Politics, as usual.

It close to even money that we will have a new president next term. I think that the replacement would be a disaster in several ways for this country but don't want to get into that right now. I would like to discuss the partisan split.

One of the GOP talking heads the other day made the point that this is now officially Barack Obama's economy, no longer George Bush's. That may very well be. But whatever he has done, he has done by himself, facing the most intransigent House in memory. They have thwarted and obstructed him from day one. The economy is a product of both his leadership and his opponents unwillingness to compromise on any issue.

I hope that people have a long memory if the Republicans retake the White House and start talking about bipartisanship and olive branches all of a sudden. Payback is a serious bitch and you reap just what you sow. Remember. Because you gave nothing.

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Interesting article on AlterNet the other day about doing away with the Electoral College. Because why should a Wyoming vote be worth six California votes? The tyranny of the minority. We are ceding our votes to a bunch of fundamentalist corn farmers, and subverting the will of urban population bases. Definitely not fair.

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"He (Obama) wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people."
Mitt Romney

The real American enemy, teachers, police and firemen.

Jocko Homo

I saw the novelist Anne Patchett speak last month. She had a tip for the aspiring writers in the audience. She says that she never does any research until the middle of her story, pesky facts having a way of bogging everything down. In homage to Anne I will fire from the hip this afternoon. If you require a citation or wish to challenge the veracity of my arguments and claims I would be glad to furnish source and page number, at a later time of course for a small fee. Administrative costs and all that.

I think that it is true that our society is in a critical nexus point. There is a group that clearly is on the side of preserving the status quo, whether it is our reliance on fossil fuels, the radical right's stance on gay marriage and civil unions, environmentalism and pollution or a host of other issues. Looks to me like a last ditch effort to defeat the inevitable but they are doing a pretty good job of hanging around. Until they can find a way to charge for sunlight.

Yesterday I ran across an article in the San Diego Union about the House's defeat of a bill advancing alternative fuel usage for the navy titled Navy’s green fleet runs into fiscal storm.

The vote split mostly along party lines, with Republicans, including San Diego County Rep. Duncan Hunter, saying that proposed massive cuts to defense spending leave no room for anything but essentials.


“We’ll need to learn to do much more with much less. Experimenting with biofuels at such a significant cost to taxpayers will not put the military on better footing or increase effectiveness, next to other investments that are much higher on the priority list,” said Joe Kasper, Hunter’s spokesman.


The Navy, which sees its green initiative as a strategic move away from reliance on expensive Persian Gulf oil, spent $13.7 million on fuel made from used cooking oil and algae, blended with petroleum, for its upcoming green fleet voyage on July 18 and 19.


It was the biggest alternative fuel purchase ever for the U.S. government — 200,000 gallons of jet fuel and 700,000 gallons of ship diesel.

Really a paltry amount of money, compared to most of the crap that our public servants waste money on, seeding new technology that is bound to pay off big time in the future. The article talks about the promise of jatropha, a subtropical crop that produces oil-bearing seeds. Jatropha already sells for about the cost of oil at $99.00 per barrel and has a lot of near term potential. Seem to recall it is called research and development. Solyndra is peanuts compared to the ridiculous fraud and pork that gets funded by the Pentagon every day,

Unfortunately, our legislators have an addiction to fossil fuels, or perhaps more accurately, the money behind fossil fuels. And its always about the money. Their attitude is very shortsighted. And it's a shame.

Read more about the Greenfleet, the United States Department of the Navy Alternative Fuels Working Group.

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The biggest governmental hoot of the year is the North Carolinians forbidding the discussion of rising sea levels. Afraid that it will scare off business. Potentially a sea level change could wipe out Hatteras and the outer banks.

A state-appointed science panel's warns that sea levels could rise by more than three feet by 2100. That could threaten 2,000 square miles of coastland. A coastal development group, NC-20, disputes the science panel's findings and says that the state should instead plan for seas to rise by about eight inches. They say stricter regulations would hurt the coastal economy.

Rob Jackson, professor of environmental science at Duke University asked the senators to hold the bill for a month to allow for more input from scientists and the public.

"My primary concern is that the bill won't take into account the best science available," Jackson said. "It's already clear to the scientific community that the rates of sea level rise are accelerating. We know why they're rising because of warmer temperatures and ice melting. This bill basically says we can't use the best scientific information to protect people along the coast of North Carolina."

I can just see a guy in water up to his neck who is afraid to say that he is drowning because you now aren't legally allowed to use the word drowning in North Carolina.  Bad for business. Call it temporary water respiration and resulting sudden expiration, sounds better. And we can always try to pray it away.

An article by Orrin H. Pilkey, the James B. Duke professor emeritus of geology at Duke University, discussing the scientific issues involving rising sea levels.

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Not to be outdone we travel north to Virginia. Earlier this year the state of Virginia paid $50,000 for a study on the potential effects of climate change and sea level rise on the state's coastline.

Only one problem: The report's authors weren't allowed to use terms like "climate change" and "sea level rise" because state lawmakers feared a backlash from the state's Republicans and Tea Partiers.

