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

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

• To the dozens who came to the south Eugene rest stop singalong last Friday, thanks — especially hosts Nathan and Tracy, the fabulous musicians, and those who brought warmth (which was everyone.) To those hoping to buy wool socks at Costco or Bi-Mart just before Christmas, we apologize for the inconvenience. Their shelves should be restocked soon.
• Crock pot cookery is a miracle by another name.
• Priceless gifts are the ones that cannot be exchanged.
• When you find yourself with no good answers, what you need is a better question.
• “Close enough for government work.” Is that really what we want to hear from our primary care physician?
• Where do all the people who were out on the roads over the past few weeks live during the rest of the year?
• My package arrived without incident. Incident was mailed separately.
• “Keeping up” is not a life goal. It’s a life plight.
• I added corrugated metal siding to a tiny house design while eating ruffled potato chips. Coincidence?
• Some people get hackles up in us that we never knew we had.
• Baseball season is several months away. But is there any other professional sport that calls its playing field a “park?” What other sport allows the home team to set the playing field’s parameters?
• Please remember to keep separate what you know from what you’ve been told.
• By and large, people seem to be getting by and getting large.
• If it wouldn’t take a corner from someone in need, I’d be tempted to sit by a traffic light with a cardboard sign: “Not poor. Not hungry. Just curious.”
• Facebook trades on our confusion between knowing about somebody and actually knowing them.
• If Michael Coughlin’s new project in south Eugene lands the city’s second Trader Joe’s store, we may no longer need the Ferry Street Bridge.
• Where is the line between minimalism and sacrifice? What moves that line better than beauty?
• When self-satisfaction equates with happiness, waistlines grow — but almost nothing else does.
• Gradualism (which too many people equate with evolution) has sanitized change as inevitable, imperceptible, and never uncomfortable.
• Productivity is more than activity. It leads with (and to) a product.
• As restaurants make all their public restrooms unisex, someone must be stockpiling used urinals.
• The plot thickens. Or maybe it’s just gotten older.
• We all love that feeling when we “get it,” but what’s behind that? Is it inquisitiveness, acquisitiveness, or the intersection of the two?
• People you don’t know are just like the people you do know, apart from being more numerous.
• The word “straight” contains wasted motion. Remove two letters and it’s still strait.
• Curves convey confidence. They take and make extra strength.
• It’s a struggle to remain as interested in what you don’t know as what you do. Only effort widens your — and the — world.
• Improving anything improves everything.
• Half our therapists should be retrained as career counselors. Satisfying work cures many pains.
• How long before wind chimes are regulated, to protect neighbors from noise pollution?
• Whenever somebody tells me I’m smart, I worry they are trying to say something else to me.
• I’m surprised Republicans didn’t tuck an elevator use tax into their recent legislation, to punish urban voters.
• Artificially whitened teeth look purple to me.
• We call it snail mail, but the address still ends with a ZIP code.
• It took us 100 years to admit that tennis balls should be a different color than the court’s boundary lines. Now can we stop processing salt and sugar to look identical?
• How far is away?
• The North Star provides a direction, not a destination.
• We might tackle addiction more effectively if we grant its majoritarian status. Almost all of us are addicted to something. Once we admit that, solutions won’t be disguised as charity.
• As Eugene grows into its cityhood, residents can help by greeting rapid changes with creativity and cheer.
• About Garrison Keillor’s firing: Donald Trump won the 78 most rural of Minnesota’s 87 counties. Prairie homes want a new companion.
• About Keillor’s image being removed from the Eugene Airport: Judas did worse things, but he’s still in daVinci’s “Last Supper.”
• Not every event has a cause.
• How much longer can “trump” remain a generic verb?
• Sharp knives and smooth-writing pens are gifts worth giving to ourselves.

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

Leftovers:

• The purpose of hot salsa is to sell more medium salsa.
• People aren’t asking for more information — they’re awash in it. They need stories that will help them draw meaning out of all that information — more signal from the noise.
• I wonder how many couples who are both public employees choose to pay the small monthly surcharge to have both of them covered on a single health care account, saving taxpayers over a thousand dollars each month for a second, separate account?
• It’s odd that I call myself a communitarian, when I’m just barely socialized.
• “Social media” is humanity’s default setting. Researchers believe that reading (at least in the West) has been around for millennia, but reading silently — without being considered anti-social — is barely 300 years old.
• I get confused between “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Eats Shoots and Leaves” — one gives the reader profound life lessons and the other is a romantic comedy.
• Remember sissy bars? (There’s no point; it’s just a question.)
• My memory’s not as good as I remember it being.
• There are two kinds of people in the world — those who store glasses rim-up and those who store them rim-down. If you don’t know which you are, then there are three kinds of people in the world.
• Tell me again. Is chicken-fried steak chicken or steak?
• Glitter: if you ever, you will always.
• A student athlete’s status would ring more true if we stopped referring to their four years of eligibility as their “career.”
• When I ask Siri or Alexa something, but forget their wake word, I remember I was never very good at “Mother May I?”
• A runner friend hurt his foot. I offered insole support. He refused. He didn’t want to add insert to injury.
• I want some or most people to agree with me most or some of the time, but I hope no one agrees with me all or none of the time.
• Just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it makes sense. We’re often forced to choose between rhyme and reason.
• Fonts matter. Use the wrong one and “pom-pom” looks a lot like “porn-porn.”
• Our government’s power resembles opera rope. Without their consent, the people will not be governed.
• I remember when floppy disks were floppy.
• What is anxiety but fear dressed up for company?
• I can tell which side of your brain is “talking” by where you place “only” in a sentence. The left brain is better at delaying its insertion. The right brain wants to put it in front of the verb.
• Headline writing is dividing into two paths. Paper editors still summarize the article, while online editors craft a click-bait tease.
• To have a non-politicizing conversation about gun laws, let’s agree on an appropriate date and ignore all the tragedies that occur between now and then.
• Rectitude and philanthropy sound too similar to things they are not.
• How often do we meet an aesthetic problem with an ascetic solution?
• There is no authority without agreement.
• How did sleeping in become a mark of success or stature? It strikes me as a passive form of self-immolation.
• If you feel like nothing is going your way, sharpen a knife and tell me if that doesn’t make things a little better.

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