Some Reads for Thursday

 Obit:  Famed artists Peter Max, known for his iconic 1960s "Day-Glo" psychedelic and similar paintings, died at the age of 88.  He was a big part of 1960s pop culture with his poster designs and such.

You can't talk about the decade without including him.

Snip:

Max began his career in graphic design in the 1960s and his swirly, colorful, instantly recognizable designs epitomized the era’s “flower power” art. But thanks to his prolific output and fun, accessible style, Max’s work remained well known and popular well into the 21st century.

...

But in his first flush of success in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his mural-like tableaus of flowers, the cosmos and cartoonish figures – all in vivid colors such as turquoise, orange and neon green – seemed to be everywhere. Dorm room walls were plastered with his posters. Household furnishings such as clocks and bedspreads sported his designs.

_______________________

Another obit:  Former Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, 84, has died.  The article notes he had a neurological disorder, and Kyl had announced last December he was leaving public life due to dementia.

Details:

 Kyl spent almost three decades in Congress, serving in both chambers, and watched his party undergo a drastic transformation, with his career spanning Ronald Reagan’s presidency to President Donald Trump’s first term. 

Former  Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who considered Kyl a mentor, described the former senator in a February 2025 interview with The Associated Press as a true statesman and a “workhorse” among Washington’s “show horses.

”If you saw him on the plane, he was sitting in the aisle, in coach, and he was reading,” Ducey said. “And he was reading potential bills or Senate business.”

---

Kyl would never cut it in today's shitshow of a U.S. Congress, even more lazy under GOP rule than in his day.

________________________

Women are ditching churches, especially right-wing ones, to escape the MAGA cancer,

_____________________

A Few Reads for Wednesday

 TPUSA must be on the skids financially for Erika to go the sue route:

_____________________________

Obituary:  Sunny,  13, the Portuguese Water Dog owned by the Obamas, has died, the family announced.  Their other dog, Bo, died in 2021.

Snip:

Barack wrote alongside multiple photos of Sunny through the years, “Yesterday, we lost a cherished member of our family.  We got Sunny at the start of our second term in the White House, and all of us – including our first dog, Bo – immediately fell in love.” 

“We also had trouble keeping up with her, for Sunny was a force of nature. Athletic and full of boundless energy, she leapt over the hedges on the South Lawn like they weren’t even there, chasing squirrels, birds and anything else that moved,” he continued. 

______________________________

Monday Reads

 Apparently Mitch McConnell rose from the dead to finally show up at the US Senate today after being out of circulation since June thanks to health issues.

Not that Mitch actually missed anything.  Congress hardly did a damned thing during the time he was away.

I am surprised he came back.  He is going to be gone in January since he will be retired.

______________________

Even the USSC will surprise cynics like myself every now and then.  This time they handed a defeat to Donald Trump over the mail voting issue.

______________________

Worthless piece of shit and natural idiot Mike Johnson has no intention of regulating AI.

______________________

Obituary:  Noted designer Bob Mackie, 87, has died.  His peak years were in the 1970s, when he designed flamboyant fashions for the likes of Carol Burnett and especially Cher.

Snip:

Mackie got his start doing drawings for Golden Age costume designer Jean Louis, then worked as an assistant to Edith Head. He created designs that Carol Burnett wore on her eponymous sketch show — particularly the “curtain-rod” dress she wore in a “Gone With the Wind” spoof that, he admitted in a 2000 interview with the Archive of American Television, would be forever associated with his legacy — and “The Judy Garland Show.”

He would eventually become known for his over-the-top, figure-hugging creations such as the elaborate, sparkling, black, midriff-baring two-piece ensemble with matching Mohawk headpiece that he designed for Cher to wear to the 1986 Oscars. He also designed splashy gowns for her to wear on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” “Cher,” “The Sonny and Cher Show.” Among the other stars for which he designed gowns were Whitney Houston, Barbara Eden, Bette Midler, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, Joan Rivers and Mitzi Gaynor. He also dressed men for extravagant stage looks, including Elton John, the Jackson Five and Robert Goulet.

