Antique Dealers Beware!

"The State of California Department of Fish and Game is ACTIVELY raiding auction houses and antique shows, confiscating ivory. It is now illegal to sell or have the intent to sell ANY IVORY within the State of California or to sell it to any bidders within the State of California REGARDLESS OF THE AGE of the ivory. The fine is a minimum of $1000 per violation and a maximum up to $5000 per violation."

The calls and letter started coming in last night. Did I know what the State of California was doing in regards to ivory and certain other animal products under the new law? Apparently the original nanny state is starting a reign of terror against antique dealers. You can't even sell a piano with ivory keys! My 1905 Washburn guitar has ivory inlays in the fretboard. Is it now contraband?

This is the first letter I received on the subject from a person I do not believe that I know:


Hi Mike and Nancy,

I bet you two don't get too many joint e mails but I thought that you both should know about a conversation I just had with Robin Mesnick (?) who manages the Wertz Bros Antique Mall in Santa Monica.  On March 30th they were raided by the Calif Dept of Fish and Game along with their Federal counterparts.  The officials did not announce themselves but came into the store just after it opened.  There were seven or eight of them and they acted like customers sending merchandise up to the desk.  They stayed for four or five hours.

What they were looking for was ivory (regardless of age), tortoiseshell, stuffed birds ie ducks, geese, sea turtles, stuffed animal heads, etc.  Having finally announced who they were, they confiscated what they found.  They got the name and addresses of the dealers who owned the items and they will each be fined $250.  Apparently having these items for sale is a felony and there could be jail time.  I seriously doubt that a lot of antique dealers will go to jail over an antique stuffed duck but $250 is a lot of money.  There is apparently some confusion over the ivory because they did not confiscate the items that they found.  They tagged them, left them in the cases and told Robin that they cannot be removed or sold until the store is notified.  Hell could freeze over before that happens!

The reason I am emailing you both is because they have also raided Alameda and Little Paris which is another large LA Antique Mall.  Robin feels they are on a mission and, since you have the two largest shows in California coming up, I thought they could be prime targets.

Robin thinks that the store may also be fined.  If that is true, so could the shows.

See you both soon.

Anne S----

This law is going to have horrible implications for the antique business. Georg Jensen tableware with the ivory finials? Go to jail. The picture above is a french boule table that I own, a gift from my father. It is made of tortoiseshell and dates from around 1860. Illegal to sell now. The law used to be pre 1927 ivory was okay. In 1989 changes were made to the law that still allowed for the sale of historical ivory. This graph shows what the law had been, in regards to owning ivory:

Now our business has been criminalized. Insane. This is PETA run amok. It is going to hurt an already beset industry even worse.  I hope that clearer heads will prevail and consider the implications this law will have on antique dealers. I can't sell a desk from the mid 19th century? Do they realize how much antique ivory is a part of the antiques trade? Is this the height of foolishness? Should we outlaw cotton because it was once picked by slaves?

California (Penal Code Section 653o).(a) It is unlawful to import into this state for commercial
purposes, to possess with intent to sell, or to sell within the
state, the dead body, or any part or product thereof, of any polar
bear, leopard, ocelot, tiger, cheetah, jaguar, sable antelope, wolf
(Canis lupus), zebra, whale, cobra, python, sea turtle, colobus
monkey, kangaroo, vicuna, sea otter, free-roaming feral horse,
dolphin or porpoise (Delphinidae), Spanish lynx, or elephant.
(b) Commencing January 1, 2010, it shall be unlawful to import
into this state for commercial purposes, to possess with intent to
sell, or to sell within the state, the dead body, or any part or
product thereof, of any crocodile or alligator.
(c) Any person who violates any provision of this section is
guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be subject to a fine of not less
than one thousand dollars ($1,000) and not to exceed five thousand
dollars ($5,000) or imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed six
months, or both the fine and imprisonment, for each violation.
(d) The prohibitions against importation for commercial purposes,
possession with intent to sell, and sale of the species listed in
this section are severable. A finding of the invalidity of any one or
more prohibitions shall not affect the validity of any remaining
prohibitions.
(e) This section shall become operative on January 1, 2011.

The article from the Maine Antiques Digest.

