This has been a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and pop culture using the Google Blogger platform with the address halbrown.org. As of Oct. 10, 2023 it has been renamed Hal Brown's Stressline and moved to the WordPress platform with the new address Stressline.org - Posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky.
I don't post political stories on the blog, these (over 1600 of them) are here on Daily Kos.
This blog is about my life and includes photo essays of my trips around the Portland, Oregon area venturing as far as Vancouver, Washington, to eat at one of their riverside restaurants and then driving along the winding State Rt 14 which also runs alongside the Columbia River all the way to The Bridge of the Gods - see photo and then crossing back into Oregon where I drive back home on the I-84 expressway which also runs along the scenic and mighty river. Another favorite drive is into our beautiful rural Yamhill County in Oregon's wine and farming country where there seems to be a lovely vista around every hairpin turn. I also document my quest to find unique restaurants in photo essays.
Unlike Putin, who may or may not carry an actual Communist Party card even though he’s often labeled a communist and he probably had some kind of KGB ID card...
I am not now nor was I ever a card carrying member of the Communist Party.
In the McCarthy era communists were not only called Commies but often called Reds, their army was called the Red Army, and there was also the Red Scare.
Now of course even the Russian flag isn’t mostly red, it is white, blue, and red. Gone is the yellow star and the hammer and sickle which those old enough know from our youth.
I have a great fondness for the color red whether it is in items I choose to have around me or in sunsets, flowers, or fall colors. I find that the often striking blue sky with lovely cloud formations, greens and other colors prevalent in nature provides a less common color accent. What garden is complete without bright red flowers (and two adorable Westies)?
By coincidence my late wife, who also liked red accents in our kitchen, and I used to be cranberry growers so during harvest season we were often were knee deep in cranberry red:
This was the view from our back windows:
I know it is all psychological, but food from filet mignon to a hot dog on a baked potato seems to tastes better surrounded by the color red.
Most of the items in my kitchen have always been red. It was my deciding to buy an air fryer that got me embarking on a quest to try to make every item on two of my three kitchen counters red. I was considering buying an air fryer having heard about all the ways they can be used. I looked at CNET, my go-to website for reviews of just about anything that runs on electricity, and found that they rated one particular air fryer in their list of the top five that appealed to me. It wasn’t the CNET review (below) that prompted me to order the one I did:
This oversized air fryer is easy on the eyes. The Dash Deluxe has the largest cooking capacity of any of the ovens we tested with a 6-quart cooking basket. It also has some undeniable retro appeal and is available in a few fun colors. The appliance we tested was aqua, though it also comes in red, black and white. This model also has all manual controls with no presets and was exceedingly simple to operate and also comes with an air fryer recipe guide.
Aesthetics aside, the Dash fried up batches of wings, Brussels sprouts, tater tots and French fries that were all cooked evenly and well. In our first round of testing, we found it easy to overshoot when air frying a mozzarella stick if you're not careful. For us, that's a good thing and only means the air fryer has considerable power that you simply need to learn to manage.
I rarely rely solely on food manufacturer recommendations or oven presets but rather use them as a loose guide and do lots of peeking and checking along the way. The Dash has exactly zero presets and no cooking modes such as roast or dehydrate but still got the most important jobs done.
It was the photo that came on when I click on the link to Amazon. This was like a trigger to my latent color red addiction.
Call me crazy if you like but just don’t call me late for a meal cooked to perfection in my air fryer, but once the air fryer took it’s place next to my maroon toaster I realized that the colors clashed slightly (photos below) so I managed to find and buy a new retro-design red toaster which was the right shade of red.
Old toaster — It was filthy inside and impossible to fully clean.
The new toaster is spanking clean and I like the retro design which complements the design of the Dash air fryer.
Serve me like a cup of nuts but just don’t serve me a bad cup of coffee, but on my other counter all the other items were already red except my Keurig coffee maker which was black. It stood out like a frost bitten thumb on an otherwise normal hand. Thus, next came the quest to find a red Keurig. I ordered one from a company on Amazon and got a message it had been delivered to my place but it never arrived. I contacted the company and discovered that it was never sent because they were out of all the red versions but could send me a black one. After a few back and forth messages I got a refund. After some web searching I found that WalMart had a red Keurig so I ordered one from their website and a few days later it arrived.
