dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle's blog

Fifth Friday footnotes, follow-ups and far-flung fripperies:

• When you get your vaccination shot, join others in calling it your Fauci Ouchie.
• I figured out why the last 12 months seemed to take longer to pass than usual. It was a Leap Year. Yeah boy howdy — that must explain it!
• Oregon has always been below average on everything. It’s finally working in our favor with COVID infection rates.
• If pizza got lazy and phoned it in, the Caller ID would say, “Cheesy Bread.”
• What you see depends on how you look.
• Lead with your weaknesses. They are what’s most interesting about you. Your strengths grew because others rewarded them. Your weaknesses remained because they are uniquely yours.
• Any moment worth capturing is also fleeting.
• I predicted in December that President Trump would spend his final hours in office knee-capping civil servants to script a satisfying exit. I was wrong. And naive.
• Take a different way home once in a while.
• I’m not afraid of heights. I’m afraid of depths. Falling wouldn’t be so bad except for the landing.
• Faith is a huge part of every human’s life. We all believe in certain things we can’t be certain of.
• Car doors and microwave doors sound oddly similar when closing. Listen. You’ll hear it too.
• You needn’t wonder how much butter a hot slice of toast can melt. It will tell you.
• Twenty Twenty: the year we washed our hands more and the rest of ourselves less.
• Plexiglass salespeople were the clear winners of 2020.
• It’s no surprise that Republicans have failed to rebuke Trump. They missed all earlier opportunities to buke him.
• The information economy has ended. The appetite economy is well underway.
• Why widen our minds when widening our bodies is so much easier?
• Contrarian view: “We need to start with a common set of facts.” How about we start with a common set of experiences or stories or beliefs instead?
• I can’t shake the feeling that I’m losing all my washable belongings, bit by bit, through the lint trap.
• Some days, I think about moving to Mexico and opening a piñata repair shop.
• Election campaigns, summarized: Biden: “America needs to heal.” Trump: “America needs to heel.”
• Election results, summarized: The emperor had no clothes except coattails.
• I’m tired of hearing about “wake-up calls.” They don’t work on the comatose or the dead.
• I’m wondering. Have instrumentalists found themselves practicing less or more during COVID?
• Biden has been imagining his presidential inauguration since he came to DC in 1972. We witnessed what 50 years of planning can do.
• My favorite line from Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem: “And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”
• Uber-generic job titles reveal certain industries’ centrality to our consciousness. (Auto) “mechanics,” (telephone) “operators,” and (therapy) “analysts,” for starters. Are there others?
• How would society change if our garbage containers were made of transparent plastic?
• I’d like to meet the originator of the prequel, unless I already have. 

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and archives past columns at www.dksez.com.

Spares:

• Pasta shapes shouldn’t nest. It’s unnatural.
• Is there anything that doesn’t sound better to many people when the prefix “eco-” is added?
• Trump issued his raft of final pardons on Wednesday morning, so he could dominate one last news cycle, stealing thunder from POTUS #46.
• “Suffering can make you bitter. Or it can make you better.” Have we reduced suffering too well? Has affluence afforded us fewer chances to make ourselves better?
• “I’m at work” — this phrase lost its meaning in 2020. What are some others?
• Where is the line between new-fangled “cancel culture” and regular old consequences? (Does accountability factor in?)
• Remember Apple’s HyperCard? It was going to change the oppressive linearity of Western culture. If only.
• “Shocked” and “surprised” always went together, until recently. We’re told what will happen. We don’t believe it will. And then it does.
• I just realized today that I’ve been mispronouncing “20” as “twunty” my whole life. Glad we got that straightened out….
• Trump may soon revive his rallies. If he does, Obama should match him, city for city — counter-programming philosopher-kings.
• My son knows the word “dystopia” and can use it in a sentence. I don’t know whether to feel proud or frightened.
• What do you imagine you’ll miss most about not being old?
• Watch the spouses for the new administration. First Lady Jill is keeping her job. (A first.) Second Gentleman Doug (another first) has quit his.
• Another: Something tells me there will be a lot of babies born the first week of August in 2021.
• The pandemic has made us overplanners. What’s the worst that could happen if you just show up (virtually) unannounced?
• I’m hoping that Biden’s magnanimity changes the DC dynamic in ways that no one has anticipated.
• Not long ago, I used the last bit of shampoo in the shower, and then finished the conditioner bottle too. An hour later, I finished my fabric softener. I felt like my own “Truman Show” after the writers were told the series was being canceled.
• “Grief is joy, inside out.” – George Valliant
• Is the cosmos fundamentally harmonic or foremost rhythmic? (There is a right answer and it may be on the test.)
• I wonder when newspapers will allow illustrators and cartoonists to wander freely across all pages. They often capture a story’s essence better than photography.
• Tom Friedman captured an essential truth: “… the future is not our fate, but a choice — to let the past bury the future or the future bury the past.”
• I’ll bet you can measure an elder’s age by the volume at which they announce every change in bodily elevation.
• Once this plague passes over us, can we keep with tradition and decorate our doorways to tell neighbors they are welcome again?
• This is my first winter without a newspaper coming to my porch overnight. (I get it electronically now.) It feels like my first Christmas without Santa Claus.
• It’s interesting to watch social media companies trying to add fact-checking into their processes. Turns out those old-media editors were not superfluous after all!
• If youtube merged with U-Haul, what would they call it?
• Corollary to “The unexamined life is not worth living” — “The unlived life is not worth examining.”
• I’m concerned that we’ll eventually get back to “normal” and it won’t seem at all familiar to any of us.
• Arranged marriages are back! In place of parents or tribal elders, we now entrust our familial future to dating site algorithms.

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