Antique Ivory Sales Banned in California, Consignments Seized
by David Hewett
California recently began to strictly enforce a much-amended state law, and it has already caused dealers and auctioneers much grief.
On Sunday, February 5, a dealer couple in their 60's set up at an outdoor flea market. A visitor to their booth picked up an item and asked, "What's this made of?" "It's ivory," the man answered.
Wrong answer. The customer flashed his badge and identified himself as an agent with the California Department of Fish and Game. He then proceeded to seize all eight of the pieces in the booth that contained ivory. He cited the couple for committing a misdemeanor and gave them a court appearance date of April 12. The man estimated his loss at between $1500 and $2000. He told M.A.D. that another dealer had lost upward of $10,000 worth of material.
That dealer, like others who spoke with us, was afraid of publicity. He said he'd heard we were working on a report about the seizures, and that's why he'd made the cold call to us. He refused to give his name or even the location of the seizure. The reason? "People are saying if you make a stink about it or get your name in the papers, they could sic the IRS on you or make it a federal case," he said. "My wife is a schoolteacher. They could change the misdemeanor charge to a felony, and then she'd be out of a job."
That couple's loss is but a fraction compared to what the owners of Slawinski Auction Company suffered. The Scotts Valley, California, firm was raided on February 18 by agents enforcing the new law. When the agents left, they took all the ivory lots with them—ivory worth approximately $150,000.
Some in the auction trade learned about that event through a February 20 e-mail warning sent out by Rosie DeStories, co-owner of Fairfield Auction in Monroe, Connecticut.
DeStories wrote: "The State of California Department of Fish and Game is ACTIVELY raiding auction houses and antique shows, confiscating ivory. It is now illegal to sell or have the intent to sell ANY IVORY within the State of California or to sell it to any bidders within the State of California REGARDLESS OF THE AGE of the ivory. The fine is a minimum of $1000 per violation and a maximum up to $5000 per violation."
DeStories's message continued: "Two days ago during an auction preview approximately 25 uniformed and armed State of California Department of Fish and Game officers stormed into my brother's auction preview. They confiscated approximately 40 lots of antique ivory that was scheduled to be auctioned yesterday on February 19."
DeStories's brother is Robert "Rob" Slawinski. He and their father, Robert "Bob" Slawinski, run the Slawinski Auction Company. We spoke with the elder Slawinski on March 6.
"This was a screw-up that didn't have to happen," he said. "We checked with Fish and Wildlife well before the auction. We have always worked with the idea that ivory has to be genuinely antique in order to sell it; I mean older than one hundred years. I've been very careful about that. We even refused a couple of pieces for that sale because we couldn't prove they were that old."
Slawinski went on to say that he had called the Department of Fish and Game and spoken to a woman there. "I explained I had an auction coming up in a few days and needed to know if there was something going on. We had heard there might be changes relating to ivory. I said I was selling antique ivory and needed to know if I was doing everything I needed to, legally, and was told they'd get back to me. She called me back a couple of hours later and said she wasn't able to talk to anybody.
"The night they showed up, they covered the parking lot. We had probably twenty armed agents here. There was no reason for that level of intimidation. They were uniformed and armed to the teeth. I have some young girls working here, and those kids were just shaking.
"I tried to work with them. About midway through the evening I told the chief, 'Look, this whole thing could have been resolved if you'd just had somebody in the office to give me the information I needed.'
"I pulled out my iPhone and showed him and said, 'What's your number?' Then I scrolled down and went to Friday and 10:41, and said, 'Here's when I called you.' He took the phone out of my hand and said, 'That's my number, and you were on the phone for five minutes.'
"I said, 'Somebody in your office answered the phone and told me no one was available,' and he said, 'No, that's not true. I was in the office all day.' He said he knew some calls came in, but 'she didn't say anything to me, and her desk is twenty feet from my desk.'
"They gave me a receipt [for what they took], but what they didn't give me was any kind of a summons. I think at that time they realized I'd done everything humanly possible. But apparently that's not enough."
Slawinski said his record was spotless, he'd been involved with the local community for 40 years, had run numerous charity auctions, and had actually received an award for saving the life of the local sheriff.
"This is impacting far more than my business," Bob Slawinski said. "One of my consignors brought me a collection that had been in the family for years and years with things going back to 1800. They needed to raise money for medical bills.
"I've called most of my consignors, and they'll be taken care of," Slawinski said. "They'll be paid whether we get the ivory back or not. My reputation is important to me. Integrity is everything in the auction business."
Slawinski said he'd learned from those conducting the raid that they had sent in two undercover agents that afternoon.
When California Department of Fish and Game law enforcement spokesman Patrick Foy heard about the raid, he laughed. "I doubt we're able to get twenty-five 'uniformed and armed' officers together in this state at any one time," he said. "That's a little over the top."
"It is illegal to sell any ivory or other material from any animal on the endangered species list in California," he pointed out. "It's legal to possess it, but you cannot sell it. Possession with intent to sell is illegal. It's a misdemeanor level crime."
We asked where they got their leads. Foy said, "If I'm at a trade show or something like that kind of event, and I find someone with elephant ivory, that's illegal. It is not legal to sell elephant ivory in California. It doesn't matter if it's antique. There is no provision in the law for how long it has been possessed or when it was made. It's still illegal to possess ivory with intent to sell in California," Foy said. "It's important to know that we are not in the business to put antique dealers out of business; that's not what we're after. Our intent is to prohibit the business of selling wildlife parts."
The portion of the law identifying the species covered lists more than just elephants, though. Whales, dolphins, porpoises, and polar bears are also included. Here's the first full paragraph of the relevant criminal code:
California Penal Code Section 653o:
(a) It is unlawful to import into this state for commercial purposes, to possess with intent to sell, or to sell within the state, the dead body, or any part or product thereof, of any polar bear, leopard, ocelot, tiger, cheetah, jaguar, sable antelope, wolf (Canis lupus), zebra, whale, cobra, python, sea turtle, colobus monkey, kangaroo, vicuna, sea otter, free-roaming feral horse, dolphin or porpoise (Delphinidae), Spanish lynx, or elephant.
Crocodiles, alligators, and seals are covered in subsequent paragraphs.
The next section, Penal Code Section 653p, repeats some of 653o, makes possession illegal, and identifies the root source of the law:
It is unlawful to possess with the intent to sell, or to sell, within the state, the dead body, or any part or product thereof, of any species or subspecies of any fish, bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile, mollusk, invertebrate, or plant, the importation of which is illegal under the Federal Endangered Species Act of 1973 (Title 16, United States Code Sec. 1531 et seq.) and subsequent amendments, or under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (Title 16, United States Code Sec. 1361 et seq.), or which is listed in the Federal Register by the Secretary of the Interior pursuant to the above acts. The violation of any federal regulations adopted pursuant to the above acts shall also be deemed a violation of this section.
There are thousands of objects that may contain ivory from the teeth of endangered species. All whales, including beluga, blue, bowhead, finback, humpback, killer, North Atlantic right, sei, and sperm, are listed as endangered in the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Similarly, all elephants are listed on the endangered species list. Since almost all ivory found on antique objects comes from elephants and/or whales, anything containing ivory is illegal to offer to sell in California.
Antique pianos often have ivory key veneers. Some antique silver or plated tableware may have an ivory ring between the handle and knife blade. Federal and country-made furniture sometimes has bone or ivory key escutcheons, and then there is the vast amount of carved ivory Orientalia that makes up whole subsections of auction offerings and is found in countless gift and curio shops throughout California.
Bonhams' March 13 Asian decorative arts sale in San Francisco included well over 125 lots that contained ivory. On March 9 and 10, all of those lots were abruptly withdrawn. Many of those lots contained multiple objects (some with as many as eight pieces), and most were described as 20th century in origin.
The law's strict enforcement is going to have an impact on those who make a number of objects, such as knives and pool cues, and repairers of antique musical instruments. Custom knife maker Al Warren of Roseville, California (who uses several types of ivory on his knives), thought he was operating legally when he wrote on his Web site: "In 1987 I secured a good supply of elephant tusk and have the 1975 bill of lading for its entry into the USA. Copies are available upon request with purchase of a knife with elephant ivory."
Warren is well aware of the pitfalls involving selling objects containing whale products. "I have a very limited number of registered teeth that belong to me that I can use for knife handles, but due to a stipulation in the law, I cannot ship them to any address outside the state of California [his emphasis]."
Warren said, when told about the California law being strictly enforced, "I guess I better get to my Web site and change some things."
The penal code banning the sale of ivory isn't the only law affecting the sale of animal parts. "If an animal exists in the wild in California," Patrick Foy said, "it's illegal to sell parts from that animal. As an example, if you hold a valid hunting license and shoot a nice big buck and have the head mounted, it's illegal to sell that head to another person. You can give it to your buddy, you can transport it somewhere, but you can't sell it."
eBay, based in California, already has made its decision about how to handle ivory. It placed a global ban on the sale of all types of ivory, stating: "This global ban will be effective January 1, 2009."
California's law will have no effect on the root cause. The demand for ivory from Asia is driving the mass murder of elephants in Africa. Poachers in Cameroon's Bouba Ndjida National Park, using modern automatic weapons, slaughtered up to 450 elephants for their tusks in just one bloody raid in mid-February.
According to TRAFFIC, a conservation group that tracks trends in wildlife trading, a record number of large-scale ivory seizures happened around the globe in 2011. TRAFFIC estimated that over 23 tons of ivory was seized in raids by authorities last year.
"I'll get beyond this," auctioneer Bob Slawinski said. "This will not affect my reputation because everybody knows me, but some homeowner who sells a used piano with ivory keys who gets busted will be liable for six months of jail time and a fine.
"They are not interested in sending people to jail; California wants the money, one to five thousand dollars fine per item."
Agents Charge the Real Traffickers in Endangered Species Parts
On January 6, 2011, a California task force working under the name Operation Cyberwild announced it had brought charges against 12 people who allegedly sold clothing, footwear, and rugs made from parts of endangered species, plus live birds and fish that appear on the endangered species list.
The arrests were announced in Los Angeles by several Assistant U.S. Attorneys, by Scott Flaherty of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and by Patrick Foy of the California Department of Fish and Game (see his comments in the main story).
The accused allegedly offered the prohibited material on two Internet services, Craigslist and eBay. Those who face federal charges were said to have sold a pair of boots made from loggerhead sea turtle leather, a leopard skin coat, a pair of sea turtle leather shoes, a tiger skin rug, and a hawksbill sea turtle shell.
The two defendants facing California charges were said to have sold an elephant foot, a bearskin rug, and mounted hawks and birds.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announcement of the arrests reported that they were aided by "[f]ive volunteers from the Humane Society of the United States who searched the Internet for suspicious items and referred the listings to investigators."
Originally published in the April 2012 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2012 Maine Antique Digest