They discovered that they could not use the phrases "sea level rise" or "climate change" in requesting the study, in part because of objections from Republican colleagues and also for fear of stirring up conservative activists, some of whom believe such terms are liberal code words.
On its website, for example, the Virginia tea party described the proposed "sea level rise" study this way: "More wasted tax dollars for more ridiculous studies designed to separate us from our money and control all land and water use."
The group urged its members to contact elected officials right away to defeat the measure: "They will pass this without blinking if we don't yell loudly."
So lawmakers did away with all mention of sea level rise, substituting a more politically neutral phrase: "recurrent flooding."

Read the article here.

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An international group of researchers in this weeks issue of Nature postulates that humans are near an environmental tipping point. The study is titled Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere.

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.

From Scientific American's review of the study:

Human activities are pushing Earth toward a "tipping point" that could cause sudden, irreversible changes in relatively stable conditions that have allowed civilization to flourish, a new study warns.
There are signs that a toxic brew of climate change, habitat loss and population growth is dramatically reshaping life on Earth, an international team of researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature.
Those pressures are greater than the natural forces that caused the end of the last ice age roughly 11,700 years ago, a time when half the planet's large mammal species went extinct and humans migrated out of Africa.
"We are doing enough to cause one of these tipping points," said lead author Anthony Barnosky, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The question now is, how close are we? Is it inevitable? What are the changes that we see coming down the road that we should be aware of in order to make the best of it, essentially."
In recent years, scientists who study the climate have argued that humans have changed it enough to push Earth into a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. Biologists have warned that accelerating rates of species loss suggest the planet is entering the sixth great extinction in its history, on par with the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Just more environmental cassandraism, left wing environmental wackjobs, don't they realize that jesus gave us this planet for our dominion? People got businesses to run. Who misses the dinosaur or carrier pigeon, anyway? You are either tough enough to make it or you move aside and join the stegasaurs. Life, it's a hard business.

James Burton

Bygone North County

A San Diego native, I have spent much of my life in northern San Diego county. I was poring over some old maps this morning, thinking about some of the North County towns that are shown that no longer exist and have faded from our collective memory. Towns like Stuart, once located north of Oceanside, Moosa, Lilac, Delphi, Ponto, Fallbrook Junction, Chappo, Ysidora, Las Flores, Buena, Farr, there are far too many of these forgotten places to count.

Rancho Guajome, circa 1891

My own Santa Margarita Valley and the surrounding area is shown on the 1948 Auto Club road map with names of old forgotten ranches, Weaver Ranch, Doville Ranch, Pearson Ranch, Harris Ranch, Radcliff's Grove, Shrobe Ranch and the elegiacally named Olympian Society.

Some of the spots have merely changed hats. Stuart is now part of Camp Pendleton. The picture on top shows Carlsbad's Red Apple Inn, erected in 1927 by A.G. Blair. It was purchased in 1936 and became the Army Navy Academy, which still exists and uses the lovely original buildings.

I was thinking about some of the other neat places in North County that have changed in my lifetime and thought I would write a short list.

*Hobbit Houses, Leucadia - When my family first moved to North County, the Hobbit Houses were still perched at La Costa Blvd. and Coast Highway. the Hobbit houses were a rather motley assortment of sharp peaked cottages. Home to a great bunch of assorted, artists, bohemians and misfits, I loved visiting this spot and knew several of the cast of characters. Paul, Mashid, Carol, Jim E. were a few of the people I knew that lived at this interesting place. Now I can't even find a picture, anybody have one?

The pictures on the left are the famous boat houses in Encinitas, close by my first apartment on I Street, the Lanikai. They still exist. The other architectural feature in Encinitas that I always liked was the house with the twin spiraling red brick fireplaces on Vulcan.

Encinitas was most fun when it was still a funky beach and surf town. Place never recovered from the money that started rolling in the late seventies, right around the time the Lumber Yard was built. Lost a lot of charm.

Many of the coolest homes were of course, eventually torn down, the little twenties bungalows that dotted San Elijo with their ancient succulents, aloes and pride of madeira.  Unfortunately they mostly made way for an awful assortment of boxy, lot line hugging, tasteless monstrosities with ugly mansard roofs and a decided lack of design.

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On a slightly more mundane plane, I will always have a fondness for the old oceanside DMV. It was located in an old bungalow somewhere off of Hill St. You waited on a big ramp outside the house. The cool thing was that the neighbor had an old mynah bird that would talk to you while you were waiting in line.

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Anybody remember the old gunite slides in San Dieguito Park? They were long and brown and a whole lot of fun to slide down. Finally removed as a safety precaution long ago after kids started crashing down them on their motorcycles, skateboards and stingrays. The old Ashley's Market in Rancho Santa Fe? The Castle in Valley Center?

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Escondido had its own share of funky spots but it all has to start at Rube's Market. Cows on the roof, cigar in his mouth, old Rube Nelson was a cultural icon. Corner of Washington and Broadway, Rube would patrol the place in his apron.

Other spots that resonated for me were the Checkered Shirt, a funky hamburger stand on the north end of town that I would stop by when I was hitchhiking up and down the state.

