Wood Duck © Robert Sommers 2026
Wednesday, September 6, 2023
Stupid and disposable
And it's not just my tattoo on the neck and fat tattooed ankle phobia.
You don't even have to travel to Pixley to see that we are getting not only dumber but much more ignorant by the day.
And that 99% of the time, stupid, dysfunctional parents will pump out equally if not more stupid, dysfunctional kids. People that resemble the folks in this video. It is quite sad and unfortunate.
Ask a Gen Zer to find the United States on a map and be prepared to cringe. And it is not just geography, it can be history, math, art, science, what have you. We just don't know shit about anything anymore.
Many will blame schools and teachers but I do not. I blame parents and genetics. Parents for not taking more interest in their children's education, not to mention drinking and using meth while their progeny is incubating in the oven.
And genetics because, oh well...
Do you know how dumb that is? Very dumb. Half the people on the freeway you drive with on a daily basis can't solve the "do you put the circular object in the round hole or the square hole?" test. And they are voting and reproducing, folks.
Maybe eugenics wasn't such a bad idea?
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I had an orange charger in front of me blast through the red light with traffic oncoming at Brandon and Mission the other day before they went up to the new mental ward that used to be our hospital. Cars coming at him. The light had not just turned red, it was closer to green. But he didn't care. Not sure if it was a patient or somebody that worked there? It is epidemic.
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Furniture, like televisions and cameras and computers and many other things, doesn't last for more than a few years now.
To understand the decline in quality, first consider what most furniture is actually made of. In the mid-20th century, the more affordable stuff was typically made domestically of American plywood — i.e., thin layers of wood glued together — while fancier pieces might be solid cherry or oak, and could be made in the United States or come from Italy or Denmark. Today, most of what’s on the market consists of Chinese-made press board and plywood, while pieces marketed as “solid wood” might be rubber wood with glued-on veneer.
These changes result from the same directive: “Everyone is just trying to reduce cost,” says CoCo Ree Lemery, a furniture designer who has worked for brands such as Pottery Barn and West Elm, and is currently a visiting professor of furniture design at Purdue University. Rubber wood, for example, is less expensive than most other lumber because it’s a byproduct of latex manufacturing, but it’s prone to decay. Chinese-made wood products are similarly cheap, but the quality is wildly inconsistent.
This is so post boomer, this attraction to junk. Our parents and grandparents had beautiful antique Federal and Biedermeier and Sheraton period pieces with solid joinery, dovetails and through tenons that would last literally hundreds of years and now this. Crap that won't make it a decade.
Chinese junk.
Of course, the modern bauhaus movement that took their design directive from minimalist, monastic worker housing and jail cells deserves its share of blame. While the look might be clean and stark, the construction was mostly shit.
We follow the design fad we see piped to us on television like mindless sheep.
I drove by the thrift store the other day and there was a fifties style modern wingback divan being given away or sold cheap. Not exactly my style but cool. Had the look. And then I thought, well, it might be a modern reproduction that is being recycled and it probably is and I kept driving. The second or third iteration forward lacks a certain gravitas...
And I saw the shift coming when Design within reach and the others started knocking the fifties stuff off with the fake Eames and Wegner. And it made no difference to anybody. That it was only a short matter of time to where the originals had no meaning and it had all turned into junk.
And here we are.
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
Cumulus
"Those people" are at it again
It is used by some very clever people who seem to specialize in very blithe and cutting one liners but unless you have a zillion followers it is a pretty masturbatory exercise, like talking to yourself in a well.
As everybody knows, one of my least favorite human beings, Elon Musk, bought the platform a while back and immediately set his sights on destroying it.
He didn't pay his landlords or vendors, overworked his staff in his customary manner and then fired most of them.
Then he let it be known that he was into "free speech" and put the welcome out for the most hateful tweets you would ever not want to see.
Many people fled, like I did, and he managed to lose how much money? $40 billion?
Well Elon has figured out who cost him the gelt. Three guesses, rhymes with Soros. Of course, it was "those people."
So now he is threatening to sue the ADL, the Anti Defamation League. He may have taken umbrage at this article, Threads of Hate: How Twitter's content moderation misses the mark. Musk has already filed suit against the Center for Combatting Digital Hate.
