My fascination with boxing began as a boy. Never the fighting type, I liked the drama. But as youth passed I no longer cared.
Many years later, I missed the rise of the cable-TV phenomenon Ultimate Fighting. Then in 2003, a Willamette Week ad touted a night of brawling. I attended to fulfill a graduate school story assignment: find an event and describe what I observed.
Waiting for the fights to begin, I saw people fawning over a guy leaning against a wall. I quickly learned Randy Couture was a world champion in this brutal sport and briefly interviewed him. He had the saddest ears I’ve ever seen. Read More
I’m waiting for numbers. As in how my Portland precinct voted in the presidential election. Only county-by-county totals are available, though I know Barack Obama’s tally will be staggering. During the campaign, I saw only one John McCain sign in the neighborhood, and it was homemade. Obama signs, including this one in my yard, spread like dandelions. And nobody is taking them down. Read More
Not posting to my blog for two days feels a bit like neglecting my toddler. Say, not giving him breakfast or lunch. Resuming with a chorus-of-snores subject — health insurance — is almost as neglectful.
But health insurance came to mind today when I read that President-elect Barack Obama is resigning his U.S. Senate seat, effective Sunday. Does it mean he has to pay the full cost of his premiums, including the share his employer paid? That’s what my wife and I have had to do under the so-called COBRA bridge plan. Read More
Parents like to display schoolwork the kids bring home. At our house we put it in on the dining table and eat it.
To be precise, Daniel isn’t our kid. He’s my nephew and twenty-three. But he’s living with my wife and me for now. With increasing frequency he’s bringing home what he prepares at school — delicious food cooked at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
He lugs the food in plastic bags tucked in his pack. Slung over the pack in a case are his wicked-looking chef knives. All this arrives home after train and bike rides. Read More
Every spring I start filling up the front porch with potted plants. The porch extends the width of our 1920s Craftsman house, so there are long wide ledges begging for greenery. The back deck next to the small goldfish pond gets a few plants too.
I gravitate toward the tropical and cold-sensitive, mostly begonias because of their exotic-colored leaves and elephant ear varieties that remind me of a youth spent in Florida lakes and swamps.
If I left them outside much longer, the first freeze would write their obituary. So a sad annual ritual took up an hour this afternoon: the move inside. Read More
I was a human dynamo today. Literally. Working out on a specially outfitted exercise bike, I generated electricity while burning calories.
Sweat dripped from my nose at the Green Microgym whenever I glanced down at the flashing numbers showing how many watts I was producing. It’s too soon to call me Megawatt Man, but I helped power other cardio equipment, slightly reducing my carbon footprint. Read More
Selective memory erasure, coming to a doctor’s office near you!
Such a treatment option appears inevitable based on accelerating medical research into how to manipulate what we remember.
Imagine the possibilities: even in my fifties, as age slowly blunts the pain of life’s low-lights, I could enjoy not remembering anything about events I choose. Who wouldn’t take advantage of this breakthrough? Read More
In our yard, autumn turns elegant Japanese laceleaf maples into flashy look-at-me strippers. For several days each year, the tree hovering over the pond dons the color of the goldfish swimming beneath its branches. An exception is their recent offspring, little gray clouds that won’t brighten until spring.
Cold has already induced torpor among the big fish, which have lost their dart-hither-and-there charm. In fact, they barely eat compared to the thrice-daily frenzied feedings just two months ago. Read More
Post-election observations keep washing over me, none more powerful than this: democracy worked when I had lost faith in it.
The doubt was well-founded, I continue to believe, but today I’ve never felt better about the country. I’ll feel even better when the sins of the last eight years are reversed and daunting problems confronted. Honest and tough leadership combined with pragmatic solutions will carry us a long way. And President-elect Obama’s victory speech was a paragon of sober leadership.
Before Obama won, I was so caught up in the race that I failed to anticipate how his victory would affect people. The scenes on television stunned me in the best possible way. A phone call from my youngest brother and his wife moved me even more. My brother, not the most emotive guy and never one to get caught up in politics, had tears streaming down his face, his wife said. Read More
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsV2O4fCgjk[/youtube]
Slipping from top of mind amid economic and election anxiety is the tragedy we call Iraq. But a soldier, a tiny plastic one in an unlikely place, reminded me today why Barack Obama appears on the verge of winning won the presidency.
Only Obama among Democratic contenders voted against the war. Without that opposition, he would have never won his party’s nomination. It was among the reasons I first felt the tug of his candidacy — long before he was an official candidate.
The unassuming soldier, a reminder of what we as a nation have wrought, brought the war back to me. How did it come to rest on a cafe’s outdoor table? Not just on a table but within the blood-red walls of a venue symbolic of smoke, fire, and death? Read More
I made my last donation to Barack Obama last night. Not that he needs the cash at this stage of his campaign, a fund-raising juggernaut that politicians and political scientists will study for years to come. My wife and I have made modest donations six or seven times. With victory appearing all but certain, this was the first motivated purely out of selfishness.
Donating by midnight put me in a drawing. The prize: an expense-paid trip for two to be among ten people backstage with the next president of the United States at his campaign headquarters in Chicago on Election Night.
Imagining that possibility, seeing Suzame and me with Obama and his family, was too much to resist. It also seemed like a good luck omen, as was the purchase of an Obama painting Friday. (The painting, displayed in our home office window, is getting many smiles and words of praise from passersby.) Such omens, though irrational, ease the intensifying tension as we reach the campaign’s end. Read More
Sometimes I look at things too simply. Take, for example, U.S.-style elections. Because we live in a democracy, the people decide who gets elected to make the big decisions that affect our lives. Therefore conducting free and fair elections should be the most efficient and effective thing we do as a nation.
Oh silly me. In truth, no other western democratic nation makes it so difficult for people to both register and vote. Waiting ten hours in line then getting turned away is hardly democratic. Same for having too few voting machines at too few precincts. And then there’s the issue of voting machine reliability and registration problems. Read More