Escondido and San Marcos both had their own restaurant barrels, selling bad mexican food for as long as I remember. San Marcos also had George Burgers, now moved and renovated and missing it's early charm and my favorite pie shop, Rog-O's. Across the street was one of North County's only chiropractor's, a wacky guy who had a giant rabbit sculpture outside.

C.J. Paderewski designed dome, Palomar College - 1958

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Del Dios is still the largely untouched jewel in the lotus, thanks to a long standing sewer moratorium. Del Dios store was the site of a lot of nice imbibing and dancing, wonder if it will ever re-open?

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Carlsbad, of course, had its most famous landmark, The Twin Inns. There were two of them when I was a kid. Built by early developer Gerhard Schutte of the Carlsbad Land and Water company in the 1880's, his partner D.D. Wadsworth built a mirror match two hundred yards south.

Twin Inn's was expensive and a very rare treat when I was young, about $6.50 for dinner. They were known for their fried chicken which was truly superb. I most remember their fantastic corn fritters. Where in the hell can you get a decent corn fritter nowadays?

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Oceanside was a place of foreboding in the late sixties and early seventies. Especially scary was the Strand and the area around the Greyhound Station. Junkies and hookers, the place we thought would never clean up, but it has cleaned up.

Used to take old Les Gampp to the ancient Rosicrucian Hall on the hill for thanksgiving vegetarian dinners, beautiful spot, haven't been back in thirty years easy. Place had just the right touch of Buck Rogers.

My dad's favorite place to grab a bite when I was young was the Royal Palms in Carlsbad. It is now Fidel's, used to serve great italian. Place was beautiful with its large hand adzed beams and mediterranean revival decor.

Vista never had much going for it that I can see, with the exception of a great burger and soda spot, the Pepper Tree Frosty that has been there forever. And Peto's. When I was young I remember once visiting the magnificent but crumbling old two story Delphi mansion near Foothill and Vista Way that gave the locale its early name, Delphi's Corner.

Encinitas was hippie, laid back surfer cool. Nice A&W on the bluff held on for as long as it could. Turkey dinners at Encinitas Cafe are still wonderful. I liked Boneyard Beach, had a rope I could climb down. Whole beach topography has changed. Swami's of course, they threw me off their basketball courts as a kid, said they were only for the monks. Whoever heard of a monk playing basketball?

Swami's collapse, early 1940's.

La Paloma Theater is a regional gem. I loved it in the old days before they tore the couches out. Spent many a night bonged out on the couches for surf, Fellini and Pink Floyd film marathons. Used to have a great bookstore next door. Green Dragon across the street.

I Street, Sattwa, Sunflower, a ton of cool health food stores back when too. Encinitas Post Office records show that early in the last century there were at least two more streets to the west, now reclaimed by mother ocean.

I remember attending the infamous Stone Steps Surf contest, when contestants had to chug a beer between heats, never forget Donald Takayama and his finalist foe smashing each other's boards in a semi drunken rage.

Solana had the roller rink on cedros, now an antique mall, that I used to enjoy. Cory Brother's Mens Store in the Plaza de las Cuatro Banderas. Now you mention the Plaza de las Cuatro Banderas and people look at you funny, the name has been largely forgotten. Also home to Another Bird, a cool concert hall near once near Pillbox. The northern People's Food. Marshall's shoes. The old and funky waffle house, now history.

Never got up to Fallbrook much until the mid seventies for keggers. Places of interest were Port's clothing and The Westerner. Mike is celebrating his 94th birthday next tuesday. Rusty's Ammo Room, although me and him never exactly got along.

Fallbrook, once known as Mt. Fairview, was of course home to the second largest ostrich ranch in the country in the early part of the last century. And the Weirz, known for their iconic single, Gypsies from Bonsall.

I know that I am naturally missing a lot and anxiously await your contribution.

New Camera

I have just started to take a few shots with the new camera. I have a lot to learn about its many features. I still have Doug's 80-400mm 1:4.5 lens and had hoped to get some bird shots yesterday eve and this morning but my flying friends weren't really cooperating. These lovely ladies were sweet enough to stand in. Not really the right lens for portraiture but then again, with subjects this stunning, how could I go wrong?

Think I will really enjoy the new Nikon D-7000.

Bob Welch - Hypnotized

Friend of Paul Percy DeGaston

I got the call yesterday afternoon. Man said that he was from Brawley and by his worn voice I could tell he was past the eighty mark. Wanted to talk about Paul DeGaston. I was busy yesterday and said I had to call him back. He called again. Rather than argue I grabbed a few pieces of paper and tried to take some notes as he talked. He talked fast.

He had first met DeGaston as a handyman in La Jolla in 1950. Right around fifty, he thought. Paul and his wife Violet had a photographic gallery down there on Prospect. He had done some odd jobs for the photographer and was intrigued by photography.

He says DeGaston and his wife lived at 1121 Torrey Pines Rd. Owned the place but lived in the little house in the back and rented out the main place. Eventually sold it for about 29k, real money back then in 1956. The caller wasn't exactly sure where DeGaston ended up after that, he thought a 1000 Palms in Riverside County and then eventually they purchased a house in Idyllwild on 10 acres with a cabin.

