Oregon Sayings And Quotes

I, Gavin MacKenzie, sexy cowboy man of Baker City, Oregon … being of sound mind and hot body … do hereby declare that I love you, Andie Marks, lawyer extraordinaire, and want to be married to you until I’m so old, I either die or my pecker falls off.I will have sex with you whenever you want, and I will always give you the option to be on top if that’s what will make you happy. Blowjobs will always be optional but appreciated.I will change diapers when called for, both for our children and for you when you’re old and decrepit. I will never spit in public or burp too loudly or say mean things about your friends.I promise never to raise my hand against you in anger or tell you that you’re useless or threaten to hurt people who you love. Ten-four, over and out, happily ever after. Those are my vows.

I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.

I still think of Oregon Trail as a great leveler. If, for example, you were a twelve-year-old girl from Westchester with frizzy hair, a bite plate, and no control over your own life, suddenly you could drown whomever you pleased. Say you have shot four bison, eleven rabbits, and Bambi's mom. Say your wagon weighs 9,783 pounds and this arduous journey has been most arduous. The banker's sick. The carpenter's sick. The butcher, the baker, the algebra-maker. Your fellow pioneers are hanging on by a spool of flax. Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the river? Yes. Yes, you are.

All I am saying is that sometimes you're doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You're not quitting. You just keep going. That's the pioneer spirit.

Once Dad took us to an amusement park in Oregon. Before I ever manifested. I plummeted twenty stories on a drop ride. Totally helpless to gravity. Unable to fly, to save myself ... I feel that same helpless terror now. Because nothing I say will divert Mom off her present course. Nothing will make her realize what she's doing to me. I'm falling. And this time nothing will save me. No mechanical device will work its wonder and jerk me back at the last minute. But she does realize, a small voice whispers through me. That's why she's doing it. That's why she brought you here. She wants me to hit ground.

In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a few weeks." I'm not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button's touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.

Saying everything you think or do in public isn’t appropriate at a dinner party or online.

Katherine’s theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits. “We just accumulate more and more strange people,” she says. “All we are are the fugitives and refugees.

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still. When anyone talked to me, whether blame or praise or just passing time, I'd watch the face, how the mouth has to work, and see any strain, any sign of what lifted the voice. And for all, I'd know more -- the earth bracing itself and soaring, the air finding every leaf and feather over forest and water, and for every person the body glowing inside the clothes like a light.

Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, and then you spend your life filling it up. You're the only one who understands the filing system, you amass some clutter, sure, but somehow it works: you're asked the capital of Oregon, and you say Salem; you want to remember your first-grade teacher's name, and there it is, Miss Fox. Then suddenly you're old, and though everything's still in your brain, it's crammed so tight that when you try to remember the name of the guy who does the upkeep on your lawn, your first childhood crush comes fluttering out, or the persistent smell of tomato soup in a certain Des Moines neighborhood.

I’ve got you, Nyla Weathers-Gutierrez, coming up with plans,” he says with a smirk. “Apparently, I’m even better at disrupting your disruptions than I planned to be.

This was not going the way I wanted it to. I felt a desperate need to escape before I said something that would screw up my plans. Ren was the dark side, the forbidden fruit, my personal Delilah-the ultimate temptation. The question was…could I resist? I gave his knee a friendly pat and played my trump card…”I’m leaving.” “You’re what?” “I’m going home to Oregon. Mr. Kadam thinks it will be safer for me anyway, with Lokesh out there looking to kill us and all. Besides, you need time to figure out…stuff.” “If you’re leaving, then I’m going with you!” I smiled at him wryly. “That kind of defeats the purpose of me leaving. Don’t you think?” He slicked back his hair, let out a deep breath, then took my hand and looked intently into my eyes. “Kells, when are you going to accept the fact that we belong together?” I felt sick, like I was kicking a faithful puppy who only wanted to be loved. I looked out at the pool. After a moment, he sat back scowling and said menacingly, “I won’t let you leave.” Inside, I desperately wanted to take his hand and beg him to forgive me, to love me, but I steeled myself, dropped my hands in my lap, then implored, “Ren, please. You have to let me go. I need…I’m afraid…look, I just can’t be here, near you, when you change your mind.” “It’s not going to happen.” “it might. There’s a good chance.” He growled angrily. “There’s no chance!” “Well, my heart can’t take that risk, and I don’t want to put you in what can only be an awkward position. I’m sorry, Ren. I really am. I do want to be your friend, but I understand if you don’t want that. Of course, I’ll return when you need me, if you need me, to help you find the other three gifts. I wouldn’t abandon you or Kishan in that way. I just can’t stay here with you feeling obligated to pity-date me because you need me. But I’d never abandon your cause. I’ll always be there for you both, no matter what.” He spat out, “Pity-date! You? Kelsey, you can’t be serious!” “I am. Very, very serious. I’ll ask Mr. Kadam to make arrangements to send me back in the next few days.” He didn’t say another word. He just sat back in his chair. I could tell he was fuming mad, but I felt that, after a week or two, when he started getting back out in the world, he would come to appreciate my gesture. I looked away from him. “I’m very tired now. I’d like to go to bed.” I got up and headed to my room. Before I closed the sliding door, I asked, “Can I make one last request?” He sat there tight-lipped, his arms folded over his chest, with a tense, angry face. I sighed. Even infuriated he was beautiful. He said nothing so I went on, “It would be a lot easier on me if I didn’t see you, I mean as a man. I’ll try to avoid most of the house. It is yours after all, so I’ll stay in my room. If you see Mr. Kadam, please tell him I’d like to speak with him.” He didn’t respond. “Well, good-bye, Ren. Take care of yourself.” I tore my eyes away from him, shut the door, and drew the curtains. Take care of yourself? That was a lame goodbye. Tears welled in my eyes and blurred my vision. I was proud that I’d gotten through it without showing emotion. But, now, I felt like a steamroller had come along and flattened me.

However much the drink is loaded with sweeteners, patients say it still tastes awful. Usually observers have noticed that the patients are so desperate to die that they ignore the nasty tasting drink. The Oregon dosage is:   Seconal capsules reduced to powder - 9 grams & Pure water - 4 ounces – OR –   Liquid Nembutal - 9 grams & Add water to suit

As of this writing, the state of California is locked in a legal fight with the United States of America, trying to defend its right to ignore federal law. Only they’re arguing from the opposite direction. Sure, they say, the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration, but in this case, we’re going to do everything we can to make it impossible for them to enforce it! News flash: The United States Constitution’s Supremacy Clause can’t be set aside because California—or Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Illinois, Vermont, or the Queen of England—says it should be. That’s why it works. States do not get to make their own rules that fly in the face of our founding documents, so they can appease LIBERAL voters and ensure LIBERAL politicians stay in office for a few more terms.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.

