March fifth

 

It's a beautiful time here in Southern California. Warm with nice breezes. Flowers are blooming, birds are singing. We know that it is only a moment of time until things are insufferably hot but we can enjoy this lovely period while we can with the knowledge that it will always feel worse in Phoenix.

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I am getting inundated with loan scam calls and texts. I get easy ten a day and they have figured out that they can use local area codes to coerce you into answering.

I am on both do not call registries but nothing works.

A pox on these assholes. Stop already. Do people actually fall for this?

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Kudos to the UCLA woman's basketball players for their latest dance routine.

Speaking of basketball, I have to say that this is one of the more disappointing SDSU Aztecs season's I have ever witnessed and I have been watching a very long time.  The NIL has killed the college game. We lost our point guard from last year,  Nick Boyd to a Wisconsin team that reportedly paid him over a million dollars this year.

The current team is so up and down. I was at the Utah St. game recently, they played great and then lost two in a row with listless play. They need a Nick Boyd, a guard who can playmake and get everybody involved.

We had some amazing years in our run but I can't see us in the NCAA this year.

Having said that, congratulations to the Lady Aztecs for going 25 - 4 and 19 -1 in conference,  first in the Mountain West.

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Saturday is my little brother Johnny's birthday. It broke my heart when they found him dead in his Pittsburgh apartment last year and my trip back there to get his stuff and try to make sense of it all was the definite low point of my year. 

He was smart and kind and I wish a lot of things had been different between us.

It was comforting to know there was no drugs or suicide, he died of natural causes. My last brother. It sucks so bad to lose a sibling, nothing ever prepares you for it.

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Speaking of John, he was with me at my first dead show in California, at the Cow Palace on 3/23/74, along with my mother, Hank and Gabe. 

People that are not into the dead will most probably find this a bore but I wrote last week about seeing the first Terrapin and Estimated prophet 2/26/77 at San Bernardino.

I started thinking about first playings of epic dead songs and the truth is that I witnessed the first Cassidy and Scarlet Begonias at the Cow Palace, as well as the first Fire on the Mountain at Winterland on 3/18/77. 

Every bit as wonderful!

I feel very lucky to have been there to experience those precious inchoate moments.

You don't love me

Touching base with the birdies

I haven't used my camera for so long I think I forgot how. The mother hawk is sitting on eggs right now, I grabbed a shot yesterday. I have the zoom on, not the better prime but the shots were acceptable in the low light.

Yesterday I had business in Carlsbad and drove to San Elijo afterwards to take a walk and hopefully see some birds. My hip and knees are hurting and I needed to move around. Kept the same lens on, pictures were sort of soft but acceptable.

Song sparrow

Yellow rumped warbler

Blue Heron

kildeer

Savannah Sparrow

I don't remember ever seeing a kildeer there before. Not an epic day but they can't all be epic. Some days you get eagles, others you get sparrows.

Followed a pied billed grebe around and this cormorant.

Never saw the falcon. Snapped a few shots of an Allens Hummingbird but didn't get anything worth posting.

I snapped this picture of mom on the way home, in harsh afternoon light.

And got this picture of the red tailed mother to be this morning, looking rather resplendent.

I have the good heavy lens in the back, will break it out soon. Had planned to go bird San Jacinto today but too busy with work.

Going to get out there as soon as I can.

My mind and body needs it.

How Iran won the war

https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2026/03/could-the-united-states-lose-the-war-in-iran-why-one-professor-thinks-it-will-happen.html

Sedaka plays Chopin

 

Hello Utah!

 I picked up a new show in Salt Lake City in May. Should be fun.

What was it you wanted?

Famous Blue Raincoat

 

Crusaders redux

I saw an interesting article at Substack today titled U.S. Troops were told Iran was was for Armageddon, return of Jesus. It was written by Jonathan Larsen. I print it here in part:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

One complainant identified themselves as a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in a unit currently outside the Iran combat zone but in Ready-Support status, deployable at any time. The NCO said they were Christian and emailed the MRFF on behalf of 15 troops, including at least 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jew. (Full email printed below.)

The NCO wrote to the MRFF that their commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”

The Iranian regime are admittedly major fundamentalist assholes and perpetrators of all sorts of nasty activities, not limited to suppressing and sometimes killing homosexuals and women and fomenting aggression throughout the region. 

But framing this as a religious war is not a ticket to success in this particular area. The people there do not like being dictated to in matters of theology, they never have. They sometimes fight for hundreds of years over slight religious deviations and martyrdom is an olympic sport in the region.

So good luck with the Jesus thing.

Few things in the mail

 

Howard caught this egret shot up in Marin.

Kip shot this picture of Galway Cathedral in Ireland this week.

Tommy stopped by on his bike yesterday.

Anthropic

Well, so much for the no war President. So easily manipulated by Netanyahu. As I said when we invaded Iraq, much easier to start these sorts of conflicts than to finish them or get into that tedious, pesky stuff like running a country. Just lob a big missile in and see what shakes down later, I guess. Hope for the best.