Anyway eventually the man became Paul's apprentice and did gardening for him. Said that Paul and Violet got along real well.

He told me that De Gaston's real last name was actually Frazier. Said that the old man told him that he was originally from Missouri. As a teenager he went to New York and apprenticed with a famous photographer, he doesn't remember the name after all of these years.

He took the name DeGaston when he became a photographer, thought it made him sound french and distinguished. He had a huge negative file when he retired and sold it off. DeGaston told him that he had made a lot of money in Shanghai. Left before the japs took over. There were a lot of rich americans there in those days ripe for the plucking. He left Shanghai for Honolulu in the thirties when things got a little too hot.

He said that Paul DeGaston was a revolutionary photographer. He used a three part die transfer process that combined three separate red, blue and yellow filters and printed them on a gel matrix in cyan, magenta, yellow and key black. He used a gigantic large format camera and set up his shots with a revolutionary three light system with a top light, a light at a 45 degree angle and a right straight light. He remembers DeGaston walking around and around the studio with the third light, trying to find the sweet spot to illuminate his subject.

Said he never kept a photo of Paul, doesn't have one, kind of odd not to be able to find a photographer's picture.

That's about all we got on the phone yesterday. Sent this email too:

 ... when Paul F. DeGaston retired,(around 1957) he and Violet bought a place in Thousand Palms, as a winter home. They kept Violet's house in the town of Idylwild for a summer home. They sold their cabin and 10 acres there (Idylwild) as well as their home on Torrey Pines Road in La Jolla. A friend and neighbor both in homes and studios  in La Jolla was the artist Carolus Verhaeren . You should Google him for a tragic tale.
 When I knew Paul, he no longer did etching or out-of-studio photography. There is a National Geographic article about Shanghai (1938 or earlier) of which all the photography was done by Paul DeGaston - very good, but the text was not by him. I long ago read Paul's copy of this article, contrasting the luxurious life of the wealthy foreign Shanghai dwellers with the dismal conditions for the impoverished locals.Excellent photography.
 Tonight we discovered the website for Gene Dougherty at  gene@BrightHorseArts.com and
noted a considerable resemblance of Mr. Dougherty to the Paul DeGaston I knew in LaJolla in the early and mid-fifties. Somewhere it was mentioned that he died in Riverside. This is possible as both Idylwild and Thousand Palms are in Riverside County and were quite rural in the 50's, perhaps no hospitals at the time. Please let me know any new developments. J


So we now have yet another new last name for Paul Percy, Frazier, and an additional place of birth, Missouri. I asked him about any anomalies in Paul's character and he spoke the world of him, no blemishes. Verhaeren was a neighbor, committed suicide in a phone booth, distraught over a woman, one of the people I sell in my gallery. Once again, two Paul DeGaston's married to a woman named Violet, both with multiple names, both dissemblers, both philanderers, both once lived in China, both artists of some merit, both with rather questionable pasts.

Keep trying to button this story up but it keeps coming. Like any good whodunnit, just when you think that things will start to clear up, you get thrown a new left hook or two.

Gumshoes and dames

My pals know that I love pulp fiction. The real pulp fiction. I am half way through a fabulous compendium, Otto Penzler's 2007 epic The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. This very thick book has stories mostly pulled from detective magazines of the twenties and thirties. Magazines like The Black Mask that became wildly popular after World War I.

These serialized stories exploded exponentially in the thirties, Penzler says over 500 titles a month and the quality of writing ranges from moribund to brilliant. This volume contains stories from some of the most talented known and forgotten masters of the genre. People like Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Norbert Davis and Erle Stanley Gardner, who hailed from our area.

What is interesting to me is that the protagonists range from saintly do-gooders to anti hero villains. Good guys are typically characters with good anglo saxon names, italians, jews and europeans usually wear the black hats. Shamus's, tough guys and cops intent on bringing a little law and order to River City.

One of my favorite characters is the jewish shyster lawyer, Hymie Croker in Leslie T. White's The City of Hell. Sometimes the animus is barely hidden at all, the hero is protecting good old america from the nasty immigrants here to steal away the american dream.  Some of the protagonists operate on the other side of the law, going after crooked politicians, evil bankers and short sellers and sharing the booty with the poor and the soup kitchens like modern day Robin Hoods. Penzler explains that the readership of this genre was decidedly populist and anti authoritarian while the country was undergoing the Great Depression.

Other memorable stories are the first Philip Marlowe mystery by Raymond Chandler, Red Wind, Carroll John Daly's The Third Murderer and Erle Stanley Gardner's great bad guy hero Lester Leith in The Monkey Murder, published in the January 1939 issue of Detective Story. Over 70 Leith novellettes were written by Gardner.

The reader is introduced to several Gardner characters whose output challenged his most famous creation, Perry Mason, of whom 80 books were written. Ken Corning, another defense attorney, Ed Jenkins, The Phantom Crook, the Patent Leather Kid and Senor Arñaz de Lobo, a soldier of fortune. Gardner was, at the time of his death, the most widely read writer in the world. An attorney, he would extemporaneously dictate novels to his secretaries in nothing flat.