He remembered the black sands beach along California’s lost coast where his mother finally gave up the fight. He hadn’t even realized she’d been injured so badly after running into his father in Seattle. She’d bled most of the way though Oregon, but he hadn’t thought it was serious. He hadn’t known she was bleeding out on the inside, a kidney and her liver ruptured, her intestines bruised beyond repair. […] They stopped six feet from the tide and she made him repeat every promise she’d ever dragged out of him: don’t look back, don’t slow down, and don’t trust anyone. Be anyone but himself, and never be anyone for too long. By the time Neil understood she was saying goodbye, it was too late. She died gasping for one more breath, panting with something that might have been words or his name or fear. Neil could still feel her fingernails digging into his arms as she fought not to slip away, and the memory left him shaking all over. Her abdomen felt like stone when he touched her, swollen and hard. He tried pulling her from her seat only once, but the sound of her dried blood ripping off the vinyl like Velcro killed him. […] He hadn’t cried when the flames caught, and he hadn’t flinched when he pulled her cooling bones out. […] By the time he found the highway again he was numb with shock, and he lasted another day before he fell to his knees on the roadside and puked his guts out.

Of course I didn't read James and sit down and say, Now I'll write a story about that “lost soul.” It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word “Omelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don't you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas... Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas. Homme helas. “Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

Of course I didn’t read James and sit down and say, Now I’ll write a story about that “lost soul.” It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word “Omelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don’t you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas . . . Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas. Homme hélas. “Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

There are five species of Pacific salmon in North America: the chum, the coho, the sockeye, the pink, and the Chinook. Each has its own diminutive: the chum is the dog, or the keta, the coho the silver, the sockeye the red, the pink the humpy, and the Chinook is the king. The original Chinook are people of the Pacific Northwest, and their language formed the core of Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trading language that stretched from Alaska to the Columbia River, along what now forms the border of Washington and Oregon, and incorporated the words of many tribes, as well as French and English. Any Canadian will still say Chinook for king, the best and biggest of the fish that the Chinook people traded.

My friends, I have been asked to show you my heart. I am glad to have a chance to do so. I want the white people to understand my people. Some of you think an Indian is like a wild animal. This is a great mistake. I will tell you all about our people, and then you can judge whether an Indian is a man or not. I believe much trouble would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. What I have to say will come straight from my heart, and I will speak with a straight tongue. The Great Spirit is looking at me, and will hear me. My name is In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat [Thunder Traveling over Mountains]. I am chief of the Wal-lamwat- kin band of the Chute-pa-lu, or Nez Perce. I was born in eastern Oregon, thirty-eight winters ago. My father was chief before me. When a young man, he was called Joseph by Mr. Spaulding, a missionary. He died a few years ago. He left a good name on earth. He advised me well for my people. Our fathers gave us many laws, which they had learned from their fathers. These laws were good. They told us to treat all men as they treated us, that we should never be the first to break a bargain, that it was a disgrace to tell a lie, that we should speak only the truth, that it was a shame for one man to take from another his wife or his property without paying for it. We were taught to believe that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that He never forgets; that hereafter

One day, fearing that I was coming down with the flu, I stopped by Bowerman’s office to say that I wouldn’t be able to practice that afternoon. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who’s the coach of this team?” “You are.” “Well, as coach of this team I’m telling you to get your ass out there. And by the way . . . we’re going to have a time trial today.” I was close to tears. But I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run, and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked off the track I glowered at Bowerman. Happy now, you son of a—? He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again, nodded. He’d tested me. He’d broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I’d held up. Thereafter, I was truly one of his Men of Oregon. From that day on, I was a tiger.

A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an “Oregon Trail” lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, “Well give you three cents an acre.” Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert.

Oregon resident Gary Harrington was arrested for collecting rainwater and snow on his rural property. Authorities accused him of constructing three “illegal reservoirs” on his 170-acre property. Harrington said although the reservoirs are stocked with largemouth bass, they serve as a contingent against wildfires. “It’s totally committed to fire suppression,” he explained to the media. Initially the state allowed Harrington to collect water but reversed its decision in 2003, citing a 1925 law stating the nearby city of Medford has rights to Big Butte Creek and its tributaries. Harrington argued that his water came only from rainfall and snowmelt. The disagreement evolved into a protracted court battle over property rights and government bullying. “When something is wrong, you just, as an American citizen, you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is wrong; you just can’t take away any more of my rights and from here on in, I’m going to fight it,’” explained Harrington. Nonetheless, he was found guilty.

to be open and straightforward about their needs for attention in a social setting. It is equally rare for members of a group in American culture to honestly and openly express needs that might be in conflict with that individual’s needs. This value of not just honestly but also openly fully revealing the true feelings and needs present in the group is vital for it’s members to feel emotional safe. It is also vital to keeping the group energy up and for giving the feedback that allows it’s members to know themselves, where they stand in relation to others and for spiritual/psychological growth. Usually group members will simply not object to an individual’s request to take the floor—but then act out in a passive-aggressive manner, by making noise or jokes, or looking at their watches. Sometimes they will take the even more violent and insidious action of going brain-dead while pasting a jack-o’-lantern smile on their faces. Often when someone asks to read something or play a song in a social setting, the response is a polite, lifeless “That would be nice.” In this case, N.I.C.E. means “No Integrity or Congruence Expressed” or “Not Into Communicating Emotion.” So while the sharer is exposing his or her vulnerable creation, others are talking, whispering to each other, or sitting looking like they are waiting for the dental assistant to tell them to come on back. No wonder it’s so scary to ask for people’s attention. In “nice” cultures, you are probably not going to get a straight, open answer. People let themselves be oppressed by someone’s request—and then blame that someone for not being psychic enough to know that “Yes” meant “No.” When were we ever taught to negotiate our needs in relation to a group of people? In a classroom? Never! The teacher is expected to take all the responsibility for controlling who gets heard, about what, and for how long. There is no real opportunity to learn how to nonviolently negotiate for the floor. The only way I was able to pirate away a little of the group’s attention in the school I attended was through adolescent antics like making myself fart to get a few giggles, or asking the teacher questions like, “Why do they call them hemorrhoids and not asteroids?” or “If a number two pencil is so popular, why is it still number two,” or “What is another word for thesaurus?” Some educational psychologists say that western culture schools are designed to socialize children into what is really a caste system disguised as a democracy. And in once sense it is probably good preparation for the lack of true democratic dynamics in our culture’s daily living. I can remember several bosses in my past reminding me “This is not a democracy, this is a job.” I remember many experiences in social groups, church groups, and volunteer organizations in which the person with the loudest voice, most shaming language, or outstanding skills for guilting others, controlled the direction of the group. Other times the pain and chaos of the group discussion becomes so great that people start begging for a tyrant to take charge. Many times people become so frustrated, confused and anxious that they would prefer the order that oppression brings to the struggle that goes on in groups without “democracy skills.” I have much different experiences in groups I work with in Europe and in certain intentional communities such as the Lost Valley Educational Center in Eugene, Oregon, where the majority of people have learned “democracy skills.” I can not remember one job, school, church group, volunteer organization or town meeting in mainstream America where “democracy skills” were taught or practiced.

I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait. “Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.

But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)

How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!

