Martha and the Vandellas

 

 Amazing band, Jamerson, Joe Sample, Wah Wah Watson, Dennis Coffey, Doc Kupka, King Erisson, Jim Keltner, Ollie Brown, Emilio Castillo. Clydie King, Maxine Willard Waters and Carolyn Willis. We forget how great Martha was, this is awesome.

Old and in the way

I was messing with a younger middle aged guy at the donut shop last week for a minor infraction and he got seriously aggrieved. I tried to tell him that it was play but he wasn't having it. Steve wondered if it would come to fisticuffs and he says to me, "Does he know that you are a senior citizen?"

I looked at him and it was like a thunder clap. Senior citizen, what the fuck is he talking about? Then it hit me. I will be sixty nine in November, does that mean that I am now old? I guess it does. I was shaken, not by the pouty dickface, who I would still punch in the mouth if necessary no matter how old I might be, but by the realization that shit, I am old.

You see, as a married guy with no kids and two cats I have basically been able to remain an emotional infant for most of my life or at least not succumb to those dark forces that subtly turn you in to your parents. In my head I am still twenty. I have basically been able to live my life on my terms, according to my script and in many ways, at least in my business, I am one of the last ones standing.

But, sobering as it was, after a quick self assessment, what he was saying was really not too far off the mark. I am old. Everything is starting to hurt. I had two people this week tell me that I was limping, something I had not realized I was doing.

My left knee has been bone on bone and seriously arthritic since 1979, when I had the anterior cruciate, medial collateral and meniscus meltdown.  It hurts to walk, let alone go up and down my stairway. I am seriously overweight, yesterday Ray asked me, "Who made your shirts, Omar the tentmaker?"

The cardiologist called last week, or her N.P. anyway and tried to talk to me about all sorts of things that would prolong my due date on terra firma. Statins, and this and that, did I know my ventricle was abnormally thick, yadda yadda ya? And I said, call me in a month, I can't deal right now, I have a little chemo issue with my bladder, one crisis at a time and hung up on him.

They really do care more than I do. I have always felt that I wanted a full life and not necessarily a long life and I have had one. Been living on borrowed time and extra credits since I was fourteen and they first gave me the three days to live. Ha, fooled you.

*

The blast is in its 18th year or is it the 19th? I will have to look at the side panel and count.

Ridiculous number of views and ridiculous number of posts, well over 14,000. As Wagman said yesterday, the equivalent of about 500 books. I was toying with the idea of doing a hardbound coffee table book of my people shots from Long Beach Flea Market. I pulled about 400 pictures out of lightroom and stuck them in a new catalogue yesterday. Some great ones. Thought about adding antique show portraits too but don't think so. Wonder if people would buy the book?

Might try to self publish, who knows? Or forget about it.

 One of the analytic tools on the blast lets me see what people are reading. This week they are going back to 2010, a nifty little number called From the Railbird's perch, handicapping the gubernatorial election.

I decided to re-read it and thought, damn that was pretty good.  And wondered for a moment if I had lost a literary step on my fastball? And honestly, I don't think so. 2010 I was what, 53?

But what has changed from those early days is the spirited feedback I got from you guys, frankly that has gone to hell. I miss Window Dancer, and KJ, who kept things spicy by making stuff up and throwing an occasional bomb, Helen, Grumpy, as pain in the ass as he was, conservative commenters like MMWB and Bloodthirsty liberal who kept things legit, my late Uncle Norm, E, Roy Cohen, a lot of people who made the comments section a very lively place.

What happened? People got old, moved away, died, lost interest, who knows? The blogger format has been pre-empted about a million ways since I started, you are reading a real dinosaur. Maybe you all left for Instagram?

But I think the main thing was that I stopped letting anonymous assholes tee off on me and I started vetting my comments. It shut things down pretty tight and now I get to hear my voice echo in the cave. 

