Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Ray Manzarek

Rock me on the water

But wait.

It appears that the reports of mother's imminent demise might be a tad premature. After initial proclamations from the doctor in the intensive care unit that she would be departing this earthly coil before the start of the new week comes a news stream of much more optimistic reports. In fact I am beginning to get the feeling that she might outlive the rest of us. Notwithstanding a silver bullet. In any case, the dialysis is working well and she is even getting back some kidney function.

My sister Barb flew up from Florida to see what's what. She put me on the horn with her this morning.

I asked her if somebody was feeding her cat? "Did you ask me if I looked fat?" she replied. "No, mom," I said deciding to try another tack. "Are you feeling okay?" "Am I gay, what kind of question is that to ask your mother?" she said incredulously.

It was readily apparent that her hearing aid is not working optimally. Exasperated, I gave up. Barbara will fill me in later.

Still think I need to get back there. Meet Buzz and the rest of the siblings and pow wow. Give her our love and a sendoff if it is in fact her time. It is very nice to know that things might not be quite as dire as we were led to believe at the present moment.

Eva Cassidy

Mr. Sandman

I am having a very interesting show up here in Santa Barbara. It was a miserable affair for the first day, then the second day of setup. I did a grand total of seventy five bucks, not a very good sign when you figure that show expenses will tally out around fifteen hundred for this shebang. Just more of the same. People around me seemed to be selling fine. I am on a bad streak and am having serious doubts about my material, my business model, the shifting tides. I am feeling like roadkill, the tibetans are ready to drag me up the mountain and cut me into little pieces for the vultures.

It is a bad time for the negativity and introspection and a bad time to be broke. Significant bills to pay or the whole damn house of cards comes down. Ill mother that I must see on the other side of the country immediately, tax payment due. Having lit the money incense, stuck the tangerine on the case (an antique dealer superstition once championed by Napa wine antique dealer Jim many years ago) prayed to all the suitable deities, I could do nothing but try to put on a happy face and trudge on.

Lo and behold, the wind shifted around noon yesterday. A past client bought a painting, somebody else bought another, then a major dealer bought a few significant works. It was a phenomenal reversal. Things that I thought I might die with and that would have been thrown into my sarcophagus with me in pharaonic times magically dissappeared. One of the greatest runs I can ever remember having. My peers congratulated me on the remarkable streak. I am close to getting religion. Tragedy narrowly averted, Robert still lives! Thank you clients and universe. I am grateful. Thank you Leslie. Thank you friends and loved ones. The bills get paid this month. Happy to be on the other side, despair is so unbecoming.

*
Celebrated with the largest bone in ribeye I have ever tackled at the Tee Off. A piece of cow that would tip over Fred Flintstone's wagon. The dark saloon was very crowded and so I sat at the bar. Ordered a greyhound but it was so stiff I mostly left it on the counter. Good meal, I dig the funky place. Bartender had been there 14 years and was still the new guy. Another nice meal at the tee off, just enough light at the bar to read the independent and I got to watch the Pacers polish off the poor Knicks.

For such a big shot town, Santa Barbara has some pretty crummy restaurants. After Superica there is not so much to talk about. I went back to Presto Pasta the first night, a client's joint and had chicken parmigiana. Good but not the Four Seasons. Went to Harry's the next night, hadn't been there in over thirty years and it was pretty disappointing. The famous salsa was good but my corn beef dip was fatty and funky and honestly made me a little ill. Ted and I went to Saigon the third night for thai/vietnamese and it was decent. Spring rolls, duck curry and a mixed vermicelli. Had to beg for proper utensils but I would go back.

*
I have a sister named Barbara. I seem to recall my mother, who knew a lot of obscure stuff, tell us that Saint Barbara, who I assume this town was named after, was the patron saint of toilets. I checked Wikipedia this morning and found no such reference. She was apparently the patron saint of artillerymen, military engineers, miners and others who work with explosives because of her old legend's association with lightning, and also of mathematicians. There is a reference to a bath house in the entry so it may require further digging.

*
I booked my hotel on Expedia and selected one I had stayed at before, the Sandman, conveniently located close to the show and frankly the only room in town this side of Motel 6 under a c note. I paid 90. Still your basic shithole.

This is a picture of the bathtub in room 151. I can deal with a little chipped paint and a bathtub that leaks onto the floor. Hot water that took approximately four minutes to arrive.

What is more disturbing is the brackish brown water that comes out of the pipe, water that makes you feel like you are soaking in one of the less hygienic sections of the Tigris or Euphrates. Really disgusting.

The free breakfast ain't so bad, started off my day all week with honey nut cheerios and a hard boiled egg. Yesterday I mixed in a cinnamon donut. Sinful but quite good.

Will stay in touch.

Sorrow - McCoys

Powerballin'

I was a bit astounded to hear that out of the millions of tickets sold for the current $600,000,000.00 Powerball jackpot, only 80% of the possible number combinations have been selected. I decided to look into the statistics a bit. Here is a link to  a page illustrating the frequency that balls are selected, both as white balls and power ball.

56, 26 and 23 are the numbers with the historically highest chance of being picked as a white ball, with the corresponding frequency of 18, 17 and 19. 29 is by far the winning number as a powerball selection.

Your odds of winning the Powerball this week, about 1 in 175.2 million. But you have to buy a ticket.

I read a book once on the science of picking lottery numbers and the author stated that your best chances are picking the upper strata of numbers and mixing in some numbers that are close to each other sequentially. It only stands to reason that you want to pick the numbers that most people don't pick.

Here are a couple links to sites regarding power ball numerical statistics. Business Insider and Daily Herald. And a good wikipedia article on lottery mathematics.

