Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You

Sugar powered rodentia and squandered opportunities

The story about scientists teaching rats to drive tiny cars so that they could score fruit loops is definitely my favorite visual of the week.

And, according to the story, it actually might have further implications on human mental health.

On another note, I don't want to sound like a prude but:

If you are lucky enough to win a congressional seat, you might want to put away the bong and forget about the throuple thing for a while.

Probably should be focussing on other, like government stuff. Just sayin'. I know, people can be so square and uptight.

Seriously, you millennials are pretty darn cool. It's obviously a brave new world.

*
News just in that wackjob Trump BLM Chief William Pendley wrote for a Lyndon LaRouche cult magazine back in the eighties. LaRouche was a notorious Hitler loving anti-semite.

LaRouche embraced a frenzy of conspiracy theories, contending that Queen Elizabeth is an international drug trafficker, that AIDS is spread by mosquitos, that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a Soviet agent, and that the rock band The Beatles was “a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications.”

Hillsborough

On my way up north soon for the fall Hillsborough Antique Show. Will be interesting but hopefully not too traumatic. Fires are so scary right now, some roads will be impacted. I'm going to take it slow and steady.

Friends in Napa and Sonoma are evacuated, some will not be able to attend show, both fellow dealers and clients.

Just hope that everybody gets through the Santa Ana healthy and unscathed. Business is obviously secondary.

If you can make it, will see you there. If not, please be safe.

Arthur Lee and Love - Live and let live

Love Revisited

The old folks had a big night clubbing last night. First we stopped at Fallbrook Live at Pala Mesa to catch a few songs of Anthony Cullins band's set and engage in a little covert industrial espionage with a man I will call Mr. X.

I let him buy me a ginger ale. Unfortunately he saw through my little ploy and the jig is evidently up. Fallbrook Kid sounded pretty good, second number was a bit more sophisticated and jazzy than what I have heard from him of late.

After the show we headed to San Diego for round two, first stopping at Spicy City on Convoy for some cumin lamb and other Chinese delicacies.

We got to the Casbah around 9:30 and caught the Loons set. I love Mike Stax's band, they have kept it cool and real in these parts for a long time. Really good drummer. Dedicated to a certain sixties vibe, they work hard to get to a special space somewhere between sweat, transcendence and raw punk frenzy.

Mike was in a sling and bandaged up but he marshaled through like a champ and the trooper that he is with a very spirited and rocking set.

They were the appetizer. Our favorite live band, Love Revisited, was the entree, making a rare local appearance and we never miss them if they are nearby if we can help it.

Rusty Squeezebox, Dave Chapple

Love Revisited was the great Arthur Lee's long time band, in fact this band, once known as Baby Lemonade, was with him far longer than any other of his band mates.

Our memory of seeing the late performer's amazing and powerful performances will always live deep in our hearts. Unfortunately it is probably easier to see the band in Europe than it is in America these days.

I caught Johnny Echols, the original Love guitarist who still plays in Love Revisited, before the show and he confirmed sad news for me.

I haven't been able to get a hold of my friend Arnold Briscoe for over a year.  I was worried about him. Was living with his mother in Wildomar.

He had foot problems from his diabetes but used to come down to the shop and jam with me. Used a very light pick so that he could do his thing. He loved my wife too.

Arnold was a remarkable guy. A great baseball player and guitar player, even better person. "Was' happnin' Rob? You cool?"

He was Arthur Lee's best friend as kids and they remained tight until Arthur's passing. He is the tall fellow pictured to the left with Arthur in this picture which he once gave me. They were both sixteen when the picture was taken.

I asked Johnny why Arnold no longer answered his phone and he told me that he had died about a year ago. And that Paul Barrere from Little Feat had just died too. I was worried about both of them.

Arnold had introduced Leslie and I to Paul at the Coach House. They were all very tight as he was with the late Charlie Allen from P.G.& E. Very sad all the way around. Wish I could have said goodbye to Arnold, loved the guy. Not a bad or mean bone in his body.

We were right in front of the stage last night when Love showed up, all quaffing tall Modelos. Mike Randle is no longer playing the white Gibson, he went Fender somewhere along the way. Rusty is playing a telecaster now too, he sounds so good on it and his vocals have improved incredibly. Singing with confidence, just gets better and better.

Show started out a bit sloppy and out of tune, the mix sucked all night but when they started playing our favorites the place just went crazy. Giant Forever Changes sing along, brought us all to ecstasy. God, I love this band!