Fresh Garbage

Seal the eastern border.

News today that three new anti abortion bills passed the Arizona legislature today, one of which officially defines pregnancy as two weeks before conception. The bill, which criminalizes late term abortions, states that gestational age is "calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman," which would move the beginning of a pregnancy up two weeks prior to conception.

This is patently ludicrous, according to medical doctors as they can not pinpoint gestational age with this level of specificity. But assuredly an Arizona Superior Court judge can.

The other bills require that schools teach students that adoption and birth are the most acceptable outcomes for an unwanted pregnancy and another "wrongful birth, wrongful life" bill that prohibits lawsuits against doctors who do not provide honest information about a fetus' health if that information could lead to an abortion. In addition, parents cannot sue on the child's behalf after birth.

Jan Brewer, the Camel non filter pin up girl, has signaled her intent to sign the bills which will give our eastern neighbor the award for most draconian state for reproductive choice in the nation, much like their pariah status on minority issues.

Once again I must say that these conservatives who believe so much in the concept of limited government are baldfaced liars. They have no business either making moral choices for anybody else or interfering in the personal relationship between a woman and her doctor.

The Republicans need to start a new department of sex. It will henceforth only be allowed between adults of opposite gender, whose marriage has been sanctified in an appropriate church and per dictates of their respective community and strictly for the purpose of procreation. Morality police will routinely check non married women for evidence of their continued chastity and virtue. Anal or oral sex and any of that fancy karma sutra stuff is strictly forbidden and the use of the missionary position strongly encouraged. Excessive pleasure from the sacred coupling is frowned upon as is foreplay, multiple orgasms, lube, marital aids or the use of any form of pornography or other methods to increase sexual stimulation. Masturbation for males is a similar felony as those little swimmers have the potential for fertilizing some wayward egg, so that is murder too. Women will undergo mandatory clitorectomies so that they will not be tempted to gain any pleasure from lawful, consecrated sexual activities. Penalty for all infractions is of course, death.

I Got a Woman

If I am scoring this one at home I have to give it to Burton. Chet is Chet and always great but Albert goes from playing every note in the sandbox to temporarily losing it. James is very inventive. Neat trio.

King's gambit

Santorum folds, Mitt fails to fire with the conservatives...Why do I have the feeling that things are unfolding perfectly according to Newt's devious little master plan? He has everybody exactly where he wants them.












I should mention that the illustration superimposed around the Newtster's head is not an actual king's gambit. That is a chess opening where white offers a pawn to weaken the defender's e pawn. Paul Morphy was a master of this way back in the mid 19th century, only losing two of the contests where he employed this strategy.

The gambit is one of the oldest openings in chess. Lucena wrote about it as far back as 1497 in the chess journal Salamanca.

One Good Man

Seminary Semantics

In his Easter message this sunday from the square in Rome, the Pope said that mankind was groping in the darkness.

I agree with the holy eminence about the rotten state of mankind however with all of the sordid pedophilia scandals in the church, I think that he might have selected a better choice of words for the occasion.

The frail pontiff is turning 85 next week and probably had other things on his mind. Best wishes to him and to all of his flock.

Windy and Warm

Supper Time

I borrowed the 70/400mm 4.5-5.6D Nikon zoom from Doug yesterday. I couldn't wait to drive home to see what else I could pick up with it when photographing our canyon's newest residents.

It is a tad better than what I had been using but this lens presents its own unique set of problems. I think that with patience I can still get what my pro photographer friend Kerry calls the money shot!

Please appreciate that this nest is located on a treetop more than a hundred yards away across a river canyon. It ain't easy.

I will post a picture for scale soon so that you can consider the distance. I am getting a very private view of my raptor friends!

KJ remonstrated me yesterday for the poor clarity and focus of the last shots I posted. Trying as best as I can.

This particular lens is AF but not AFS so I had to manually focus and I stupidly didn't bring my tripod with me so this is all handhold.

Images are a tad sharper than with my 300mm but not demonstrably so. I may need to rent a 500mm or larger lens to achieve the level of clarity that I am hoping for but the tripod just might do the trick. Dumb. I will keep shooting until I get it right. Shame to blow this opportunity.

Still isn't it wonderful to see the little hawk chicks crane their little necks up for a piece of ground squirrel supper?

Nora Aunor

This lady was known as the pride of the Phillipines, a country that really loves its crooners. You can get shot for being off key in a karaoke bar over there. Here she ably handles a Charles Aznavour standard.