He is claiming that the ADL's statements about rising hate speech on the social media platform have torpedoed X’s advertising revenue.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk said US advertising revenue is “still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!”
Musk also claimed that since he took over the platform in October 2022, the ADL “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”
“To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!” he said.
The X/Twitter response to his accusations and his chosen villains has actually been pretty good.
He won't sue the ADL, the discovery would destroy him. But he will certainly go after the little guy who he can bully. I decided to dig a little deeper and actually read the CCDH lawsuit.
The CCDH wrote an article in November of last year, Fact check: Musk’s claim about a fall in hate speech doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that X/Twitter took umbrage at.
And it is sort of funny. Instead of denying the existence of the hate filled posts he says that the data was illegally accessed and scraped from his platform. Sort of like, well, it is there but you weren't supposed to see it so we can now pretend it doesn't exist.
He also takes issue with the supposition that his platform is overwhelmed with harmful content. I guess that is pretty subjective. X evidently believes that the number of hateful or fake posts is not as important as the amount of impressions that they create. Sort of strange logic if you ask me.
Free speech is one thing but hate speech is clearly another and not terribly hard to discern. The nigger, faggot, kike stuff is not exactly code. And now, thanks to free speech, we can see hateful comments like this on about every online forum imaginable, I even had to change the commenting here at the blast.
Since Charlottesville, the Nazis have come out from their closets, even arriving at Disney World this weekend.
But by all means blame "those people." They make a convenient foil and have to be behind everything, don't they?
Monday, September 4, 2023
Wisconsin whine and cheese
Have you been watching what is going on in Wisconsin? Very nasty stuff at the Supreme Court. Republicans make up about 54% of the state and control 75% of the legislative power through gerrrymandering and ugly redistricting schemes.
Now they want to impeach the new liberal Supreme Court Justice before she has ever even heard a case. For bias. And prejudging cases.
Which is a hoot because we all know that conservative judges never prejudge a case, they come to every case with an open mind but they somehow all miraculously land on the favored politically expedient outcome every time through pure objective analysis.
Remarkable, really.
You see the same thing at SCOTUS of course. Kavanaugh, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, all respecting stare decisis and not prejudging and then BOOM! you get Dobbs and see it was just a charade.
They obviously lie and pretend a lot better than we do.
The current Chief Justice, Annette Zeigler, is accusing Dems of staging a coup. What balderdash!
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The conservative chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday told the new liberal majority in a scathing email that they had staged a “coup” and conducted an “illegal experiment” when they voted to weaken her powers and fire the director of state courts. Liberals gained a 4-3 majority on Aug. 1 when Justice Janet Protasiewicz began her 10-year term after winning election in April. Conservatives had held the majority for 15 years prior to that. The emails are the latest sign of broiling tensions on the court since liberals took control.
In their first week in power, the liberal justices voted to fire the state court director, hire Skwierawski and create a committee to do much of the work that the chief justice had done, a move that significantly weakened Ziegler. She was elected by the conservative majority to a second two-year term as chief justice in May.
Justice Rebecca Dallet, one of the four liberals, responded to Ziegler late Monday by saying she was “disappointed” that Ziegler was communicating through the media with a “deeply inappropriate, and at times partisan, tone and tenor.”
Dallet defended actions of the majority justices, saying everything they have done is constitutional.
“We are simply creating process so that a majority of the court can effectively work in the face of an intransigent and uncollegial chief who apparently insists on a public debate about issues for political purposes, rather than allow a court majority to function as it always has,” Dallet said.
What a bunch of crybabies and sore losers. You lost a majority on the court and think you can keep power and control? That is not the way it works. And the funny thing is, it was Republicans who changed the rules to give the power to appoint a Chief Justice to the majority rather than the old way, which was seniority. But now that the ball is in the other court, they are spitting bullets.
The subject of all this caterwauling was the new majority’s decision to fire the conservative chief justice’s right-hand man, Randy Koschnick, the director of state courts, replacing him with an appointee of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker who will answer to the whole court, not just to Ziegler. According to Justice Rebecca Dallet, Ziegler spent months rebuffing the majority’s efforts to get her to choose a date at the start of the term to discuss Court business. The new majority called a meeting anyway. At that meeting the justices revised Court rules “to make Court decision-making more inclusive, timely, and responsive” according to Dallet — and effectively to prevent the chief from slow-walking the calendar, preventing cases she doesn’t want to hear from coming up.