In a typical 6/49 game, six numbers are drawn from a range of 49 and if the six numbers on a ticket match the numbers drawn, the ticket holder is a jackpot winner—this is true no matter in which order the numbers appear. The probability of this happening is 1 in 13,983,816.
This small chance of winning can be demonstrated as follows:
Starting with a bag of 49 differently-numbered lottery balls, there are 49 different but equally likely ways of choosing the number of the first ball selected from the bag, and so there is a 1 in 49 chance of predicting the number correctly. When the draw comes to the second number, there are now only 48 balls left in the bag (because the balls already drawn are not returned to the bag) so there is now a 1 in 48 chance of predicting this number.
Thus for each of the 49 ways of choosing the first number there are 48 different ways of choosing the second. This means that the probability of correctly predicting 2 numbers drawn from 49 in the correct order is calculated as 1 in 49 × 48. On drawing the third number there are only 47 ways of choosing the number; but of course we could have gotten to this point in any of 49 × 48 ways, so the chances of correctly predicting 3 numbers drawn from 49, again in the correct order, is 1 in 49 × 48 × 47. This continues until the sixth number has been drawn, giving the final calculation, 49 × 48 × 47 × 46 × 45 × 44, which can also be written as . This works out to a very large number, 10,068,347,520, which is much bigger than the 14 million stated above.
The last step is to understand that the order of the 6 numbers is not significant. That is, if a ticket has the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, it wins as long as all the numbers 1 through 6 are drawn, no matter what order they come out in. Accordingly, given any set of 6 numbers, there are 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 6! or 720 orders in which they could be drawn. Dividing 10,068,347,520 by 720 gives 13,983,816...

andmoreagain

Mom talk

My mother is dying. She is in an intensive care unit in Maryland, hooked up to a dialysis machine, with no independent kidney function. She has been in and out of the hospital all year with a serious infection but it appears that we have finally reached the tipping point. We don't know if it is a matter of hours, days or even weeks but the doctor told my sister that next week might be too late. Barbara flies up from Florida monday and will suss everything out.

I talked to my mom last night, she asked me if I wanted the painting in her bathroom. I have no idea what she is talking about but a painting is honestly the last thing on my mind. I would like to go see her and say goodbye, can't afford to at the moment but can't afford not to either and might have to borrow some money to pull it off.

You get issued one mother and father in this life, for better or for worse and I am happy that we are at least speaking again here at the end. My mother is brilliant and eccentric. While much of my childhood I felt like collateral damage in her enormous wake, she always fed and clothed us and I never doubted her love for a second. What else can you ask for? She taught me a lot of valuable life lessons, the principle one being that people matter more than things. She never met a stranger in her life. Going into a restaurant with her could be a very embarrassing proposition.

Last night I had a dream that I was marching down the street at her memorial, in front of Swamis in Encinitas, only I was holding a huge and heavy iron gate. Somebody, I forget who, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You know, you can put that down now." Not sure what it means. Will keep you posted.

Sleepy John Estes

The red queen and the court jester

I finished a really interesting book last week, Michael Shermer's Why Darwin Matters. Written in 2007, the book clinically and dispassionately takes the precepts of creationism and intelligent design and pretty much lays them to waste.

I first got acquainted with Shermer when I was judging the Fallbrook Film Festival and previewed Stephen Auerbach's movie Bicycle Dreams. At that time he was a long distance bicycle racer racing across the United States in the R.A.M..

Shermer was raised a devout evangelical christian and creationist. At some point he had an intellectual epiphany and changed his worldview. Now the editor and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, he took a trip to the Galapagos in 2004 with a cohort to retrace Darwin's steps. The book recounts some of the things he learns about evolution and natural selection on this trip.

I don't have the book in front of me at the moment and would like to revisit it for a future post but it is full of good scientific information that I will share at some point soon. He gives an insider's look at the intelligent design movement and explores and explains Darwinism, neo Darwinism, symbiogenesis and other similar evolutionary hypothesis in layman's terms.

*
I was reading something about evolution yesterday and heard about the conflict of the Red Queen and the Court Jester for the first time. What are you talking about, you may ask? My kind of metaphor.

The Red Queen is a concept developed in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen that maintains that evolutionary developments and counter-developments cause co-evolving species to mutually adapt. This is referred to as biotic adaptation.

The Court Jester hypothesis, championed by Berkeley Professor Anthony Barnosky in 1999, maintains that such changes in evolutionary speciation are better explained by abiotic forces, like climate or meteor strikes, some kind of outside of the box, wild card event.

"[W]hether this march of morphology and species compositions through time, so well documented not only for mammals but throughout the fossil record, is more strongly influenced by interactions among species (Red Queen hypotheses), or by random perturbations to the physical environment such as climate change, tectonic events, or even bolide impacts that change the ground rules for the biota (Court Jester hypotheses). . . . A class of alternative ideas, here termed Court Jester hypotheses, share the basic tenet that changes in the physical environment rather than biotic interactions themselves are the initiators of major changes in organisms and ecosystems. . . . Court Jester hypotheses imply that events random in respect to the biota occasionally change the rules on the biotic playing field. Accelerated biotic response (relative to background rates) is the result." Anthony Barnosky - 2001

I look forward to having Shermer's book in hand and sharing it with you.

Stay Calm

If you are in the Santa Barbara area the next three days, friday through sunday, the Blue Heron Gallery will be exhibiting at the CALM Antique Show. The event is held at the Earl Warren Fairgrounds. Drop by and say hello! Some really great decorative dealers at this show, looks really good.

Bitch, moan and dish

It is pitiful when a grown man with a megaphone engages in a repeated public renting of garments and plaintiff blubbering about his sorry lot. Especially when his misery is largely self imposed. (see bad buy-ed.)

Notwithstanding this fact, it has been a wretched week, in a wretched month and I honestly find little to commend this whole 2013th year of ours. Of course I take solace in the fact that it can always get worse.