Old Hickory

I have finally finished Jon Meacham's American Lion, the Pultizer winning biography of President Andrew Jackson. It was a long and difficult book to read but a book that I highly recommend nevertheless. Very satisfying in the final analysis.

Andrew Jackson was a man with what we, two centuries hence, would consider deep flaws. A non repentant slave owner and anti abolitionist, he was instrumental in relocating the native americans west of the Mississippi River.

For all of his flaws however he was probably the President most responsible for utilizing and increasing the power of the executive. Meacham's book takes you through many battles of the Jackson presidency. The first occurs in the first week, when the President's wife Rachel dies in office. She had been horribly pilloried as a whore and a bigamist. He earned more brickbats when snide rumours started flowing about the wife of his Secretary of Defense, Margaret Eaton.

Jackson was the first populist president, who felt that he answered only to the people. He railed against the Federalists, who believed that laws should be shaped by and for the benefit of the patrician elite. He was in many ways the father of the modern day Democratic Party, or at least the principles that he avowed.

He was a dedicated servant of the Union and fought the cries for nullification that came from his ardent enemies Clay and Calhoun and from the State of South Carolina. These forces threatened to split the Union asunder. He led efforts against Nathaniel Biddle and the National Bank that ended in a game of chicken when Biddle tried to choke off credit to kill the presidency. He had to deal with a French government that refused to pay its debt and a budding fight between Mexico and the Texans that desired independence. A larger battle was a south that bridled under what they perceived as an unfair tariff.

He had to deal with the likes of Ezra Stiles Ely, a preacher who wrote a popular tract in 1827 called "Christian Party in Politics" which advocated for only electing protestants and "should join forces to keep Pagans and Mulims from office" as well as deists like Washington and Jefferson or Unitarians like John Quincy Adams. Or Socinians. "Every ruler should be an avowed friend of Christianity."

Jackson was the first President to not only pay off the debt but to wield the veto pen in a way that it had never been used, more than all of his six predecessors combined. The old indian fighter and hero of the Battle of New Orleans was a shrewd tactician and loved to challenge a legislature that he considered dishonest and corrupt.

I saw a lot of similarities between Jackson and our current president reading this book and highly recommend it to any student of American history.

The Great Society

Getting ugly.

It may be me, but I have a bad feeling that race relations at present are worst than they have been in decades. I don't know the reason for the decline, besides the obvious answer of many hands reaching for a piece of the same shrinking pie.

I wonder if some people will ever come to grips with the notion of having a black president? Does he engender such anger and distrust merely because some do not agree with his politics or could other factors be in play? An innate suspicion of someone who doesn't resemble us perhaps?

I like to look at a lot of different sources of news. Two places I enjoy going are the CNN and USA Today online comments sections. The sites are both ostensibly non partisan and they get a wide mix of political persuasions, all slugging it out pretty good.

Anyway, we have had a whammy of stories lately, all dealing with an undercurrent of race. Trayvon Williams' shooting first, then Tulsa. A young white man's father had been shot and killed in an argument with a black man and the son sought retribution. A writer for a respected conservative magazine, National Review, writes an incredible indictment of blacks and why we should really be afraid of them. Got him fired. This is on the heels of Buchanan. Fox News interviews the heavily armed Neo Nazis that are marching in Florida to keep the white people safe today and calls them "another civil rights group." Ruben Navarette wrote an article yesterday about minority journalists getting purged in the print shrinkage of the news and print world.

When Williams got shot, the online comments often went something like this; black people shoot white people all the time, what about that?

After the Tulsa shooting and before there were suspects the USA Today rhetoric was also quite colorful: why do you have to say five black people were killed instead of five people? Why do you have to say the black community is worried about continued shootings instead of the community and how do you know the shooter wasn't an angry black man or woman? Now this takes a bit of intuition but there aren't a lot of blacks with vendettas against people with dark skin. These people were targeted. Capiche? But the argument is made every day now that white people are essentially color blind and that minorities are the real racists.

I thought that we were past it but things are getting ugly. Go to USA Today after any story about race and see what I mean.

Willie Dixon - Nervous

Willie Dixon, accompanied by the guitar practitioner who coaxed the sweetest and most sonorous notes ever out of a fretboard, Mr. T-Bone Walker. Memphis Slim on keys, Jump Jackson on the skins.

Easter Basket

I had been looking at the nest these past few weeks with no small sense of suspicion. Yes, the female redtail hawk was standing some sort of vigil but maybe there had been some complications. Maybe she was sitting on an egg that would never hatch. Perhaps it was a rock? A false pregnancy?

After all, all of the births of our young native raptor friends in the past few years had occurred in March at the latest. These birds looked awfully small, perhaps it was a juvenile dress rehearsal, if such things even happen in the avian world.

In addition there were some very strange looking additions to this nest, which has been used for generations upon generations of birds in the Santa Margarita River valley. Puffballs and bits of red scrap, what else? Eggshells?

*

I was driving out to get the papers this morning when I saw the three little heads pop out of the nest. Both mother and father were standing by looking at their progeny. I could say proudly but it would be a terrible cliché. How do I know the parental emotions locked away in the brains of these fellow creatures?

Last year we had two chicks, the year before three. I stopped on the bank in the middle of the high and winding dirt road that overlooks the canyon and the very tall sycamore. I put my 300mm on my nikon, just a tad short. By the time I got to my vantage, the father had split.

I took a flurry of shots. Enlarging them in Lightroom allows me to see many delicate interactions between the birds that I could not see from my distant perch.

Doug is going to let me borrow his sharp 400mm lens for a while. I promise you we will get some pictures!

These will have to do for today. Lovely chicks, no?

FENTON ROBINSON somebody loan me a dime

Family Feud

I sort of had to expunge myself from my genetics forum. The long and short of it is that my big mouth got me in trouble again.

A few months ago an arab man started peppering the site with cryptic and paranoid ravings accusing certain undetermined people of stealing his people's birthright. It didn't take long for me to unravel the guy's garbled pronouncements and figure out the group of interlopers that he was railing against. Guess who?

I called him out on a few things and the administrators were none too pleased. I had already previously been cautioned about my withering sarcasm and somewhat unorthodox approach amongst my more learned peers. It was intimated that I was perhaps overly confrontational.  I had been trying to make nice but I guess it was not to be. They told me to just let him rave but I couldn't help baiting him a little bit.

Last night I got a rather oblique stern warning from one of the powers that be that retribution for my next misdeed would be swift. I did what I had to do, I pulled the plug. It was evident that my nemisis was using the forum to advance religious and geopolitical points of view that had no bearing on the intended purpose of the website. Everyone else was content to ignore him and to let him rant. I wanted to pull his fangs. Couldn't listen to it anymore. So I left. Point of honor, owe it to the tribe.

