Two article from CNN about dieting and portion size. Mostly they are a puff piece, but the third link to the portion size quiz was surprising. It's crazy how many calories are stuffing down their faces nowadays.
The Belle and Sebastian concert Thursday was freaking awesome. It was at the Roseland Theater in Portland, which is a pretty small place. It is set up with an upstairs area with seating and a downstairs main floor. The downstairs is all ages and the upstairs is 21+. So we headed upstairs after we got inside and found that it was pretty empty. In fact, we were able to get front row seats very very close to the stage. Really, I think they were the best seats in the house.
The show was awesome. They played lots of great older stuff and a few songs from their new album. Surprisingly and thankfully the concert was almost completely different from the DC show I linked to last week. They spent lots of time talking to the audience, and were constantly switching out instruments. I counted 9 guitars, plus a xylophone, trumpet, multiple keyboards (including one that you had to blow into to make sound), a DJ, etc. They played every song I wanted to hear, including Lazy Line Painter Jane during the encore. It seemed like they really enjoyed playing what the people were requesting, and even brought up a girl to sing the LLPJ song because Stuart Murdoch said he couldn't remember the words. And that girl could really sing and had great stage presence.
So the concert was great on Thursday and the Friday we packed up and headed to the coast. Our hotel was a little different than what we expected from the pictures online, but overall it was exactly what we were looking for. About a block from the beach with an ocean view, a kitchen, giant fireplace and separate bedroom, it had all that we needed and more. Friday we arrived around 4pm with plenty of daylight to walk along the beach and skip some rocks into the water, then cooked ourselves dinner at the cabin. I built a raging fire with the wood a coworker was nice enough to give us and we made s'mores and hung out together. It was a lot of fun and very relaxing.
Saturday we got up early enough to go on an awesome hike up to Falcon Cape. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and cool, and the trail was not very muddy at all. At one point we had to walk along a fallen tree that cut the trail and I took a picture of Jen standing next to a fallen tree that was wider than she is tall. The end of the hike brought us to a cliff overlooking the beach and rocky shoreline 200 feet over the ocean. It was really cool up there watching the surfers and listening to the waves, so we decided to eat our picnic lunch we brought with us. We hiked back the same way we came, overall about 4 hours of hiking was plenty to get my knees and legs feeling well exercised.
That night we ate out at a restaurant in Cannon Beach. It was a little European-style restaurant that is attached to one of the hotels we were considering. The food was phenomenal, and we learned they have a sister restaurant in Portland's Pearl district so we are definitely going to check that place out. They had this amazing french-fry (pomme frites) basket as an appetizer that I'm still dreaming about. They fried up hole garlic cloves with the potatoes and seasoned with rosemary and other spices. They were so freaking good! For entrees Jen had the polenta with eggplant and I had a stuffed porkchop. We were both really happy but decided to skip dessert so we could go back to the cabin and make more s'mores. We do love the s'mores, and calculated that they really aren't that bad for you, only about 110 calories each. After the hike we had definitely earned them.
Sunday we packed up and headed the city of Seaside. Can you imagine where it is? If you guessed on the coast, you are correct. Our cabin had super fresh salt water taffy in a little bowl and I cleaned those off, but I needed more. We heard the good taffy was in Seaside so we went to their boardwalk to just walk around and scope out the taffy situation. Well, it turns out there are at least 4 taffy places on the 1/4 mile boardwalk, so we went with the one that claims they are the only candy shoppe that makes their taffy in the store. I am happy.
Well that's about it. Sunday we were home with plenty of time to get the house cleaned up and relax a little more before work started on Monday. We both had a great, relaxing getaway that we both really needed. We were both incredulous that the weather stayed sunny and warm all weekend, only to start raining again as we drove back to Portland. You never know if (when) it's going to rain during the Oregon Spring season, but we hit unbelievably great weather and enjoyed every minute of it.
"There is no fundamental right to distribute, cultivate or possess marijuana," Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Quinlivan, the government's lead medical marijuana attorney, wrote to the appeals court.
Good point, Mr. Quinlivan. But surely you'd concede that there is also no fundamental right to confiscate or destroy marijuana, or to imprison those who possess marijuana. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
What the anti-marijuana moralists refuse to accept is that there is zero moral component to medical marijuana -- or marijuana, period. Just as with alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, misuse and abuse and general stupidity can turn a beneficial or morally neutral instrument into a bad thing. With marijuana, though, the "bad" end doesn't kill anybody, not even the abuser, unless you combine it with a car.
There is no legitimate foundation for this government's war on marijuana (like some other wars I could mention). It's based exclusively on imaginary benefits, which make horrible, overreaching laws.
(...)
It's instructive to imagine the prohibitionists' benefit proposition. It's not easy, because the rationale is essentially "because we've done it that way for sixty years." But here goes: by lumping marijuana in with the world's most harmful substances under the law, we can keep a certain number of people from trying it. By keeping those people from trying marijuana, we keep them from possibly enjoying it, which could lead to someone driving a car while impaired, which could lead to someone being hurt or killed. Not a bad argument, really, since nobody wants to see impaired folks driving.
