David Bromberg

Forty seven years ago on memory lane

This was an interesting week in my life 47 years ago. A lot of my musical history happened 45 to 55 years ago and my memory is surprisingly still pretty clear. Lot of memories coming down the pike, especially next year. 77 was epic.

I flew back to Washington D.C. the last week of July 1979 for a condominium conference. I was building homes and projects back then. It turned out to be the most eventful flight of my life. A drunk passenger who had been cut off from alcohol tried to get into the cockpit and finally started beating on a male flight attendant.

I was amazed that everybody on the plane merely watched and I jumped up and tackled the man, pinning his arms behind his back. Only then did an undercover air marshal come up with handcuffs. Three of us tied him to his chair with belts for the remainder of the flight. 

He had a male companion but for the rest of the flight the man maintained that he didn't know him. He was on his own. I don't know if you have ever flown to Dulles but you leave the plane in the middle of the tarmac and get on busses or trains back to the terminal. We were met by about two dozen members of law enforcement with guns, waiting to take the guy in. They said he was going to away for a real long time.

I get on the bus and I get what might be the only standing ovation I have ever received in my life from my fellow passengers, for getting off my ass and doing something. I don't think I have ever mentioned it before but still feel proud of my actions.

At the end of the conference I flew to New York to see my mother. Lowell George of Little Feat was playing at the Bottom Line on the 24th of June, his only solo tour. I was a big Little Feat fan, had seen them at their best but by this time George was struggling with serious addiction. My wonderful friend Doug Garn accompanied me to the show.

George was extremely overweight by this time, wearing camouflage gear and sweating up a storm. It was a terrible night, you could feel that things were really off. Rode hard, put away wet.

It proved to be his penultimate show. He died in his hotel room four days later, after one last show at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington D.C..

I flew to Portland from New York, meeting my friend Mark Alderman for a Grateful Dead show at the Portland Speedway. 

Mark worked for Infinity Records, helped manage Spyro Gyra, had once worked for Cashbox. He loved the dead and the great bi-coastal scene that we were a part of.

He had swank digs off Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.

He was a handsome, quick witted guy, could walk into any bar and come out with the most lovely companion. 

We once went to the Renaissance Fair and he astounded me shooting arrows, he was one of the most talented archers I have ever seen. He said he learned at camp.

Everything came easy for Mark.

Too easy. He fell for the wrong woman and eventually took his own life, not long after. 

Too many drugs in the equation back then. For many of us.

We stayed with his friend Joel, a very strange guy. Won't even talk about that weird night.

The Dead were playing with some real favorites of mine, Bromberg and McGuinn, Clark and Hillman. You can see the setlists here. I loved those guys but I don't remember a stellar performance.

It was a cold and drizzly morning when we got to the raceway. Bootleg posters advertised the show as Byrds and Dead.

I remember very little if anything of the music of the two opening acts at this point. The dead came on and delivered a decent if perfunctory first set. The nearby mountains provided a beautiful backdrop behind the stage.

At some point Bob Weir made what I thought at the time was a very cavalier and snide remark about Lowell's passing, "It was fun while it lasted." In any case, the weather got weird and we got some rain but not too much.

The high point of the show was an incredible Other One that seemed in perfect synch with the clouds which parted at the crescendo. One of the best I ever saw. Or heard I guess. You can hear the dead part here if you feel like it. But sometimes the recordings don't translate, you have to have been there.

I would skip to the Estimated Prophet but suit yourself.

I was talking to two friends yesterday, both rock and roll photographers, about how much fun we had back then. Leven shot jazz album covers and rock and roll for Fantasy, Peter did a lot of photo work for a lot of people, including the Eagles and maybe Capricorn.

We were lucky to be there for some great tunes. Thought it would last forever. It didn't. But like the late Bobby Ace said, it was fun while it lasted.

*

Sad to hear that one of my favorite songwriters, Chip Taylor, has died. Taylor wrote Angel of the Morning and Wild Thing, as well as my personal favorite, Fuck all the perfect people amongst a host of other great tunes. He was a genius and the brother of John Voight, and a real character.