The store smells of roasted chicken and freshly ground coffee, raw meat and ripening stone fruit, the lemon detergent they use to scrub the old sheet-linoleum floors. I inhale and feel the smile form on my face. It's been so long since I've been inside any market other than Fred Meyer, which smells of plastic and the thousands of people who pass through every day. By instinct, I head for the produce section. There, the close quarters of slim Ichiban eggplant, baby bok choy, brilliant red chard, chartreuse-and-purple asparagus, sends me into paroxysms of delight. I'm glad the store is nearly empty; I'm oohing and aahing with produce lust at the colors, the smooth, shiny textures set against frilly leaves. I fondle the palm-size plums, the soft fuzz of the peaches. And the berries! It's berry season, and seven varieties spill from green cardboard containers: the ubiquitous Oregon marionberry, red raspberry, and blackberry, of course, but next to them are blueberries, loganberries, and gorgeous golden raspberries. I pluck one from a container, fat and slightly past firm, and pop it into my mouth. The sweet explosion of flavor so familiar, but like something too long forgotten. I load two pints into my basket. The asparagus has me intrigued. Maybe I could roast it with olive oil and fresh herbs, like the sprigs of rosemary and oregano poking out of the salad display, and some good sea salt. And salad. Baby greens tossed with lemon-infused olive oil and a sprinkle of vinegar. Why haven't I eaten a salad in so long? I'll choose a soft, mild French cheese from the deli case, have it for an hors d'oeuvre with a beautiful glass of sparkling Prosecco, say, then roast a tiny chunk of spring lamb that I'm sure the nice sister will cut for me, and complement it with a crusty baguette and roasted asparagus, followed by the salad. Followed by more cheese and berries for dessert. And a fruity Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to wash it all down. My idea of eating heaven, a French-influenced feast that reminds me of the way I always thought my life would be.

No, seriously," Mark continued. "Once you've been involved for a while, do your charity work in some third world toilet, they start letting you in on some of the bigger secrets to Responsivism, and how the knowledge will save you." "Go on," Juan said to indulge him. Murph might be flakey, but he had a topflight mind. "Ever heard of 'brane theory?" He'd already talked with Eric about it so only Stone didn't return a blank stare. "It's right up there with string theory as a way of unifying all four forces in the universe, something Einstein couldn't do. In a nutshell, it says our four-dimensional universe is a single membrane, and that there are others existing in higher orders of space. These are so close to ours that zero-point matter and energy can pass between them and that gravitation forces in our universe can leak out. It's all cutting-edge stuff." "I'll take your word for it," Cabrillo said. "Anyway, "brane theory started to get traction among theoreti cal physicists in the mid-nineties, and Lydell Cooper glommed on to it, too. He took it a step further, though. It wasn't just quantum particles passing in and out of our universe. He believed that an intelligence from another 'brane was affecting people here in our dimension. This intelligence, he said, shaped our day-to-day lives in ways we couldn't sense. It was the cause of all our suffering. Just before his death, Cooper started to teach techniques to limit this influence, ways to protect ourselves from the alien power." "And people bought this crap?" Max asked, sinking deeper into depression over his son. "Oh yeah. Think about it from their side for a second. It's not a believer's fault that he is unlucky or depressed or just plain stupid. His life is being messed with across dimensional membranes It's an alien influence that cost you that promotion or prevented you from dating the girl of your dreams. It's a cosmic force holding you back, not your own ineptitude. If you believe that, then you don't have to take responsibility for your life. And we all know nobody takes responsibility for himself anymore. Responsivism gives you a ready-made excuse for your poor life choices.

In late fall, I had a phone sessions with my Oregon therapist. For some reason, we started talking about happiness. “Chris achieved happiness so easily,” I said to him. “And I don’t.” The counselor interrupted me. “Do you know how he did?” I started to answer that I didn’t. But then I realized that Chris had set out to do many things, and he’d achieved them. He’d wanted to be a rodeo competitor, work as a cowboy, join the SEALs. He’d done all of those. What’s more, he excelled at them. Those achievements made him happy, or at least confident enough that he could be happy. As we talked, the counselor noted that I, too, had my own achievements. But I told him--as he already knew--that I wanted to do so many more things. And I always do. Was that a reason not to be happy? The counselor pointed out that I tend to focus on what I haven’t done, rather than what I’ve achieved. My thinking runs; If I do A, then B, then C, then I’ll be happy. But when I achieve A, rather than saying “Yay!” I say, “I haven’t done B and C, so I can’t be happy.” Why focus on what I haven’t done? Why not celebrate those things I have done, even as I look forward to doing other things on my list? Those achievements are accomplishments--I should feel good about them, confident I can do more. And happy. Or at least happier. Another lesson. There are other components to happiness beyond achievement. “Smaller” things, like carving out time for workouts as well as the kids, are actually big things when they are added up. Yet I often feel those things are distractions from what I really want to achieve. Blockers, rather than stepping-stones. Obviously, the wrong way to think about them. On paper, it doesn’t seem like a very profound realization. But put into practice, it means that I--we, all of us--have to keep things in the larger perspective. If you want to achieve a lot, then the reality is that you are always going to have something else you want to do. Keep trying to achieve, but don’t beat yourself up for not getting everything done. The “smaller” things are just as essential to happiness. So: the key to my happiness is appreciating what I have and what I’ve done, and realizing that I’ll always have something else to do. Profound? No, but empowering. I might never have realized it had I not been grieving so deeply. I would have felt silly, really, talking about achieving happiness when Chris was alive. Why wouldn’t I be happy with a great husband and wonderful children? I was happy. But not at the deepest level. I’m not there yet, obviously. But it is possible now. And yet I still wonder: How can I possibly be happy with Chris gone?

BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

she thought of the mix of kids in her class and in Melissa’s and she knew that the future could be bright. No one had tried to say she didn’t have a right to be in that school, or acted interested in who her ancestors were, but they had been interested in who she was and where she had moved from. They wanted to know what she did and wore and liked.

We have an affordable housing crisis in the city,” says John Miller, executive director of Oregon Opportunity Network, “and when folks from out of town buy units and convert them into Airbnb units, that has negative effects on the neighborhood.

Jack rode back into the river, steering his horse toward their raft. Samantha couldn’t see his dark brown hair under his wide-brimmed hat, but she could see the focus in his face, the strength of his arms as he guided his horse. When he glanced over at her, she blushed. Micah elbowed her. “Someone’s sweet on you.” “Hush,” she whispered. “Papa says you’re going to marry him.” She elbowed him back. “I told you to hush.” Micah tipped his hat low over his shaggy hair, but she could still see the grin on his face.

Alex stepped forward. “Who is gone?” Both men turned, and Huey’s eyes filled with surprise. And then fear. “Who is gone?” he repeated. Huey cleared his throat. “Samantha and the boy.” Alex clutched his fists. “Where did they go?” “Across the river.” Alex grabbed the man’s collar, pushing him up against the wall. “What do you mean, they went across the river?” “I told her you wouldn’t like it if she left.” “Told her?” Alex raged. “Why didn’t you stop her?” “I couldn’t. She insisted on paddling herself across the river.” He shook his head. Samantha had almost drowned on that river. Why would she insist on leaving on her own? He relaxed his grip on Huey’s collar. “What did she say when you told her I wouldn’t like it?” “She said it didn’t matter, that you were leaving first.