It got so bad today I decided to consult the old Chinese oracle. Retreat, first and fifth line changing. Sommers, you are treading on dangerous ground. The worst place to be in a retreat, right on the front lines. Not good to lounge around in the snapping jaws of the lion's mouth while plotting your next move. Of course unfortunately, that is where my clan feels most comfortable. Does wonders for your adrenaline. How did the old song go, never did nothing that my spirit couldn't kill.

I get the third leg of the show trifecta tomorrow, my Belmont Stakes up north. Getting a little barn sour after the bad works and failure to hit the old pay window. So shoot me already.

*
Dropped my phone and busted it in O.B. the other day while waiting for Les to arrive from Dallas. She was driving back there with her brother when some girl broadsided them and now her neck is sore and her headaches are worse. Really sucks.

*
If Verizon doesn't screw up the new HTC-One too badly I am seriously thinking of getting it. Sexy phone. Reports are that they want to rename it the butterfly and I am afraid that would be a deal killer.

*
Had a high pressure main line break and the four hour fix didn't work. I woke up this morning to the bucolic sound of water bubbling out of the ground like a desert spring. I have been fixing irrigation for about 40 years but learned a new trick from the neighbor.

Being at the bottom of a mountain, the water coming down from on high, we get enormous pressure. It takes hours sometimes to clear the water out of the lines to make a proper fix. You can't use red hot pvc glue on high pressure mains because it won't hold. Ditto the blue, the grey is best.

So he let me in on an old plumbers secret. You stuff the pipe with bread and it absorbs the excess water and doesn't kill your pvc joint, which needs to be dry. Eventually it blows out the pipes. In a remarkable show of kismet and the good lord's divine plan, a greek friend gave me half a loaf of bread yesterday (we had none in the house) and I was able to try the cure. So far the pipe is holding.

*
I caught a painting in the act of sliding over and taking out a $4500 zuni olla today so maybe, just maybe my luck is turning.

*
They sealed the genetics thread that I had done my rabble rousing on. Funny thing, you rarely if ever meet a racist who is willing to admit he's a racist. Even that guy over at the Heritage Foundation who thinks Mexicans are stupid.

*
News today that the United States State Department is now carrying water for Monsanto. Now they effectively own all three branches of government. Soon we will work them into the Pledge of Allegiance.

*
The worst story of the week is the one Wasem sent me about the Bakersfield cops beating the poor "possibly drunk" man to death and confiscating all the passersby's cellphones that had recorded the incident. You know they will walk. It's a good old boy town. I watched one of the videos and it was truly sickening. Don't be hispanic in Bakersfield. It could get you killed. Sheriff might have a shot in Obama's Justice Department.

*
I actually talked to my mother on Mother's day. I thought that I was home free when I got the answering machine but she called me back and I didn't recognize the number. I got a half hour dissertation on her fatalities so she must be doing all right. We had a little kerfuffle last fall and a long period of silence but I did my duty and all is now peachy.

*
I loved this story, Joe Biden endorsing bullets made of chocolate.

*
I was listening to a Grateful Dead show on Sirius today and thinking damn, it has been such a long time. Over forty years ago I listened to the infamous Wall of Sound at the Cow Palace in Daly City. I had seen the Dead many times back east but this was my first West Coast Dead concert. Where the hell did the time go and why didn't they warn us that we would never be able to have that kind of fun again?

*
New study out that weed helps bladder cancer. Didn't help mine, I had about six surgeries for it, but it certainly helped with the long term recovery... My recurring kidney, bladder and ureter cancer was probably caused by some of the lethal solvents that I was breathing in my sign shop.

It is a terrible catch 22, still classified as a worthless, dangerous substance, scientists aren't even allowed to study it properly. Raise your hands if you thought that things would be different with this president. Bastards.

A Merman I Should Turn to Be

President flashback

While initially it looked like President Obama was trying to be a transformative president on the model of a JFK, recent events lead me to believe that he is actually more a student of Richard Milhouse Nixon.

On the heels of reports that his IRS targeted conservative groups comes the news today that they tapped all the communications from A.P.. Not individual reporters, the whole freaking Associated Press. Including their home telephones. An unprecedented dragnet and data sweep. Tricky Dick, meet Tricky Barack. So much for that quaint little notion of a free press.

I still think that given the choice and the competition, even in hindsight I would hold my nose and pull the lever for this man again but have lost my faith in him near completely. And I think that there will be fewer and fewer true believers that he will be able to rely on for support for the remainder of his term. Why should anybody go to bat for this president?

His U.S. Attorneys are still shutting down medical marijuana dispensaries and putting weed patients in jail at a record rate. He has turned his back on civil liberty, in this country and abroad. When we look back and ask ourselves at one point we surrendered our liberty to Big Brother in this country, he will surely be a prime candidate for review. He has a sorry ass record regarding whistleblowers in his administration.

He thinks that he has the right to target american citizens with drones, even on their home soil, not to mention his eradicating questionable targets abroad in sovereign foreign nations. Talked a good game about getting us out of Afghanistan. He has been so willing to accommodate the opposition that his favorite move is the unprovoked surrender, he really ends up standing for next to nothing most of the time. Keystone XL will be the final nail in the coffin.

It is really too bad, things were so promising. We have wasted a great opportunity in this country. Don't ask progressives for support, Barack. When did you ever support us?

Sandy mollusk

Pearl Chinese Cuisine
11666 Avena Place
Rancho Bernardo, CA 92128

www.pearlchinesecuisine.com


My wife Leslie and I are celebrating our nineteenth wedding anniversary one day this week. Unfortunately my job is calling me out of town and we will not get a chance to be together that evening.

She has been in Texas visiting her brother and I picked her up at the airport last night. She didn't have the greatest flight, sandwiched in a middle seat both ways, but did enjoy her time with her brother very much. I was starving when I picked her up, thinking Chinese but she still wasn't hungry as I slowly drove up Convoy looking for something that looked good and I forlornly passed Jasmine and headed back on the freeway.