Matty Groves

Don't kill the messenger

Ready for some bad news? President Trump is nothing if not an agent of discord and an enemy of established order. One merely has to look at his alienation of long time allies like Canada, Italy, Britain and Nato and his new choice of friends in Moscow and North Korea to know that the deck has been radically shuffled.

But some conventions are sacrosanct and should not be trifled with, like the protection of envoys and diplomats. We don't kill the messenger. It's an old rule.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on social media. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again.”

In a 20-minute phone call with Fox News, which revealed his sensitivity to the criticism being directed at him by Republicans and Democrats alike, he said: “We may take over the strait, if we have to. If they don’t make a deal, we’ll collect tolls.”

Referring to the strait, he appeared to threaten to kidnap the Iranian negotiators, saying: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”

Yesterday Trump intimated, with customary crude profanity, that if things didn't go his way, Iranian diplomats would never make it back to their country. This sort of threat is taboo in diplomatic circles and undercuts approximately a thousand years of war time civility and behavior.

This all started back in the thirteenth century. 

Between 1219 and 1221, the Mongol forces under Genghis Khan invaded the lands of the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia. 

When a senior Mongol diplomat was executed by Khwarazmshah Muhammed II, Khan mobilized his forces and invaded, laying waste to Khorasan, destroying Herat, Nishapur, and Merv, three of the largest cities in the world. 

Herodotus records that when heralds of the Persian king Xerxes demanded "earth and water" (i.e., symbols of submission) of Greek cities, the Athenians threw them into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well for the purpose of suggesting they would find both earth and water at the bottom, these often being mentioned by the messenger as a threat of siege.

Vlad Țepeș aka Vlad the Impaler, the Volvolde of Wallachia, was said to have nailed the turbans of Turkish emissaries to their heads when they demanded he collect certain taxes. 

In the Crusades, the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was sent by the Holy See to negotiate some way to bring back the gnostic Cathar heretics to the faith, and in turn he was murdered by the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI.

A Roman envoy was urinated on as he was leaving the city of Tarentum. The oath of the envoy, "This stain will be washed away with blood!", was fulfilled during the Pyrrhic War.

William of Tyre mentions how the Templars killed an Assassin envoy in an ambush in order to prevent him returning home with the peace treaty he had arranged with the Franks.

Sultan Mehmed Han crushed the skull of the Hungarian envoy despite the Prophet Muhammad's prohibition on killing messengers.

The concept of diplomatic immunity can be found in ancient Indian epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, where messengers and diplomats were given immunity from capital punishment. 

In Ramayana, when the demon king Ravana ordered the killing of Hanuman, Ravana's younger brother Vibhishana pointed out that messengers or diplomats should not be killed, as per ancient practices.

Count Matveyev

The British Parliament first guaranteed diplomatic immunity to foreign ambassadors under the Diplomatic Privileges Act in 1709, after Count Andrey Matveyev, a Russian resident in London, was subjected to verbal and physical abuse by British bailiffs.

The problem with bellicose bullies like the President is that one day it might be another country threatening our envoys and I would like to think that we would want to see them respected as well. 

There are minimal rules of behavior in diplomatic circles but this is actually a quite important one.

*

Trump ties possible Greenland takeover to Red Lobster shrimp giveaway.

Problematic News Consumption

Blogreaders may have noticed that there is a lot more food, birds and music of late and less political material. Well, there is a reason for that. We live in a divided world and I don't want to add to the rancor. Although I clearly have a partisan bent I would rather focus on things that unite rather than things that divide.

I saw an interesting article recently at Science Daily, Your brain was never designed for this much bad news.

Turns out we are on overload, well people like me and my friend Steve anyway, people that process a lot of information.

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 percent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 percent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six percent of those who didn’t.

It is a good read,  give it a look, that is, if you feel like getting triggered. Which brings me back to my friend Steve at the donut shop. You think I am a Cassandra with my negative news, Steve has a steady stream every morning. 

I repeatedly tell him not to react, that it is bad for his health. I lost my faith in humanity a long time ago, don't think I have quite as big a problem, you just can't take this crazy life too seriously. It will literally make you sick.

In some ways I admire those friends of mine, many on the right, that never read the news or open a newspaper or website. Not that ignorance is bliss but the reality is that both the left and right live in these impenetrable media silos and often lack the critical thinking skills to discern what passes for truth these days.