Call me vain if you want to, just don’t call as vainglorious as Trump, but I generally try to coordinate the colors I wear and sometimes just add red “Happy Socks” (I happen to have the pair Wikipedia used in their entry on this) or a red belt and/or a bright red t-shirt as an accent even though I only have a couple of red shirts, for example I put on the outfit in three of the photos below just for this diary.
Thanks in advance to the small number of Kossacks who I expect will be reading this. The six or so persistent critics of what I post here (unlike Putin, I don't have you on an an enemies list) who may be thinking that they suspected I was mentally unbalanced, or worse, may be now patting themselves on the back saying that this diary proves it.
I am often puzzled as to how the editors in charge of major media websites decide to place stories where the are. The online version of The New York Times (subscription) has an article about pickelball sharing the top of the page with articles about the looming Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Of course once a paper “goes to press” with their print version all breaking news is then covered on their websites. In the old days huge unexpected news stories some papers were able to get second editions onto the street and they were called EXTRAS or Extra Editions, for example:
The pickle ball article is nowhere to be found on the print front page of today’s New York and national editions of The NY Times:
Caption of top of page photo: Marching in the Olympics’ closing ceremony on Sunday as Beijing handed off to Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the 2026 hosts.
Whoever put together the front page decided that a photo of the closing ceremony of the Olympics was so newsworthy that it deserved 2/3rds, or four of the six columns, above the fold.
The print edition of the International edition doesn’t have anything about pickleball on the front page. They have a bottom of the page article unrelated to breaking international news.
For comparison, the top of the website of The Washington Post (below) has their articles about Russia and Ukraine in the left column and the story towards the center of the page with a prominent photo is “The hate-crimes trial of Arbery’s killers highlights everyday racism — and casual gun culture.”
I admit to being something of a traditionalist when it comes to news reporting and would prefer that our two newspapers of record keep the most significant national and international news most prominently in their print and online editions. Call me of having been stogy but I didn't think it was a good idea when The New York Times which was often dubbed The Gray Lady decided to use color photos after all other major and most minor papers were using them.
When The New York Times first considered printing in color in the early 1990s, it did not go over well with some.
Steven Heller, the former art director of The New York Times Book Review, remembered his skepticism.
“It’s so silly now, but at the time I said never,” he said. “I mean, we were the old Gray Lady. I didn’t see us putting on new clothes.”
As fate would have it, it was the Book Review under his helm that was the first section of the paper to print something in color. The year was 1993, and the cover greeted readers with a striking illustration of a bright green and orange serpent.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Louis Silverstein, a bold art director for The Times, introduced new graphic design elements that continue to shape the appearance of the paper today.
If you were to pick up a copy of The New York Times in 1960, you would have mostly seen dense pillars of words. Sentences would have been packed tightly, like commuters on a busy subway car.
The Times was, as its nickname suggests, the Gray Lady.
But over the next two decades, that began to change. A bold art director, Louis Silverstein, emphasized graphic design elements that have since become standard industry practice. More white space appeared and the photos got bigger.
Working during a period of cultural, technological and economic shifts, he transformed The Times into a paper that took design as seriously as it did text in its journalism, and he helped to establish the role of the art director as a key player in the newsroom. By 1984, the paper was respected for its design by industry experts.
I didn't mind it when the Times was The Gray Lady. For example I don’t need to see a color photo of Richard Nixon here
Of course these days both The New York Times and The Washington Post online use color photographs very effectively and publish compelling photo essays.
Those who read my diaries may accuse me of having a double standard since I am on of the very few community members who frequently creates unique images for my primary illustrations and uses many images in the context of what I post.
Currently the article “Yale’s Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students” is in the spot that the pickleball article was in earlier this morning:
Feb. 20, 2022
Nothing to report.... except that we are going to have overnight temperatures in the low 20's in the coming week.