When we got to Rancho Bernardo I made my move. We had heard about Pearl Chinese Cuisine for several years but had never dined there. Located at the location of the old Anthony's, the parking lot was packed as we approached. This would be a substitute for our anniversary dinner.

We were greeted by a tall and beautiful hostess and quickly seated at a table covered with white linen. The seats were also white and quite comfortable. The first thing I noted was how extensive the seafood menu is, filled with some of the same exotics I see in San Francisco goose webbing included.

Pearl is primarily a dim sum place I believe, but the normal dinner fare was quite intriguing. We were served delicious chrysanthemum tea and ordered a honey glazed barbecue pork appetizer. Leslie was not real hungry and we decided to only order a few things this time.

Her pick was the clay pot chicken curry. I ordered crab in garlic but the server came back to tell me that there was no more crab and anyway the ginger was better. I said fine change it to lobster and hold the scallions.

I went to the men's room to wash my hands and noticed the chipped wood on the plate stand. The bathroom was not filthy but was a long way from spotless. Not a good sign. I came back and Leslie took her turn to freshen up. The staff at Pearl was super friendly all night, very genuine.

While she was gone they brought our prospective entrée to the table. Mr. Lobster looked healthy and as happy as one could expect considering the circumstances and I said okay, fine. In a few moments I had a reality flash and inquired just how much the grabby crustacean was going to set me back. "Two and a half pounder," she said. "Seventy two bucks." I gulped but didn't want to appear the cheap skate. What the hell, it was our anniversary. At that moment I felt my back pocket and realized that I was out of cash and my sweet wife would be picking this one up.

I am going to make this short and sweet. The meal pretty much sucked. Pork was dry and tough. The chicken curry was ghastly, sour and frankly inedible. The lobster sure didn't show its weight for being a two and a half pounder, looked more like a 19 ounce weakling. And it wasn't all that good. Certain parts of it also had a curious sour taste, the one lasting memory I will have from this meal. I should mention that they don't give you nutcrackers and meat was hard to find and recover.

The acrid taste of the food meshed well with the omnipresent mothball smell that I had been trying to put my finger on the whole meal. Very unappetizing.

We, or should I say, she, asked for a bill. They brought us a bland mango pudding and some orange slices for dessert and we paid our check and sashayed on into the night.

Would probably never return.

Space Oddity

A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield?­­fref=ts
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/po­­sts/p/pub

Fledging

I like to think that I have a fairly decent grasp of the english language but I am continually confronted by gaps in my knowledge base. The other day somebody asked me if the hawklings were still fledging? Not absolutely sure what they were referring to and now wanting to appear like a dolt, I blustered a vigorous assent and ran to the dictionary. What does it really mean to fledge? I was of course aware of the term fledgeling but felt that it covered any nascent period of adolescence.

Not quite. From Merriam Webster:

Definition of FLEDGE

intransitive verb

of a young bird

: to acquire the feathers necessary for flight or independent activity; also : to leave the nest after acquiring such feathers

transitive verb

1: to rear until ready for flight or independent activity

2: to cover with or as if with feathers or down

3: to furnish (as an arrow) with feathers

Examples of FLEDGE

1. The young birds haven't yet fledged.

Origin of FLEDGE

fledge capable of flying, from Middle English flegge, from Old English -flycge; akin to Old High German flucki capable of flying, Old English flēogan to fly — more at fly

First Known Use: 1566

Now, this is sort of confusing. I am in reality no closer to understanding what it means to fledge. Why, you may ask? Because the event describes the act of acquiring feathers prior to flight at one point and being capable of flight in another. To rear until ready for flight and to leave the nest after acquiring your wings, in aircraft parlance. Which is it?

Here is the meaning of the term fledge from Wikipedia:

Fledge is the stage in a young bird's life when the feathers and wing muscles are sufficiently developed for flight. It also describes the act of a chick's parents raising it to a fully grown state. A young bird that has recently fledged but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding is called a fledgling.
In ornithology, the meaning of fledging varies, depending on species. Birds are sometimes considered fledged once they leave the nest, even if they still cannot fly. Some definitions of fledge take it to mean the independence of the chick from the adults. Adults will often continue to feed the chick after it has left the nest and is able to fly.

Interesting that it also indicated feathering an arrow, In spanish an arrow is a flecha, the archer a flechador. I called my baby hawks hawklings. I don't know if it is correct terminology or not so I looked it up. From Answers.Com:

A newly hatched bird might be called a hatchling, while the term nestling or chick is sometimes applied. What is probably the most correct term for the young is eyass (pronounced "EYE-ess"). 

I get another new word, eyass. Definitely never heard that one before.

In terms of venery, two or more spiraling hawks are a boil. A cast or lease is a general word for multiples and a kettle are a large group flying together, something that true hawk watchers will tell you that they rarely or never see.

Here is a bit on the fledging and early stages of the red tailed from Wiki:

A clutch of 1 to 3 eggs is laid in March or April, depending upon latitude. Clutch size depends almost exclusively on the availability of prey for the adults. Eggs are laid approximately every other day. The eggs are usually about 60 x 47 mm (2.4 x 1.9 in). They are incubated primarily by female, with the male substituting when the female leaves to hunt or merely stretch her wings. The male brings most food to the female while she incubates. After 28 to 35 days, the eggs hatch over 2 to 4 days; the nestlings are altricial at hatching. The female broods them while the male provides most of the food to the female and the young, which are known as eyasses (pronounced "EYE-ess-ez"). The female feeds the eyasses after tearing the food into small pieces. After 42 to 46 days, the eyasses begin to leave the nest. The fledging period follows, with short flights engaged in, after another 3 weeks. About 6 to 7 weeks after fledging, the young begin to capture their own prey. Shortly thereafter, when the young are around 4 months of age, they become independent of their parents. However, the hawks do not generally reach breeding maturity until they are around 3 years of age. In the wild, Red-tailed Hawks have lived for at least 21 years. The oldest captive hawk of this species was at least 29 and a half years of age.