So screw it, go fishing, bake a cake, climb a mountain. Just don't be constantly triggered. Not good for you.

Gram at Altamont

Uneven vocals but I don't think I have ever heard it before. I love Parsons.

Yummy chicken

 

I wanted to cook something simple last night and was hankering for chicken thighs. I decided to do them a bit differently than usual.

Last week I made drumsticks and was looking at a soul food recipe that recommended a teaspoon of baking powder in the rub in order to get crispier skin. Or was it a half teaspoon? I don't remember now.

Anyway the drumsticks came out great and I decided to add a half teaspoon to the dry rub I prepared last night. Now I assume and maybe I should not because everybody's tastebuds are different, that most of our poultry dry rubs are very similar. The only diff here is that my wife likes cumin, I can take it or leave it.

Depends how I feel.

My basic mix is salt, pepper, garlic powder, smoked paprika, cayenne, a little onion powder on occasion and either Italian seasoning or herbs de provence, depending on how I feel. Might add a little sweet paprika too, for depth.

When I made my drumsticks I decided to try and add some of this stuff. 

It had been sitting on the counter for a while, minding its own business.

Someone gave it to us to try and I forget who now. Sorry!

I am not sure why but it added some wonderful piquant depth and complexity to the rub.

Might be the lemon peel or the thyme.

But what a difference.

I would use it once again last night.

We used the Weber the other night for lamb and fennel sausage, crookneck, corn and steaks, decided to stick with the oven this time.

I drizzled my olive oil, added my rub and then baked it skin side down on a sheet for twenty five minutes.

400°.

I usually start skin side up, don't you?

I flipped it at the allotted time and basted four pieces with the Kosmos cherry habonero sauce and four with the Kinders honey hot at 425° for five minutes and then a second baste of the same duration.

The recipe called for a third baste but I was at 185° internal at that point and pulled them.

Between the excellent rub and the barbecue sauce this was some great chicken. 

Loved both sauces equally.

The recipe suggested a one minute broil at the end but I didn't see the need, it was pretty near perfect. 

Leslie made orzo and fresh broccoli and we had a delightful meal.

My late brother Buzz, a lawyer turned chef, would have turned 67 yesterday.

I would love to have cooked with him. 

Miss you, man.

*

We have been using a lot of different table salts of late and I want to write a blogpost about it. Leslie is crazy for some black hawaiian finishing salt right now. If you have a second and favor a certain salt, please send me a message.

Humble Pie

Ferruginous Hawk

 

The largest and in many ways most beautiful of all hawk species.

Detroit Emeralds

Buoyed

I had wanted to write about it for several weeks. The Trump administration, through the National Science Foundation, had proposed deepsixing the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which monitors critical weather data. After a bipartisan outcry, they have now reversed their decision.

The National Science Foundation is reversing a decision to shut down buoys and other maritime science equipment used to monitor weather and climate conditions along the Pacific Northwest coast and elsewhere.

Established in 2016, the Ocean Observatories Initiative maintains ocean monitoring instruments on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to collect open-access data used for weather forecasts, and wave tracking and other research. The program’s 900 ocean sensors, built for $386 million, also detect marine heatwaves and El Niño-related anomalies.

Last month, the Ocean Observatories Initiative announced it was “descoping,” a plan that involves removing in-water infrastructure by 2027. The National Science Foundation said the Coastal Endurance Array, previously deployed in the Northeast Pacific Ocean off the Oregon and Washington coasts, has already been removed from the water, but the agency is developing plans to redeploy it.

I am glad that somebody finally came to their senses on this. It is imperative that we have this sort of raw data in a time of significant global warming, turbulent weather and climate change.

Jan Hammer

The Jew Thing

Thoughtful piece on Israel by Ted Sasson. 

Did you read the story about the kid that won't work for jews? Cornell student Austin Franco has been pretty honest about his antipathy towards jews.  And now he is being financially rewarded for that hatred.

Sad, but I have worked for lots of people I couldn't stand, jews and nonjews. Still it is one thing to hate jews and Israel and another to target people and synagogues with bullets and fire. And that is also happening more and more often, especially in Europe and Canada right now. People are afraid to wear anything that might make them a target.

