignite a structure if the fire is over 50 feet away, I recall it was. So it's helpful to have cleared space around a structure. However, often, or usually, embers are the bigger danger to a house. And embers can fly long distances in a wildfire, especially in a strong wind. Thus there's no way a wildfire can be controlled by bare earth, since embers can travel a mile or so, igniting other fires when they land, which then create more embers.

 

This means that wind is worse than trees burning. Yet historically forest management has been viewed as the best way to combat wildfires -- thinning trees, clearcutting, and such. Elemental features persuasive interviews with wildfire experts who say that based on solid research, taking trees out of a forest doesn't work well to reduce wildfire risk.

 

In fact, the film shows a researcher talking about an Oregon fire that spread over land that included both clearcuts and old growth forest. The clearcut land fared worst in the fire, because replanting of trees created a monoculture where all the trees were about the same size, making it easy for the fire to spread through crowns close to each other, whereas the old growth forest, being much more diverse, resisted fire to a greater degree. 

 

I've watched a lot of documentaries. Elemental is one of the best I've seen. The original photography is beautiful, and archival footage of the recent Paradise, California fire and other wildfires is expertly blended in. The film starts off by startling the viewer with scenes of the horrendous damage wildfires can do to homes/towns, and concludes by demolishing many of the myths about how wildfires should be controlled.

 

Putting them out sometimes isn't the wisest course of action. Native Americans knew that fire rejuvenates the land. Elemental shows current tribe members reverently setting fire to some of their land, making fire a sacred sacrament of sorts rather than an evil to be fought with brute force.

 

I'm sure that not everybody who sees the film will come away convinced that the policies advocated in Elemental should be followed. However, I'm confident that every viewer will find much in the film to think about, since it takes a much-needed scientific approach to dealing with wildfires. The film is shaping up to be a big success. You can see it at Salem Cinema until September 15.

 

Here's part of an email Ralph Bloemers sent me about the film in his Executive Producer role. (Copying and pasting led to some weirdness in the font sizes.)

 

Over the past five years, National Geographic and PBS Filmmakers Trip Jennings, Sara Quinn and I traveled throughout the West and across the country to visit with the top experts, indigenous fire practitioners and communities impacted by fire. We spent time capturing rebirth in the burn using time lapse and wildlife camera traps, and went into active fires with firefighters and first responders.

 

The result is a new film entitled Elemental - which seeks to present the thinking of top scientists in a visually compelling and engaging way that is directly relevant to most people’s lived experience - and offers solutions to keep our homes and communities safe.

 

Elemental has been entered into dozens of festivals and been selected for fifteen so far - including the Valley Film Festival in LA (August 6), Sonoma (September 21st), the Mill Valley Film Festival in Northern CA (early October), Sedona (Arizona), Doc Society, Greenpoint, Newburyport, Wildlife Conservation and more. 

 

For our Portland Premiere, Senator Jeff Golden, Rep Dacia Grayber and Rep Khanh Pham co hosted the event. Willamette Week named the film it’s Top Pick, it was featured in the Oregonian and on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud.  

 

We are premiering it across Oregon and other Western states in the coming months, and doing private screenings as well.  The response has been overwhelming. 

Taylor Tomlinson's stand-up comedy heals my frazzled psyche

My big problem with life is... (drumroll please)... LIFE. 

Meaning, insofar as I know what I mean, but now that I just wrote this blog's topic sentence, I'm stuck with explaining it, no matter how many problems get fixed in my life, new ones pop up like a perpetual motion machine designed by a sadist.

I suspect most people feel this way. So what are we to do? 

Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll only can take us so far, especially if we're (OK, me) so old, sex is starting to  look like the car that zipped by in the other lane and now is so small in the rearview mirror it's barely discernible; drugs are limited to marijuana because dealers of harder stuff are find to find when you're 73; and the last rock band truly worth listening to in your entirely personal opinion was Cream over fifty years ago.

Meditation? Yeah, I've been there and done that for a really long time.

The fact that I'm still as messed up in 2022 as I was in 1969 when I started to meditate every day tells me that based on that extensive flat trend line, the chance of me taking a sudden quantum leap to a blissful state of enlightenment is vanishingly small.

So I'm becoming increasingly convinced that television is the solution to my problems.

After all, when I'm engrossed in a good show, I forget about what was bothering me before I turned the TV on. Sure, those bothers are still going to be there when I turn the TV off, but at least I've had a break from worrying about my medical ailments, my psychological defects, global warming, why our dog won't come when I call her, Trump becoming president again, and a host of other anxieties.

In the realm of television, I'm enamored with certain types of stand-up comedy. The qualities I enjoy are honesty, observational humor as opposed to jokes, self-awareness, and, naturally, a comic's ability to laugh at themselves.