I wistfully think that if I had gone the youtube video route and became an influencer I would be rolling in dough right now, like Meidas Touch  or somebody like that. But it would have got real boring, no food, no music, just horrible divisive politics 24/7 and we probably all would have lost interest. 

I think I can still make a huge file copy of the blast. Remind me to give it to one of you so that it can be recreated if I were ever to slip on a banana peel and check out. Would be a shame to see it completely vaporize, wouldn't it.

Many of you have been with me here the whole time, thank you friends.

Etta James

Salts of the Earth

Leviticus 2:13 - Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.

For some reason I have been thinking and reading a lot about salt of late. When I was a kid in school I remember an old story that told us that salt was once as valuable as gold. While not entirely accurate, it was incredibly valuable and did trade for the price of gold for a time in the sixth century sub saharan Africa.

Why?

Because before the advent of refrigeration, salt could cure some food and meat and protect it from perishing. It prevented harmful bacteria in food and helped general human health. Gold can't do that.

From Wicki:

Some of the earliest evidence of salt processing dates to around 6000 BC, when people living in the area of present-day Romania boiled spring water to extract salts; a salt works in China dates to approximately the same period. Salt was prized by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Hittites, Egyptians, and Indians. Salt became an important article of trade and was transported by boat across the Mediterranean Sea, along specially built salt roads, and across the Sahara on camel caravans. The scarcity and universal need for salt have led nations to go to war over it and use it to raise tax revenues, for instance triggering the El Paso Salt War which took place in El Paso in the late 1860s. Salt is used in religious ceremonies and has other cultural and traditional significance.

A salt war? Jeez.

It has been used in both religious rites and in war.

An ancient practice in time of war was salting the earth: scattering salt around in a defeated city to symbolically prevent plant growth. The Bible tells the story of King Abimelech who was ordered by God to do this at Shechem. Texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ploughed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after it was defeated in the Third Punic War (146 BC), although this story is now considered to be entirely apocryphal.

A few years ago I was able to visit the three Salinas or salt pueblos of southeastern New Mexico. Abbo, Qurai and Gran Quivera.

Populated by various Tiwa and Tompiro tribes back to about the thirteenth century, these pueblo indians mined the dry lakes of the region and traded the vital commodity of salt with a variety of tribes, including indians of the plains region.

The three most eastern pueblos, which were abandoned mid 16th century, made their livelihood by selling salt to many other tribes from the east including the Comanches and other plains Indians.

Zuni Pueblo was supposed to have the best and whitest salt the Spanish conquerors had ever seen.

In 1540, when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition attacked and occupied the Zuni village of Hawikku, the colonizers “found what [they] had more need of that gold silver,” as one account put it, “that is, a great quantity of corn, beans, [. . .] and the best and whitest salt I have seen in my whole life.” The invaders soon found the salt’s source, the Zuni Salt Lake. Coronado himself felt the lake—and its superior salt—worthy enough to bring to New Spain’s first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza’s attention. After seizing control of the pueblo, Coronado wrote to the viceroy of the Zuni’s “finest order and cleanliness” in their preparation of food and the “excellent granular salt that they bring from a lake one day’s journey” from the village. 

In any case I have been doing my own salt exploration. You see, we are getting more and more different salts at home and I was interested in what my friends were eating or using or if we were an anomaly? If you are strictly morton's well then god bless you.

So what do we have in our kitchen?

The salt we use the most, or at least I do, is Trader Joe's Fine Sea Salt, which is supposedly of Mediterranean origin. 

I didn't think it was kosher but I guess it is. 

But what exactly does that mean, kosher salt? 

Good question and I am not exactly sure of the answer. 

But I believe that sea salt comes from evaporated sea water and kosher salt may come from salt deposits. 

Kosher salt contains no iodine or caking agents and is typically courser.

There is no great reason I use this, I could just as well be using Morton's but it is cheap and good in a pinch. (salt humor) I use it a lot when I am baking.