And we are not immune here in the United States either. From the ADL:

• Over half of Jewish Americans (55%) report experiencing some form of antisemitism in the past year.
• 79% of all respondents are concerned about antisemitism.
• Nearly one in five (18%) were either the victim of an assault, experienced threat of physical attack, or experienced verbal harassment due to their Jewish identity in the past year, while over one-third (36%) witnessed actual or threatened antisemitic violence.
• Jewish Americans experienced antisemitism in many contexts, with the most common ones including online, public spaces, the workplace, and educational institutions.
• Safety concerns are widespread among American Jews; over 50% are somewhat, very or always worried about personal safety, one-third have discussed with others what they would do in a “worst case” scenario, and 14% have developed a plan should they need to flee the country due to rising antisemitism. These rates are significantly higher for those that experienced direct antisemitic harm.
• Jewish-Americans who experienced direct antisemitic harm or witnessed antisemitic acts within the past 12 months exhibited higher rates of symptoms used to screen for anxiety and depression.
• One in five Jews who wore something distinctively Jewish before October 7 have since taken it off.

Clearly the antizionist movement doesn't discriminate with its hatred and violence. Any Jews are fair game, Israel supporters or not.

And then there is this Democratic woman candidate in New Mexico who wants to jail supporters of Zionism and castrate them, Maureen Galindo.

On social media this week she wrote, “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS.” She has elsewhere referred to the “synagogue of Satan,” a phrase with Biblical origins that was popularized by Louis Farrakhan to promote the idea that today’s Jews are inauthentic, and said that “Israeli leaders are not real Jews.”

On Instagram Wednesday Galindo wrote that, if elected, she would “write legislation so that all Zionism and support of Zionism is undoubtedly Anti-Semitic, since it’s Zionists harming the Semites.” The candidate added that she would turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” adding in parentheses, “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Never again? It can always happen again. 

Friends

Pillow talk

I need a new pillow. I even dreamt about getting a new pillow last night. 

I am getting a tmj problem, first in thirty years and I think my bad pillow is causing all sorts of alignment problems and various pains from my head to my knees. I'm not sleeping that well between the aches and the apnea, walking around tired.

I am a side sleeper. I like a firm pillow on the bottom and a soft down pillow I can squish and scrunch to mold and put under my neck.

So I started looking online.  Down pillow prices range from thirty five dollars and up as far as you want to go.

I think I have found one on amazon I like and then I read the bad reviews first and then usually high tail it to the next offering.

My favorite hotel pillow and mattress is the Westin brand.

These pillows, even with a 40% discount, are really expensive. But then you read the reviews and they say that they are nothing like the ones at the hotel, not nearly as comfy.

Lena likes the Ralph Lauren soft, says that they sometimes go on sale at Macy's. I don't think I can wait that long.

Anybody out there that can recommend a really good pillow brand in feather and down?  I would prefer to stay away from the acrylic poly fills.

Harvey Mandel

Tuesday Travels

 

As some of you know, my wife suffers from a rare condition called paroxysmal hemicrania.  It is a subset of cluster headaches aka suicide headaches and has been very debilitating. I have so much love and respect for her for dealing with near constant pain and not giving up but it makes her life very difficult.

She has tried ever potential cure in the world but as I said, it is rare and research is scant. She saw the local expert for botox injections, was part of a nerve block study at Stanford and has just completed sixty days with an occipital stimulator in her brain stem courtesy of UCSD.

Nothing has really worked but she did undergo a little relief with the stimulator, which was removed yesterday. They got the wire completely out, which is a good thing as sometimes pieces break off and stay.

Anyway, during her procedure, I took the picture of this couple in the waiting room yesterday, which turned out not to be a couple. He was waiting for his wife.

Edie, on the right, is 91. I told her that I had to take shot and she liked it, was once a photographer. A resident of La Jolla since 1962, we had a very interesting conversation which I will not go into now.

Her husband lived to over 100. I showed her my bird photography, she liked it. Neat woman.

*

After Leslie's procedure we went to lunch, her choice. She said Din Tae Fung in La Jolla but when we got there it was an hour and a half wait. It always has a long wait, that is why I never go. I can get food nearly as good on Convoy for a lot less hassle. A girl in line said that there is a two month reservation backlog.