I will miss communicating with many of these people, an exceedingly bright group of laymen and geneticists. Just like it said on my kindergarten report card; Did not play well with others.

Superman & The Mole Men #4

Lucid moment

I went phone shopping this week. I am not a big tech guy, hovering somewhere between luddite and grudging pragmatist forced into using the new technology.

Usually the last one to get anything. But I had dropped the old phone and it was a broken mess so I went down to the Verizon store and decided to see what was available these days.

The most important litmus test for me was, "Will it fit in my pocket?" Surprisingly, very few of the new phones would. My old phone was the original droid and it had a nice small footprint, although it is woefully out of date by today's standards.

Anyway, all of the new droids are these huge monsters that I would need to rock a manpurse to carry. I was looking at the iphone 4s's and they were very cool but it was immediately evident that the screen is really tiny. And they are not currently 4G. I put the Blue Heron Blast up on the iphone and could barely make out the letters. No way it could fly.

The nice sales lady pointed out this new phone from LG, the Lucid. It came to market the last week of March. Has the 1.2 GHz dual core 8860 Qualcomm snapdragon processor and another gig of ram. Runs on last year's gingerbread platform (horrors) instead of the newer 4.0 ice cream sandwich.

Phone has 1080p video and a nice sharp 5 meg camera. Supposedly upgradable to ice cream sandwich one of these days.

The long and short of it is that the phone is so far beyond what I am used to in terms of ease of use and utility. Wifi, bluetooth, mobile hot spot, etc. Things have come a long way in three years. Thing cost less than eighty bucks. A relatively no name phone that meets my present needs quite satisfactorily.

*

What I find funny is that I decided to google the LGLucid and see what the experts had to say about it. It is an understatement to say that it has been generally panned. Should have waited another month for the real phones to come out.  A good choice if you don't need the absolute fastest speeds or latest features, but don't want to miss out on anything important either. This was a good display — two years ago! There’s still no excuse for any manufacturer to ship a phone with such an outdated and inferior operating system. Underneath the ugly layer of UI chrome is a surprisingly meager portion of preloaded bloatware. 


I waded through CNET and PC Mag and Tech Crunch and Laptop and Android Police and the Verge and a plethora of sites devoted to gear heads. Here is a typical review from Android Police. Now a guy that blathers as much as I do has no right to call anybody out but isn't it a bit unnatural to be so devoted to one's mobile phone? I spent less time buying a car than these people outlay for a portable communication device. Having come in from the prehistoric cold, I am more than happy and show absolutely no embarrassment in wielding a cell phone with shock, last year's technology. If I can keep it long enough perhaps I can sell it as an antique. And the kicker? I just found a site where you can buy it for a penny...

Ripple

Ripple, an interesting new concept in "trust" currency.

Making Flippy Floppy

State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes

Reprinted from today's Murfreesboro Daily News Journal

Tennessee Legislature wants Scopes trial rerun

By Staff Reports

At a time when Tennessee is becoming a national center for technological and alternative fuel research and development, it is odd — to say the least — that our state Legislature would push scientific debate back more than 85 years.

Our state was ground zero for the argument over teaching of evolution in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial” after a young teacher in Dayton was charged with violating state law that allowed only the biblical theory of creationism to be taught in classrooms.

John Scopes was convicted in a circus-atmosphere trial that captivated the nation, but Tennessee and numerous other states eventually changed their laws (1) to allow the teaching of biological evolution as an accepted theory of science.

With Republicans controlling the General Assembly, a spate of socially conservative legislation is rolling through the state Capitol, instead of a focus on good government, and this measure appears to be at the head of the class.

Legislation headed for the governor’s desk would encourage teachers to present scientific strengths and weaknesses of topics such as biological evolution, chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning, even though those matters are largely settled in the scientific community.

Science and teacher associations across the state and nation oppose this legislation, yet our Legislature is determined to impose its will on the classrooms of Tennessee, showing a general disrespect for scientific academia in favor of running its religious views up a flagpole.

Besides playing on people’s emotions to garner votes, this could lead to a legal battle over the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

Even more dangerously, it threatens to bog our children down in a debate that should be carried out in Sunday school and at home rather than in science classrooms where experiments and research should take priority.

At the same time this incursion could quell the intellectual curiosity of our children, education budgets would certainly increase because of the need to buy new textbooks.

If Tennessee is determined to move in this direction, it must ask this question as well: Will creationism be on the test? After all, standardized tests are the way we judge our students, schools and teachers, and if teachers start pushing creationism as scientific theory, they could damage student performance on key tests.

Our General Assembly would serve people better by keeping its hands out of the classroom and letting the Department of Education determine what should be taught. Otherwise, school curriculum will be filled with nothing but the ramblings of our elected leaders’ political whims.

—Murfreesboro Daily News Journal

(1) In 1967 - Robert

The Mutants

xy hates xx

A woman in Wisconsin, working a comparable job to a man, makes about seventy five cents to every dollar he makes.  This results in a loss of wages that experts peg at approximately four thousand dollars a year for the average family.

In 2009, the Equal Pay Enforcement Act was passed in Wisconsin that allowed lawsuits over wage discrimination to be held in the less expensive state circuit court.

Today Governor Scott Walker quietly signed SB 202, which repealed the law, to the delight of business groups. The law had been previously ratified by the Wisconsin House and Senate in the last few months along party line votes.

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Much has been written about the so called gender gap. The USA Today/Gallup poll last week shows Obama with an 18 point lead among women, up from 13 in the last election. Presumptive nominee Romney leads Obama by 1 point among men but by a whopping 18 men 50 or older. In this poll women self identified as Democrats by a 41 to 24% margin, men identified as Republican by a 27 to 25% margin. Obama now holds a 9 point lead in the head to head. Poll had a +/- margin of 4 points.

What is problematic about all this to the Republicans is the fact that women have a 54% majority among registered voters. It is amazing to me that the conservatives were stupid enough to fall in to the contraception/abortion/women's issues trap in the first place. Self immolation on a grand scale that I think will ultimately seal their downfall this run. They should have learned from their successes in the last election. Tell everybody it is about the economy and then smite the nation under a barrage of personhood, creationism and antiabortion amendments. Most people are too stupid to notice.

The GOP will deny that any problem exists at all. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says that the War on Women is as real as a "war on caterpillars." Our President will rightfully run with this issue and set of talking points. Look for the most gender stratified election in our history.