Not a particularly noteworthy salt.

After baking is when the subject starts to get good, or spicy, that is when we get to finishing salts.

A tiny spritz after the cooking is done and the ordinary may become sublime.

Leslie's favorite right now is black Hawaiian lava salt. 

Hiwa Kai.  This stuff is really expensive.

I saw $54. I hope my wife isn't paying that much but somehow I doubt it.

I cook a lot of beef and like the maldon salt with its large crystals for both the pre cook rest period and the finish.

Maldon is pretty, tasty and hard to beat.

Love the big, course flakes.

We have also been heavy users of various pink and Himalayan salts.

I like the one with spicy garlic as we are heavy garlic users in our home.

One of those weird finds at Marshalls...

What else do we have hanging around?

Well, a bunch of stuff, er salt.

Hatch chili, lemon...

I opened the hatch chili the other night, smells surprisingly sweet.

You could say we are salt obsessed but Lena has way more than we do, I think she actually belongs to a salt club.

She turned us on to these samples.

These are three that she gave us that I am aching to try, the last Sel Gris Brut de Guerande being her personal favorite and one of the most prized salts in the world.

This is a lot like the Camargue salt that comes with our favorite butter, Belgium's Les Pres Sales.

And she showed us some of the other salts in her larder as well as some outrageous peppercorn from Cambodia.

I thought that Leslie and I were an anomaly in our salt craziness but I guess not. 

Melissa is the finest cook that we know and I asked her what salt she favored? She also liked the French salt but sent me this article, the 26 best sea salts in the world. You can see that there are many places in europe that produce wonderful salt. Portugal is referenced a lot.

Lena read somewhere that the best salt came from one of two places with the cleanest water in the world but can't find the citation. She sent me this article on Japanese sea salts and one on Celtic sea salt from Brittany.

So you see, I thought that I knew a little something on the subject and once again find out how much I have to learn. 😁

By the way, in my short research, this book came up several times as a good read, Salt: a world history by Mark Kurlansky.

I just ordered some of the blue Persian salt, it looks very interesting as well as beautiful.  Not sure if I should eat it or snort it.

You folks eating any special tasty salt that I should know about?

Janis

Medical report

So, as I said a while back, I have started a new drug regimen for my bladder cancer. I have been waiting for this new drug for about a year. There were twenty nine people in the initial drug study, it was reported that twelve and a half percent had serious side effects of one kind or another. I was the second person to get the drug after the study group, the first left the office about ten minutes before I got there.

Yesterday was my third once a week infusion. The first one was relatively trouble free, but I noticed some serious differences with the BCG I have been taking all these years. They put a clamp on your penis, apply lidocane and then through a long tube pass my severely enlarged prostate and inject the medication into my bladder. If I am lucky I don't get a UTI. Lucky so far.

Last week was terrible. With BCG I expelled the agent in a couple hours. This stuff is a gel that never leaves. I believe that it was absorbed into my gastrointestinal tract and has since caused me serious difficulty. 

I had a four o'clock meeting last Thursday, the day after the application and I was seriously thinking about checking into the hospital at 3:36. I am not going to get into the minutia but it was extremely painful. I ended up throwing up in my trash can at work for about an hour.

When I got to the doctor yesterday I told her about the problems and she offered to stop the drug but I told her that we needed to try it another week at least. After forty two years with bladder cancer, I would like to think or hope that one day I can get off this cancer roller coaster. Who knows?

I altered some of my behavior or customary practice yesterday per the doctor's instruction and things went relatively easily. Hematuria but not much else.

Today however, was different. At about noon, the nausea and malaise set in and I had to go home and lay down. Bought some ginger ale. Felt whipped.

It is typical for me, the effects of these long sequences of chemotherapy or immunotherapy are cumulative. In three weeks I should be a total basket case, that is if I can make it through the rest of the scheduled visits.