No thanks.

We went to Convoy instead and did a Chinese food crawl. Stopped at Dumpling Inn for Xiao Long Bao but it is closed Monday and Tuesday. She ran into Jasmine Express for Sesame balls with azuke paste. We then went and tried a new restaurant for us, next to Magic Kitchen, Szechuan Chef.

We had salted pickles, xiao long bao and garlic ribs.

Quite good. 

But not good enough to make my A list rotation.

Then we went next door and I made her try the cumin beef with hand pulled noodle at Shan Xi.

So delicious. Definitely A list. She went next door to Tastee bakery and bought purple taro cake to take home.

We visited dear friends Lena and Ron later in Cardiff. 

My wife wanted to see the ocean so we drove to Grandview. Nice to feel the sea wind in our faces.

So happy to be with such a wonderful person to love and share my life with. 37 years and counting!

Jeff Beck

Scrambled logic

I was talking to somebody, maybe Steve, and he said that the man at the farmer's market told him some of his customers carefully go through the egg cartons and then remove all the brown and blue eggs, oddly they will only buy a carton of perfectly uniform white shelled eggs.

I am going to be honest with you. I really don't understand this behavior. I don't think there is much if any difference in either quality or nutritional value. I also don't share the belief that brown eggs come from inferior, third world countries, brought up from the south with the screwworms by those nefarious souls that would wish to bring harm to our country.

Now I am not inferring white supremacy in the colored egg haters decisions or making any statements on the supreme goal of colored egg diversity but I do find the selection process somewhat curious. 

Perhaps the white shells more perfectly match the trendy new "navajo vanilla " color of french enameled cookware? Of course I champion your right to eat any colored egg you wish.

I used to raise chickens and I favored the blue or green eggs actually. True or not, I was once told that araucana eggs, the blueish ones, had slightly less cholesterol and more protein and I chose to believe it. [ed. note; It is true] Plus, I personally find them far prettier.

Perhaps there is a bible verse that says that the blue eggs shall not lie with the brown eggs, I don't know? 

People get real crazy with theology.

I have a neighbor who will kill any snake on his property, including harmless kings, garter and garden varieties because of something the bible supposedly says about evil serpents.

Such a strange world we live in.

On the Freedom Trail

50 years ago this week I watched the Grateful Dead do a string of shows at the Boston Music Hall. Boston was a great city to trip around in, with architecture that varied from old buildings from our founding to very space age.

The shows were a lot of fun, it was one of my favorite venues, very small and intimate;  a volleyball game on the floor before the shows, lots of frisbee action. The shows were rocking, I remember a great St. Stephen and if I remember correctly a Comes a Time.

My memory is a bit foggy but I believe that I returned from a year abroad in Israel and Greece before the show. I had to cut my overseas adventure short, an unfortunate encounter with a beguiling lass from St. Moritz required that I seek powerful antibiotics stat.

I flew to New York and got a shot in the butt and then on to Boston, where I stayed with my older sister Liz, who was living in Revere at the time. Caught all three nights of this tour, the rest is a fog. But I believe that I first met my friend Doug Garn at these shows. I think I had seen him at Bethesda Fountain previously but never got to know him until Boston.

However, my memory might be a bit shaky, this was admittedly a long time ago. I am happy to say that I caught the band at a time when they were very, very good.

lapsed catholic

Jonathan sent me this, I thought it was funny. It is age restricted, you have to watch it on youtube. Give it a shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NJToxBTk2A

Tull

Arrivaderci!

Just a short note to let Fallbrookians that dear friend of the blast Deliman aka Dominick Grossi is moving to Holland with his lovely wife Linda. We wish the long time sandwich maker the greatest happiness with his move to the Netherlands.

He was so sad they took Trump's name off the Kennedy Center that he decided to split.

I hope they frisbee golf over there.

The old restaurant, which he sold, is still going strong. I stopped by the other day, quite busy. Keep supporting them, they are all nice people.

Fat man in the bathtub

Food

I was talking to a friend this morning who mentioned that she loved when I wrote about food but eschewed the political stuff. I get that. Although, like her I have no political affiliation, and abhor both the far left and right, my brand of centrism is obviously a different flavor than hers.

In any case, it's a dead horse. Maybe I can talk about food?