Micah set down his gift and wrapped his arms around both of them. Alex leaned down and lifted the boy with one arm. The other he put around Samantha. “I no longer have an income, or a position for that matter, but we can find our way together, can’t we?” Samantha smiled. “I have a surprise for you.” He kissed the top of her head. Micah grinned. “Does this mean you’re going to marry her?” “If your sister says it is all right.” Tears trickled down her cheeks. “It’s fine with me.” Alex looked into her eyes, and she never wanted him to look away again. “Is there a reverend around here?” he asked. Samantha laughed. “I believe we can find one.” He leaned close to her. “Will you marry me, Miss Waldron?” She put her hands on her hips. “Only if you’ll stop calling me ‘Miss Waldron.’” “All right.” He paused, leaning closer as he whispered in her ear, “How would you like to be called Mrs. Clarke?” “Samantha,” she insisted. He smiled. “I think I’ll just call you Sam.

Brennan was well aware of the irony inherent in catering to an audience who still thought of him as a hillbilly: “Some of my friends say that the Tycoon is remarkably like myself, much more so than McCoy.” Almost plaintively he declared, “I do wear suits, shirts, ties, and even shoes. . . . The fact is that I actually do have business interests, and am in personal life much closer to being an executive than a farmer.” Richard Crenna said as much about his Real McCoys co-star. In fact, Brennan owned a piece of The Tycoon not to mention his ranch and other properties in California and Oregon. And like Walter Andrews (his first and middle names, which as an extra he sometimes used together), he enjoyed learning other peoples’ business—as when he ran the store in Joseph when its owner was late showing up. When in Joseph, he always liked to stay in room 16 in his motel, which had an adjoining room he used as an office.

Oh, Go,” I say. “I have a lot of issues. But running isn’t one of them. I’m not the kind of girl who runs. I’m more like the kind of girl who gets kicked out.

By His grace and for His glory, when we opened up our hearts to Jesus, God placed us—weak and foolish that we are—in Christ. And because Christ fulfilled the “ifs,” we get the “thens,” leaving us nothing to do but say, “Yea and Amen!” If that sounds too good to be true, think of it this way.… Suppose I’m in Switzerland and I begin to crave a hamburger, fries, and a shake. The two dollars I have in my pocket will buy just that at Hot and Now Burgers in Medford, Oregon. Therefore, if I can get to Medford, then I will have a burger, fries, and a shake. So I call the airport and say, “Can you give me directions to Medford?” “What is your mode of transportation?” the official asks.

Back in Portland, Oregon, Diehl realized that another fundamental problem involved communication. Engineer Mendenhall had spotted the fuel problem. He had given a number of hints to the captain and, as the situation became serious, made direct references to the dwindling reserves. Diehl, listening back to the voice recorder, noted alterations in the intonation of the engineer. As the dangers spiraled he became ever more desperate to alert McBroom, but he couldn’t bring himself to challenge his boss directly. This is now a well-studied aspect of psychology. Social hierarchies inhibit assertiveness. We talk to those in authority in what is called “mitigated language.” You wouldn’t say to your boss: “It’s imperative we have a meeting on Monday morning.” But you might say: “Don’t worry if you’re busy, but it might be helpful if you could spare half an hour on Monday.”5 This deference makes sense in many situations, but it can be fatal when a 90-ton airplane is running out of fuel above a major city. The same hierarchy gradient also exists in operating theaters. Jane, the nurse, could see the solution. She had fetched the tracheotomy kit. Should she have spoken up more loudly? Didn’t she care enough? That is precisely the wrong way to think about failure in safety-critical situations. Remember that Engineer Mendenhall paid for his reticence with his life. The problem was not a lack of diligence or motivation, but a system insensitive to the limitations of human psychology.

Not at all. What I mean is that God places different burdens on each heart. Can you imagine if every single Christian and pastor had the same calling? What would happen to all the other needs in the world — or even in this town, for that matter? “God calls all of us in a unique way. As none of us are created identically in appearance or how we think, or feel, we’re also not given the same gifts. “We must be responsible for where God plants us, rather than judge others for not being in the same place. That’s not to say that our calling can’t change, or we might see a hardship and strive to fix it. But if we don’t, then we’re accountable to God, rather than to one another. Does

He wants to set you free from the bitterness and pain you’ve been carrying, but He can’t as long as you hold onto the hurt. Forgiving isn’t saying what they did is right, it’s simply letting go of the past and choosing to walk toward God’s light and love, instead of toward darkness.” “If I ever go back home, I’ll have nothing to do with those people.” Unease rose up in Julia at the thought, leaving her almost physically ill. Wilma shook her head, her face serious. “God doesn’t require we be friends with those who hurt us or even return to a previous relationship. That’s not to say you couldn’t be courteous should you meet one of the church members on the street, but forgiveness doesn’t necessitate friendship. Sometimes it even requires a separation from the person, for our own safety, and that’s as it should be.

As we started our long drive back to the zoo, we stopped at what could be called a general store. There was a pub attached to the establishment, and the store itself sold a wide variety of goods, groceries, cooking utensils, swags, clothing, shoes, even toys. As we picked up supplies in the shop, we passed the open doorway to the pub. A few of the patrons recognized Steve from television. We could hear them talking about him. The comments weren’t exactly positive. Steve didn’t look happy. “Let’s just get out of here,” I whispered. “Right-o,” he said. One of the pub patrons was louder than the others. “I’m a crocodile hunter too,” he bragged. “Only I’m the real crocodile hunter. The real one, you hear me, mate?” The braggart made his living at the stuffy trade, he informed his audience. A stuffy is a baby crocodile mounted by a taxidermist to be sold as a souvenir. To preserve their skins, hunters killed stuffys in much the same way that the bear poachers in Oregon stabbed their prey. “We drive screwdrivers right through their eyes,” Mister Stuffy boasted, eyeing Steve through the doorway of the pub. “Right through the bloody eye sockets!” He was feeling his beer. We gathered up our purchases and headed out to the Ute. Okay, I said to myself, we’re going to make it. Just two or three more steps… Steve turned around and headed back toward the pub. I’d never seen him like that before. My husband changed into somebody I didn’t know. His eyes glared, his face flushed, and his lower lip trembled. I followed him to the threshold of the pub. “Why don’t you blokes come outside and tell me all about stuffys in the car park here?” he said. I couldn’t see very well in the darkness of the pub interior, but I knew there were six or eight drinkers with Mister Stuffy. I thought, What is going to happen here? There didn’t seem any possible good outcomes. The pub drinkers stood up and filed out to face Steve. A half dozen against one. Steve chose the biggest one, who Mister Stuffy seemed to be hiding behind. “Bring it on, mate,” Steve said. “Or are you only tough enough to take on baby crocs, you son of a bitch?” Then Steve seemed to grow. I can’t explain it. His fury made him tower over a guy who actually had a few inches of height on him and outweighed him with a whole beer gut’s worth of weight. I couldn’t imagine how he appeared to the pub drinkers, but he was scaring me. They backed down. All six of them. Not one wanted to muck with Steve, who was clearly out of his mind with anger. All the world’s croc farms, all the cruelty and ignorance that made animals suffer the world over, came to a head in the car park of the pub that evening. Steve got into the truck. We drove off, and he didn’t say anything for a long time. “I don’t understand,” I finally said in the darkness of the front seat, as the bush landscape rolled by us. “What were they talking about? Were they killing crocs in the wild? Or were they croc farmers?” I heard a small exhalation from Steve’s side of the truck. I couldn’t see his face in the gloom. I realized he was crying. I was astounded. This was the man I had just seen turn into a furious monster. Five minutes earlier I’d been convinced I was about to see him take on a half-dozen blokes bare-fisted. Now he wept in the darkness. All at once, he sat up straight. With his jaw set, he wiped the tears from his face and composed himself. “I’ve known bastards like that all my life,” he said. “Some people don’t just do evil. Some people are evil.” He had told me before, but that night in the truck it hit home: Steve lived for wildlife and he would die for wildlife. He came by his convictions sincerely, from the bottom of his heart. He was more than just my husband that night. He was my hero.