Lee Dorsey - Ride Your Pony

Freewheeling Friday

A couple of stories on the food front. Monsanto is threatening to sue the state of Vermont over a proposed bill that requires producers to label genetically modified food as such.

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Today is the first day that genetically modified salmon can be sold in the grocery stores of America. You won't be able to tell what you are buying, of course, due to heavy pressure from the mad scientists. Industry is starting to believe that resistance to GMO labeling is somewhat futile.

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Supreme Court takes up GMO patent case.

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Consumer Reports reports that most medical implants have never been tested for safety.

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I can't put my finger on the link at the moment but saw a blurb the other day that the FDA is now requiring private producers to do their own safety testing on poultry. Gee, I feel safer. Found it! 800 federal poultry inspector jobs eliminated, industry will now police itself.

In related news, the Maryland State Senate weakens a bill that would restrict the amount of arsenic in chicken feed. The poison helps maintain a plumper bird. Don't think it is really so healthy for humans.

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In 2005, our country banned the use of a class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones because of their adverse affects on humans. Turns out they are still using them.

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Conservative columnist blames pink slime controversy for the end of farming as we know it and the death of 150,000 more innocent cattle per year.

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Utah joined Iowa last month in banning picture taking from factory farms.

"Coming less than a month after Iowa became the first state to adopt a so-called "ag-gag" law, the Utah bill signed into law by Gov. Gary Herbert is designed to thwart animal welfare groups that have planted employees inside big farms to document incidents of animal abuse."

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Happy Good Friday to all that celebrate the holiday. I close with this quote from Martin Luther. Sin strongly, my friends:

Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.

Turn On Your Love Light

Play Ball

Bulldozers at Chavez Ravine

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story tonight about Los Desterrados, the poor mexicans whose homes in Chavez Ravine were uprooted to make way for Dodger Stadium in the 1950's. The Brooklyn Dodgers had set their sights on the west coast and a poor minority community stood no chance of standing up to the bulldozers. They were ostensibly moved to make way for new public housing, a promise that was never delivered on.

I sent the article to Millard, a true blue angeleno and Dodger lover and got this terse response:

This is pure horseshit. Chavez Ravine was a total dump, a hell-hole nobody missed except the squatters who lost their free ride. Nobody wanted to go there, always avoided it. Except for people like Millard Sheets who painted the 'local flavor'.

Maybe it was a dump, Millard, it was a poor community. Poor people don't have a lot of expendable money to live in palatial estates like you rich folks did up in the valley. They usually ended up in barrios. Chavez had a long standing community and tradition that got literally steamrolled. I don't blame these guys for still being pissed. One man's dump is another hombre's palacio. Dig?

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Faithful blog reader and surf impressario Allan Seymour sent me this letter:

Hello Robert,

Tomorrow is the double-double. The Cubs Season Opener on WGN at 11:00 AM, and the Padres Season Opener with the great Vin Scully on L.A. television at 4:00 PM.

Petco's pastoral surrounding frames the hopeless Padres. Let's just go-a-head and call them the Cubs of the NL Western Division. 

I would like to take you to a Padre game this year.

Check out an interview I did with thaliasurf.com For a brief moment I felt Sommersesk recalling my youth, and sharing my opinions.

Yesterday was an epic day at San Onofre. In your travels try to stop by my home/gallery in Capistrano Beach.

Aloha, 

Allan Seymour

I would love to catch a game. I have refrained from saying I told you so about recently departed Padres CEO Jeff Moorad but he turned out to be the pompous pretender I said he was. All hat and no cattle. Wonder if Moores will let them flounder? Now I can go back to being a Padres fan again. Hope they come to their senses and bring in the fences. Long right field turns our hitters into eunuchs and they are never the same again.

Also Allan, I know it sounds like heresy but I am not a Scully fan. Puts me to sleep. Would much rather listen to Jerry Coleman.

Nate Colbert

Oops!

No sooner than I wrote about liking the comfortable, old and familiar than I hit the wrong button on my blogger layout page and lost my old blog format for eternity. Hopefully I can cobble something together that I can live with. Damnit.
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Phone dropped from a six foot height onto the concrete. Gravity won. Looks like I need a new phone.

Eep Hour

ifthisisthefuturei'llsettleforthepastthanks

Crowded House

Michelle Duggar is a christian woman from Arkansas who has nineteen children. She doesn't put much stock in the concept of overpopulation. Last week she said something that got me to thinking - that we could cram all of the people in the world in Jacksonville and they would all fit nicely.


"Well, first off, the idea of overpopulation is not accurate because, really, the entire population of the world, if they were stretched shoulder to shoulder, could fit within the city limits of Jacksonville," she told the Christian Broadcasting Network.


I did some checking. I am assuming for the sake of her argument that she meant Jacksonville, Florida instead of the much smaller Jacksonville, Arkansas. It was a good pick by Mrs. Duggar. Did you know that Jacksonville, Florida is the largest city in the lower 48, encompassing 758 square miles?

Technically, if we stacked humans like cordwood or sardines, what she says is correct. My calculations tell me that a square mile contains 27,878,400 square feet. Multiply that by 758 and you get 21131827200 square feet. Now if we assume for the sake of conversation that an average human being occupies about 2 square feet of ground and divide by two we come up with a figure of 10,565,913,600. The most conservative estimate that I could find of human population at the moment is approximately 6,954,087,000 with some spare change at the end because we are breeding faster than the population clock can count.

So she is right. It would be extra cozy and intimate but it could be done. In fact we have a roomy 3.03 square feet per person to nestle the world's population if we all decide to relocate to Jacksonville.

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Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story in 1886 titled, How much land does a man need? It is a good question. I have done some checking although the answers are not verified. Some experts say that an agrarian clan of 100 needs roughly 20 square miles to actually survive and sustain themselves. Lifeboat Earth devotees can make a case for fully operational homesteads supporting a family of about 1/4 acre.

I gleaned a tidbit from a man named Gary Stein who sounds like maybe he knows what he is talking about on the internet. He posits that it takes about 200 square yards to support someone living on grains, 1500 square yards for a person on a milk based diet, 4000 square yards for pork subsistence and 10,000 for beef. I will take him at his word.

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We are gaining roughly 250,000 people a day on the planet. It has had a devastating effect on biodiversity, namely those other critters we share the planet with. World population is expected to reach 9,000,000 by 2050. Maybe that three square feet per human will look pretty good one day?