Mike kept moving forward and playing these beautiful solos right in front of my wife Leslie. She was in rapture.

At some point my feet started killing me and I had to find a seat to sit down. I found a cushion in the back of the joint.

A tall schmuck was smoking a cigarette in the doorway and the smoke filled the back room. He walked by me and said "Hello officer" and then quickly walked away with a smirk, my new clean cut coiffure evidently giving me the sheen of law enforcement. Oh well, should have booked him.

Great show, got better and better, Stax joined them at the end for a rousing version of Seven and Seven.

Made a bit of small talk with the fellows after the show. Got back around two in the morning, pretty beat.

So glad that we still have an occasional opportunity to catch these wonderful musicians. Quite a night!

Get In The Sun

Time of the Evil Kings

I cracked up yesterday when I heard White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham comment on the pushback on our Great Leader from ex Chief of Staff John Kelly.

"I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President," she said. 

The cartoonish and self reverential language out of both Trump and his minions in the White House is sounding more and more like the puffery once reserved for the government press and sycophants in places like North Korea and also once heard in Maoist China.

God help us survive this "so great looking and smart, true stable genius."

Perhaps he and his bestpal Vladimir can now do some beefcake shots together for Playgirl.

To the rescue

I had a pretty cool dream last night. I was in a large boarding house, in Eastern Europe. It might have been Bulgaria. There was an enormous great room and I ordered food but it took hours to get to me. Other people were eating, the vibes were really weird. Something was definitely not right. Suddenly I was being pursued, by unspecified antagonists, who obviously wanted to do me great bodily harm.

I didn't quite know what to do so I contacted Big Dave, my longtime great pal and constant tech support mentor. Once upon a time, Jacobs was a Microsoft V.P., later a bigwig at Marimba and MacroMind. Wrote the Fetish column for Wired. Has devoted years to perfecting his own kidney matching transplant software.

all good...

I am running. What to do? "Never fear," says BigDave on his cellphone. Suddenly a holographic plastic credit card materializes above my head, straight out of the ether. Like a scene from the Matrix, I furiously grab the card and stick it into the conveniently close atm type portal and am automatically transported through space to a temporary safe zone.

The wonders of molecular compression and real time transmogrification.

This type of scene plays out several times before I wake. My pursuers never did catch me.

Obviously I can always count on Big Dave.

Evening Herald

Kinga Głyk - Joy Joy

Impeach this.

Gerald Ford was asked what an impeachable offense was in 1970? He replied that it was whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment of history.

There is a wonderful article on the history of impeachment in this week's NewYorker, The Invention and Reinvention of Impeachment by Jill Lepore. Lets face it, the i word is on everybody's lips, might as well familiarize yourself with its history.

The concept actually dates to 1376 when the English Parliament attempted to wrest power from the King. And then apparently it became the rage; there were no less than ten impeachments in England between 1376 and 1450, when the King, to put a stop to it, simply stopped summoning the Parliament.

Lepore adroitly explains the historical significance of the House acting as accusers and the Senate as judges in impeachments. This article is non partisan and shines a lot of light on the matter. I would read it if you are interested. You might also take a look at this article by Robert Sommers, Hail Kleisthenes which explains how they took care of things in ancient Athens.

Every year at an assembly of 6000 citizens, the Athenian people would be queried if, in their opinion, there was a leader whose power was too great and a threat to democracy.
If the vote was affirmative that person would be exiled from Athens for a ten year period, without loss of property or civil rights, nor with any dishonor to his family. This power was called ostrakismos, which we now know as ostracism.

That works too.

Cruella de Emasculator

It is hard to assess or judge public figures, let alone any couple. There is definitely a public and a private face.

A friend once told me that couples are like icebergs, you see the ten percent on top of the water but ninety percent lurks below out of view so it is quite difficult to judge behavior in private relationships.

Take the Conways. One, Kellyanne, is a key advisor to the President. Her husband George, hates the President and is very open about his disdain. Beautiful, not everybody has to agree with their spouse about everything.

But Kellyanne, in a recent spat with a journalist, said something that would be an absolute deal killer for me. In reference to a reporter who was asking about her husband she said this:

"Let me tell you something, from a powerful woman. Don’t pull the crap where you’re trying to undercut another woman based on who she’s married to. He gets his power through me, if you haven’t noticed. Not the other way around."

The day my wife says I get my power from her is the day I walk out the door. And vice versa. Thankfully, we have a balanced and even relationship. If I were you George, I would take a hike right about now.