Although I haven't been cooking too much, I have been eating.  A lot of eating. Won't even tell you what I weigh but I have set a personal record, not even trying. Will have to deal with that later I suppose...

So what have I been eating?

Jim and Debbie were down to their last steak so I bought another beef subprimal and we broke it down into sixteen beautiful New York steaks. 

Price has gone up about twenty percent but it is still doable as I think that they are apt to go quite higher for a variety of reasons.

Buy it while it is reasonably affordable or get ready to eat a lot of chicken.

Took half home, seal a mealed them and stuck them in the freezer.

 I cooked one up the first night. 

Probably the best New York yet, tasted dry aged, a lot of intramuscular fat, definitely the consensual favorite over the ribeye and Top Sirloin.

If it was not a prime it missed it by a hair.

*

We had three racks of ribs in the freezer and decided it was time to do an oven rib night.

Two beef, one pork. 

Both good but the beef were superior.

I was going to make homemade sauce but Les said not to bother.

I made a special rub and we had a whole row of sauces to try, came down to these two after the taste test.

Both great.

*

What else?

We made a nice jidori chicken piccata with angel hair, mushrooms and artichoke hearts.

I got some grief for adding too much butter to my olive oil but I think it tastes better.

I also added a little too much wine which we had to cook off, rookie that I am.

The jidori chicken has so much flavor!

Not exactly a pretty plate but delicious.

We often favor bucatini but it was nice to go to a lighter pasta for this meal.

*

Pretty much everything else has been restaurant food with all my trips to the doctor and San Diego.

Pulled noodles with cumin beef and cabbage at Shan Xi Magic Kitchen.

Serious comfort food,  noodles with a bit of tooth and a bite.

I always get the wider hand ripped noodle, this was a treat!

Next day Wagman and I went to Jasmine and had an expensive dim sum lunch, barbecued pork, roast pork, duck, flanken, shumai, the works.

Then it got really expensive. 

I screwed up the apple pay in the parking lot and got a sixty dollar ticket.

I called Diamond Parking and the guy was nice enough to lower the ticket to fourteen.

Thank you, Moses!

Picked up cumin lamb from Spicy City for my wife. Her favorite.

I think that is all the food for now. 

Great horned owlet

 

Shiva's Headband

What's a good fly?

Another Texas story caught my eye. There is a rare break between MAGA Texas and the Federal government. It concerns beef, something Texas takes very seriously.

Texas is being beset by new cases of New World Screwworm. The critters kill Texas cows. New World screwworms are actually flies whose larvae burrow into the open wounds of mammals, causing infection and even death. They were first discovered in the United States in 1923 and Texas thought they had them eradicated in the 1960's after a massive eradication campaign.

This was accomplished by releasing sterile flies among other things. Unfortunately, a facility in Panama is the only one in the world that currently makes these sterilized screwworms. 

People like Michael Kelsey, from the Oklahoma Cattleman’s Association, want at least one production facility in the U.S.

“The biggest thing we need to do right now, in our minds, is start producing more of the sterile male flies,” Kelsey said. “And in order to do that we need a couple, at least one, maybe two, perhaps even three, depending on how far along this goes, production facilities.”

A group of bipartisan lawmakers filed a bill in Congress in May that would create such a facility, but it is still awaiting a hearing.

Unfortunately, like everything else in our society, the issue has become politically polarized. Dems note the cuts that Trump has made at the USDA and the effects of climate change on the problem.

Nearly a dozen Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter to Rollins this week questioning whether job losses at the USDA have hurt food inspections and livestock safety programs.

Nearly 20% of the counties in the U.S. that started 2025 with at least one employee from the federal Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service ended the year with none, the letter said.

Repubs are blaming illegals for bringing the worm up even though human carriers are very rare. 

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wants to blame Joe Biden, because, well, they always want to blame Joe Biden.

Texas Ag Commissioner Sid Miller wants to try a different tack than the sterile flies, poison pellet bait. This interview with him is sort of priceless.

Texas Standard: Are you satisfied with how the USDA has responded so far?

Sid Miller: Well, for the most part, yes. I think they’re responding correctly.