None of this amounts to a constitutional crisis. Right-wingers’ claims that a “rogue majority” is violating the constitution doesn’t stand up to a simple reading of the clause they cite, Article VII Section 4 of the Wisconsin Constitution: “The chief justice of the supreme court shall be the administrative head of the judicial system and shall exercise this administrative authority pursuant to procedures adopted by the supreme court.” (Emphasis added) The same section clarifies that “any 4 justices shall constitute a quorum for the conduct of the court’s business.”
The four progressives who now make up the majority went ahead and conducted court business without Ziegler only after she refused to join them. Instead of participating, Ziegler chose to air her grievances on talk radio.
Her temper tantrum is reminiscent of losing Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly’s bitter, self-pitying concession speech on election night, which catapulted him into the Hall of Fame for sore losers.
Like Kelly, Ziegler can’t stand losing power and is publicly sulking about it. Kelly refused to congratulate Janet Protasiewicz, after she beat him in a romp, sniping that she was not “a worthy opponent” and sweeping off stage by calling down a curse on the entire state: “I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it.” Ziegler refuses to meet with her colleagues now that she’s in the minority and claims that she should still be able to make the rules.
“Look, the conservatives sowed this,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, observes of the bad blood on the Court. “They sowed discord.”
Republicans pushed through a constitutional amendment in 2015 changing court procedures just so they could oust the late, nationally esteemed Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson. After they’d changed the rules so that chief justices are elected by the majority instead of chosen by seniority, conservatives on the Court went even further and pushed out Abrahamson before the end of her term. Ziegler was elected to her first two-year term as chief by her conservative colleagues in 2021 and in March 2023 they gave her a second term in a secret vote whose breakdown they refused to disclose.
You see the same exercise in raw power in Ohio, Wisconsin, Alabama, South Carolina, most places where the GOP is in control. Suppress the vote, stop citizens petitions, dilute minority voting, let friendly State Supreme Courts protect your gerrymandered districts and keep you in power.
Sad and disgusting really.
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Judge Earls called it square and honestly and is now getting squelched for it.
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Tennessee House speaker shoves black lawmaker
Tempers flare after GOP silences black congressmen and fails to enact gun control measures in the wake of the recent school shooting.
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Kennedy's SCOTUS legacy erased by his old clerks.
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Monday conglomeration
I was sad to hear about the passing of Bill Richardson. I knew Bill, donated to Bill, had dinner with Bill and thought he was one of the most able politicians and public servants I have ever met. Best modern day negotiator we have ever seen, dennis rodman notwithstanding. Bill was not without his faults but who is? * Burning Man. I have never had the desire or inclination to check it out. Never felt like my bag. But I was a participant at one of its primal antecedents, the early Rainbow Festivals, both in Highbridge Park in Spokane and in Cusick. Lived in yurts, homemade structures, tree houses and school buses back then, had a ball. Same concept, without the big money ticket for a burning man type experience today. We fed each other, slept with each other, played with each other, made music with each other, got pretty high on occasion and it was a wonderful experience that I have never regretted for a moment. Highbridge lasted about four months. Crazed Caravans of hippies with names like Medicine Story and Lou Gottlieb from Morning Star Ranch, it was a counter culture who's who and way too much fun. Way too agoraphobic and claustrophobic for that sort of thing today but I flowed a little easier around people then. Burning Man seems like way more of a classist or caste experience with better structures perhaps and cooler art, a heck of a lot more planning involved than our primitive efforts. Bit rich for my blood. Hobnob with Neak Katyal and Chris Rock and some of today's luminaries. Paris Hilton. Elon. Michael has a millionaire friend who is there right now, still loving it he said. And I think that notwithstanding a fatality, and who knows what happened there, it seems like it will be ultimately self sustaining, rain and mud notwithstanding. People will share and survive and maybe have the greatest experience of their lives because some of these people probably don't experiences challenges like this on a daily basis and challenges make us not only stronger but feeling better about ourselves. My prediction is that even more people want to return next year. Of course, a few more weeks of not getting out of there and maybe you get more of a MadMax scene where people start eating each other? But I highly doubt it. Marjorie Greene thinks the rain is god's wrath for liberal hoaxes like climate change. Tell me, why did god hate hurricane belted Florida so much, Marge? Or Hawaii. How did they piss him off?* Yesterday I started proofing photographs with whatever paper I had around until the paper I ordered gets here. They look pretty terrible but then again I am a perfectionist. It takes me 6 to 10 tries to find an exposure and color value that will work on the printed page. That is why I don't get people who send work to labs? And say, "print it." I am a control freak and there are so many visual decisions that must be made before something meets my subjective criteria? Why would you cede your aesthetic decision making to another human if you are an artist? Now actually the fun starts. I have new ideas about how to create prints that I would never have considered doing, the luminosity of the captured image looking so perfect on a backlit monitor. A few of the more graphic images might even get printed on watercolor paper. Will keep playing and experimenting. Never settle.