I was sound asleep at the Oregon beach cabin one night when there was a knock at the door. A woman who said she was from the Red Cross stood on the front porch. I was foggy-headed. At first, I could not get through my brain what she was saying. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” she said. “But you need to call home immediately.” Terror struck me. My mind raced. Where was Steve? Bindi lay asleep in the bedroom. I asked the woman from the Red Cross to stay on the porch while I went across the street to the pay phone. The international calling procedure seemed immensely complicated that morning, and terribly slow. I tried to keep my fingers steady as I dialed. The sun had not yet risen. I was in my robe. It was February of 2000, and I remember thinking, It’s always the coldest just before the sun comes up. I heard Steve’s voice on the other end of the phone and experienced an immediate flood of relief. He’s alive. But something was terribly wrong. Steve was incoherent. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Not long before, we had lost our favorite crocodile to old age, and I thought that something had happened to one of our animals. But the tone of Steve’s voice was different. He was sobbing, but finally managed to choke out the words. His mother had been killed in a car accident. I felt the blood drain from my face. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He tried to explain, but he couldn’t really talk. The next thing I knew, the line went dead. It took a few frantic calls to find out what had happened. In the process of moving to their new home on our property, Lyn had left Rosedale to make one last trip with a few remaining family possessions. She was driving with the family malamute, Aylic, in the passenger seat beside her, and Sharon, their bird-eating spider, in a glass terrarium tank in the back of the truck. Lyn left the Rosedale house early, about three o’clock in the morning. As she approached Ironbark Station, her Ute left the road traveling sixty miles an hour. The truck hit a tree and she died instantly. Aylic was killed as well, and the tank holding the bird-eating spider was smashed to pieces. Early in the morning, at the precise moment when the crash happened, Steve was working on the backhoe at the zoo. He suddenly felt as if he had been hit by something that knocked him over, and he fell violently off the machine, hitting the ground so hard that his sunglasses came off. He told me later that he knew something terrible had happened. Steve got in his Ute and started driving. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew where he had to go. It was still early. With uncanny precision, he drove toward where the accident occurred. His mobile phone rang. It was Frank. When his brother-in-law told him what had happened and where, Steve realized he was already headed there.

In spite of the death of the big croc, I felt that our time at Cattle Creek had been superb. Even before we got back to the zoo and saw the footage, there was a hint in the air that something special had been accomplished. We were elated at saving one crocodile and bitterly disappointed at the one that had been shot. Perhaps Steve felt the failure to save the Cattle Creek croc from poachers more strongly than I did. He was normally an action man, focused on his next project. I wasn’t used to him being gloomy or fixated on mortality. But he kept asking me to promise him that I’d keep the zoo going if something happened to him. “Promise me,” he said, wanting me to say it out loud. I solemnly promised him that I would keep the zoo going. “But nothing’s going to happen,” I said lightly, “because the secret to being a great conservationist is living a long time.” On the drive back to the zoo, we had talked for a long time, a marathon conversation. We didn’t know whether our Cattle Creek documentary would make a huge difference or not. But we agreed that through our zoo and our shared life together, we would try to change the world. I told him about my days at the vet hospital in Oregon, and the times I’d sit on the floor and weep, I’d be so overwhelmed by the pain and suffering visited upon innocent animals. But that burden seemed much easier to bear now, because I had someone to share it with. Steve truly understood how I felt. And I was someone who could sympathize with the depth of his dedication to wildlife. There was a big wide world out there. We were just a small wildlife park in Australia. It was absurd to think the two of us could change the world. But our love seemed to make the impossible appear not only possible, but inevitable. I look back on the talk we had during the ride to the zoo from Cattle Creek as helping to create the basis of our marriage. No matter what problems came along, we were determined to stay together, because side by side we could face anything.

We drove into the Cradle Mountain resort still munching on raspberries. Emma and Kate waited with the kids in the car. “I’ll just be a minute,” I said. “I’ll check in and we’ll head to our rooms.” The currawongs were calling, and a padymelon, a small version of a roo, hopped off a wall just at the edge of the car park as I went in. “Where’s all the snow?” I asked the woman behind the desk. “It snowed this morning,” she said. “Well, good,” I said. “There’s hope.” Then she passed me a note. She said, “Frank called from the zoo.” “I’m not surprised,” I said. “I haven’t called the zoo all day, and Frank is always trying to track me down.” “Why don’t you come take the call in the office?” she said. I thought that was a little odd, since when I had been there before I’d always used the pay phone near the pub at the resort. But I entered the office and sat down in a big, comfortable chair. I could see the car park out the window. Emma and Kate were still out at the car. Robert had fallen asleep, and Kate sat inside with him. Bindi smiled and laughed with Emma. “How you going, Frank?” I said into the phone. He said, “Hi, Terri. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a while.” His voice had a heavy, serious tone. “Well, I’ve just got here,” I said. “Sorry about that, but I’m here now. What’s up?” “I’m sorry to say that Steve had a bit of an accident while he was diving,” Frank said. “I’m afraid he got hit in the chest by a stingray’s barb.” I’m sure there wasn’t much of a pause, but I felt time stop. I knew what Frank was going to say next. I just kept repeating the same thing over and over in my head. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. Then Frank said the three words I did not want him to say, “And he died.” I took a deep breath and looked out the window. There was Bindi, so happy to have finally arrived at one of her favorite places. We were going to have fun. She had brought her teacher and Kate. She was so excited. And the world stopped. I took another breath. “Thank you very much for calling, Frank,” I said. I didn’t know what I was saying. I was overwhelmed, already on autopilot. “You need to cancel the rest of our trip, you need to contact my family in Oregon, and you need to get us home.” So it began.