I blind opened the I ching, or Taoist book of wisdom this morning before work. My eyes fixed on a second line, I didn't even read or notice the particular hexagram.

Severely wounded, you need to rest.

I'm going to pay attention.

*

On the bright side, I have registered as a volunteer at a cancer resource center in Temecula called Michelle's Place. I told them that I want to do phone work and mentor new cancer patients. I think I have a lot to share with my long experience. We will see what happens.

You know, you know

Norman Birger

I received a call from a man in Florida a few months ago who told me that his late grandfather was a painter who had traveled to the southwest in the mid twentieth century and painted with a lot of local artists, many associated with Bettina Steinke and the Blair Gallery in Santa Fe. 

He had amassed a nice collection of paintings, many from a well known group of Denver artists who had moved to New Mexico.

He told me that his family was not particularly interested in the artwork and he had noticed that I had sold many of the same artists at the Blue Heron Gallery in the past, would I be interested in selling the collection?

I said that I certainly would and have received some wonderful work from him painted by his artist friends that I am in the process of cataloguing and putting on line for sale. Works by Steinke, Ned Jacob, Dane Clark, Ramon Kelley, John Encinias, Roy Swenson and many others.

But what really intrigued me was the work of his own grandfather, Norman Birger. Frankly, it was exceptional. 

Like this incredible oil crayon drawing of the sanctuary at Chimayo. I love this. Reminds me of Leon Gaspard.

I asked his grandson, just who was this man? Obviously an artist who slipped through the cracks of time and was unknown to the art world at large, regardless of his considerable talent. I have found that this happens more often than you think in this world, regardless of talent. People have to make a living and sometimes they have to make choices.

It was obvious that this man was a talented artist in a variety of mediums, as well as a remarkable draftsman and renderer.

I started doing some research.

Born to a prosperous family in Minsk, Belarus on October 2, 1901, Norman Birger was a classically trained artist who studied at the University of Kiev, succeeded by studies in both Prague and Vienna.

This was a pivotal and exciting time in Austria, the Vienna Secessionists were in vogue. 

And understand that you did not leave a University art school like Kiev or St. Petersburg without having acquired considerable artistic chops.

After the Bolshevik revolution, he moved to New York in 1921.

In 1921, Birger and his brother were attending college in Vienna, and the buzz was that fortunes were being made in the United States.

"So I decided to go to America and become a millionaire," Birger says.

"My brother decided to go back and be with my mother in Russia." Birger's mother died during the German invasion in World War II, and his brother ended up in a refugee camp. 

In 1922, Birger married his high school sweetheart Rose, who he had lost touch with and had independently moved to New York herself. Within a few years they had two children, Larry of Miami and Nina, who lived in California. To support his family, Birger worked as a trolley driver, factory worker and radiator repairman. 

Birger also was an artist who was obviously enchanted by the southwest and traveled by car through the region, doing portraits and landscapes. 

But he knew that he could not make a living during hard times.

"During the Depression, an artist couldn't earn enough money to buy a ham sandwich," he said.

In 1936, living in New Jersey, Birger fixed a neighbor’s broken lock, found out that he had a knack and became a self taught master locksmith. 

In 1945 he and his wife moved to Miami and carried on with his new career. 

Birger retired in 1970 and evidently went back to his true passion, art, a vocation he had always worked at on the side at a master’s level.

I have a lot of unanswered questions about Norman Birger. He was obviously a friend and admirer of the great Russian artist and teacher Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955). Fechin was from Kazan, Russia and he emigrated to America in 1923, eventually teaching at the New York Academy of Art before a bout of tuberculosis sent him to New Mexico, where he settled in Taos under the watchful eye of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

There are two Birger drawings of Fechin in the collection I received, both executed posthumously in 1969 and one of Alexandra Belkovitch “Tinka” Fechin, the wife Fechin had divorced in 1933.

The master’s influence is quite clear. 

