Daily Blues & Views

 I love bittersweet chocolate ice cream. The trouble is, very few companies make it. That wasn’t always the case. A few years ago the Three Twins company made a wonderful bittersweet chocolate. Like many things we love, it disappeared when the company went out of business. That happens all too often these days. We find a product we love and then it’s suddenly gone. I have a long list of things I always looked forward to that have disappeared.  So it goes. A few months ago, while browsing the ice cream freezer at my local grocery, I chanced to see the words Bittersweet Chocolate on an ice cream container. Well, not exactly. It was a cashew milk frozen dessert boldly displaying my favorite flavor. With lowered expectations, I purchased the product and was delighted to find it was really good. The flavor I’d been missing was now back in my life.  Not for long. This product, manufactured by the Forager company suddenly disappeared. No store that had previously carried the fla...

       About 55  years ago, when I was in my Junior year of college at UCLA, I participated in a most exciting activity.  On a large bulletin board on the ground floor of Royce Hall, far away from the ads for typewriter service, and upcoming concerts and speakers, way up in the right-hand corner a little experiment was taking place.       an anonymous group of students was exchanging ideas and opinions under pseudonyms.  It was the age of flower children and war resistors.  It was smack dab in the big middle of the Civil Rights movement.  Nixon was the President, and the Beatles were still a relatively new group.  Dylan was transitioning from Folk to Rock, Janis Joplin was about a year away, and the Rolling Stones were a competent blues band of British blokes.       There were no cell phones or computers.  Gas costs about a quarter a gallon and tuition for arguably one of the best universities...

 I just finished a thousand mile road trip. One of the things that happens When you spend the better part of your day in a car is that you hear things on the radio that you might normally have missed. While I often listen to music while driving, I mostly listen to NPR stations from city to city, state to state. It’s always fascinating to hear the differences between the larger cities versions of NPR and those national stations emanating from smaller or university towns. So it was last weekend while driving back to Portland from the Bay Area I chanced to hear the name and then the voice of a former student of mine. It was on one of those Sunday afternoon NPR programs that deal with important subjects, but that many people miss because they aren’t in their cars at that time. The topic was AI and other recent computer consequences that our culture is bracing for. I was vaguely listening, concentrating more on passing large semi trucks and noting the distance to the next town. When I h...