Loving you baby is as easy as falling off a log

This is from the 1965 album Woman Blue. It is very faithful to the version that ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax found and compiled in 1934, an autobiographical song of an eighteen year old woman locked up in jail for murder. More of a plaintiff dirge than its successors' treatments. Its antecedents include Blind Lemon Jefferson's Deceitful Brownskin Blues, which was released as a single in 1927. A man named Bob Coltman discovered the song in the Lomax songbook and started performing it in the late fifties.

Judy Roderick was born in Michigan, grew up in Indiana, lived much of her later life in Montana. She was an early player in the Greenwich Village scene and played at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Judy died at the too early age of 49, succumbing to a heart attack brought on by childhood diabetes.

Things I miss

I was running through some of the things I used to be able to get, ingest, view or peruse that are no longer available to me. Here is a very short list that I will expand upon as new things come to mind:

Pine Brothers cough drops, the soft ones that tasted like candy. Breyers peach ice cream like they made it in the seventies, with the big chunks of peaches. Wintergreen lifesavers, the kind that sparked up in your mouth before they changed the formula. Sleeping with and breaking in a new baseball mitt with neatsfoot oil. Chicken Delight, the broasted southern California chicken of my childhood that was made in waist high drums and tasted so unique. Jack Kirby. Calvin and Hobbes. Mom's stroganoff. Winterland. Rube's Market. The fresh smell of the sheets Anne Marshall hung up on her clothesline in East Hampton. Huntley Brinkley. Arthur Lee. Sugar daddies melting and stretching in the hot west Texas sun. Hung Gar. Mrs. Gershon, the teacher who taught me how to read. Three flies out. Shooting the hawk's nest. Gene Clark. Throwing dirt clods at trains. Good kaiser rolls and salt sticks. Captain Kangaroo and Fractured Fairy Tales. John Lennon. Spitting for distance. The waterslide at the Grand Hyatt in Poipu. Sweet watermelon, they don't pick them at the right time anymore, haven't had a decent one in years. Steve Marriott. Corn fritters. Juggling and frisbee. Jonathan Winters. Wall diving in the Cayman Islands. Chick Hearn. Soul Train. Eva Cassidy. Robert Anton Wilson. The old Papaya King hot dogs. Fudgesicles for a nickel. Tom Terrific. Durwood Kirby. Garagiola and Kubek. The Far Side. Blumers Deli. Playing black jack with my pop at the Sahara. Mother's Oats Comix. Midnight watermelon theft in Carlsbad (the stolen ones are sweeter). China Cat Sunflower. Bob Mcallister. Santa Marta Red. Stewarts draft cola. La Paloma Bookstore. And Esmeralda in Del Mar too. Hilly Rose. Fireball XL5. Sandy Denny. Ralphie Valaderes. Wax bottle candy. Ralph Kiner. Fallen maple leaves in the autumn. Smell of chestnuts on 59th st. Bob Dale. Scoring soccer goals. Gene Wilder. Grandma's seven layer rum cake. Allison Steele.

Buteo Regalis in flight

Watermelon Man

Raptorville

I didn't feel well today, not sure why. Nauseous, certainly could be an after effect of the anesthesia but who knows? I'm not a doctor, don't even like playing one on the internet.

I talked to the real doctor's office yesterday, they won't have the pathology reports for a few days, receptionist was brisk and sort of put me off. Scheduled an appointment for my birthday, a little less than two weeks away. Thought it should be sooner but it is evidently out of my hands.

So I am going to do the show in San Francisco next week. It will be a bitch getting up there as I have little energy for driving but I will shoulder on. Drive up Tuesday. This is a big month for making dough for me and it looks like I will have to miss the show in Santa Barbara the following week, my medical appointment with the urologic oncologist  is square on the day I have to set up for the Calm Show. Too important to miss, need immunotherapy stat. Lots of friends have offered to help me set up at the S.F. show and I am very grateful for that.

I decided not to pack for the show today, have three more days to do it. Needed some "me time." So I headed up to my other office to shoot some birds. It was lovely.

This raptor is a gorgeous ferruginous hawk. I don't get an opportunity to shoot too many of them. The largest buteo. A rare bird.

Click on the shots and see how beautiful it is with a close up.

I got real sick shortly after I saw this bird. Found a Porta Potty, very clean, thank you United Services! Started throwing up and more, will spare you the gruesome details but I thought I was done and I wasn't and when I got back in the van I nailed my pants, shirt, car floor, car door and door side pocket.

