Eluding the Germs; plus, Mohamud verdict and Tully's sale

Is the ’flu season over when Punxsutawney Phil pokes his head out of the ground?

It’s been a nerve-wracking winter so far. In years past, when stories ran in the media about the progress of the latest version(s) of influenza, I could feel reasonably safe, because I spend most of my working day at home. I don’t go to an office anymore where I’m trapped with other people who have come in to work still sick, and I don’t have to ride germ-ridden buses and trains every day.

Regular readers of this blog may remember a commentary I posted two years ago about wee beasties in our modern, tech-laden world.

For the past four to six weeks, though, many of my local Facebook friends have been bitching and moaning about a really rough bout of the ’flu this year -- and in a few cases, some appear to have suffered more than one round!

Wednesday night I went to the final rehearsal for a staged reading of three new short plays scheduled for this Saturday, and at least three of the five other people in the room were recovering from bad colds. One had experienced laryngitis as part of her sickness, and was only just coming out of that.

When it’s both that widespread and that close, I get to feeling paranoid and surrounded on all sides.

Business as (un)Usual

More than two years ago — two years and two months, actually — I wrote on this blog about the breaking news story of a 19-year-old “Islamic terrorist” who had tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb in downtown Portland a few blocks from my apartment.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud attempted to explode a bomb in Pioneer Square during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony for which thousands of people from the Portland metro area had gathered. But the bomb was a harmless fake, supplied to Mohamud by the FBI, which had been assisting him for the preceding four months in the person of an undercover agent posing as an Islamic terrorist.

In custody ever since, Mohamud finally went on trial this week in federal court for the alleged attempt at a terrorist bombing. The court is also just a few blocks from the site of the alleged bombing attempt, and maybe ten blocks from my apartment. (In fact it overlooks the two parks where Occupy Portland made its encampment a little over a year ago, between Oct. 6 and Nov. 12, 2011.) As I write, the undercover FBI agent who made contact with the teenager in July 2010 is testifying about their activities between that July and his November 26 arrest.

Coffee . . . Black, White, and Green

Friday morning’s news that the bankrupt Seattle coffee chain Tully’s had been purchased by an investment group that includes Patrick Dempsey, the star of “Grey’s Anatomy” (often referred to as “Dr. McDreamy”) brought up a lot of coffee-related thoughts and memories.

Coffee is ubiquitous in our jacked-in, high-tech world. Local stores and national chains are routinely mobbed every weekday morning before people settle down to their PCs and cubicles; then again at mid-morning breaks, at noon, and even after quitting time. Apparently, many teens and even pre-teens get a daily caffeine fix.

I did not grow up drinking coffee. I have no idea whether my parents ever drank it. I know we had tea from my mother’s Japanese upbringing. I vaguely remember my father liked a roasted-grain substitute for coffee called Postum.

When I was a kid, I associated coffee with the Folgers ads that had “Mrs. Olson” purring “it’s the richest kind” about the “mountain grown, for better flavor” brand. Coffee was just a thing that grownups drank; a bit stodgy and a lot less cool than cigarettes (which didn’t interest me, either). You pictured commercial coffee bulbs and squat white mugs in greasy spoon restaurants and church kitchens.

Fight Tactics for the Online Crusader

As I mentioned the other day, in the weeks since the Clackamas Town Center shooting and the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I’ve engaged in many debates with people on Facebook about gun control.

I’m not going to repeat those arguments . . . yet. What I wanted to examine today was the meta-issue of how to talk with people you violently disagree with, and probably more important, why. As a veteran of several decades of online firefights -- back in the days of Usenet, some of the most heated arguments I got into occurred on the Camille Paglia discussion list -- I’ve had a lot of experience with Internet battles.

I have a couple of Facebook friends -- people I probably linked up with as friends of friends, rather than people I know personally -- who are staunch gun rights advocates. I don’t go out of my way to antagonize these folks; I just calmly dispute some of their assertions to one another on an irregular basis. We go back and forth a while, and then I wander off.

A few days ago, one of that crowd typed in a comment whose like I’ve seen many times in the course of Internet debates on any number of subjects. “Give it up,” he told the ally who was arguing with me; “Not going to change a liberal mindset … Can’t be won.”

Back Again

Wow, where does the time go?

If I were to guess the last time I posted to this blog, I would have said two months ago . But it's been three.

That's going to change. I'll make this one short and sweet -- with the promise that there will be plenty to come. Soon.

2012 was a difficult but interesting year, not only for the nation and the world but for me. 2013 no doubt offers more of the same, though I'm not inclined to play the predictions game.

As I stated here a year ago, I also don't make New Year's resolutions, because they strike me as an exercise in setting oneself up to fail. Too often, we resolve to fix or stop doing something, and one simple misstep becomes an automatic black mark . . . and an inducement to give up.

I prefer to be more general and vague; I set some goals for the year. Not so much specific, tangible goals, because again, too many things are out of our control and it's easy for bad luck to look like personal failure. Rather, I resolve at the back of my head to do more of this or that . . . to push my life and activities in a direction that brings me closer to the kind of person I want to be.

That includes writing. With regard to this blog, I can predict a substantial increase in activity. I've certainly not lacked ideas for topics to write about.

As you might guess, in recent weeks I've had a number of debates with various folks on Facebook about gun control, a subject on which I've had occasion to write before. Recent news headlines and online firefights have provided fodder for multiple future commentaries. There are new developments in news events I wrote about a year or two ago, such as the supposed 2010 Pioneer Square "terrorist bomber," Mohamed Mohamud.

There's also recent news about how the government suppressed the Occupy movement last year, terming it a "terrorist threat" while at the same time admitting that Occupy was a peaceful movement. I participated in a small way in Occupy Portland, and wrote a lot on this blog about what I observed. The latest news outpaces what my paranoid imagination can devise about how "they're out to get us."

2012 was also a good year for pleasure reading. I read a total of 160 books and more than 50,000 pages, so I imagine there might be a thing or two to say about that, the way I wrote about reading Proust more than a year ago. And there's always plenty to say about the latest electronic gadgets, Americans' lemming-like race to own and be owned by them, and their effects of our voracious demand on the lives (and deaths) of people on the other side of the globe.

Stay tuned.