When Bindi, Robert, and I got home on the evening of Steve’s death, we encountered a strange scene that we ourselves had created. The plan had been that Steve would get back from his Ocean’s Deadlist film shoot before we got back from Tasmania. So we’d left the house with a funny surprise for him. We got large plush toys and arranged them in a grouping to look like the family. We sat one that represented me on the sofa, a teddy bear about her size for Bindi, and a plush orangutan for Robert. We dressed the smaller toys in the kids’ clothes, and the big doll in my clothes. I went to the zoo photographer and got close-up photographs of our faces that we taped onto the heads of the dolls. We posed them as if we were having dinner, and I wrote a note for Steve. “Surprise,” the note said. “We didn’t go to Tasmania! We are here waiting for you and we love you and miss you so much! We will see you soon. Love, Terri, Bindi, and Robert.” The surprise was meant for Steve when he returned and we weren’t there. Instead the dolls silently waited for us, our plush-toy doubles, ghostly reminders of a happier life. Wes, Joy, and Frank came into the house with me and the kids. We never entertained, we never had anyone over, and now suddenly our living room seemed full. Unaccustomed to company, Robert greeted each one at the door. “Take your shoes off before you come in,” he said seriously. I looked over at him. He was clearly bewildered but trying so hard to be a little man. We had to make arrangements to bring Steve home. I tried to keep things as private as possible. One of Steve’s former classmates at school ran the funeral home in Caloundra that would be handling the arrangements. He had known the Irwin family for years, and I recall thinking how hard this was going to be for him as well. Bindi approached me. “I want to say good-bye to Daddy,” she said. “You are welcome to, honey,” I said. “But you need to remember when Daddy said good-bye to his mother, that last image of her haunted him while he was awake and asleep for the rest of his life.” I suggested that perhaps Bindi would like to remember her daddy as she last saw him, standing on top of the truck next to that outback airstrip, waving good-bye with both arms and holding the note that she had given him. Bindi agreed, and I knew it was the right decision, a small step in the right direction. I knew the one thing that I had wanted to do all along was to get to Steve. I felt an urgency to continue on from the zoo and travel up to the Cape to be with him. But I knew what Steve would have said. His concern would have been getting the kids settled and in bed, not getting all tangled up in the media turmoil. Our guests decided on their own to get going and let us get on with our night. I gave the kids a bath and fixed them something to eat. I got Robert settled in bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep. Bindi looked worried. Usually I curled up with Robert in the evening, while Steve curled up with Bindi. “Don’t worry,” I said to her. “Robert’s already asleep. You can sleep in my bed with me.” Little Bindi soon dropped off to sleep, but I lay awake. It felt as though I had died and was starting over with a new life. I mentally reviewed my years as a child growing up in Oregon, as an adult running my own business, then meeting Steve, becoming his wife and the mother of our children. Now, at age forty-two, I was starting again.

Neither made any further comment.  Wyatt stared disbelievingly at Kate. Thankfully, he didn't say anything. But she

Galen Rupp matriculated as a freshman at the University of Oregon in 2004 and was performing well. There was only one problem—Salazar didn’t have any faith that the head track-and-field coach was the right collegiate mentor for his young protégé. So Salazar and Cook helped orchestrate the firing of coach Martin Smith, a quirky leader who many of the Nike loyalists didn’t think was the right fit for Rupp. In this effort they came to loggerheads with Bill Moos, the university’s athletic director. Knight and Nike had had a long and mutually prosperous twelve-year run with Moos in which the school’s athletic budget grew from $18.5 million to $41 million. But he didn’t want to fire his head coach, who was objectively good at his job. Knight threatened to withhold funding for the construction of the school’s new basketball arena until both coach and director were gone. Less than a week after he led the team to a sixth-place finish at the NCAA indoor championships, Smith was replaced by former Stanford coach Vin Lananna, a devout “Nike guy.” Moos would retire a year later, saying, “I created the monster that ate me.” Knight then made a donation of $100 million—the largest donation in Oregon history—to the university.

Crews that fight forest fires in Oregon are now so heavily Hispanic that in 2003, the Oregon Department of Forestry required that crew chiefs be bilingual. In 2006, the department started forcing out veterans. Jaime Pickering, who used to run a squad of 20 firefighters, says the rule means “job losses for Americans—the white people.” Zita Wilensky, a 16-year veteran, was the only white employee of Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Unit. Her co-workers made fun of her and called her gringa and Americana. Miss Wilensky says her boss gave her 60 days to learn Spanish, and fired her when she failed to do so. It is increasingly common, therefore, for Americans to be penalized because they cannot speak Spanish, but employers who insist that workers speak English are guilty of discrimination. In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced a small Catholic college in San Antonio to pay $2.4 million to housekeepers who were required to speak English at work. There are now about 45 million Hispanics in the country. What will the status of Spanish be when there are 130 million Hispanics, as the Census Bureau projects for 2050? In 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the prohibition against discrimination because of “national origin” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that if a foreigner cannot speak to a government agency in his own language he is a victim. Executive Order 13166 required all local governments that receive federal money (all of them, essentially) to translate official documents into any language spoken by at least 3,000 people in the area or 10 percent of the local population. It also required interpreters for non-English speakers. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that hospitals alone would spend $268 million every year implementing Executive Order 13166, and state departments of motor vehicles would spend $8.5 million. OMB estimated that communicating with food stamp recipients who don’t speak English would cost $25.2 million per year.

A Guide to Choose the Perfect Paint Contractor Paints bring colors to the world and painters bring our dreams into shape. Wall painting requires some exclusive skills and people who master them are considered as experts. In today’s competitive market, everyone we see says that they are experienced and will be a perfect choice for a painting project, whether it is a room, a house, office or a tall building. But you can’t believe in their words. There are so many things that you need to consider while selecting a painting contractor. In the article, we have come up with a guideline that will truly help you find the right contractor. So, continue reading: Here’s what you should consider while choosing a Paint Contractor Considering a contractor for a wall painting project is a challenging task. So, you should follow the below-mentioned tips offered by Brian Erik Jamison of Portland Oregon, which will help you in this process.

This will be so much better,” Miss Jean Bauer says with her hand on my shoulder. “Caroline will be able to start school in a month and a half and get back to having a regular education like any child here in Oregon.” “Yes,

Just me tonight. Vanni’s gone up to Oregon with Paul for a few days, and I don’t rate much time with Tom while he’s on Brenda’s dance card.” “Oregon?” Jack said with a lift of his brow. “You don’t say? What do you suppose they’ll find to do in Oregon?” Walt smiled at him. “Funny.” Jack chuckled. “Sounds like maybe some things got sorted out. This mean we won’t be seeing too much of that nice Dr. Michaels around here?” “I think maybe that nice Dr. Michaels hanging around lit a fire under Paul,” Walt said. “Good man, Haggerty. If a little slow.” Jack laughed. “Don’t go too hard on him, General. I think Vanessa scared him to death. She’s awful pretty. Wicked smart, too.” Walt appreciated the compliment and smiled. “Hell, sometimes she scares me.” “I’ll

A half century after Nidetch’s Mallomar binges, scientists had developed a technology that could see cravings erupting, like solar flares, inside the human brain. In early 2008, a research team at the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging at the University of Oregon measured just such a craving in a nineteen-year-old college student we will call Debbie. Debbie had her head inside a very large, very expensive round magnet called an MRI scanner when an image of a chocolate milk shake was flashed before her eyes for two seconds. As soon as Debbie saw it, certain parts of her brain became “activated,” which is to say they drew in lots of blood as millions of neurons were fired. These regions—the left medial orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and three other small, curly pockets of gray matter—are all associated with “motivation.” And the functional MRI (fMRI) showed them glowing a bright yellowy orange, like coals in a hot fire, indicating those parts of her brain were churning through quite a lot of blood. She was experiencing “incentive salience,” the scientific term for a Frankenstein craving, or a heightened state of “wanting.” Debbie got what she wanted.