When I find a stand-up comic like that, my problems feel less important not so much because I've hidden them under a Bed of Distraction, but because the comic has laid out their own problems on the bedspread for me and anybody else watching for them to see -- which makes my own vicissitudes seem less serious, since if the comic can laugh at their problems, I can do the same with mine.

Or at least try to do the same with mine. Not surprisingly, I tend to find other people's problems more humorous than my own, though I'm working on looking on my own life as if it was material for a Netflix special.

Like "Look at You" featuring the hugely talented comic Taylor Tomlinson. I learned about her from a newspaper story about leading comedians with televised shows. The description of Tomlinson's act appealed to me the most, so my wife and I watched "Look at You" last week.

We loved it. 

Tomlinson starts off by talking about her mental problems and psychotherapy experiences. I figured that would be worth about five minutes, then she'd be on to other subjects. But no, Tomlinson stuck with that highly personal theme for, I don't know, around 20 minutes of the one hour stand-up show, maybe even longer.

For someone so young, about 25, she's remarkably self-aware. And more importantly, really funny. Tomlinson has an appealing manner about her that makes her easy to watch.

Here's some You Tube videos with material from "Look at You."

Russ & Delana Beaton's 61st anniversary celebration

Tonight Russ and Delana Beaton celebrated 61 years of marriage at the Willamette Heritage Center's Dye House. Their children, Lynn, Alan, and Brenda, organized the event in a masterful fashion.

Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent. 

After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about Russ and Delana. When a microphone was put in my hand, I said something like this:

Russ and Delana strike me as the nicest people I've ever known. I'm sitting at a table with three retired Willamette University professors. [Russ, and I think Delana also, taught there for many years.] Because I'm political and like to dig for truths under the surface, I asked them if in their experience, the Beatons really are as nice as they seem to be. Each of them said, Yes, they are. The only negative thing I heard from their Willamette colleagues was, Sometimes they can be too nice. Which doesn't seem like a flaw to me. Not at all. I only wish that one day someone would say about me, "He was too nice." For sure, this will never happen.

There were lots of stories and anecdotes about the accomplishments of Russ and Delana. They've changed so many lives for the better. To give a couple of examples -- and there are many more -- Russ was instrumental in getting Oregon's highly successful land use system off the ground, and Delana has been a tireless advocate for homeless people in Salem.

Here's some photos of their wedding 61 years ago that I captured via my iPhone. 

 

It was a beautiful celebration for a beautiful couple. In a world with so much negativity, it felt healing to be in at atmosphere of well-deserved unalloyed positivity toward the Beatons and how they’ve helped others over so many years.

Near the end, Russ said "usually such praise is only heard at your funeral." Originally scheduled for last year, but Covid led to a postponement. Russ did mention that they were married in 1961, so he saw a certain symmetry in celebrating their 61st anniversary now.

My unusual joy in reading a big thick novel, The Magus

A few days ago I felt the satisfaction of climbing a large mountain. Exhausted. Exhilarated. Satisfied. Except my mountain was a big thick book, The Magus by John Fowles.

It isn't that I'm unacquainted with big thick books. They're just usually non-fiction. It'd been a long time since I'd tackled a literary novel like this one.

I'm not sure how The Magus ended up on a shelf where my unread books resided. I recall hearing that it was a classic thriller of sorts. This is the Amazon description.

Widely considered John Fowles's masterpiece, The Magus is "a dynamo of suspense and horror...a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul....Read it in one sitting if possible-but read it" (New York Times).
A young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. There, his friendship with a reclusive millionaire evolves into a mysterious -- and deadly -- game of violence, seduction, and betrayal. As he is drawn deeper into the trickster's psychological traps, Nicholas finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish past from present, fantasy from reality. He becomes a desperate man fighting for his sanity and his very survival. John Fowles expertly unfolds a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature.

Quite a few months ago I elevated The Magus to a row of books that I read every morning before I meditate. I'd only read a few pages a day from it, doing the exact opposite of what the New York Times recommended above: Read it in one sitting if possible.

Wow. I'm a fast reader. But it's hard to imagine reading the 656 pages of The Magus in one sitting, nor does this seem desirable. 

I savored the book. From the first pages, I highlighted passages that stuck me as particularly well-written or profound. These were the passages marked in yellow on the initial two pages.

I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.

I had long before made the discovery that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed. My father was through being the right age at the right time rather than through any great professional talent, a brigadier; and my mother was the very model of a would-be major-general's wife. That is, she never argued with him and always behaved as if he were listening in the next room, even when he was thousands of miles away.

Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility.

During my last years at school I realized that what was really wrong with my parents was that they had nothing but a blanket contempt for the sort of life I wanted to lead.

There were things, a certain emotional gentleness in my mother, an occasional euphoric jolliness in my father, I could have borne more of; but always I liked in them the things they didn't want to be liked for.