But replace "marijuana" in that argument with any of the following: alcohol, Ambien, energy drinks, religious ecstasy, driving-while-getting-a-blowjob. Precisely the same risks; unconscionably different prohibitions and penalties. You could sure smash up a herd of schoolchildren if you tried to operate a moving vehicle while a good friend bobbed in your lap, but lap-bobbing on its own isn't a crime. In most states, anyway. Driving while impaired, including being impaired by lust, is already and justifiably illegal, not to mention breathtakingly stupid. Where is the societal benefit in jailing, robbing, and, for our medicine-using friends, torturing and killing people who aren't driving while impaired? It doesn't exist.
(...)
Folks, the threat of a pothead nation simply doesn't exist. It is a pipe dream. There is no consequence of responsible marijuana use that justifies any of this malicious, violent, immoral prohibition. We need leaders who will assert that the government can't take away selected freedoms simply because they're fun or interesting or they keep Hostess's Twinkie division in business.
Thursday, March 23, 2006 :::
This weekend should be very nice for Jen and I. Tonight is the Belle and Sebastian concert in Portland. Should be a lot of fun. If you want to hear what you're missing, NPR posted a recording of B&S concert at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC. It sounded like a pretty good show. I'm really looking forward to tonight. (alternate link)
Friday Jen and I are taking the day off work and going to the Oregon coast for the weekend. We'll be staying at a nice little hotel just south of Cannon Beach, at Arch Cape. Basically this weekend is a de-stress and getaway weekend so we can relax and recouperate from our hectic lives. Jen is under a lot of pressure at work lately and she really needs a de-stressing weekend. We're planning on doing some hiking and chilling out by the fireplace.
Otherwise not much else going on. Shout at yalls laters next week.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 :::
God Damnit!!!! I hate this administration so much it makes my blood boil. Screw these assholes. Why can't the Democrats put up at least one decent candidate to defeat the Republicans? ARGHH!!!!
The IRS is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns. If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers will be able to sell information from individual returns - or even entire returns - to marketers and data brokers.
The change is raising alarm among consumer and privacy-rights advocates. It was included in a set of proposed rules that the Treasury Department and the IRS published in the Dec. 8 Federal Register, where the official notice labeled them "not a significant regulatory action."
Sunday, March 19, 2006 :::
This is a pretty good article. It should have been more publicized during the last election, but better late than never. One prone to conspiracy could ask why it was released on a Saturday, the slowest news day by far.
Some even say The Associated Press fears the right-wing Republicans so much they censor themselves. I think those people are completely right! But if I disagreed, would you have recognized the straw man argument?
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer Sat Mar 18, 12:52 PM ET
WASHINGTON - "Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently. ADVERTISEMENT
Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."
"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."
Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.
When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.
The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.
He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.
Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is just as problematic.
Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.
"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."
Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.
Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.
The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.
Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security Department against Democrats.
He told at least two audiences that some senators opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service protections.
Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the fight against terrorism: "My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter of intelligence and law enforcement."
The assertion was called a mischaracterization of Kerry's views even by a Republican, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) of Arizona.
Straw men have made more frequent appearances in recent months, often on national security — once Bush's strong suit with the public but at the center of some of his difficulties today. Under fire for a domestic eavesdropping program, a ports-management deal and the rising violence in Iraq, Bush now sees his approval ratings hovering around the lowest of his presidency.
Said Jamieson, "You would expect people to do that as they feel more threatened."
Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy."
Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.
Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the program underestimate the terrorist threat.
"There's some in America who say, 'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,'" Bush said during a January visit to the NSA.
The president has relied on straw men, too, on the topics of taxes and trade, issues he hopes will work against Democrats in this fall's congressional elections.
Usually without targeting Democrats specifically, Bush has suggested they are big-spenders who want to raise taxes, because most oppose extending some of his earlier tax cuts, and protectionists who do not want to open global markets to American goods, when most oppose free-trade deals that lack protections for labor and the environment.
"Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our economy from the world," he said this month in India, talking about the migration of U.S. jobs overseas. "I strongly disagree."
Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams (I think) from the air on the way to Boise.
Mannequin with an extremely long arm.
Pictures from Schuyler's birthday. We went to Beppe and Gianni's Italian restaurant in Eugene, and it was fun. Schuyler's parents picked up the tab, Thanks!
Wednesday, March 08, 2006 :::
I haven't had much to talk about lately so I haven't been posting. Mostly I've been working very long hours in Boise, and on the weekends hanging out with Jen and getting stuff done around the house.
But here's a synopsis of what's been going on. I'm going to be back in Portland next week, unexpectedly. I was planning on returning the week after next but tool time issues have forced me to push up my return by a week. Unfortunately, that means that I'm going to be home when Jen is travelling for work. She will be going to Nicaragua on a factory inspection. So we'll be missing each other which sucks pretty bad. I really miss her when I'm in Boise.
The 23rd is the Belle and Sebastian show in Portland. I'm flying back early for the show, and then we're going to take off Friday and go away for the weekend. We will probably do a B&B or something on the coast, but it has yet to be decided. I have to buy my car next week, get insurance, and do our taxes. If you're wondering, I'm buying the company car Taurus, and plan to resell it when the '06 year end models go on sale. Should be a fun week for me running around trying to get stuff done.
My parents are going to come visit us at the end of April. It will be their first time to Oregon. I think they'll like it. Hopefully it won't rain but you never can tell.