Kerry is always accusing me of writing like a bad gumshoe novelist and wanting to be Mickey Spillane. He is probably right. I love the depression era writing and the patter of the day. Faces are maps, grenades are pineapples, the patois is vivid and colorful. Probably the same reason I love Bogart, Raft, Edward G. and Cagney. I watched Legs Diamond as a kid and I was hooked.

Find this book at the library like I did and give it a whirl.

The Shindogs - I'm Down (Shindig 1965)

The Shindogs, featuring James Burton on the Tele, Delaney Bramlett on bass, Joey Cooper on lead vocal and the Wellingtons as backup singers.

Thursday Shpiel

"Do you think I should sell one of my old Nikon's now that I am getting the new one?"

Suddenly I felt a short, staccato, icy burst across my bow. "What new one?"

"Oh, the Nikon D7000. We discussed it, didn't we? You know it's been years since I have had a new camera. Only so many shutter clicks left in the old girl, you know? Anyway it should be here tomorrow."

Leslie was really pretty cool with it, hey it's your money, I can't tell you what to do, etc. Always better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. The camera came yesterday. Think it will be a marked improvement. I get a lot of pleasure from photography and think I owed it to myself to finally get a new rig. D7000 should offer a marked improvement in resolution, light sensitivity, frames per second and a host of other areas. No one can say I didn't get my money's worth about what is in comparison a toy, the old D 40x. Still it is hard to spend money on a luxury item in this economic environment.

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Everybody knows that Helen is super smart but Barbara brought the breadth of her genius home in spades. As soon as the Italian cruise ship hit the rocks, Helen was on the horn booking her next trip with the company, figuring that prices would plummet, which they did. So while we stay plunked down in Paducah she is having a gay old time ferrying around the Norwegian fjords with her hubby. Some people have all the brains.

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My cardiologist called the other day. Blood work finally came back. My bad cholesterol numbers are way down, good cholesterol is way up. He was a little astounded. I owe it all to my new high fat, sugar laden diet. Might even write a cookbook. I have a working title - Eat like a swine and live longer.

Speaking of which, we libertine gourmands better eat all the fois gras we can this month, because next month they won't allow farmers to stuff any more grain down our canard buddies' gullets. Vincent's, anyone?

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Word on the street is that the Patchetts and Clayborns dined at the new Vintana restaurant in Escondido last night and really liked it. To my knowledge, neither party bought a new Lexus during dinner.

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My new favorite meal in Fallbrook, after the shrimp and garlic skillet  at Rosa's is Pedro's' Tacos fried chicken burrito. True culinary genius.

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Statistics show that people in poverty actually spend $1.50 for every dollar that they claim that they have, at least according to a Neal Bortz faux commencement speech that Will forwarded to me.

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On the same topic, a buddy of mine in town likes to complain about the unions and is applauding the Wisconsin recall result. Only problem is, his spouse is getting serious bank for her teacher retirement every month. I am like, if you feel that strongly, how about sending some of that money back. Not a chance.

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Indica varieties of marijuana may make you insane, at least according to this study sent to me by Shawn in Thailand.

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Michael Cartwright has just sent over his new issue of MUST - the Temecula Southern California Wine County online newsletter.

baseball question

The answer to the math question, as sharp minded Kerry in San Francisco was the first to point out, is that the bat cost $1.05 and the ball cost a nickel. Don't feel bad if you instinctively thought, as I did, that the bat cost a buck. Half of the applicants to M.I.T. and Harvard reflexively answered the same way.

Charlie Rich

Rick Griffin Rip Off

I was looking deep in cyberspace for a particular Rick Griffin image yesterday when I came upon this web site. K-Type, a company that sells fonts, is marketing a font based on the work of my late friend, the iconic psychedelic artist, Rick Griffin.

I had never seen the site before, and wrote Denis, a maven of all things Griffin. He said that the thing had been around for close to a decade and would ask Carl, a Griffin scholar who has focussed on his lettering, for more information about the deal.

I wrote Ida, Rick's widow, and she had never seen the site before and was going to fire off a letter to the company.

I am not a copy write attorney but it seems to me a gross violation to not only market a lettering style like this that is such a patent rip off of an artist, name it after said artist and then neither license or pay the estate. California has very strong laws about the rights of an artist's estate, I believe they exist for 75 years after his or her passing. Somebody is clearly making money on someone else's name here, and the quality ain't so hot either. £180 (GBP) for an enterprise license is not cheap. How many have they sold? It is apparently one of the top ten fonts that they sell, according to the website. Kind of ironic to sell a license for something that you do not own a license for.

I would hire a good lawyer, audit their books, and demand a big fat check for this incredible ripoff. Utter hubris and disregard. It is one thing to copy an artist's work, another matter entirely to use their name to sell your own shoddy copy.

The story that never wants to end...