And on to the next opponent, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, NATO, take your pick. Whoever the daffy old octogenarian sets his errant mind on next.

I really don't feel like riffing on current events but kudos to the man at Anthropic for adhering to his internal red lines that disallow use of his technology to mass spy on ordinary Americans or in autonomous weapons systems.

“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,” Anthropic spokesman

So rare to see a red line these days. Looks like a dangerous system in the best of hands.

...even AI’s creators “do not understand how our own AI creations work,” as Amodei once put it — or what they’re capable of. The risk, then, is not just that powerful AI would enable the government to “make a mockery” of the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy by assembling “scattered, individually innocuous data [about individual Americans] into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale,” according to Amodei. Or that, in matters of life and death, “fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day.”

The risk is also that whatever the phrase “all lawful purposes” encompasses today, it can’t possibly keep up with what AI could do tomorrow.

“Demanding unconditional access before [these] systems are ready is not an assertion of authority. It is a wager that the unknowns will not matter,”Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained in the Atlantic. “The danger is not that Silicon Valley will wield too much power over the military. It is that neither will fully understand the systems it is rushing to deploy — and that the consequences of that ignorance will be tested not in a laboratory, but on the world.”

I read a government official try to explain this surveillance business the other day who admitted that there are a lot of gray areas here. I see a clear attack on our civil rights and freedoms, the rights to not be searched or unreasonably surveilled without warrant or probable cause. And as this article in Scientific American points out, there is a lot to be mined in those "gray areas."

The company was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives who believed the industry was not taking safety seriously enough. They positioned Claude as the ethical alternative. In late 2024 Anthropic made Claude available on a Palantir platform with a cloud security level up to “secret”—making Claude, by public accounts, the first large language model operating inside classified systems.

The question the standoff now forces is whether safety-first is a coherent identity once a technology is embedded in classified military operations and whether red lines are actually possible. “These words seem simple: illegal surveillance of Americans,” says Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “But when you get down to it, there are whole armies of lawyers who are trying to sort out how to interpret that phrase.”

All that personal liberty stuff goes out the window so easily. If the government has the technology, they will use it and justify it, no matter what are the supposed legal constraints. And if it is a right wing government, the Supreme Court will most probably back them up.

Was reading today about a mass surveillance project going on right now on highways 8 and 80 in San Diego, which is scanning every license plate that goes by and assembling a massive database. Ostensibly it is to further the war on drugs and find missing children, yada, yada. 

Citizen response was predictable, "Who cares if you have done nothing wrong." This surrender and blind meek acceptance of government intrusion is the way our personal rights evaporate on the road to a fascist state.

Let me know how that goes.

Peter Thiel is clearly the devil, Dario Amodei at least gives one hope.

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Funny postscript. After banning Claude, U.S. used it in its military strikes.

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John Bolton on the Iran strike.

Top Shelf

We are all different. Some people thrive on vegan or vegetarian diets. I have tried it before, for two protracted periods and it is not for me. My body needs red meat to thrive. I know that for some of you that lands me on a lower evolutionary rung and for that I apologize. I will probably be reborn as a rock. But it is what it is.

For the past few years I have been buying large subprimal hunks of beef and breaking them down myself. Why? I can select the right piece of meat with the most marbling and best color for one thing. And have you priced beef at the grocery store or bought a steak in a restaurant lately?

Prices are through the roof. 

I rarely will buy a steak in a restaurant although I did buy an extravagant bone in rib eye at the Tee-Off which was damned good although exorbitantly expensive. 

I was hungry and out of town.

Trust me, this is a lot cheaper.

When I first started cutting my own beef I favored ribeyes. 

About thirteen dollars a lb. 

But I found that there was too much wasted fat and they sort of dissolved on the grill. 

I then switched to New York strips, which I love and which were a little cheaper at around ten bucks a lb. 

Nice, firm, less fat, better texture. Toothy.

My dad was a steak and potatoes guy and growing up we ate a lot of top sirloin. 

It is a cut that seems to have gone out of favor with the general public who are ribeye mad  right now but I like it a lot and it is a heck of a lot cheaper. Love the strong beefy flavor.

I have been craving it lately. 

Perhaps it reminds me of my dad and childhood?

Anyway I decided to buy one recently at Costco Business and break it down.

Eighteen lbs at $6.69 a lb. for choice, 

Far and away the least expensive meat we have purchased.

A pound of steak for less than the price of a big Mac.  

You get me?

But also a hunk of beef that requires far more expertise trimming and breaking down than anything I am used to.

It is a bit of a chore.

I split beef with Jim and Debbie, my cohorts in steak.

This one had the best marbling and beautiful fresh color.

We all took turns trimming and it went really well.

We watched a couple YouTube movies and coached each other and I am very proud of every one of us!