I felt pretty miserable. Like the old man in Little Big Man, I had a passing thought that it would be a good place to die. Alas it was not to be. But I can think of worse places to expire.

I eventually found my sea legs after about three more trips to the john and was in decent shape for the rest of the afternoon. Not sure if I can blame my problems on the cancer but it is certainly a convenient excuse.

Watched a lot of harriers working the fields, saw a male at one point. They are gray and ghost like.

This is a female hovering at left.

Saw my old buddy the butcher bird, the loggerhead shrike. This bird likes to impale its prey alive, on a handy thorn or piece of barbed wire. Nasty little snit.

I actually started a mystery novel once where this vicious little bird figured prominently. Probably will never get finished, can sit for eternity with the other unfinished manuscripts. Graceland, which I got the farthest on, was begun when my first wife left me, soon after I left for Desert Storm in 1990. I think it lays in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet in my home office. Probably will never finish it or even look at it again, why stir up bad memories?

red shouldered hawk

this dark morphed red tailed was actually chasing the egret.

Illness aside, another pretty damn nice day at the office.

Current Events

I seldom agree with the conservative writer and editor Rich Lowry but he is dead on here. The Fantasy of Republicans Ditching Trump

Friends like us...

I was saddened to see that we have once again betrayed the Kurds, they did our dirty work against Isis and now are apparently of no more use to us. Kurdish protesters pelted United States military vehicles with potatoes and other vegetables as we abandoned them and slowly drove away, leaving them no doubt to a grisly fate and future.

There is an excellent article at the Intercept about the history of Kurds being betrayed; Eight times the U.S. has betrayed the Kurds by Jon Schwarz. Kissinger's rationale may have been the most sickening because he knew better.  Trump is more of a village idiot, once again talking out of his ass, he says let somebody else fight over the blood stained sand, we were great to the Kurds and anyway they're not angels.

Hell of a way to treat someone that has had your back.

Kinga Głyk - 5 Cookies

Heat waves

October is breast cancer awareness month. Did you know that one in eight women in the United States will get the disease in their lifetime although men certainly get it as well? That an estimated 41,760 women will die of the disease this year but mortality rates have been falling steadily since 1990 due to early detection and better treatment. Breast cancer survivors are the largest group of cancer survivors in our country.

Here is an interesting story; an English woman visiting Scotland on holiday pays admission to the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions Museum in Edinburgh.

They have a thermal imaging camera installed at the museum. She takes a picture with it and notices a hot spot on her breast. She investigates further when she gets home and finds out that she has self detected her own breast cancer.

The crazy thing is that the admission to the museum was probably minimal and her photograph cost next to nothing yet a simple thermal imaging test in the United States will set one back a minimum of $250.00.

Forty one year old Bal Gill was very lucky. Without the providential shot her cancer would have probably gone undetected.

Don't be a fool like me, get your colon, breasts, prostate and bladder checked for cancer with regularity. If you are 55 and older and have not had a colonoscopy, it is time. Don't wait.

God's gonna cut 'em down

Bring home the bacon

As if we didn't have enough problems to worry about in this world. Wars and rumors of wars, global warming, illiteracy, graft and corruption. Now add this one to the list. The Great American Pork Pile. According to Bloomberg, we here in America are sitting on a veritable matterhorn of uneaten bacon, the likes of which we have not seen since 1943.

America is sitting on a mountain of uneaten bacon.
More than 40 million pounds (18,000 metric tons) of pork bellies, the cut used for bacon making, were sitting in refrigerated warehouses as of Sept. 30, according to U.S. government data released Tuesday. That’s the most for the month since 1971.
The overhang came after a build up in the American hog herd. Pork output surged over the summer months and through September, said Dennis Smith, senior account executive at Archer Financial Services Inc. Bellies have seen a magnified inventory increase because demand is mostly domestic, unlike cuts such as ham, for which overseas buying can help reduce reserves.
Hog producers started building up their herds in anticipation of more demand for meat imports from China, where African swine fever has killed millions of pigs. The U.S. herd swelled to 77.7 million head. as of Sept. 1, a record for the month and the highest since 1943 considering all periods, the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture data show.

You want to help your country? Skip the stupid quinoa and kale at lunch tomorrow and order a BLT.

Make America great again. Eat more bacon.

Ain't it funny how time slips away?

Pssst, got BCG?