In my email box tonight:

Dear Mr. Sommers, my husband knew De Gaston well in the 50's in La Jolla, and worked as an apprentice in his studio. A lot of the surmises in the March blog are off base. We would love to share the truth with you, including his years in Shanghai, early days in Missouri etc. I hope this e-mail reaches you, am a novice at it, and couldn't reach you at the blueheronblast address. By the way, he wasn't the abortionist. Please reply if you get this.

KP

Bobby Sommers. Cub Reporter

I pulled yesterday's Fallbrook Public Utility District rebuttal post. In the middle of the night. It didn't feel right to me. The anonymous emailer raised some good points but they were overridden by his personal jabs and anger. Unfortunately when you engage in ad hominem attacks, even valid points that you make tend to get forgotten. Mr. Hayden wrote a pretty straightforward response which I welcome and I think that he deserved a more courteous answer.

If you would like to read the post, I have it published under the Hayden letter from the other day. I think that I am through with the investigative journalism shtick and am taking off my muckracker cap. Things get too ugly, too fast. The people that ride into town with the white hats on only see black hats and vice versa.

WildBill commented at breakfast that people that comment anonymously on the blast tend to feel like they have a greater freedom to be assholes than people that sign their names to their post and I think I agree. I have considered doing away with anonymous comments but some people have a problem figuring their way through the comment system and commenting anonymously is the easiest way to chime in. But I would appreciate it if you would sign your name anyway.

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According to Blogger, this is my 3225th blog post and I have received somewhere around 5026 comments to date. That is a lot of writing. I can honestly say that while many blogs have serious issues with trolls and nasty people, I can count the truly vile comments on both hands. I think that is pretty cool. I am not counting Kerry in Arizona because I know that he just tries to stir the pot every once in a while. I rarely if ever censor anything on the blast. I got a fairly crappy comment last night and suggested that the reader, who was of course anonymous, find a different place to read.

A lot of people are reading this blog. All over the country, all over the world. Don't ask me why, they can't all be cruising for porn sites. I meet new lurkers every day. A lurker, for those of you who are not familiar with blog parlance, is someone unknown to you who reads but never comments. It is of course very flattering to me that people enjoy my writing and contributions. But the more people that read, in some ways, the harder it is to write, especially when everybody is wired so differently. Loses a bit of intimacy. Some of my associates have expressed genuine surprise that I haven't been stalked by some psycho yet.

I have even given consideration to making the blast an invitation only affair. But if I had adopted that stance some of my greatest readers like Len in New York, Linda in L.A. and Randy in Bristol would never have come on board. So we will keep things as they are for a while.

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Of course I have threatened to stop several times writing several times in the past and we all know how that turned out so I won't even think about playing that card on you again. Would like to write fiction but it takes a clearer mind than I possess at present. Georg Simenon could crank out a novel in seven days, Earle Stanley Gardner could do it in three, takes me ten years. Will keep at it as long as its fun, then it goes poof! and I try something different.

Simple Math Question

A bat and ball cost $1.10.

The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost?


From "Thinking, Fast and Slow," by Daniel Kahneman.

Good Bye Pork Pie Hat

Shaft

Shut yo mouf

If you ask me, and admittedly no one has, the President of the United States has a bit of an image problem. Our greatest presidents since day one have been old generals or war heroes and Barack just doesn't have that macho swagger. I think that it makes him hard to relate to for most average white guys.

The fairly ineffectual president George Bush could stand on a carrier declaring mission accomplished doing his best Clint Eastwood impression and the country just ate it up. Make my day, hombre. Barack offs Osama Bin Laden on his watch and gets zero street cred. Unfortunately he looks like a guy more comfortable on a squash court than somebody you would want watching your back in a barroom brawl. He frankly seems a little bit soft.

He tried the macho thing a few months ago when he warned the world that he didn't bluff but it didn't exactly resonate. I'm not saying he is a pussy on the level of Jimmy Carter but he reinforces the image of the democrats as people who drink tea with their little fingers aloft in the air.

Maybe it has something to do with the company he keeps. I am nursing a bad cold this weekend. Laying on the couch in the midst of my suffering I told my wife that Anna had just offered me a chance to have dinner with Barry and Michelle. "Anna who?" "Anna Wintour," I said in my most casual voice. "The editor of Vogue wants to have dinner with you?""Well, not just me, Sarah Jessica Parker will probably stop by, you know how she is." I showed her the gmail. 

Robert --

I am thrilled and honored to be co-hosting an event with the President and the First Lady at Sarah Jessica Parker's home on June 14th.

And I'm happy to have the chance to extend an invitation to you as well.

Enter for the chance to join us, along with a guest of your choosing:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Night-in-New-York

After dinner, you'll join the President and the First Lady for a private Mariah Carey concert.

Pretty fabulous. I wouldn't miss this opportunity.

Hope to see you soon,

Anna Wintour

Now I don't think I could exactly fit it in to my schedule, what could we really talk about, the problems he has driving to his right on the basketball court? Reminisce about the good old days on the business end of a bong?  I know that Mariah Carey is really popular and all but I must confess her music does absolutely nothing for me. If ever there was a gathering of the Hollywood elite, it is this confab, even if we are actually talking Manhattan or possibly East Hampton. These are not my people. I blanche at the thought of watching another Sex in the City rerun. That's the problem, his base is clubby and chummy and all but a lot of us normal folks don't really fit in. Won't play in Peoria.