We separated the culotte or picanha section, the most prized beef in Brazil with its gorgeous fatcap.

Love the apron!

We made beautiful baseballs out of the tenderloin, long strips of the picanha, pulled the mouse steak and trim for stir fry.

I think we ended up with about 18 steaks. 

Jim likes his a little thinner than I do. 

We adjusted.

He threw a small one on his super hot grill to test our work.

Perfection!

We made a picanha the next night at home and it was delicious. 

I wish we had left a little more flatcap on it as it makes the steak so buttery.

Next time.

I haven't tried a baseball cut yet but it will happen very soon.

With vacuum sealed New York, Ribeyes and now Top sirloin steaks filling our freezer, we are good to go for the next four or five months at minimum.

Can't wait.

Noth - New Yorker

 

Schwing Auditorium

Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of the most amazing concert I ever witnessed, 2/26/77. San Bernardino.This is a song called Estimated Prophet, which was introduced that night, among other new songs. To say the night was transformative is a clear understatement, as most anyone who was there will tell you.

Where does the time go?

Lemon chicken with artichokes, fennel and potatoes.

Leslie has been a bit under the weather and she asked me to cook her dinner last night. She found a recipe she wanted to try. She hasn't been eating much of late and I was happy to cook her some protein.

Here is the recipe for lemon roasted chicken with artichokes, potatoes and fennel.

I was reasonably faithful to the script, added some garlic of course. I used the olive oil that was in the marinated artichokes. Didn't have fresh parsley but did have fresh thyme. I went with yukon gold instead of purple fingerlings, delicious if chromatically lacking.

I did a two minute broil at the end and the skin crisped up beautifully.

Had one snafu when I tried to one hand the tray out of the oven to add the vegetables, fifteen minutes in and the liquid spilled and tipped and I burnt my upper arm a tad.

A first. 

Hopefully not to be repeated.

Leslie loved it. (The food, not the burn.)

I liked it too but will doctor it next time, add a bit more spice for our customary flavor palette.

Perhaps paprika and red chili? Maybe cayenne.

It was wonderful but a little European wimpy. Loved the fennel, which we used to grow.

But the chicken could not have been better cooked.

First 15 minutes at 450°, then thirty five more with the vegetables before the broil phase.

Can't wait for leftovers tonight!

Working Man Blues

I got back last Monday evening from my shows in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara. There was no break between them so I was on the road for a long while and am pretty burned out. Hadn't had one of these back to backs in a year and they take both energy and logistical planning.

Thankfully Alyssa let me do my laundry on the day between the shows. Made more sense to stay in Encino then to drive all the way home.

Shows were very good, not great. As always, I sold nice material and bought nice material. Everything is sort of a blur at this point. Many regulars did not show up, I worry about some of them.

Here is the Palm Springs booth. 

Steve, my booth partner from Phoenix, and I went to the Art Intersect show next door and saw a lot of awful art with a couple nice things mixed in. We enjoyed talking to the owner of the Blue Rain Gallery and to the noted sculptor Geno Miles, who we ended up having dinner with later at Billy Reeds.

As always, Palm Springs is home to some very colorful people.

Barones didn't show again, must be boycotting.

A lot of very nice people did show including Mary, David and John, great friends and clients and some very good clients from Nebraska.

Caught Leanne at Trader Joes with her dog.

We went to the Vintage Flea Market Sunday, saw people I haven't seen in decades, a couple referred to me as an Original G which I will take and wear as a badge of honor.

Someone asked me why I hadn't retired yet?

The truth is number one, I can't afford to and number two, I really enjoy my job. Many of my retired friend are bored stiff and even the wealthy ones seem cash poor and on a fixed income.

Live already. Will do you know good when you are dead. And I will let you know when I have time to play. Still working...

Steve spotted this dog transfixed watching television in a Tesla and I had to snap a pic. 

Was in the car for several hours. 

Love the light.

Funny shot.

Santa Barbara was more of the same. 

Got my feet soaked in a mud puddle, rain was off and on, glad I brought extra shoes.

I went a little more modern than usual, having all the Modernism stuff in the van. Looked good. I bought a nice Mina Pulsifer that had been exhibited from 1963, a Norton Bush (I think), a neat Orrin white and a great Julian Ritter painting of Bacchus which I show on top.

Ritter was an immigrant from Germany who graduated from the Art Canter and two years later painted this in 1934 at the age of 25. He ultimately was destined for ugly clown paintings but he once had real chops as this painting shows.

Our best and most creative work is usually created in our twenties for some reason.

Dain Calvin did the show and he and his wife Sue and her cousin all came with, they had tickets for Lotusland, a place I still have never been.

We had a great dinner at one of my favorite bars, The Tee Off, perched at this spot on State St. since 1956.

Big Dave showed up one evening after visiting his son in Los Angeles and we had dinner as well.

All in all, a cool but exhausting foray.

I think that that is all I have right now.

Rob

female harrier and other birds (she's on the bottom)