We woke up at 4:30 this morning and drove down to the hospital in San Diego for my second bladder surgery. Put me under, things seemed to go well.

The doctor resected the old tumor locations and grabbed some additional spots for analysis as well. We won't really know anything until the pathology reports come in.

But the doctor says that we have a serious problem if we want to save my bladder. It has become almost impossible to get BCG, the immunotherapy I need for my cancer. Read about the shortage here. We need to get some and we need it now. The dwindling supply is indeed critical.

The Tice strain of BCG was developed at the University of Illinois from a live culture that originated at the Pasteur Institute. Although additional strains are being grown in Germany and Japan, the Tice is the only currently FDA approved form of the Bacillus of Calmette and Guerin (BCG) strain of Mycobacterium bovis.

Made by Merck, it takes three months to grow. They almost quit production two years ago, they don't make a lot of money on it but it is keeping a lot of people alive and needs to be produced for my and many others sake. I was part of one of the first BCG studies back in 1985 and it kept my bladder cancer at bay for a long time.

Because my current cancer is a bad one, a couple T1s in the lamina wall, I should go to the head of the list but we have to get some first. If you know where to get approved BCG and can pull some strings, let me know.

*

I feel alright. Left the hospital and went straight to dim sum. Thankfully no catheter but must take it easy for a couple days and no driving for 24 hours. Still have no idea what the future holds until path reports come back and I am assured that we have an adequate supply of BCG.

Thanks and much love to all my well wishers. Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

Robert

Hero Takes A Fall

Wait until the big girl sings

"Hey Mister, did you know that your van just exploded?"

The words of the porter rang painfully in my ear. The Palm Springs Fall Modernism show was gearing up to be a disaster of epic proportions, and I wasn't even yet in the starting gate. For the second time in three years, my van decided to fail in Palm Springs. This time my back hatch wouldn't stay up, for some reason it was automatically closing, with a lot of force and speed, so I couldn't even unload my merchandise.

I decided to try to prop it up with a stick but immediately smelled something electrical in nature and considered the fact that I might in fact be burning out a major motor or electrical system. I pulled some things out of the side door and brought them inside and when I returned to the vehicle I was alerted to the fact that the van had produced a rather loud bang in my brief absence.

"Shit," I thought. "There goes two thousand dollars I don't have." I drove over to Crystal Chrysler in Cathedral City. They tried and failed to help me when the front door went haywire two years ago. Or was it the side door? The doors on the Caravan and Town and Country are definitely the model's Achille's heel. The passenger side slider has been manual for two or three years, wasn't worth eight hundred bucks to me to get the door a new sensor. Anyway, maybe they could pull a fuse and convert the rear hatch to full manual so that I could do my show?

Really nice guy in service, Danny Ramos, said my hydraulic struts had given out, that was the explosive sound when they blew. He took me inside to see Sal, I bought a new set for about one hundred and fifty bucks and Danny installed them for me on the spot with his own tools for free. Wonderful guy, much appreciated. Tragedy narrowly averted. Could have been a true nightmare.

I got all my stuff in and started setting up. This fall show is the junior member of the Palm Spring Modernism events, the February show has a lot more dealers and energy, many more people in town.

Still, the promoter, Rosemary Krieger, and her staff are so good to me that I am going to support them at every opportunity that I can. The show was well attended and very nice in its own way.

Bill Warmboe from Burlingame split the booth with me, his first time exhibiting there. Here he is with our great friend Rick Petteford. Both of these guys are extremely close brothers of mine. Bill sells jewelry, pottery, glass and paintings, Rick was a studio potter himself for decades.

I always feel like a fish slightly out of water at Modernism. I sell curated paintings with what I consider historical relevance, today the buyers are more visceral and unconcerned with pedigree, corvids looking for bright, shiny objects. Purely decorative now. I frankly abhor a portion of the material, reminds me of a seventies bad acid trip but it drives the market and one must conform I suppose or be swept away in the torrent of history. I admit I still struggle. Hard to sell something you hate or can barely tolerate anyway.

Some dealers do a beautiful job.

 

Rick evidently puts his shoes on one at a time, just like I do.

There were wonderful great new dealers at the show. Carolyn Flynn and Jim Hellemn. This couple next door were international scuba divers and selling lovely undersea photographs of his really excellent work.

I am going to take Jim Hellemn out and shoot birds one day, loan him some equipment. They want me to get back in the water with them. Tempting, scuba was one of the great joys of my prior life.