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I drove out of the Santa Margarita River valley today and saw the mother red tailed hawk on a telephone pole. I grabbed the heavy camera off the car seat and jumped out of the car, motor running, with a quick look to ensure that I didn't lock myself out of the car. She flew away and I didn't get the ideal shot. Damn.

A short while later, I arrived at the nest and saw my hawk progeny. I would like to continue to use the word hawklings but found to my chagrin that it is not actually a word. Shame, it fits so well.

Mother showed up shortly thereafter, checking on her fledgelings. (Note, both fledgelings and fledglings are permissable spelling - ed.) They are in that gawky stage, quite large now and the nest is getting a bit cozy for three. They are losing some of the down of infancy and getting their darker feather foliage that they will wear throughout their adult life.

The shot you see above isn't very sharp. I should have shot at a higher f-stop for more depth of field. I include it because it is nice to see a little of mom's preening!

After spending a few minutes observing the birds I drove a bit further and saw this raptor on the wire. I believe that it might be a sharp shinned hawk although it may prove to be a plain old coopers. Its small beak makes me favor the former. Perhaps one of you birders will tell me?

I went for a walk with my pals Ron, Lena and Liz in the early afternoon yesterday and espied this yellow fellow high in a tall conifer. I am no birder but my guess is hooded oriole.

Reconnaissance One

My friend, the artist Michael Maas, just sent me a link to this film that he has produced. It is the creation of film maker Eric Minh Swenson, the music by Dave Blackburn. Fascinating lysergic panoply of sound and color detailing the act of artistic creation.

5.12.13

Byrds

Paul Williams Benefit in O.B.

There will be a benefit in Ocean Beach tomorrow for the family of the late Paul Williams. Paul was a man of enormous talents and gifts. He was the founder of Crawdaddy magazine, keeper of the Philip Dick archives (one of my literary heroes), brilliant writer, influential critic. The husband of the longtime local singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, he suffered early dementia after an accident and died recently at the age of 64. I dig Cindy, last time I saw her play she made a plea for combat veterans with brain injury. I met him once, held him in the highest regard. A superbrain. I plan on going.

PaulStock, A Tribute to Williams & a Benefit for his Survivors

Who: Mojo Nixon, Jose Sinatra & Miff Laracy, Bart Mendoza’s True Stories, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Berkley Hart, Ric Kaestner, Jon Kanis & Listening to Rocks, The Jive Bombers

When: 2 p.m. Sunday, May 12

Where: Winstons, Ocean Beach, 1921 Bacon St., Ocean Beach

Tickets: $10 suggested donation at the door

Phone: (619) 222-6872

Online: winstonsob.com

Brew and ship

Couple

© robert sommers 2013

Going back to my used to be

Trampese

4/23/1910 I.W.W. flyer

Here is a little hobo dictionary of words that I have grubbed from Mark Wyman's Hoboes book.

The hobo was known, among other monikers, as a blanket stiff or bindle stiff, floater, harvest gypsy, apple glommer, sugar tramp and drift in. The bindle was the rolled up blanket or bundle that they carried on their back.

Hoboes "beat their way" on freight trains. This migratory population "rambled" and "freighted" around the country. They "hibernated" at fleabag hotels in the city between harvest seasons.  They often "bummed" their way home.

They would try to steal a free ride in the "blind baggage" area of the train.

"Riding the bumpers" meant standing on the train couplers between the cars.

To "ride the rods" was to hang onto an under frame truss rod below the car. Very dangerous, especially when the "bulls" or "shacks" would dangle a metal coupling pin under the train and try to kill the poor vagrant. That deadly practice was called a "bo-teaser."

"Mission stiffs"wouldn't work but would accept a "religious conversion" for bread, coffee and a free bed.

A dead hobo would normally be buried in a "pauper's field."

"Lodgers" were allowed to sleep in the jail for a night.

An "apple knocker" picked apples, "pearl divers" washed dishes, farmers were "clover kickers," shacks" were brakemen, "scissor bills" was the name for those who refused to fight back. A carpenter was a "splinter belly", a "shovel stiff" worked a shovel, "rust eaters" worked the railroads. A "working stiff' worked steady.

Masses of hoboes lived in "jungles", those pushed off the trains were called "jumpers."

Many hoboes worked timber. Short log country was logged by "tramp lumberjacks." These folks "galloped" from Montana to Idaho. They started as "Whistle punks" and graduated to "choker setter."

They used "steam donkeys" to "highball log."

Their labor champion, the IWW, was of course known as the "wobblies."

"First bale" marked the start of a season.

Cotton was first hoed and then "chopped," the hardest work in the field.

"Snowdiggers" were tramps that came from the north.

Mexican workers composed and sang "corridos", blues songs describing their hard lot.

The sugar beet topper, often a child, was known as a "beeter." Hispanic beet workers were known as "betabeleros."

Japanese harvest workers were known as "buranketto boys."

Packing house workers "rustled" oranges.

This book, Hoboes, bindlestiffs, fruit tramps and the harvesting of the west is a good read if you have an interest in American history and spirit. Pick it up at your local library like I did.

Jim Pepper

Asshole From El Paso

From an original asshole from el paso - me. Basil Court, McArthur Elementary, Cielo Vista.

Bums and bindlestiffs

Senior Policy Analyst Jason Richwine couldn't resign quickly enough for the Heritage Foundation after the recent disclosure of his dissertation study linking hispanics to lower intelligence quotients.

I am reading a fascinating book about the history of transient labor in this country, Mark Wyman's Hoboes, bindlestiffs, fruit tramps and the harvesting of the west. The book takes you from northwest coast hop picking, beating the tracks (riding the rails) to sharecropping, basically a great chronicle of America from the 1880's through the depression. Hobo jungles a mile wide.