Scientists talk about the ability of the earth to sustain life in terms of carrying capacity. I quote from an article by James Hopkins titled Human Population Crisis :

"Hypothetically, if the human population continued to grow at our present rate, the mass of people would be equal to the mass of the earth within 1600 years. In 2300 years at this rate, the mass of people would fill up our entire solar system, and if you were able to create matter from nothing in order to make people, in roughly 5300 years a great sphere of humanity with a radius of over 150 light-years would be expanding faster than the speed of light."

It is hard to argue with people of faith regarding this issue. God has promised them that it will all turn out okay. A little crowded perhaps but okay. Let's hope.

Plastic People of the Universe

It's alright, we know where you've been.

The connectivity of our world is increasing so rapidly, exponentially, on a daily basis. I was cruising the web today when I found a link to instagram, the very popular mobile sharing photo app which has just been released for the Android platform.

I click on the link on my desktop which takes me to Google Play, one of Google's latest roll-outs. The program automatically tells me what phone I am using, in my case that old dinosaur, the original droid. I click install on my computer and the program is instantly loaded on my mobile phone. Magic. No hands, no wires.

I sort of fail to see what this program is delivering me but that is besides the point for this discussion. I am left with four ways to distribute the photograph, twitter, facebook, tumblr and foursquare. I also have the option of using a geotag. Well, the reality is that  I use none of these services. Gave up the facebook habit two years ago, thank god, never wanted to tweet and saw no need for incorporating foursquare or tumblr into my life. So I guess that this program is not for me. I am peeved that you can not comment on many newspaper or internet sites unless you do it through Facebook. This seems shortsighted, that you are forced to use a third party service in order to be heard.

Google of course is trying to drive traffic to Google+ and is throwing off strong hints that we should be redirecting our blogger profile to our google+ profile. Soon I am sure that it will be mandatory. That is the way they roll. Well I don't want to give up the relative non convergence of my various worlds so that I can spill it all on the table that is Google+. All of your aggregated personal information, your  search habits, etc. wrapped in a neat little bow so that you can be an easier target for directed advertising. Google+ is not really a comfortable working environment, at least for me, still can't grok all the circles and extended family and all that.  Not a workspace I need to utilize. Unless I am forced to, of course.

Google just revamped the blogger platform, giving me a whole host of features I neither want or need in the new package. It is difficult for me to adjust to the new workplace. You have to get into a weird backdoor to access the template designer now, going through layout and finding the tool in a different spot. They have given the user greater control of meta tagging and greater ability to tweak the search engines. Also those that choose to can now utilize dynamic views and a lot of other esoteric stuff.

Me, I find myself a comfortable workspace, I live with it.  I like the widths and the color and the fonts and I do things the same way most of the time and people find that it is a familiar place to come and that it is easily accessible. I don't want to change but will probably be forced to.

Google gave us a weaning period but soon the old interface will be officially dead. I will have to figure out a way to use the new one. It is free after all and it is not like I allow them to advertise on the page so I suppose I should just thank them. They also saw fit to kill Picnik, a really handy Google program that I actually paid for.

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My new car's uconnect bluetooth has some interesting features. I merely say blues, or outlaw country and it finds the musical genre for me. I don't think musicologists are necessarily running the show. Soultown, the great soul station is now officially a subset of hiphop. Right. It also mutes the radio automatically when I am talking to somebody on the phone, a really great feature.

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In other technology news, there is a disclosure this week that local police departments are routinely engaging in the wholesale tracking of people through their cell phone gps. Without a warrant, probable cause or court order, of course. Would Orwell and Huxley be laughing or crying right now? Certainly saying I told you so. The police state wants total information control, soon we will all be wearing little implantable chips. A god fearing patriot with nothing to hide should have nothing to fear, right?

England is trying to trump us this week in the warrantless search for all of your communications department. They may catch us but never fear, John Poindexter's DARPA wet dream never really died, we are just implementing it very slowly. We are still number one. You won't feel the snare until it is tightly wrapped around your ankle bone.

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Check out the ibrain - the machine that can read your thoughts. Can replicators be far behind? Or robots in a day?

Peaches En Regalia

War and Victory!

Please be aware that we at the Sommers domicile have officially declared never ending war without quarter on our eternal enemy, the infernal pest known as the Gopher. Our four acres is so riddled with holes that it sits perched, ready to fall another level, en masse, like Rotterdam or Mexico City.

I have surveyed the battlefield and it looks grim. Swiss cheese like portals dot the denuded landscape like a hormonally challenged adolescent's pockmarked skin.  Once we kept the rodent population somewhat at bay, when my wife understood the utility and importance of barn cats. But now, after losing a large number of our felinous friends to coyotes, our remaining cat lives indoors in sweet luxury and spurns his predacious duties. We have trapped and flooded and all the normal stuff, to no avail and decided to resort to near nuclear measures.

Today we decided that we had had enough. I consulted Bruce, the smartest man I know in these and many other matters and he gave me the zyklon B, industrial strength cure.  I went to Hanks and bought a half a dozen road flares. We dug down into the hole and inserted the lit flare and then shoved the end of the leaf blower in at high speed, flooding the whole tunnel system with the deadly gas. Les ran around tamping the holes in the yard where smoke was rising with a shovel. I was a trifle nervous about the flames blowing back and the gas engine that I held in my arms exploding.  Was I imagining little gopher shouts alerting the clan that  resistance was futile and that the end was surely near?

After the gopher extermination  campaign I dropped a little moth ball in the hole as a reminder, like Bat Masterson might leave an ace of spades pinned to his vanquished enemy's lapel.  Thar's a new sheriff in town, spit.

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We will see how this works. I did some reading on the subject and also heard about castor oil pellets and juicy fruit gum having a killing effect.  The juicy fruit was a new one on me, apparently they  eat the foil too . Maybe they kill themselves blowing bubbles, you got me. But I am willing to try anything at this point.

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This is a gopher that the cat brought in today . He doesn't kill them anymore, likes to play with them and let them run around the living room. Leslie catches them and lets them go two miles away near our mail box. Anyway they are kind of cute when they aren't tearing up the yard. We may get a Jack Russell next.

Bang Bang

Screw you, I got mine.

I watched Van Jones on Bill Maher the other night and he alleged that Judge Scalia made some pretty awful comments during the recent health care testimony.


"You know what’s worse and I’m surprised no one has made a big deal about, Scalia himself said maybe the idea that we help people when they’re sick we should get away from. He joined the let them die caucus.”

