No, Thursday's Out....

My new electric toothbrush wanted me to install an app on my phone so that so I could select my brushing experience. I refused to give it my name, address, astrological sign, or telephone number, just as if it were a guy pestering me in a bar (an experience I have actually never had). I did have a guy persist once, but it turned out he knew me, and in fact was a nice academic librarian I had met when I made a trip to visit his university, so guess who was embarrassed that time. Yeah. Anyway, I gave the new electric toothbrush the cold shoulder, and now it is judging me harshly, making frowny faces at me. (Okay, if I brush for a while I get a smiley face, and if I brush for ages I get a smiley face with stars for eyes, but still.) The invitation to select my brushing experience reminds me of my only stay in a W Hotel, in New Orleans*, where the front desk person answered my perplexed calls with a breathy, seductive, “W…. How may we enhance your experience?” The W was high on design. My ...

I spend part of every day deleting and unsubscribing, and am always behind in my reading, but even so, I’ll humbly recommend the free weekly newsletter, Reasons to Be Cheerful , a compendium of positive news stories. You may not like being cheerful, or worry that if others become cheerful, they won’t keep fighting the Good Fight. Or you may not care that the New York Public Library is giving away half a million books in its latest literacy campaign, nor that traditional cheesemaking is having a resurgence in Bosnia, benefitting both the economy and the environment. That’s fine. But if you are so moved, do give it a try. You can always unsubscribe. My own local reason to be cheerful today is that InitiativePetition 17 got enough signatures to make the November ballot.    IP 17 “would require a permit and safety training to buy a gun in Oregon [and] would also ban high-capacity magazines, which hold more bullets than a regular firearm. ” Actually, the petition got more t...

Yesterday, I walked over to Reed for an open rehearsal (free!) of Chamber Music Northwest. They were working on George Crumb’s American Songbook, part 2, which features a singer, a pianist, and 120 percussion instruments (yes, I know, the piano is also a percussion instrument). The 120 items are played by three people, each in the center of what amounts to a Percussion Fort. In the Q&A afterward, a musician showed us two rocks that he uses in one section. He found them in a stream in New Jersey.   I admired his rock playing, but I coveted this one item that looked like a whisk, and that made otherworldly whirring noises when he whipped it around.   (Now I’m hearing all the W’s in the end of that sentence.) The music was terrific, and, as one of the musicians promised, moving. (I worry that I am not smart enough to “get” a lot of modern music, but this wasn’t like that.) In each segment, the singer performed a spiritual – Swing Low, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, I Wen...

Many years ago, when I was a young middle-management type, we got a new CEO. I didn’t spend much time in the CEO’s orbit, but I hated his bullying style, and I was particularly alarmed in one meeting when he excitedly referred to a badly-written bid from a big customer as our “license to steal.”   I took my alarm to our Finance guy, a retired-military straight arrow. He wasn’t remotely a pal, but he was one of those reliably honest and trustworthy people. He gave me a few minutes’ hearing. It turned out Col. Finance was also bothered by the new CEO, for additional reasons.   I was about to do some work at our parent company in the UK, and Col. Finance suggested I ask to have lunch with a particular parent-company Bigwig, and tell him our concerns. Col. Finance believed Bigwig would listen to me, and perhaps speak to the owners, if he (Bigwig) thought that was wise. The telephone had already been invented at this time. I don’t know why Col. Finance didn’t call Bigwig...

When I was a teenager, back before Roe was decided in 1973, my mom - a physician who could be wise and patient and perceptive and liberal, except when she wasn’t - was adamantly anti-abortion.  Asked to explain her reasoning, she would shout, “YOU were an ACCIDENT! And so was your BROTHER!”  And that was it. Case closed, as far as Mom was concerned. She apparently believed the case would close for me, too, if I just grasped the precarity of my own existence. In any case, she had only one argument, but she thought it was a winner.* And I was a highly inconvenient baby. I’m in her arms, three weeks old, in the photo of her graduating class of interns. (This was when the dean of one med school said they had two women in every class, because “one would be lonely.” The joke was that they thought there were two women in her class, but it turned out there were three! Haha!) Many years later, long after I’d grown up and moved away, I discovered that Mom had become pro-chioce. ...

It’s Juneteenth, Father’s Day, and Portland Pride today, plus there was a Thorns game at the stadium, so everything was hopping, for a Sunday. I was headed to church, but wasn’t singing in summer choir, so I’d slept in, and was cutting it close. I’d been stumped getting dressed, as I was looking for Pride regalia, but then I remembered that my kid told me the mushroom hoodie (which she calls my Fun Guy top) was sufficiently multi-colored to be a Pride outfit. (This was wise of her, because my alternative was stealing something of hers.) And then I got to my car. The door was open, and the car had been well rifled. The contents of the glove box, and a pile of back seat errata, were all on the driver’s seat. Okay! No visible damage, suggesting that they didn’t have to break in. I must have left it unlocked. I shoveled everything over to the passenger side, promising myself I’d clean it up later, and took off. And the Hawthorne Bridge went up, just as I reached mid-span. Okay! ...

My favorite news story of the week is about how two guys, Dave and Doug, made hundreds of crop circles in the UK, back in the 1980’s and 90’s, which some folks took to be evidence that aliens were about to land. It all happened about 40 years ago, and the reveal isn’t news – they came clean way back in 1991. The trouble is, true believers in the aliens-make-crop-circles theory just don’t believe that Dave and Doug made them - despite their having the drawings, and describing in detail how they did it. Eventually, a number of copycat pranksters made circles, and also came clean, at which point some true believers went for a variant explanation: yes, humans do make crop circles, but there is a supernatural force directing their efforts! There’s a movie coming out about all this, which is why it’s in the news. The  article quotes one Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology prof from the University of Bristol, who says, “conspiratorial cognition and conspiracy theories are self-sealing.’ ...