And it leads me to believe that Birger was acquainted with the family back in New York, if not Russia or the Ukraine.

I also received a remarkable Fechin charcoal study of Ramon Miraball in the first group, a painting of which later graced a page of Arizona Highways in 1952. 

Was Birger also a one time or past student of Fechin? 

Quite possibly. 

The family informs that Birger maintained relations through the years with Fechin's wife and his daughter, Eya.

The influence is quite clear in the work, like this piece Carmelita which won the 1976 American Heritage Show first place award.

Or this lovely drawing of the Russian emigre singer Yulia Zapolskaya Whitney (1919-1965), who I assume was a friend or associate.

I look forward to discovering more information about this talented artist. 

I would also like to locate other and pictures or examples of earlier work if it exists.

If you are able to fill in any blanks, please let me know.

after William Sharer

David Bromberg

Forty seven years ago on memory lane

This was an interesting week in my life 47 years ago. A lot of my musical history happened 45 to 55 years ago and my memory is surprisingly still pretty clear. Lot of memories coming down the pike, especially next year. 77 was epic.

I flew back to Washington D.C. the last week of July 1979 for a condominium conference. I was building homes and projects back then. It turned out to be the most eventful flight of my life. A drunk passenger who had been cut off from alcohol tried to get into the cockpit and finally started beating on a male flight attendant.

I was amazed that everybody on the plane merely watched and I jumped up and tackled the man, pinning his arms behind his back. Only then did an undercover air marshal come up with handcuffs. Three of us tied him to his chair with belts for the remainder of the flight. 

He had a male companion but for the rest of the flight the man maintained that he didn't know him. He was on his own. I don't know if you have ever flown to Dulles but you leave the plane in the middle of the tarmac and get on busses or trains back to the terminal. We were met by about two dozen members of law enforcement with guns, waiting to take the guy in. They said he was going to away for a real long time.

I get on the bus and I get what might be the only standing ovation I have ever received in my life from my fellow passengers, for getting off my ass and doing something. I don't think I have ever mentioned it before but still feel proud of my actions.

At the end of the conference I flew to New York to see my mother. Lowell George of Little Feat was playing at the Bottom Line on the 24th of June, his only solo tour. I was a big Little Feat fan, had seen them at their best but by this time George was struggling with serious addiction. My wonderful friend Doug Garn accompanied me to the show.

George was extremely overweight by this time, wearing camouflage gear and sweating up a storm. It was a terrible night, you could feel that things were really off. Rode hard, put away wet.

It proved to be his penultimate show. He died in his hotel room four days later, after one last show at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington D.C..

I flew to Portland from New York, meeting my friend Mark Alderman for a Grateful Dead show at the Portland Speedway. 

Mark worked for Infinity Records, helped manage Spyro Gyra, had once worked for Cashbox. He loved the dead and the great bi-coastal scene that we were a part of.

He had swank digs off Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.

He was a handsome, quick witted guy, could walk into any bar and come out with the most lovely companion. 

We once went to the Renaissance Fair and he astounded me shooting arrows, he was one of the most talented archers I have ever seen. He said he learned at camp.

Everything came easy for Mark.

Too easy. He fell for the wrong woman and eventually took his own life, not long after. 

Too many drugs in the equation back then. For many of us.

We stayed with his friend Joel, a very strange guy. Won't even talk about that weird night.

The Dead were playing with some real favorites of mine, Bromberg and McGuinn, Clark and Hillman. You can see the setlists here. I loved those guys but I don't remember a stellar performance.

It was a cold and drizzly morning when we got to the raceway. Bootleg posters advertised the show as Byrds and Dead.

I remember very little if anything of the music of the two opening acts at this point. The dead came on and delivered a decent if perfunctory first set. The nearby mountains provided a beautiful backdrop behind the stage.

At some point Bob Weir made what I thought at the time was a very cavalier and snide remark about Lowell's passing, "It was fun while it lasted." In any case, the weather got weird and we got some rain but not too much.