Now I tried to find a record of Scalia saying anything like that and I can not. He said some pretty noxious and ludicrous things but I think that Jones' paraphrasing takes certain liberties with the truth.

There was an instance I found when Solicitor General Verrilli tried to explain the need for the provision that is revealing.


"Free riders, Verrilli explained, will refuse to pay and still get treated at a much greater cost because we have “obligated ourselves so that people get health care.” Scalia responded, “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.”

I would like to point out that there were several moments in the debate that really gave me cause for concern. This is one of them. The other was when it became apparent that the justices didn't understand that the way insurance works is the healthy people's premiums pay for the sick people's. You pay and hope you don't get sick. Sounds socialist and all but that is how the insurance game works. You don't just pay a high premium right before you walk  in the hospital door. That is why we call it insurance.

It appears that we are fundamentally challenging the notion of what it means to be an American when we start asking these questions, they threaten the very fulcrum of the American society that we have grown up in.  Reset to the Ron Paul debate where the crowd cheered when he said that we ought to let people die. The conservative thrust is to try to tear down every last fibre of the safety net that protects not only the moochers but also our very young and very old, all the while cutting revenue from the rich and giving more money to defense then they even asked for, you know the generals can't be telling the truth.

One of the questions in the bible that is left open and never really adequately answered is the question asking us if we are indeed our brother's keeper? I thought that it was one that we had actually maybe figured out.  The court and the conservatives in our society are trying to tear down ever facet of the New Deal and the Great Society that has ever been instituted post great depression.

The reality is that the smart money says that all of these haves or someone in their immediate family will happen to find themselves on the outside looking in some day, maybe through no fault of their own. Welcome to the side of the havenots, what was that you said about dishing out that tough love?

This carnal, feudal, vicious world that they long for is a denigration of our humanity, against our sense of fairness and compassion and much of the basic tenets of what I thought it meant to be an american. Back to dog eat dog. A great society is one that takes care of the weakest amongst us. I know that I am screwed up but I just can't stop believing that.

Karla Bonoff

Disregard the screwed up lyrics on the video. Karla has a special voice. Garth Hudson on accordion.

La Dulce Vida

Leslie and I decided to forgo our normal Sunday brunch at Le Bistro and catch up with some good friends on the coast. We left extra early in hopes of seeing some of the big waves that were supposed to roll in. In another example of the best hopes of mice and men we got stuck in a huge Carlsbad 5k traffic jam and things got sort of late and we ended up jumping on the freeway and down to our Cardiff buddies, Ron and Lena. They just came back from three months in Thailand, Myanmar and Bali. So exciting to be in a country like Burma where things might actually be getting better, how many places can you say that in this world? She took this picture of the incredible Aung San Suu Kyi on a banner. When Burmese people talk about their wonderful leader, who has suffered so much for her people, she is referred to quietly as "the lady."

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Lena has a beautiful blog from her trip, Rice is Sacred and we looked at some of the great pictures she took on her trip. This picture she took is of women in asia getting their feet cleaned and exfoliated in a tank of garra rufa fish. She said that the sensation ranges from a tickle to "Hey, you little f*ckers, that hurts."

Bob and Shela came over and we ate and rapped and enjoyed just a wonderful spring day. After that we drove to see our good friends and my close genetic cousin Stanley and Tracy. Actually we found out that he is Leslie's genetic fourth cousin as well, god, did those jews intermarry... Tracy's grandfather made a beautiful violin many years ago that she is learning to play again, Suzuki style. She and the violin both sounded great. More sitting on the porch and soaking up the sun.

We finally took our leave and drove to Cedros to see Tracy's sister, the fantastic jewelry maker and wire bender Lynn Merchant. Lynne had wired together all of these beautiful wild turkey feathers and the long chain looked quite amazing. Her shop is really a visual jewel crammed with a beautiful creation throughout every square inch.

We left and drove to Fletcher Cove aka Pillbox. It is now Yuppie central with a nice playground for the BMW bassinet set. I used to live in an underground basement at Sierra and Pacific overlooking (underlooking?) the cove. Mushrooms grew up out of the floor and I only had my waterbed for heat. Waterbed's, does anyone still use them? Great for one, seasick for two. Anyway the ocean was not terribly impressive at least for big waves. All the advance publicity must have scared them off.

We drove over to Crush, the upscale restaurant and wine bar in Solana Beach. Leslie had never been. I ordered a glass of an outrageously good supertuscan for a mere five bucks, on account of happy hour. Leslie had a ginger, cilantro, vodka, lime, ginger beer and saki martini which she really enjoyed.

Dinner was unfortunately less successful. we ordered a really nice chili garlic scampi with a delicious and rather creamy sauce. The bread there is simply outrageously good, including an unusual and scrumptious brown rye. We ordered the ossobuco over risotto with porcinis and a rib eye and decided to share both. Our entrees were accompanied by a creamed spinach and potato pancakes and maybe some other things. The rib eye was perfect, in a very strong reduction that worked. The osso buco was also in a very strong sauce but it was over salted to the point of almost being inedible. When I complained to our server, who was excellent by the way, she talked to the chef. He said that it may have seemed over salted because it is cooked on oak and oak concentrates the flavors. Sounds like bullshit to me. I think he just lost control of the salt.

Crush, like Cucina Urbana, serves a rustic italian fare. I had a six hour ragu last time whose flavor palette was also ponderously deep like an inky pool. I happen to like this style of cooking but it is probably not for everybody. Now I have to wonder if that is the way everything is cooked there? If I had one complaint when I first  visited the restaurant it was that the entree selection was very limited and it is still so.  We were offered desert which we declined and paid for the meal including the screwed up entree and drove back home. Probably won't return for a while. A bit disappointing.

Beatles - No Reply (take 1,2,3 rare version)

Superman & The Mole Men #3

Foolish Pleasure

My stat count for the blog is really in the dumper. Yippee! There are several possible reasons for the blog to be undergoing a slump; the search algorithm has changed so I am not getting as many Bangla Deshi's searching for porn, people are sick of my constant raving, I stopped sending it out so much, expecting people to know how to bookmark it if they want to read it, Google has yet again monkeyed with the search engines and the googlebot, etc.. Could be a million things, or maybe just a momentary blip.

Frankly I am happy at my newfound lack of popularity. It is something of a pressure to write for the unseen masses, never knowing who I will offend and who will ultimately come gunning for me. Have we had any blog stalker killings yet?

I am happy to write for my regulars, my friends, my longtime invisible lurkers. This isn't a popularity contest and it has to be fun for me and not a chore. So enjoy the blog and remember not to tell anybody about it.