I’m a little frustrated that I can’t get them to use the fly bait. The bait is… You don’t put it in a trap. You actually just put it out. It comes in a pellet. So you scatter the pellets out and the flies are drawn to it by an attractor. And then when they eat the pellet, of course it kills them.

They’ve used it before. I mean, it’s a USDA program that was used in 1976. We had 29,000 cases of screwworms in the fall of ’76. We put out the fly bait and we went from in the fall of ’76, 29,000 cases. In the spring of ’77, we had 39 cases. So it’s almost 100% effective.

They’re very reluctant, actually, to use the fly bait. They say it’s environmentally unsound. I keep asking why, and they say, ‘well, it would probably kill the good flies, too.’ My answer is good flies? I mean, what’s a good fly? That’s kind of like a good fire ant. I don’t care. I mean we’re going to kill some house flies, or you’re afraid we’re gonna kill some stable flies?

So I don’t know what a good fly is, but anyway, that’s the reason. I don’t think it’s a sound reason. I think it is a little ridiculous myself, but anyway, I’m going to keep working it.

I love the question and had to think about it for a second. What is a good fly?  Miller asks a relevant question and may have a valid point. I decided to find out if there were good flies and what the positives are to having them in our ecosystem. Noah had to put the fly pair on the ark for a reason, right?

What have I found? Well, they are excellent pollinators and the only pollinators for some types of chocolate. They also pollinate apples, strawberries, carrots, onions and bell peppers as well as black pepper and coriander.

They break down dead animals, feces, and rotting vegetation, recycling vital nutrients back into the soil. Without them we would be sitting on a big heap of poo.

They are a protein source for a huge number of species including birds, reptiles, amphibians and other insects.

The earth would be in a tragic state without flies, for all of their nagging irritation. But it leads me to a memory of an old conversation I had with Dr. Wolf once in New Mexico, the world's leading expert on mosquitos.

I asked the old doctor what the beneficial aspects to his favorite insect might be and he said something that I have never forgotten.

He said that without malaria, which the mosquito carried, vast untouched sections of the Congo and Amazon would have been overpopulated, which would have led to all sorts of horrible problems on our planet.

The universe has it pretty together and has got us this far. When so called experts try to get get in the way with their radical engineering solutions without considering tertiary reactions, watch out!

Love that dirty water?

I don't often report stories that I find on Fox News but the Blue Heron Blast is nothing if not fair and this one actually had merit. 

A woman in Trinidad, Texas was arrested on felony charges for reporting that her tap water was dirty on Facebook.

Jennifer Combs says she never set out to become the face of a fight over free speech, dirty water and small-town power. She says she was simply trying to help people in Trinidad, Texas, report problems with their water. Some residents had complained about discoloration, sediment, odors and health concerns. So Combs used her Southern Belle Watch Facebook page to collect reports and send them to the state.

Then, according to Combs, the situation took a turn that still sounds hard to believe. She says police came to her home and arrested her on a felony warrant over a Facebook post.

"I've never even had a speeding ticket," Combs said. "I'm a mom of four kids. I have one grandbaby right now. I have two more grandbabies on the way."

Story gets worse, the more you read. 

Combs says the post was later removed by Facebook after it was reported by a select group of people from the community and flagged, though she says Facebook did not tell her why. But before it came down, she says, then-Trinidad Police Chief Charles Gregory had taken a screenshot of it and posted it on the Trinidad Police Department Facebook page, accusing her of making a false report.

Except she never made a police report, she just posted something on Facebook! Anyway, the case went to a Grand Jury, which saw the whole thing was bunk and decided not to indict her. The water clerk in the town is fired for failing to say that Combs offended her. A judge later dropped the disorderly conduct issue involving her. Then, she says, the city fired that judge. The City Attorney was fired the same night.

The town is continuing to press on against her.

So what is the overriding lesson here? You may think you have a federal right to free speech but not in Texas you don't. And be careful what you put on Facebook or Instagram because they just might be coming to get you and you could end up in the hoosegaw.

Med report

I got my first chemo treatment with the new drug yesterday. 

It is a gel and the doctor hopes that it will find its way better to my bladder tumors than the other drugs we have used in the past. 

Although it has been around for a while, it has just been approved for this new application. 

I have waited almost a year for it.

I am the second person to get it in our area, the first was just before me. 