Jake eyed the fire, remembering what Gene Bell had told him about attracting the Thunderbird. He thought about going over to say something, but quickly changed his mind. It would be just another reason for the older boys to tease him about flying creatures and make-believe. In fact, they would be right to tease, because Jake believed that the Thunderbird might be his only chance of a proper pioneering adventure on the boring Oregon Trail. Thinking about the Thunderbird made Jake Polson feel a little bit like his hero Julius Greengrass, and that had to be a good thing.

When it comes to spiritual dis-ease there is probably no issue more powerful than that of guilt. People often joke about guilt and its relationship to spirituality, or more frequently, religion. One man in Oregon jokingly calls himself a "Zen Catholic." Referring to his Irish Catholic background, which for him was the basis of some guilty feelings, he says, "I not only feel guilt, I meditate on it.

Things in the kitchen were, thankfully, going according to plan. Ginny's hands moved at a gratifying pace over the stove. She deftly controlled the four burners to simmer sauces with ease. A pair of solid wooden cutting boards were positioned at her elbow, piled with minced garlic, leafy herbs, and fresh root vegetables. A beautiful cut of Angus beef rested on the counter, coming to room temperature and marinating in rich juices. An elevated twist on a white chocolate cheesecake chilled on the packed refrigerator shelf. All in all, she had planned a fabulous meal. This was how Ginny had always envisioned Mesquite running, smooth and well staffed, with happy guests at the table and herself at the helm. If she thought about it hard enough, which she rarely had time to do, Ginny would say this evening was damn near perfection. Feeling sentimental, she allowed herself a pour from the bottle of chilled Oregon pinot noir in the refrigerator. She wiped her fingers clean with a nearby tea towel and watched as the golden evening light filtered through the windows, illuminating the translucent burgundy liquid in her glass. This is how it should be, she thought to herself. Happy customers in the other room, her daughter and her sister all under one roof, and a warm place to call home. She'd be content if she knew it could last.

They didn’t seek commonality with other churches. It was divisive and fear-based.” At a very young age, she sensed that she was being trained, as a dog might be trained, to grow up to be a woman with no ambition other than to bear children. She learned that while there was only one road to heaven, there were a great many to hell. Secular music, for instance, which she was forbidden to listen to. Science, for another. In sixth-grade science class, when the theory of evolution came up, Charity was handed a note saying she needed to go straight to the principal’s office and wait it out until those lessons were over. The other kids who went to her church all got the same note. Which is not to say that she had not learned things in church. When she was seven years old, missionaries who’d been to Africa came and spoke of plagues they’d witnessed. That experience had triggered an obsession: from then on, she’d wanted to know everything she could about disease and the viruses that caused them. She decided to become a doctor before she grasped all the reasons why she couldn’t. “I didn’t know anybody who had graduated from a four-year college,” she said. “That’s not what people in Junction City did.” Her school guidance counselor told her that kids from Junction City didn’t become doctors, and that she should change her mind. Instead of changing her mind about her ambition, she guarded it. “I learned to hold that card close, because no one believed it,” she said. In her senior year in high school she was thrown a lifeline, in the form of a scholarship from a foundation set up by a local lumber tycoon, for kids whose parents hadn’t gone to college. The Ford Family Foundation, as it was called, offered to pay her way to Oregon State. “The elders said I was disobeying God’s will because I wanted to go to a four-year college,” Charity recalled.

It's just, I don't know, painful and embarrassing all at the same time. This is my son we're talk ing about, and I can't help but feel I've let him down. If I'd been a better father, he wouldn't have drifted into something so dangerous." No one knew what to say for a second. Uncharacteristically, it was Eric Stone who broke the silence. So versed in technical mat ters, it was easy to overlook his human side. "Max, I grew up in an abusive home. My father was a drunk who beat my mother and me every night he had enough money for a bottle of vodka. It was about the worst situation you could imagine and yet I turned out okay. Your home life is only a part of who you be come. You being a larger part of your son's life might have changed things or it might not have. There's no way of knowing, and if you can't know for certain there's no need for useless spec ulation. Kyle is who he is because he chose to be that way. You weren't around for your daughter either, and she's a successful accountant." "Lawyer," Max said absently. "And she did it all on her own." "If you don't feel you can take responsibility for her success, then you have no right to take responsibility for Kyle's failings." Max let the statement hang, before finally asking, "How old are you?" Stone seemed embarrassed by the question. "Twenty-seven." "Son, you are wise beyond your years. Thank you.

Dayton’s police chief, Richard Biehl, had the following to say about the futility of the rapid response by his officers to the 2019 shooting in the city’s Oregon District: Despite their best efforts, their heroic efforts, their extraordinarily rapid response to this horrific threat doing what has really rarely been done anywhere in the country to stop a threat that soon, and still nine dead and 20 others injured…It’s amazing the harm a person can cause in such an extraordinarily short period of time when they have a high-velocity weapon with an enormous amount of ammunition…There’s a balance between protecting oneself and providing weapons and equipment that allows mass shootings to occur and for victims to be injured or killed at a rate of more than 1 per second, which happened in the Oregon district…That’s unconscionable and that’s something that can’t be deemed reasonable.111

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.

Proverbs 12:10 says, “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.

Freddie put a fax machine on top of a printer and carried both out to the van, juggling them there with one hand and one knee while unlocking the van’s side cargo door. It was a pain having to unlock and relock the van every trip, but anybody who leaves a vehicle alone and unsealed for even a second in Manhattan is looking for trouble, and will soon be looking for a new radio. It may be that the pervasive air of theft and chicanery forever floating like an aggressive cloud bank over New York City had played some part in Freddie’s original decision to become a thief. In a different part of the world, where both property and human feelings are respected—oh, someplace like Ashland, Oregon, say—even the scurviest villain will have the occasional bout of conscience, but in New York’s take-or-be-taken atmosphere moral suasion goes for naught.

This book was inspired by the story of the people who set out on a walk for help on March 30, 1849, in Doolough, Ireland. It was a hard story to hear, and a hard story to tell, not least because to separate the story from the history, the people from what had happened to them, was a difficult process. For a long time, I struggled with the idea of giving a voice to those who’d been silenced, of making them into characters in a story of my telling. Their history, their ending, is theirs alone. I can only hope that those who didn’t survive Doolough, who didn’t get to tell their own story, would have been glad to have had it recounted as it is here, and that they would forgive me any mistellings, omissions, or misunderstandings. This book is for them, and for the Cayuse people of the Pacific Northwest, who today form part of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeast Oregon. The Cayuse are, as they say, still here. The Irish and the Cayuse were banished to wander the world. May their souls, and the souls of their ancestors and their descendants, find peace in their ancestral homelands.

Initially seen as relatively benign, the seven hundred miles of bulkheads and seawalls in Puget Sound—enough to armor the entire ocean shoreline of Washington and Oregon—have become more of an “in your face” environmental issue, says Hugh Shipman, a retired Washington Department of Ecology shoreline geologist.6 Armoring shrinks beaches by changing wave dynamics and preventing the inland movement of the shoreline.