The high point of the show was an incredible Other One that seemed in perfect synch with the clouds which parted at the crescendo. One of the best I ever saw. Or heard I guess. You can hear the dead part here if you feel like it. But sometimes the recordings don't translate, you have to have been there.

I would skip to the Estimated Prophet but suit yourself.

I was talking to two friends yesterday, both rock and roll photographers, about how much fun we had back then. Leven shot jazz album covers and rock and roll for Fantasy, Peter did a lot of photo work for a lot of people, including the Eagles and maybe Capricorn.

We were lucky to be there for some great tunes. Thought it would last forever. It didn't. But like the late Bobby Ace said, it was fun while it lasted.

*

Sad to hear that one of my favorite songwriters, Chip Taylor, has died. Taylor wrote Angel of the Morning and Wild Thing, as well as my personal favorite, Fuck all the perfect people amongst a host of other great tunes. He was a genius and the brother of John Voight, and a real character.

Matty Groves

Don't kill the messenger

Ready for some bad news? President Trump is nothing if not an agent of discord and an enemy of established order. One merely has to look at his alienation of long time allies like Canada, Italy, Britain and Nato and his new choice of friends in Moscow and North Korea to know that the deck has been radically shuffled.

But some conventions are sacrosanct and should not be trifled with, like the protection of envoys and diplomats. We don't kill the messenger. It's an old rule.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on social media. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again.”

In a 20-minute phone call with Fox News, which revealed his sensitivity to the criticism being directed at him by Republicans and Democrats alike, he said: “We may take over the strait, if we have to. If they don’t make a deal, we’ll collect tolls.”

Referring to the strait, he appeared to threaten to kidnap the Iranian negotiators, saying: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”

Yesterday Trump intimated, with customary crude profanity, that if things didn't go his way, Iranian diplomats would never make it back to their country. This sort of threat is taboo in diplomatic circles and undercuts approximately a thousand years of war time civility and behavior.

This all started back in the thirteenth century. 

Between 1219 and 1221, the Mongol forces under Genghis Khan invaded the lands of the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia. 

When a senior Mongol diplomat was executed by Khwarazmshah Muhammed II, Khan mobilized his forces and invaded, laying waste to Khorasan, destroying Herat, Nishapur, and Merv, three of the largest cities in the world. 

Herodotus records that when heralds of the Persian king Xerxes demanded "earth and water" (i.e., symbols of submission) of Greek cities, the Athenians threw them into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well for the purpose of suggesting they would find both earth and water at the bottom, these often being mentioned by the messenger as a threat of siege.

Vlad Țepeș aka Vlad the Impaler, the Volvolde of Wallachia, was said to have nailed the turbans of Turkish emissaries to their heads when they demanded he collect certain taxes. 

In the Crusades, the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was sent by the Holy See to negotiate some way to bring back the gnostic Cathar heretics to the faith, and in turn he was murdered by the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI.

A Roman envoy was urinated on as he was leaving the city of Tarentum. The oath of the envoy, "This stain will be washed away with blood!", was fulfilled during the Pyrrhic War.

William of Tyre mentions how the Templars killed an Assassin envoy in an ambush in order to prevent him returning home with the peace treaty he had arranged with the Franks.

Sultan Mehmed Han crushed the skull of the Hungarian envoy despite the Prophet Muhammad's prohibition on killing messengers.

The concept of diplomatic immunity can be found in ancient Indian epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, where messengers and diplomats were given immunity from capital punishment. 

In Ramayana, when the demon king Ravana ordered the killing of Hanuman, Ravana's younger brother Vibhishana pointed out that messengers or diplomats should not be killed, as per ancient practices.

Count Matveyev

The British Parliament first guaranteed diplomatic immunity to foreign ambassadors under the Diplomatic Privileges Act in 1709, after Count Andrey Matveyev, a Russian resident in London, was subjected to verbal and physical abuse by British bailiffs.