The drug company sent three people down to make sure that it was administered properly. 

I looked at the literature for the drug and only 29 people were in the test group, 12% had negative side effects.

Nothing too life threatening. 

Hope I can skate through.

It is powerful. Like BCG, I am going to have to be careful where I pee because contact with this can cause pregnant women cleaning bathroom toilets to abort. I have to be careful to avoid skin contact because rashes can develop.

What they didn't tell me was that I need to do this every Wednesday for six weeks. I thought it was a one time shot.

This is problematic because number one, it is right in the middle of my Santa Barbara show and two, the effects of these types of immunotherapeutic agents tends to be cumulative with me and by the sixth week I am really hurting.

Hopefully this time will be different.

It is administered in a small tube through the penis, past the swollen prostate and right into the bladder. Historically I have experienced a high percentage of UTIs after this procedure. I am on cipro, hopefully will avert that this time. There is also a lot of general bruising involved.

Anyway I feel pretty good considering, little harder when the lidocaine wears off,  but thought that I would tell you what is going on. Minor nausea and discomfort. On top of that, I had to go to see the cardiologist this week, in order to keep getting my blood pressure medicine. Once a year. I don't get to see the doctor anymore, only the NP and things didn't go real well.

I get there and immediately say something to piss off the receptionist. Accidentally. I apologized for my poor language and behavior. A minute later a woman walks in with two boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts for the staff. My kind of cardiologist!

The NP asked me how I felt and I said fine and he asked me if I was lying?  Sort of weird. I asked him if he thought I needed to gain weight and things went downhill from there. I think we have communication issues. More labs and a calcium score tomorrow. He saw something in the heart physiology that he doesn't like.

Always something.

Lani Hall

Daily blotter

GOP welcomes Screwworm back to Texas.

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They are watching you. And keeping a file.When it comes to ICE your civil liberties evidently fly right out the window.

...Scarlet Kim, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Trump administration has set a precedent of characterizing lawful First Amendment activities as possible crimes.

"We know that very high level officials within DHS and Lyons himself have explicitly equated First Amendment-protected activities like video recording, gathering information about federal agents, and sharing that information publicly as essentially potential criminal acts that threaten officer safety," said Kim, who is representing observers in Memphis and Minneapolis in federal lawsuits against agencies involved in immigration enforcement.

"So their own definition of what potentially violates the law and could trigger surveillance against an individual includes activities that are squarely protected by the First Amendment," Kim said.

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Forest Service spraying Round-up on public lands

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Trump loves the inflation.

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Cadet Bonespurs

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New York and Trump

Allan Holdsworth

Doge Bags

I think that this story at Wired is worth looking at.

A federal IT staffer filed a complaint about DOGE, then went public. Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his brake lines were cut. Now he’s suing for defamation.

...In a new defamation lawsuit, filed by Berulis in a DC court on April 17 and made public this week, Berulis alleges that Musk himself made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. The complaint was initially filed under seal because Berulis maintains a security clearance that requires prepublication review of anything related to his work with the government.

Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut.

Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis.

Like I needed another reason to despise Elon Musk.

Fela Kuti

The Bored Samurai

Having a long background in martial arts, I love to geek out on samurai movies. 

Have binged Lone Wolf and Cub, Zatoichi and Hanzo the Razor. 

The Japanese genre is called Chambara or "Sword fighting" movies.

I found a new series recently on YouTube, The Bored Samurai, from 1973.

Saotome Mondonuske is hatamoto to the Tsunayoshi Shogun. 

He bears a crescent shaped scar on his forehead that tingles when he senses trouble and signifies that he has the Shogun's permission to cut people to pieces.

Guy rips through twenty or thirty antagonists at a time, with very little blood shown.

Pretty much the same plot every time, evildoers trying to overthrow the Shogun and damsels fall in love with Saotome left and right.

Great acting for this sort of thing. The lead is played by the excellent Utaemon Ichikawa. His faithful servant Kinai is also a hoot.

If you are a real nasty person, our protagonist will unleash his dual frontal blade assault on you. Believe me, you do not want that to happen.

Oddly, it looks like their is a stand in for the lead in episode seven that is never explained and ddidn't feel quite right. Still, a nice quick binge.