It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details, statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation, but in a code to which she had no key. “There’s trouble in California,” said Wesley Mouch sullenly. “Their state legislature’s been acting pretty huffy. There’s talk of seceding from the Union.” “Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters,” said Clem Weatherby cautiously. “They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months.” “The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly overemphasized,” said Dr. Ferris dreamily. “What is now known as the People’s State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development whatever.” “People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of privations,” said Eugene Lawson eagerly. “It would be good for them.” “Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?” said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his feet. “It’s a fine time to give up a whole continent—and in exchange for what? For a dinky little state that’s milked dry, anyway! I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet. With trouble and the riots everywhere, you won’t be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation—troop transportation—unless you hold your soldiers within a few days’ journey of any point on the continent. This is no time to retrench. Don’t get yellow, listening to all that talk. You’ve got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there.

Katherine Watkins, teacher at Cedar Park Middle School, Beaverton School District, Oregon: I'm going to say something that's not nice, and not sweet, but it's true. If you're not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you're making yourself obsolete in this field or profession. Our district is only getting browner and browner with our children and so if... you know, obviously you can't change your melanin, but you can change your mind so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] children. So if you're being resistant, I understand that, but your going to have to eventually come to the light, because if your going to keep up those old views of colonialism it's going to lead to being fired because you are going to be doing damage to our children, trauma. And so as we fire the teachers who sexually abuse our children we will be firing the teachers who do racists things to our children to traumatize them. And while our district might not be completely on there, OEA [Oregon Education Association] is working on it, NEA [National Education Association] is working on it, and so it's just a matter of time. So it's like you either evolve or dissolve.

Rep. Edith Green of Oregon rose to say that while she, too, was tired of discrimination against women, she was most concerned now about the plight of Black Americans. “For every discrimination I have suffered,” she said, “I firmly believe the Negro woman has suffered ten times that amount of discrimination. . . . I suppose this may go down in history as ‘women’s afternoon,’ but the women of the House, I feel sure, recognize that you men will be the ones who finally make the decision.” Still, she said, discrimination against Black Americans was far worse than it was toward women.

I put in, in all, 15 years among the Sioux, Assiniboines and Mountain Crows. I'm not going into the subject, but I will say that the more I saw of the relations of the white man and the Indian, the more sympathy I had for the Indians. pg 62

The lack of affordable housing regulation allows rents to rise with little restriction, and Oregon law prohibits local governments from enacting almost all rent-control policies outside of special subsidized units. But regulation, like Portland’s famous urban growth boundary, has also enhanced the number of multi-unit buildings being constructed inside a limited zone to avoid suburban-like sprawl. Although Portland’s rental rates are not skyrocketing at the speed of San Francisco or even Seattle, the U.S. Census ranks Portland as having one of the tightest markets in the nation. Despite tax-abatement programs for luxury neighbors like the Pearl District and the South Waterfront supposedly tied to affordable-housing units, the city Housing Bureau says they won’t even meet 2003 goals, much less expand and continue programs. Meanwhile, the average condo price rose 41 percent last year and the average apartment rental has climbed at a steady pace of six percent in 2012 and again in 2013.

No. 1, when you ask who’s interested in this, the usual answer is, terminally ill people with excruciating pain. False. Factually not true. It tends to be a preoccupation of people who are depressed or hopeless for other reasons. No surprise, actually, if you look at what leads to suicide: hopelessness and depression. You have to look at euthanasia or assisted suicide as more like suicide than like a good death. Second, this notion that there’s no slippery slope, as advocates have long claimed? Totally wrong. Look at Belgium and the Netherlands: First, it’s accepted for adults who are competent and give consent. Then, it’s “We’re going to extend it to neonates with genetic defects, and adolescents.” Any time we do anything in medicine, it’s the same way: We develop an intervention for a narrow group of people, and once it’s well accepted, it gets expanded. I think it’s false to say, “We can hold the line here.” It doesn’t work that way. Third, people say this is a quick, reliable, painless intervention. No medical intervention in history is quick, reliable, painless and has no flaws. In the Netherlands, there’s about a 17 to 20 percent rate of problems, something screwing up. Initially, when the Oregon people published — “We have no problems. Every case went flawlessly!” — you knew the data was wrong. It had to be wrong. Either you’re not getting every case, so the denominator was wrong, or people are lying. There’s nobody who does a procedure, not even blood draws, and it’s perfect every time. So this idea that this is quick, reliable and painless is nonsense. And the last and most important point is: You want to legalize these interventions to improve end-of-life care in this country? That’s your motivation and this is your method? PS: I don’t think people argue that–— ZE: [interrupting] Oh, people do argue that! That is the justification for these procedures: It’s going to improve end-of-life care and give people control. The problem is, even in countries that have legalized it for a long time, at best 3 percent of people die this way in the Netherlands and Belgium. At best, 10 percent express interest in it. That is not a way to improve end-of-life care. You don’t focus lots of attention and effort on 3 percent. It’s the 97 percent, if you want to improve care. The typical response is, we can do both. Hmmm. Every system I’ve ever seen has a bandwidth problem: You can only do so much. We ought to focus our attention on the vast, vast majority, 97 percent of people, for whom this is not the right intervention and get that right — and we are far from that. I don’t think legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide are the way to go. It’s a big, big distraction.

why is most of the evil of this world the work of men? I suppose there are a few evil women, but they are a rarity, and I can’t say I ever met one.

General Environment Principles Here are some things to keep in mind when organizing a child's environment. (1) Participation in Family Life: from the first days on invite the child into the life of the family. In each room—the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, front hall, and so forth have a space for the child to function. (2) Independence: The child's message to us at any age is "Help me to do it myself." Supporting this need shows respect for and faith in the child. Think carefully about family activities in all areas of the home, and arrange each space to support independence. A twin mattress for the child's bed; a small cupboard, coat tree, or low clothing rod or hook wherever the child dresses or undresses (front hall, bathroom, bedroom, etc.); a stool or bench for removing shoes and boots; inviting shelves for books, dishes, toys. This is a very child-friendly bathroom in a home in Oregon where the mother, a Montessori Assistant to Infancy, had an infant community. 4) Belongings: This brings up a very important point. It is too much for anyone to care for or enjoy belongings when there are too many out at one time. In preparing the home environment for a child, have a place to keep clothing, toys, and books that are not being used. Rotate these when you see the child tiring of what is out on the shelf, in the book display, or toy basket. Have just a few pieces of clothing available to the child to choose what to wear each day, just a few toys that are enjoyed, and only a few favorite or new books. (5) Putting Away & The Sense of Order: "Discipline" comes from the same word as "disciple" and our children become disciplined only by imitating us; just as we teach manners such as saying "thank you" by modeling this for our children instead of reminding, we can teach them to put away their books and toys only by gracefully and cheerfully doing it over and over in their presence.

Okay, son. All I am saying is that sometimes you’re doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You’re not quitting. You just keep going. That’s the pioneer spirit.

I say by pure chance, but is it really? Am I allowed to think that some coincidences are more than coincidental? Can I be forgiven for thinking, or hoping, that the universe, or some guiding daemon, has been nudging me, whispering to me? Or else just playing with me? Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of nine-thousand-year-old sandals… salvaged from a cave in Oregon? Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born?

Equivalent ways of describing something should lead to equivalent judgments and decisions,” says University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic. “But it’s not true. People’s judgments about risk are very moveable and subjective.” When you face a chance to make or lose money, your decision can be pulled one way or another like a lump of Silly Putty just by a minor change in context or description—what psychologists call framing.