The problem with bellicose bullies like the President is that one day it might be another country threatening our envoys and I would like to think that we would want to see them respected as well. 

There are minimal rules of behavior in diplomatic circles but this is actually a quite important one.

*

Trump ties possible Greenland takeover to Red Lobster shrimp giveaway.

Problematic News Consumption

Blogreaders may have noticed that there is a lot more food, birds and music of late and less political material. Well, there is a reason for that. We live in a divided world and I don't want to add to the rancor. Although I clearly have a partisan bent I would rather focus on things that unite rather than things that divide.

I saw an interesting article recently at Science Daily, Your brain was never designed for this much bad news.

Turns out we are on overload, well people like me and my friend Steve anyway, people that process a lot of information.

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 percent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 percent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six percent of those who didn’t.

It is a good read,  give it a look, that is, if you feel like getting triggered. Which brings me back to my friend Steve at the donut shop. You think I am a Cassandra with my negative news, Steve has a steady stream every morning. 

I repeatedly tell him not to react, that it is bad for his health. I lost my faith in humanity a long time ago, don't think I have quite as big a problem, you just can't take this crazy life too seriously. It will literally make you sick.

In some ways I admire those friends of mine, many on the right, that never read the news or open a newspaper or website. Not that ignorance is bliss but the reality is that both the left and right live in these impenetrable media silos and often lack the critical thinking skills to discern what passes for truth these days.

So screw it, go fishing, bake a cake, climb a mountain. Just don't be constantly triggered. Not good for you.

Gram at Altamont

Uneven vocals but I don't think I have ever heard it before. I love Parsons.

Yummy chicken

 

I wanted to cook something simple last night and was hankering for chicken thighs. I decided to do them a bit differently than usual.

Last week I made drumsticks and was looking at a soul food recipe that recommended a teaspoon of baking powder in the rub in order to get crispier skin. Or was it a half teaspoon? I don't remember now.

Anyway the drumsticks came out great and I decided to add a half teaspoon to the dry rub I prepared last night. Now I assume and maybe I should not because everybody's tastebuds are different, that most of our poultry dry rubs are very similar. The only diff here is that my wife likes cumin, I can take it or leave it.

Depends how I feel.

My basic mix is salt, pepper, garlic powder, smoked paprika, cayenne, a little onion powder on occasion and either Italian seasoning or herbs de provence, depending on how I feel. Might add a little sweet paprika too, for depth.

When I made my drumsticks I decided to try and add some of this stuff. 

It had been sitting on the counter for a while, minding its own business.

Someone gave it to us to try and I forget who now. Sorry!

I am not sure why but it added some wonderful piquant depth and complexity to the rub.

Might be the lemon peel or the thyme.

But what a difference.

I would use it once again last night.

We used the Weber the other night for lamb and fennel sausage, crookneck, corn and steaks, decided to stick with the oven this time.

I drizzled my olive oil, added my rub and then baked it skin side down on a sheet for twenty five minutes.

400°.

I usually start skin side up, don't you?

I flipped it at the allotted time and basted four pieces with the Kosmos cherry habonero sauce and four with the Kinders honey hot at 425° for five minutes and then a second baste of the same duration.

The recipe called for a third baste but I was at 185° internal at that point and pulled them.

Between the excellent rub and the barbecue sauce this was some great chicken. 

Loved both sauces equally.

The recipe suggested a one minute broil at the end but I didn't see the need, it was pretty near perfect. 

Leslie made orzo and fresh broccoli and we had a delightful meal.

My late brother Buzz, a lawyer turned chef, would have turned 67 yesterday.

I would love to have cooked with him. 

Miss you, man.

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We have been using a lot of different table salts of late and I want to write a blogpost about it. Leslie is crazy for some black hawaiian finishing salt right now. If you have a second and favor a certain salt, please send me a message.