I am currently reading a section on the history of the long, love hate relationship between Arizona and Mexican migrants. In 1918 the Republicans took over Congress. Washington's Rep. Albert Johnson called a hearing titled "Temporary admission of illiterate Mexican laborers." Much of the hearing was a discussion of Joint Resolution 271, which basically gave the mexican laborer an open door since they were so necessary to the cotton harvest. Whites refused to work in the stark Salt River Valley conditions and the blacks had moved to the cities.

One of the classic moments from the hearing is when Texas Representative Carlos Bee said that "the Mexican is specially fitted for the burdensome task of bending his back to pick cotton and the burdensome task of grubbing the fields." His cohort and resolution cosponsor Representative Claude B. Hudspeth was not to be outdone; he believed that the Mexicans "...are an inferior race, Mr. Vaile, they are an inferior race of people."

Guess some things never change.

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Will publish a lexicon of some of the great new words I have discovered while reading this book.

Blue Oyster Cult

Deathwave

The other side © Robert Sommers 2013

The waves of death engulfed me; the currents of chaos overwhelmed me. 2 Samuel 22:5

Those that are close to me know that I have been in a very dark mood the last few weeks, if not months. What better time to discuss the wave of death? Scientists have tried in vain to understand what happens in the moments during brain death, particularly that odd 5 to 15 second period where the brain sends out a high frequency signal, perhaps signaling the mother ship for docking instructions.

From Discover.com Brain waves surge moments before death:

A study of seven terminally ill patients found identical surges in brain activity moments before death, providing what may be physiological evidence of "out of body" experiences reported by people who survive near-death ordeals.
Doctors at George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates recorded brain activity of people dying from critical illnesses, such as cancer or heart attacks.
Moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brain wave activity, with the spikes occurring at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration.
Writing in the October issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the doctors theorize that the brain surges may be tied to widely reported near-death experiences which typically involve spiritual or religious attributes.

These researchers decapitated rats and found that a minute later they broadcast this high amplitude signal, a process they say might be reversible.

This scientific paper, Neural Dynamics during Anoxia and the “Wave of Death” offered some explanations for the occurrence.

Abstract

Recent experiments in rats have shown the occurrence of a high amplitude slow brain wave in the EEG approximately 1 minute after decapitation, with a duration of 5–15 s (van Rijn et al, PLoS One 6, e16514, 2011) that was presumed to signify the death of brain neurons. We present a computational model of a single neuron and its intra- and extracellular ion concentrations, which shows the physiological mechanism for this observation. The wave is caused by membrane potential oscillations, that occur after the cessation of activity of the sodium-potassium pumps has lead to an excess of extracellular potassium. These oscillations can be described by the Hodgkin-Huxley equations for the sodium and potassium channels, and result in a sudden change in mean membrane voltage. In combination with a high-pass filter, this sudden depolarization leads to a wave in the EEG. We discuss that this process is not necessarily irreversible.

Citation: Zandt B-J, ten Haken B, van Dijk JG, van Putten MJAM (2011) Neural Dynamics during Anoxia and the “Wave of Death”. PLoS ONE 6(7): e22127. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022127

Editor: Olivier Baud, Hôpital Robert Debré, France

Received: May 10, 2011; Accepted: June 15, 2011; Published: July 13, 2011

Copyright: © 2011 Zandt et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Discussion

Dynamic phenomena that occur during hypoxia and the way they are reflected in the EEG are only partially understood. Measurements of extreme cases showing clear features in the EEG present an opportunity to gain insight in the relation with the underlying physiology. Such an extreme case is decapitation, in which the supply of energy to the entire brain is halted almost instantaneously. This causes the EEG to become flat after several seconds, but also results in a large amplitude wave approximately a minute after decapitation. Van Rijn et al. suggest that this wave “ultimately reflects brain death” [3], but also state that further research on the physiology of brain function during this process is needed.

What exactly is this wave of death? At what frequency does it cycle? Merely last gasp chemical reactions or is it possible that it points to the existence of a soul or better yet, a personal electrical field, one that might need a half a minute to aim and shoot into the next bardo?

In any case, it is a curious topic. A 2002 paper in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine found that brain cells taken from a person several hours after death could survive for weeks in the lab. Scientists think the wave was evidence that the brain was on its last legs. Neurons have an electrical signal, thanks to an imbalance of positive and negative charges along their cell walls. This imbalance is called a "membrane potential." The wave of death might signal the loss of membrane potential, specifically from a mineral imbalance of sodium and potassium channels where the latter channel gets too big.

Hot Rod Race © Robert Williams 2013

definition of the wave of death in Urban Dictionary:

It occurs in traffic and often leads to a bad accident. One car is stopped. Another car coming in the opposite direction wants to turn left in front of the stopped car. The driver of the stopped car waves as if to say "it's OK to make the left turn in front of me". However, in the empty lane to the right of the stopped car, here comes another car whose driver has no idea that the left-turning car got the OK wave. The left-turning car and the car in the empty lane hit together usually pretty hard. Thus, the wave of death.

I was in an accident because some asshole gave another driver the wave of death.

Happy © Alex Grey 2013

Please Send Me Someone To Love

May tidings

News out today that our planet's CO2 levels have just reached historic heights, over 400 ppm. First time in history. Yippee! I give the climate change contrarians less than 24 hours to declare that the earth's plants will be happier now.

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As a photographer, you have to love afternoon sun.

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"The Internal Revenue Service said Friday that while "mistakes were made" when the agency inappropriately targeted conservative groups for additional reviews between 2010 and 2012, its actions were not motivated by partisan politics."
Holy Richard Nixon, Batman!

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The Republican congress has bagged two Obama nominees this week, at EPA and Labor. They seem content to just obstruct at every opportunity.

"...a Congressional Research Service study of recent judicial nominees found that Obama’s nominees have been blocked longer than any other administration since 1980, with Obama’s district court nominees waiting an average of 221 days for confirmation, compared to an average of 34.7 days for Reagan’s court picks." 