Cactus needlepoint
Renée called me the other day and told me she had a great idea. "I want you to do a coffee table book of great cactus in Fallbrook."
People planted a lot of cactus here in the sixties and seventies and there are some magnificent specimens around. Many of them are blooming right now.
I appreciate her for alloting my time and the good suggestion but my plate is very full right now and I am not exactly a cactus expert. If the project gets done, I am afraid somebody else will have to do it.
But I started to think about the cactus on my property. They are all pretty, if you like that sort of thing. I wandered around with my phone this morning and grabbed a couple shots.
I have two types of opuntia, Luther Burbank's favorite. While I have a pretty vast lexicon of botanical names, my knowledge of cactus is practically nil. I call the picture on top my "Mickey Mouse" opuntia for it's round paddles.
The opuntia pears are beautiful from a color perspective.
I have a huge stand of San Pedro and columnar cactus behind my property but didn't even wander there this morning.
And a phenomenal rare cactus of the most intense blue variety.
Maybe tomorrow?
It was buried beneath an echium but we trimmed it back to give it some light.
Nice to see, it has been a few years.
What else?
I've known people like that.
Fractal magic.
I'll keep my eye out if I get anything else worthy to share.
Sunday, September 3, 2023
The New Yorker
There seem to be so many issues around and they come so frequently that I would be lying if I said I read every word. But I try to keep up.
The writing lately seems to be getting better and better.
Last week's issue, whose cover is shown here, was particularly good, although there was no Hannah Goldfield food column.
By habit that is where I first look. She has my dream job, eating out in New York every night for work with a seemingly unlimited expense account. Tough life.
About as tough as Kevin Costner's soon to be ex wife having to get by on a measly 67k a month. The indignity. I like what she said the other day, that her kids now had "luxury in their blood." Poor bastards.
Anyway my point is that there is a great article by the German director and actor Werner Herzog that I loved this week, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh." And another great article by John Kenney called "the Wisdom of Rudolph Giuliani."
You can read them through the link I supplied. Worth a read. This week's issue, is archival, didn't kill me as much but an article by Nabakov and a great story by Haruki Murakami, "The Elephant Vanishes."
A girl and her doll
I was sitting in front of my shop on Wednesday talking to Renee and Robin when this woman and child in a stroller passed by. I didn't inquire as to the nature of their relationship but I assume, grandmother and child.
Something about the girl and her doll intrigued me and I asked if I could take a shot with my phone and the older woman readily assented.
I am not sure what was incongruent but thought it was interesting that a young light to medium complected girl, probably latina, chose a non white playmate.
Could she already be aware that her own pigmentation was not that of the dominant majority in this country? Is she more comfortable with an imaginary friend with darker plastic skin? Is she self identifying? Of course, the event could be entirely random, she might have a row of different complected dolls and merely chose this one on this particular day. We will never know.
I am only 6.4% sephardic, the jewish genetic group that is darker than most ashkenazi but my family tends to be darker than most European jews. I remember being called derogatory names on the school bus all the way back to kindergarten. Caused me to feel as part of the "other" at an early age.
Interesting to think about when racial identity is actually established in a young psyche.
Saturday, September 2, 2023
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Friday, September 1, 2023
Library Show possibilities
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| I don't know if you remember this one but I had a series. Drunk guy with his two pet chickens and beautiful face. He was walking in front of my shop. |
I started looking through my bird shots the other day. I need to pick eight to print for the library. With over 200k shots I can't even barely scratch the surface and this is in no way a final cull, there are many I love and just haven't grabbed yet. I will look again tomorrow.