Americans want a John Wayne type running the show. A little grit and swagger. No matter how stupid he or she may actually be. Although Barack is of mixed race, we never get to see the ghetto street tough. Richard Roundtree. Doesn't every black dude, however milktoast, have one lurking deep inside?

Barack!

Who's the black president

whose hoop skills are so excellent?

(Barack!)

Damn straight

Who is the man

That would risk his neck for his brother man?

(Barack!)

Can ya dig it?

Who's the cat that won't cop out

When there's danger all about

(Barack!)

Right on

You see this cat Barry is a bad mother--

(Shut your mouth)

But I'm talkin' about Barack

(Then we can dig it)

He's a complicated man

But no one understands him but his woman*

(Barack)

* and Saul Alinsky

So that would be my advice to this president, if he would ever stoop so low as to ask advice from a common, uneducated, blogging, art dealer. Find the floor length fox coat with the broad lapel, if you don't have one you can borrow one from Clyde Frazier. Pull the platforms out of the closet. Call up Vladimir and say "Holmes, you got five seconds to get your sorry butt on board with Syria or I am going to lay some evil whoopass on your creepy Volga skull. You know what I'm talking about." The American public could relate to you for once and we would be probably quicker on our way to achieving world peace.

Think about it, Barry,

Your friend, 

Robert Sommers

...and your friends closer.

You think the Obama Administration really gives a sheit about civil liberties? Better read this. And take a gander at Obama's Kill List by Amy Davidson - The New Yorker. JS sent this one over - Obama, Drone Warrior.

Franz Kafka © Robert Sommers

From the Department of Homeland Security. Hundreds of words you should avoid using on the internet if you don't want your own government to spy on you. I got a sawbuck for the blast reader who can use the most of them in a coherent and funny paragraph. And then we will write you in jail.

Katrīne Drozdoviča - Bruce Conner

Unleashing the Furies

Queen Calafia and her Amazons - Maynard Dixon

Interesting news story this week about the two army reserve women suing the government for excluding them from certain ground combat units on account of their gender.  The women say that females are already in the combat zone but discriminatory policy is keeping them from getting the arms training that they need to fully protect themselves. This they contend is actually dangerous. And they probably have a point. But there is probably a very good and simple reason to keep females out of combat - women are just too damn mean.

Remember the catfights in junior high and high school? Girls unleash a savagery unknown to men when they are going at it. Hair, earrings, scratching it is all fair game. I would sooner have my (hypothetical) children watch the bloodiest MMA fight than an average schoolyard brawl between women.

Why do you think the african lionesses do all the work hunting? Not just because males are lazy, it's because they are perfect killing machines. Stick women in combat, synchronize their periods and you have a lethal fighting force that could make Sergeant Fury's Howling Commandos look like the evening tea group at the Little Sisters of the Poor.

A buddy of mine has a son who has been a prison guard at both the men's and women's prison. He prefers to guard the men. Dan tells me that after the men have a scrap it is basically over and done with. However if the women have an altercation he says that it goes on for literally ever. They never forget. Forever. Til the end of time.

Is it fair to unleash a bunch of estrogen imbalanced amazons on an unsuspecting world? I can only guess at the depths of their savagery. I broke a nail. We are going to take out Russia today. Hell hath no fury and all that...

So let's just back up and rethink this women in combat business. Might qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.

The odd story of Paul de Gaston and Paul de Gaston

Paul De Gaston circa 1933

I think that we can tidy up the Paul De Gaston tale finally. Put it to bed. Two separate men, two separate stories, both linked by not only a name but some very strange coincidences and congruities. Both men with a rather dark, if not sordid past.

 I got this letter from Paul Robert's daughter Gloria this week. Thank you Gloria. Not much else I can say about the entire matter, both families have their dirty little secrets, neither men exactly pillars of the community. Interesting tales, and more stuff in my brain that I am not at liberty or should I say, do not feel comfortable divulging.

The story to date can be found here. And here and here.

Message via your Google Profile: RE: PAUL DE GASTON FROM HIS DAUGHTER

I was sent your Blue Heron Blog from 2-25-12. The art is not from my father. Mine is the abortionist; he was interned during WWII because he was a loud-mouth blowhard who sought and got attention from his remarks about Hitler/Germany. But he wasn't a spy and since he served in the US Army Signal Corps he believed he was a citizen and only filed one set of papers, ignoring the 2nd set that was required at a later date. He did learn oils, chalks, charcoals, etc.as my brother states, but never was as talented as the art you are showing. If you are interested in why Germans in America were interned in WWII see: ( In 2000,Stephen Fox published Amrica's Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment and Exclusion in World War II: Memory and History ISBN 0-8204-4914-8. It has been replaced by Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans during World War II (ISBN 0595351689), which incorporates new information.) In addition, and incorrect, is the fact that my older brother didn't b other to include in his flowery description of our father (he has dates, etc. wrong) is that de Gaston isn't my father's real name. He was born with the last name "Bach". When his parents immigrated to the USA after WWI they changed the name to "Gaston". Later when my father, who wanted to be a movie star, came west he added the "de" because he thought it would look better on a marquee. There are de Gaston's in San Diego county, but are not related to the Paul Robert de Gaston who was the abortionist, practicing medicine without a licence. There was a photographer in S.D. county and I believe he did go to China; but I don't know if he was the artist. (the drawings, paintings...yes, photography is an art-form too.)