Texas Senator John Cornyn had the audacity to complain about the dearth of judicial nominations when he himself short circuited the process and refused to make recommendations.

"Texas has one of the worst judicial vacancy rates in the country, due in large part to its senators simply not making recommendations to the White House. Cornyn and fellow Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) haven't moved to fill seven vacant judicial slots. One of those slots has been empty for 1,743 days; another has been without a nominee for 1,044 days, according to data recently published by the Alliance for Justice, a left-leaning association of more than 100 organizations focused on the federal judiciary."

I scare myself

Wienerstock

Ken and Lauren Seals took their dachshund to the wiener dog races in Temecula last weekend. About 65 dogs took part in the canine run for the roses. Looks like a lot of fun and Ken gives us some really great photography. Link to Ken's site here to see more shots.

Heighty High

Black Peter

Let the chips fall where they may

I pride myself on calling balls and strikes fairly from either side of the plate. Check my early posts on Benghazi here, here and here. Even here. It was obvious from the get go that the State Department and the administration were trying to peddle a bucket of shit. I don't care what the CIA guy said, there was a reason Susan Rice wanted to project the idea that the Libyan violence was not an orchestrated terrorist attack but instead a spontaneous eruption. Because we were trying to consolidate hard fought political gains and this fit the narrative better. "They love us so much."

The Republicans and Issa's committee are clearly using the Benghazi hearings to inflict as much harm as they can get to stick to the administration and maybe further down the road, Hillary's election chances.

That being said, I think that it is important that we hear from the whistleblowers. When Mr. Hicks says that he was demoted to a crappy desk job for not adopting the company line, I believe him. Of course the military brass said that the Special Ops aid he requested would never arrive in time. We talked about the matter at coffee and one of the guys, an ex captain said, "Did you ever know a general or admiral that was not a politician?" Maybe Ken actually said it, don't know his old rank.

Of course a lot of what the Republicans are alleging doesn't hold water either. Clinton's name is on every cable, that is the way it always works at State, there is no evidence that she was in on anything. Mostly what we get from the administration is that working in the foreign service is a dangerous job and these courageous men and women knew what they were in for and accepted the inherent risks. But somebody was asleep at the wheel. It didn't have to go down like this.

Of course if the security detail was not allowed access to bullets or the people back home stopped paying the help and you were letting the station run on fumes and not granting repeated requests to bolster security, well that would not be a good thing.

I Shall Not Be Moved

Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl and Johnny, Sun Studios - circa 1956.

islama - islamo

I have to confess. the conservatives were right. Upon hearing about the events in Boston, I was hoping for right wing, tea party zealot. Eric Rudolph, McVeigh type. I was wrong.

I have been doing a little research and I have the sneaking suspicion that I may in fact be an Islamophobe. I read this article Exclusive: Dagestani Relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev Is a Prominent Islamist in Time Magazine yesterday about Tsarnaev's cousin in Dagestan and offer you a quoted section in order to start a brief conversation:

“We also believe in the restoration of the caliphates that ruled after the death of the Prophet, may peace be upon him.”
As such, they are fiercely against U.S. intervention in the Muslim world and, more broadly, the encroachments of Western liberalism. Within 20 minutes of meeting a TIME reporter, Bilyal Magomedov, one of the group’s leading members, poses a rhetorical question: “Tell me, who is not an enemy of America these days?” Asked what he thought about the Boston bombings, he offers a silver lining for the Islamist cause. “In principle, it’s good that this happened, even though the [Tsarnaev] brothers suffered,” he said. “Don’t understand me wrong, but September 11 led many Americans to convert to Islam. It’s another question that people died there, sure. But people also started to wonder why this act was committed… And when the enemies of Islam try to blacken the religion, Allah creates the opposite effect. More people get interested in Islam. They get curious.”

The bright side of 9/11? More islamic converts. Perfect! Honestly, I can think of no other creed that believes in mass conversion by force and is so active in the killing of innocents in order to achieve their theological aims. And allah forbid that you belong to the wrong religious subset, you'll end up deader than an Israeli at Mecca.

In order to explore the roots of my hostility and to learn something about islamophobia, I checked a book out of the library, ISLAMOPHOBIA, making muslims the enemy by Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg. Both of these men are or were connected with Wesleyan University. This book, written in 2008, looks at Islamophobia through the prism of western political cartooning. It is a standard apologist's text for the sins of the religion and its adherents. The book is pretty darn worthless but I did glean a few things from it.

The book points out that only a fraction of a fraction of the world's billion or so muslims engage in terrorist activities and violence. We only have a million or so natives to really worry about. Having said that, muslim sensitivities are quite high because of the results of western empire building on their turf and real or imagined western denigration and hostility.

More muslims live east of Afghanistan than west of it, according to the author, rendering the middle east an "insignificantly minor place" in demographic muslimdom. Only a small minority of muslims today and historically are engaged in religiously motivated armed conflict. Media outlets overlook the moderate voices of the majority of muslims.

The book goes on and on, exploring the tenets of the religion of peace and vilifying anyone who might object to the message. What else did I learn? Part of Mohammed's duty was to be a warlord and raid trade caravans, a tribal tradition. European imperialists are the real bad guys. Muslim slaves brought by the spaniards predated the english arrival in the new world. Muslims have become synonymous with terrorists in the minds of many americans. Muslim defenders of the levant used straight swords like the crusaders, at least for the first two centuries, not scimitars. The croissant was invented in Vienna in 1689 after the successful repulsion of Turkish invaders. Croissant comes from the word crescent. If you think that cartoonists are mean to muslims you should see how they depict the french. Honor killing, genital mutilation and forced marriage occur in some other cultures besides the islamic, one should not assume that the western "ideal" is normal. 