Of course, how they look on the printed page will be the key. There is no print that looks as good as an image that is on a backlit monitor so I am sure that I will be surprised. I ordered paper today, expensive.
It should get here Monday or Tuesday. Never had a show yet that paid for itself with the cost of framing but here's hoping.
So here is a start of 43. Many do not have final processing, the little kestrel has some sort of problem in transit. Some of these did not get into the catalog full resolution, but they all are sharp in reality.
Which are your favorites, if any? Help me pick.
https://lightroom.adobe.com/shares/ee240801d86c4349ac8ad01ff30ff139
John Abraham - see ya!
Don Perry called me from Minnesota, not sure how he found out.
He said that they found John dead in his bed.
John was an antique merchant and a swapmeet dealer.
He used to be at the Hillsborough Show, sold with Don in fact, but could be found at a variety of swap meets across Southern California the past forty years or so.
He was a very funny guy with a great laugh and sense of humor.
His merchandise was also always top notch for his particular milieu, he could uncover gems like nobody else, seemed to have an endless supply of treasures.
Woke up every Saturday in the middle of the night and worked his ass off.
You could not find a nicer person in this world. He always treated everybody fairly. He gave people good deals. He wanted you to be happy. I think I can safely say the man had no enemies.
I don't know or remember a whole lot about John's past. I think he was a native angeleno. I know he was a childhood actor in the 1950's. Maybe an animal show... or Circus Boy, something like that. He told me once.
The flea market world will not be the same without him. We will all miss his warmth, compassion and impish smile. We have lost a legend and a mensch.
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| always a ham... |
Give war a chance
One of them likes to needle me by sending me stupid MAGA stuff hoping I get triggered. Once in a while I reply in kind.
The other night he sent me this from his friend in Nevada:
Subject: Great interview with General MacGregor
LISTEN TO THIS !!!!!!! VERY INFORMATIVE
I sent this back to him and the rest of the people on the email chain:
propaganda from Putin's boy
when did Putin's puppet make general? Last I checked he was a Colonel.
Mostly we went to Auschwitz but we got around, Treblinka, Sobibor, we made it into all the camps. But unfortunately we didn't make it out. If you were a Christian or German Sommer who happened to live in Indiana, the records show that you had a lot better chance of survival. The good lord was not nearly so kind to our side of the patronym.
When I saw them next for coffee I got razzed for being a war monger. "We remember when you guys were all about love and peace. What happened?" I asked them if they were down with Russia invading neighboring sovereign states and taking their land over?
The conservative line these days is that a) we shouldn't help the Ukrainians because we need to help secure our southern border first b) Europe should be doing more c) we put Russia in this position and it is all our fault. d) the Ukrainians are evil nazis.
I was doing some genealogy work last night looking at Sommer (my true family surname) relatives. My father changed his name and entered the s at the end when he enrolled at UCLA in the 1940's.
I had been contacted by a male line descendent and we were trying to put the dots together. And I found about a hundred or more people with my family surname who died in the holocaust, either in the ghetto or in the camps. There are many more citations than I show but you get the point.
Now they were not all kin but many of them were and my father's side of his family was almost completely decimated. His mother's side, the Szkarlats, did not fare much better. We have discussed that before. In any case, I have either blood or familial relations with every single one of them and I have proof of that.
It is sobering for me to look at the pictures and the names and the markers. A missed ship, a different turn at a road and I would not be alive today. Could have been me.
Heck of a lot of people dying between 1941 and 1944.
And do you know why? Because the world largely did nothing. Here in the United States you had the America First crowd, people like Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, anti semites who openly backed the Germans and preached isolationism.
The Tucker Carlsons of their time. Six million people, whole family lines wiped out, if my grandfather had not left a few years earlier I would not be alive today.
When you casually say the words Never Again you should think about the reality of allowing people to get wiped out by genocide, whether they are Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, Gays, Gypsies, Native Americans or Ukrainians.
Or do we simply let the wolves and the bullies win?
If we have learned any lesson, and I don't think we have frankly, I would hope that it would be, don't wait until it is too late. Help people who are getting slaughtered.
Next they may be coming for you.
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