Station Man

Friday Frizzip*

*Sound of one of Don Martin's shoes hitting the pavement.

Little bit of weekly housekeeping.

Robin Adler and Dave Blackburn have been playing a bunch up in Temecula at The Wine Company,  29073 Overland Dr. Temecula CA 92591 (across the street from Costco). I think that they are playing  most Saturdays but you should call first. tel:877-488-9463 http://www.tvwineco.com/contact.html

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Rich sends along a very interesting link - War Pigs - The Fall of a burning empire.

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Shawn in Thailand offers this interesting link. Beautiful photography in this issue of Conservation Magazine.

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Dave in Japan sends over this interesting article regarding memory and cognition from Delancey Place.

In today's encore excerpt - chess grandmasters have average cognitive skills and average memories for matters outside of chess, and only show their extraordinary skills within the discipline of chess. This suggests that expertise in chess (and most other areas) has less to do with analytical skills -- the ability to project and weigh the relative merits of hundreds of options -- and more to do with long-term immersion and pattern recognition. Experts have experienced and "stored" thousands of game situations and thus having the ability to pluck an optimal answer from among those stored memories. It also suggests that expertise may be less a result of analytical prowess and more a result of passion, love or obsession for a given subject area -- enough passion to have spent the hours necessary to accumulate a robust set of memories in that area:
"The classic example of how memories shape the perception of experts comes from what would seem to be the least intuitive of fields: chess. Practically since the origins of the modern game in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability. In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world's best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the grand masters didn't perform significantly better than average on any of their tests. The greatest chess players in the world didn't seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.
"But if chess masters aren't, as a whole, smarter than lesser chess players, then what are they? In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist and chess aficionado named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates merely good chess players from those who are world-class? Did the best-class players see more moves ahead? Did they ponder more possible moves? Did they have better tools for analyzing those moves? Did they simply have a better intuitive grasp of the dynamics of the game?
"One of the reasons chess is such a satisfying game to play and to study is that your average chess buff can be utterly befuddled by a master's move. Often the best move seems entirely counterintuitive. Realizing this, De Groot pored through old games between chess masters and selected a handful of board positions where there was definitely one correct, but not obvious, move to be made. He then presented the boards to a group of international chess masters and top club players. He asked them to think aloud while they brooded over the proper move.
"What De Groot uncovered was an even bigger surprise than what his Russian predecessors had found. For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. ... They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.
"It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. When De Groot listened to their verbal reports, he noticed that they described their thoughts in different language than less experienced chess players. They talked about configurations of pieces like 'pawn structures' and immediately noticed things that were out of sorts, like exposed rooks. They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.
"Grand masters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.
"But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct long ago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master's development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.
"As impressive as the chess masters' memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces -- ones that couldn't possibly have been arrived at through an actual game -- their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices'. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces [which is the average for most people]. These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven?
"The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context -- there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world's best chess player it is, in essence, noise.
"In the same way that a few pages ago we used our knowledge of historic dates to chunk the twelve-digit number, chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master's skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-class status in chess -- or any other field -- without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing chess intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.
"Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on analysis, many of the chess master's important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like [experts in other areas such as the veteran] SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb [when others don't], the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new."
Author: Joshua Foer
Title: Moonwalking with Einstein
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2011 by Joshua Foer
Pages: 63-66

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North Carolina is legislating mandatory stupidity regarding rising sea levels and climate change. Must Read.


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World is fucked up beyond belief, face eating in Florida, disemboweled man spills guts to cops, body parts in the mail up in Canada, roommate cooking up boarder's brains for brunch, santeria killings in Mexico, seattle wack job blows away barista, syrian troops slaughter, employment down, PTSD's up, no large sodas in New York, etc., etc. hope things get better, and make it soon.

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"The neighbor remembered a time when he plowed her road after a big snowstorm, allowing her to get in and out. "He didn't want any thanks for doing it; he just did it," she said. "He's been a good neighbor. He even took care of my dog when he ran away. He said little about his past, didn't like doctors and didn't like banks, Bush said. "He was a happy man," Bush told the newspaper. "He was like a father to me. He was the guy I called and went to if I had a question. I don't know who I'm going to call now.""

Indiana fugitive shot by Oregon police.

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LeMasters sent this over:

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And this. Jessica Sanchez belting it out.

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Google is furnishing a tool for users in China so they will know when Big Brother is looking over their shoulder. I give them two weeks before they cave in to chinese pressure.

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Green Lantern. Finally out of the closet. I always thought his superhero outfit was a little too well coordinated.