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I have lived in the middle east and studied the situation both on the ground and from afar. I was thinking about my recent arguments at AlterNet regarding an article contrasting American's comparative reaction to the Boston bombing viv a vis the West, Texas disaster. And I have come to a conclusion. Americans have an overwhelming desire to think that the whole world thinks like they do, that every human being is at heart a rational and moral being. It is a serious conceit of ours, especially among liberals. The Bilyal Magomedovs of the world are fictional, or inconsequential at best, since they don't fit into our favorite narrative that the whole world is interested in peaceful coexistence. It is anathema for us americans to have to consider a large group of people evil. The real enemy is capitalism or the Israelis, flouride or maybe circumcision. It is always our fault because we are americans and when we get attacked by the next terrorist action we might consider turning the other cheek. Perhaps give the mean old, misunderstood terrorist a timeout, but certainly not at Guantanamo.

And so we can look forward to more and more tragedies like Boston. Because we never learn.

Arlyne Ingold

photo courtesy of the Village News

A great friend of Fallbrook, known far and wide for her generosity and philanthropic work, passed away yesterday. Arlyne Ingold was 95 years old. She had been ill for the past several years but her symptoms worsened the last several days and she died yesterday morning in her home after slipping into a brief coma.

Arlyne had four children, many grand and great grandchildren. Her kids were all beside her in her last days as was her trusted aide, Carmen.

Arlyne was born to Sebastian and Mary Ann Walz on December 27, 1917, in Carroll, IA, and moved with her family to Los Angeles at the age of three. She was married to the late Robert Ingold and they were longtime residents of the friendly village.

Arlyne will be greatly missed by her family and many friends. She was known for her vivacity, sense of humor and the way she enjoyed life with so much gusto. Fallbrook owes this woman a lot, she did so many wonderful things for our town.

Sick, Sober And Sorry

Fool some people

In a remarkable political rebirth, Republican Mark Sanford has been elected back to the South Carolina House. What is the message from the voters when they put a philandering liar and adulterer back in office, a man censured for misusing state funds, who was accused as late as last month for breaking into his ex wife's home when she was out of town?

I think that the message is that the bible belt is not in play. Red states will stay red, blue states will stay blue. They would elect a murderer before they elect a democrat in some of these states.

Play the jesus redemption card, go straight to the office of the first South Carolinian congressional district, unless you have a little side trip scheduled to visit Argentina or the Appalachian Trail first, of course. You folks deserve him.

"A short while before the wedding, when Mark and I were picking readings and vows, Mark told me that he didn't want to use a wedding vow that included the promise to be faithful. He was worried in some odd nagging way, he said, that he might not be able to remain true to that vow. In retrospect, I suppose I might have seen this as a sign that Mark wasn't fully committed to me, and with the benefit of the knowledge I have about Mark now, I could point to this moment as a clear sign of things to come."

"We were all together the day Mark called to tell me that he had more explaining to do. Another woman, it seemed, had come forward and suggested to a member of the press that she had also had relations with Mark, which meant he would likely have to address the accusation with an AP reporter who would be interviewing him later in the day. I was gut-punched all over again. Mark had sworn to me when I'd discovered his secret back in January that Belen was the only "other" woman. Now he explained that there had been nothing much at all with this new woman, nothing he had felt I needed to know about before. Ever businesslike, he wanted to know what I thought he should reveal in the interview. Here again he was asking for my advice instead of first considering how the news might make me feel. Here again he was only really admitting his indiscretions because the woman had come forward, forcing him to come clean. I would soon learn—secondhand from the AP interview—that Mark had had yet more dalliances over the years, but that in his opinion he had not "crossed the line" as he'd done with Belen. When I pressed him for details when I saw him a few days later, I understood fully that his and my definition of an appropriate line were not at all the same."
Jenny Sanford - Staying True

Bob Seger- Love The One You're With

Elephants and the bees

The Republicans don't appear to be very serious about budget negotiations. Mitch McConnell insists that he will not negotiate until the democrats accept two preconditions; that the outcome of the negotiations not raise taxes or lift the debt ceiling.The dems certainly won't accede to that so there will be no prospects for accord in the future. Senator Cruz made a similar take or leave it offer to Harry Reid yesterday.

They either think that they are dealing from a position of strength or they simply don't care. They will be intent to just obstruct through the next election cycle and hope that their approval rating somehow crawls out of the tank.

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Looks like the three front runners for the right are the young turks Ryan, Rubio and Cruz. They need to pander to the hispanics that they will need to court with the changing electoral demographics. I would say that it will be Rubio's to lose but it has not been proven that a Cuban will electrify the rest of the hispanics, they typically are much more conservative than the mexican population. He seems slightly less toxic than Ryan and Cruz, who is totally malevolent and punkass in his manner, especially to his colleagues.

I am not a republican but wonder if any of my republican friends are excited about these three and if not them, who? Rand Paul has great pluses among many but turns off an equal number with his isolationism, belief in the right to privately discriminate and other idealogical libertarian ideas that might seem extreme for the populace.

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© Robert Sommers 2013

The accent mark sent over this article about the great honeybee die off, Todd Woody's Honey Bees Are Dying Putting America At Risk Of A Food Disaster.   Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has wiped out some 10 million bee hives worth $2 billion over the past six years.

The USDA thinks that the answer is to breed better bees. Because we humans are so much better at this nature stuff than nature itself, just look at our track record.

Hudgins sends this in response;

I really the brilliant statement:  "One answer: Breed better bees."

It really makes a lot of sense to genetically engineer a bee that can survive and prosper on a mix of industrial grade poisons and isopropylamine salt of glyphosate. 

What could go wrong with a chemical that inhibits the enzyme catalsyt in the synthesis in plants of the amino acids tyrosine and tryptophan.  (Note: tryptophan is an essential amino acid. This means that it cannot be synthesized and therefore must be part of the diet.)

The human race is very poor indeed at seeing connections.  

Other then the ones that link dollars together....