I went to Oxford in 1948. In my second year at Magdalen, soon after a long vacation during which I hardly saw my parents, my father had to fly out to India. He took my mother with him. Their plane crashed, a high-octane pyre, in a thunderstorm some forty miles east of Karachi. After the first shock I felt an almost immediate sense of relief, of freedom. My only other close relation, my mother's brother, farmed in Rhodesia, so I now had no family to trammel what I regarded as my real self. I may have been weak in filial charity, but I was strong on the discipline in vogue. 

Over and over as I read The Magus, almost on every page, I'd picture John Fowles tossing off sentences with seeming ease that I couldn't write in a thousand years of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

Maybe it wasn't that easy for Fowles. But I suspect it was. That led me to feel a curious combination of literary joy and envy as I made my way slowly through the book. I was hooked on the story, a marvelously creative plot with fascinating characters. 

And I badly wanted to be able to write even a semblance of the evocative passages that my highlighter displayed in yellow. Eventually, though, I realized that what Fowles possessed as a novelist, and I didn't, and never would, wasn't so much an exceptional ability to write, but an exceptional ability to understand people and human relationships.

Here's some excerpts from an early chapter that shows what I mean.

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car -- not so common among undergraduates in those days -- and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

I found my sexual success and the apparently ephemeral nature of love equally pleasing. It was like being good at golf, but despising the game.

At times I'd say to myself, "Man, The Magus would make a really great Netflix streaming series." I'd say this because Fowles was so adept at creating characters in his novel who were complex, flawed, and hugely interesting -- just what I look for in my TV watching.

I would like them not because they were likable. Few, if any were. But Fowles allowed me to get to know them as deeply as I've ever known another person, as strange as that may sound. Meaning, a skilled novelist is able to reveal what is in a character's mind more clearly than real people are able to do, or at least choose to do.

It was quite an adventure, reading The Magus over many months. I'd forgotten what a pleasure a marvelously written literary novel can be. Thanks for reminding me, John Fowles.

Remember Ukraine. American support can't waver.

It's been about six months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In those dark early days of the war, it seemed highly unlikely that Ukraine would still be an independent nation half a year later.

Yet here we are, with the brave Ukrainians basically fighting Russia to a standstill. So let's remember Ukraine -- today, tomorrow, every day. 

If Ukraine continues to get strong support from the United States and our allies, there's a very good chance that before too long Putin and his Kremlin cronies will realize that the price of waging their unprovoked war against Ukraine isn't worth the loss of life, sanctions, international condemnation, harm to the Russian economy, and other problems Russia is facing.

The Ukrainian people won't give up their fight. The only way they lose this war is if key supporters, notably the United States, tire of supplying aid to Ukraine and punishing Russia. So preserving American public opinion in favor of Ukraine is crucial.

One way I remember Ukraine is by following The Kyiv Independent on Twitter. For more in-depth coverage of how the war is going, there's The Kyiv Independent web site. How this publication came to be makes for some interesting and inspiring reading in the About section.

The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s English-language media outlet, created by journalists who were fired from the Kyiv Post for defending editorial independence.

The Kyiv Post, Ukraine’s global voice, went silent on Nov. 8, 2021, days after celebrating the 26th year of its uninterrupted run.

The publication was shut down by the owner in his attempt to take full control of the newsroom that has always followed the principle of editorial independence. 

Yet, the editorial team of the independent Kyiv Post refused to be silenced. If we couldn’t save the Kyiv Post brand, we could save its values.

On Nov. 11, 2021, over 30 ex-Kyiv Post employees decided to continue the Kyiv Post’s legacy by launching a new publication – the Kyiv Independent.

The following values will serve as the backbone of the Kyiv Independent: 

• • The new publication will serve its readers and community, and nobody else.
  • The Kyiv Independent won’t be dependent on a rich owner or an oligarch. The publication will depend on fundraising from readers and donors and later on, commercial activities.
  • The newsroom will decide and execute the publication’s editorial policy in the community’s best interests. Attempts to influence it from outside will not be tolerated.
  • The Kyiv Independent will always be at least partly owned by its journalists.
  • The Kyiv Independent will strive to reach financial sustainability to preserve its independence in the future.

The team unanimously chose Olga Rudenko, former deputy chief editor at the Kyiv Post, who dedicated 10 years to the brand, to lead the new publication as editor-in-chief.

The Kyiv Independent is still in the making. The website you see is our first, temporary platform. 

As we embark on this new project, we vow to serve as the true, independent voice of Ukraine. 

The Kyiv Independent provides fair and reliable news on a variety of topics. From Russia’s war against Ukraine and disinformation campaigns to the ongoing pandemic and medical procurement, from human rights in occupied Donbas and Crimea to reforms in Kyiv, nothing will escape the view of the Kyiv Independent.

But we can only do it together with you. Join us today and become a part of Ukraine’s fight for a better future with the Kyiv Independent.