The other great new couple I met were Perrin Lam and of Disruptmodern, she is the creative director. He is an artist that specializes in beautiful drawings and prints and jewelry in the secessionist and suprematist style. I bought a lovely necklace for Leslie. Here is Perrin showing another of their creations. Sweet couple, hope to see them again one day.

I sold one small painting for peanuts the first night. Nothing on Saturday. But I stayed remarkably calm and even. I have a surgery tomorrow, can't afford to be in an emotional tailspin. I got food poisoning Saturday night, at a neighborhood Italian joint. The chicken parmigiana smelled slightly rancid and I guess it was. For the sake of probity and good taste, I will spare you the sordid graphic details. Kat inquired about garlic and our server said that they only had alowee, it took me a second to realize that he meant aoli. Decided not to correct him as he was overlarge and looked not too receptive to constructive criticism and I am not exactly in the peak of physical condition at present.

I was staying at the Marquis Resort, a timeshare right next to Shermans. I got a great deal at Hotels.com. Enormous room with kitchen and fireplace, two baths. Secured basement parking. Unbelievable deal at under eighty bucks. Being next to a great deli, I ate there a lot. Finally finished the antibiotics, so I had their latkes and brisket special, the cherry cheesecake, blintzes, matzoh ball soup, corned beef and tongue sandwich and and lox and eggs. Honestly, I ate like a jew.

Sunday was more of the same at the show, no business. Zippo, zero. Around one or two a woman walked up and asks for a price on a german vase. It was two hundred but I said forty, thought I might prime the pump.  She walked away and I said loudly to Bill, "Good, I am on a great losing streak here and I don't feel like messing with my luxurious misery for a mere forty clams. Leave me to plunge in my vortex, will ya."

Twenty minutes later the dame came back and bought the freaking thing. Damn it. Then an oversexed gay dude came over and offered me oral satisfaction right there on the spot. Said he brought knee pads. I told him that homie didn't roll that way and he accused me of being homophobic. He mentioned that he could suck a sixteen penny nail out of a two by four and that if I closed my eyes I could never never tell the difference but in the final analysis he just couldn't seal the deal. Ended up selling him a painting at a significant loss so that he would go away.

Then a wonderful architect from Malibu bought two more small paintings. The show would not be a total disaster, I would break even. And then in the last thirty seconds, an older woman who had been admiring my Thomas Hart Benton litho, said that she was buying it. Show took me to the mat but it was a success when the final bell rung.

I checked out of the hotel yesterday morning. Said I only had one complaint. The print on the second floor as you get off the elevator is ridiculously crooked and in fact glued to the wall so that it can not be straightened. I told them that I was ocd, a very obsessive art dealer and that seeing things out of level like this messed with my head. That I came close to tearing it off the wall but knew there would be surveillance and repercussions. And that it was hard to patronize an establishment so aesthetically clueless. She said she understood.

Anyway, all in all , the weekend turned out to be a success. I love these stories where the hero faces an initial turmoil, then is knee deep in all kinds of antagonism and finally comes back to conquer after all in the climax of the third act. Textbook.

Bloom and bust

This is Edmond J. Sullivan's lovely illustration for the twenty sixth verse of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1913. This work was translated by Edward FitzGerald, the image later appropriated by Stanley Miller.

Romeo Void - Just too easy

Home medical test

Jeff Olsen sent me this but I sort of cleaned up the format a bit:

Go outside and piss in the garden.

            If ants gather - diabetes.


             If you pee on your feet - prostate.


             If it smells like barbecue - cholesterol.


             If your wrist hurts when you shake it  - osteoarthritis.


             If you return inside with your dick hanging outside your pants - alzheimers

Donna Lee - Kinga Głyk Trio

I discovered the young Polish bass sensation Kinga Glyk recently. Like Jaco reborn. Love her stuff, great band. Check out more of her music, here she shines on a bass uke.

Desert Fashion

I am back from the 2019 Fall Modernism Show in Palm Springs. I have a lot to share as always but am very busy and need to unpack the van as life is very compressed at the moment. Looking forward to filling in the gaps later.

So for now you will have to settle for some pictures of attendees. I have shot a few of these people multiple times over the years.

Palm Springs has a fashion sense that is so outrageous and iconoclastic, don't think there is anything else like it anywhere else in the world! People there like to have fun and obviously don't take themselves too seriously.

I would see somebody interesting and drag them into the corner of my booth for a shot. All graciously obliged.