_____________________________

A Few Reads for Sunday

 This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy at India's Nanda Devi mountain where a woman with the same name and the daughter of famed mountaineer Willi Unsoeld collapsed and died of illness.  I just finished reading another book focusing primarily on this ill-fated climb, Fatal Mountaineer.  I also have read John Roskelley's book about the expedition as well as Lawrence Leamer's biography of Willi Unsoeld.  Willi died less than three years after his daughter in an avalanche at Mount Rainier.  He would have been 100 years old on October 5.  That only goes to show how quickly time goes by.  He was just 52 when he died in 1979.  If you don't mind a paywall, here is a 2023 article about Devi's (as she was known) fatal climb of her namesake mountain.

__________________________

A hood and robe on the statue would have been more in line with what Charlie Who really was.

___________________________

At Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park

 Last month I went with a small group--just four people--on an organized hiking excursion to the California Redwoods at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park near Crescent City, California.  Here are a few pictures I took:

 

I went to Avenue of the Titans and then Stout Grove.  

Some Saturday Reads

 Eighty-year-old Trump is finally realizing he is not immortal, just immoral, and he can't face it.  His "Trump-a-Palooza" event in Dallas was a total flop.

_________________________

From a few years ago is this article about the mystery of why Frank Sinatra's grave marker was replaced.

Some pretty interesting stuff there.

_____________________________

Complete effing hypocrite is what  "libertarian" Rand Paul truly is.

_____________________________

Reads for Monday

 I for one don't expect this country to EVER elect a female president.  Sexism is just too ingrained.  It doesn't matter that women have headed countries and empires for literally thousands of years, if one includes monarchies in the mix.  American men especially are so fucked up, they can't stand it women are in any position of power.

_______________________

It can only be hoped the GOP suffers massive losses in November.

________________________

More Obituaries in the News

Noted jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, 70, died earlier this week:

Cassandra Marie Fowlkes was born on December 4, 1955, in Jackson, Mississippi. Music was already part of the family. Her father, Herman Fowlkes, was a jazz and blues guitarist and music teacher, while her mother, Mary McDaniel, loved Motown.

Wilson studied piano as a child, later learned guitar and clarinet, and absorbed music from many directions. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell could sit alongside jazz, blues and the sounds she heard growing up in Mississippi.

After moving toward the New York jazz scene in the early 1980s, she became associated with saxophonist Steve Coleman and was a founding member of the experimental M-Base Collective.

__________________________________________

 Just three days after her feminist colleague Gloria Steinem had died, Robin Morgan, 85, passed away.  She was one of the original second-wave feminists and perhaps best known for editing the classic anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful.  

Morgan started out in show business as a child actress.  Her best known role was playing Dagmar, the youngest daughter, in the live television series Mama, during the years 1950-1956.  Morgan left the series before it ended.

Her son, Blake, said this:

"My mother Robin Morgan died peacefully in her sleep early this morning. Surely, she will be remembered for designing the iconic image of the women's movement (the fist in the circle of the women's symbol) and for her formative anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful, for co-founding the Sisterhood is Global Institute with Simone de Beauvoir, for co-founding the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, for a lifetime of fierce feminism and fierce friendship. But first and foremost, she was an artist. Her art fueled her politics, fueled her feminism, fueled the way she raised me. She taught me that how one does anything is how one does everything—that the personal is the political, and that as she once wrote, 'Hate generalizes, love specifies.' I'll have more to say and more songs to write about her, but for now, I'll express my love and gratitude that so many of you knew and loved her as both my mother, and as your friend."

Guardian:

Her legacy was one of deeds, words and images. Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory”, the feminist reworking of “history”, and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement. Her poem Monster, with such lines as “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it” was quoted at feminist rallies and beyond. Her poem Arraignment helped capture the movement’s embrace of the late Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide in 1963. Morgan’s rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth’s song J’Accuse Ted Hughes.

Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant garde Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs.