I'm Moving to Substack

I'm not Larry David. He just looks like me.

I've started publishing my stories on Substack.

If you're not familiar with Substack, it's a platform for writers and creators to publish content directly to subscribers, paid and not paid. Many journalists, pundits and others have turned to Substack, which is independent and not supported by advertising.

 Print and broadcast journalists are losing jobs for economic reasons as well as being threatened and/or censored as mainstream newspapers and networks (legacy media) are being gobbled up by mergers and acquisitions in the big money game.

The media landscape has changed. Wealthy investors are becoming the overlords of information, including tech titans Larry Ellison, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Even Donald Trump has his own social media site.

I've decided to move beyond my blog to reach more readers and get out from under Google, whose platform supports this blog. Substack should offer me more freedom as far as control of my photos and what I write. At least that’s the theory.

I thank Google for affording me the opportunity to publish my work for the past 10 years. They have made it easy. Substack is relatively new, launched in 2017, and does not offer the easy layout tools that Google provides.

All things not being equal, there is no guarantee that Substack will survive. And Google may become an AI behemoth. So what's new? We live in a fast-changing world.

I plan to continue my Talking Real Stories on Google while I begin to post the SAME material on Substack. I may end up using both platforms. I’m trying something new and we’ll see what happens.

I invite you to join me on Substack by subscribing to my writing :.https://kevinsamson731032.substack.com/. You are not required to start a paid subscription. I'm not clear about the advantage for paid subscribers. For writers it's an opportunity to earn a little money, a rare concept.

Substack will offer you the opportunity to receive my posts automatically by email, without me going through the process of sending them to you individually. That’s a bonus for me.

Thank you, my esteemed readers. It's a great pleasure sending my stories to you, and reading your comments.

Again, Talking Real Stories will continue to appear on this current Google platform for the time being. It will also appear on Substack. If you have questions, you can contact me by email or text me. I will send you my phone number for texting, if you do not have it, through your private email address. 

Mahalo, Melekalikimaka, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 

Hope to hear from you in 2026!

 

Trump’s Comedy Problem

Art by KCS 1/18

Rodney Dangerfield was funny. The way he strode onto a stage, his eyes wide open with a crooked countenance. We laughed. “I tell ya when I was a kid, all I knew was rejection. My yo-yo, it never came back."  His schtick revolved around his famous line: “I get no respect.”

Steve Martin launched his career in comedy wearing an arrow through his head. He played dumb.

Bill Murray became famous for his deadpan humor that essentially mocked himself. 

Will Ferrell called himself "a cotton-headed ninny muffin." 

Lucille Ball, perhaps the most popular comedienne of the 20th Century, played the zany housewife.

Great comedians are funny because they exaggerate and expose their ( and our) foibles. They’re anything but perfect, the same as we normal folks are not perfect. We laugh with them because we identify those feelings and insecurities. It’s called empathy (sorry Elon).

I've recently come up with a theory about our current, painfully insecure president. 

He’s failed as a businessman with six bankruptcies. Ironically, he made his fortune selling his name, his brand. Which is all air. Nothing there but a phony concept.

He’s failed as a president once and is fumbling again into a sorry excuse for a politician. He keeps telling us that he’s the greatest president whoever lived etc, etc. His redundancy and ego may, indeed, cause him to believe his own lies, but he’s faltering again in his role as leader.

Is he just dumb? Maybe. He was able to sell himself to unknowing voters and big money donors who saw opportunity with a president they could buy. You could call that smart. Or cunning. Or corrupt.

Currently he is taking the stage again. He believes he can save himself in front of an audience. Ever the showman, he adores himself when he's in the spotlight. His final encore, he believes, will be as the beloved comedian.

Granted, he wears funny extra-long ties and covers himself with gobs of clownish orange make-up. And he’s in love with that weird hairstyle of a rat’s-nest-on-fire. His presentation wreaks of humor. Yet his shtick is not funny. We laugh at him not with him. 

His jokes are derogatory. He insults other people, gives them juvenile nicknames. He boasts and berates.

His spiel on immigrants, his hands waving in and out like a baker squeezing dough, reveals a self-dealing contempt for people of color: “Somalia," he draws out the word for comedic inflection, calling the country "dirty, filthy, disgusting."

Folks are not buying his shtick. Latest polls by the Associated Press and NORC found that only 36-opercent approve of his job performance. The most recent Gallup poll shows 60-percent of Americans disapprove of his second term performance. 

Legislators in conservative Indiana voted on December 11 to reject gerrymandering their voting districts to favor Republicans, as instructed to do by His Highness. 

He's still got his dancing girls -- Pam, Karoline and Kristi -- but the whole act is getting stale. It's becoming as he would say, "a very very bad joke."

Barbarian Daze and the Surfing Life

Cowells, November 2025 PHOTO:KCS

Some 30 years ago I rode one of the most memorable waves of my life. The wave was a curling storm of beauty, seemed to break forever and I surfed it through several sections with good balance and control. My ride began at Second Peak at Pleasure Point on the Eastside, one of a series of Santa Cruz's notorious surf breaks.

I had lined up with two friends, Ron Harsh and Derrick Clark. As the wave approached, Ron turned his board as if he were going for it. As compadres we had ridden waves together so I turned and caught the wave believing Ron was behind me. I heard what I thought was a whoop behind me, like woowee!

Through every section I heard Ron whooping it up. Only it was not Ron. The rider behind me was a Point local who was telling me to get out of his way. I found that out at the end of the ride. "Hey, don't let that happen again," he said in an angry tone.

I felt deflated, like a kook. Which I was. You don't jump in front of someone already on the wave. I had been stoked the entire ride. Now this.

When I paddled back, Derrick said, "If you get into a fight, we're not going to back you up."

"I thought you were riding behind me, Ron."

"Oh no. I got out of the way. That was Kevin Miske, one of the best longboarders out here." 

In retrospect, the ride was worth the tongue lashing.

I had returned to surfing at age 50, after more than 30 years of mostly dry dock. I was riding my new custom surfboard shaped by my friend Johnny Rice, a Santa Cruz legend. Johnny was probably in his mid-60s. 

I took the pleasure of riding waves with Johnny and his wife Rosemari (see photo below). We were among a lineup of locals who surfed the long-peeling and mostly gentle waves at Cowells, the local Westside break where "everyone starts and ends," according to local lore.

Rosemari Reimers Rice surfs a wave at Hermosa Beach 1962. Rosemarie is among those honored in the Three Princes exhibit at the Santa Cruz MAH through January 5.

Cowells is a family wave where you meet your neighbors in the water. Here's a few I remember: Longboard Tim who never wore a wetsuit, Talking Todd who never stopped talking, Door-Shop Dave, Rail-Ding Bob, Big Steiny and Little Steiny, Mac Reed, Matt Micuda, Dave Gardner, Jeff Larkey, Nesh Dhillon, sisters Joni and Bonnie MacFarland, Jane “the Lane” MacKenzie, David "the Buddha" Anderson, Kim Stoner, Ed James, noserider Raney Oullette, Jason "Rat Boy" Collins, Joe Collins, Bob Collins, Dave Collins (none related), Carpenter-Dave (Rogers), Juan Hernandez and his buddy Ron, Fritz Bensusan and Laura, Mindy and Jock Martin, Michel Junod, Fitness Todd (Smith), Nel Newman, Corey Salzman, Lisa McGinnis, Leigh Miller, Brian and Meg, Jen Coco, Laura Williams, Susan Coffey, Kai Cole, Michael the “Flyin’ Hawaiian,” Chris Murren, Maureen Niehaus, identical twins Sarah and Rachael Raskin, Sarah Gerhardt (first woman to ride Mavericks) and hubby Mike, Doc Scott, Jeff and Michelle Scott, Greg Kohler, Steve Kurtz, enforcer Vince Collier and Pat Farley, who produced a documentary film, Cowells and the New Millennium (2004),  that was first screened at the nearby historic Cocoanut Grove and everybody came. A fine effort by a rookie filmmaker, Farley's documentary won awards at several film festivals.

I'm sure I missed a few names. But you get the picture. At times it was a love fest. All the local kids surfed here at one time, before graduating to the bigger waves at Steamer Lane and in some cases the monster waves up the coast at Mavericks.

Pat Farley prepares for a paddle on a flat day in September 2025. PHOTO:KCS

 Santa Cruz surfer girls (left to right) Taryn, Bryna, Becca and Paige party before launching on their Costa Rica and points south adventure, year 2000.

Family vacations became surfing holidays in Hawaii and Mexico. We traveled with our friends Nancy and Steve Howells. Steve was a shredder. He rode short and longboards, on all kinds of waves. He had been employed in the nascent surf industry of the 60s in shops where the holy grail surfboards themselves were first born and John Severson’s Surfer magazine and logo decals for your car windows were distributed. Steve had tested new boards for shapers out of Santa Barbara. 

Our youngest daughter, Isabel Bryna, joined us on these trips. She established bonafide cred as the surfer in our family, having grown up with the waves, competing in various contests and school-sponsored events, a charger who nearly lost her leg when the fin of her board sliced into her thigh. 

Following graduation from Santa Cruz High School, she and a pod of surfer girls -- Bonnie Salter, Becca Davis, Sara Stewart, Paige Nutt and Taryn Craig -- split for Costa Rica and points beyond, including the beaches of Australia. They spread out and beyond, fearlessly chasing waves and life experiences in the Southern Hemisphere. We parents hugged them goodbye and held our breath in the terminal at San Francisco International Airport.

My claim that I have surfed the Atlantic Ocean in Uruguay is due to our adventuresome daughter. Barbara and I made two trips to the far coast of Atlantica in Uruguay, where our granddaughter Viva was born. Today, Bryna and Taryn reside on the island of Kauai where, as surfer moms, they continue to ride waves of the Pacific with their children.

Since that wild ride where I got yelled at at Pleasure Point on my new Johnny Rice board, I have surfed through six surfboards, four of them shaped by Bob Pearson, one by Ward Coffee, both Westside shapers. That’s a paltry number for my surf buddies who have accumulated quivers of boards for all conditions. For many who ride waves, the surfboard is not merely an aquadymanic vessel for riding, but a finely shaped objet d'art that merits a place on the wall.

The iconic longboard is built to glide through water like a dolphin and turn gracefully as directed by the rider through footwork and weight balance. The rider becomes one with the wave resulting in being stoked, having been fed the fire that fulfills your being. Or so the soul surfer believes.

My surf buddies Tony Lorero, Rob Butterfield, Don Iglesias and I -- continue through our seventh decade to live for another wave. When the ocean turns calm and there are none, we paddle on our boards, tell stories and complain just enough so that we never lose our stoke and good humor. Fellow paddlers are welcome.

According to Don, "Surfing makes you a better person." 

Tony finds that debatable.

Rob says hello to everyone.

COVID, which sent thousands of wannabes into the water, was a boon to the surf industry that has morphed into clothing and related gear that the old timers would never believe, like the wetsuit wrench. Hell, Rod Lundquist, one of the early Santa Cruz surfers of the 50s says they entered the cold water in second-hand wool sweaters from Goodwill. There were no wetsuits! Or surf contests. The crowds drove Rod to hang-gliding.

With so many people in the water today riding new iterations of the noble surfboard -- including kite boards and motorized hydrofoils -- and with technology making secret spots widely known, localism seems fairly quaint. 

Old surfing maxim: We were all kooks at one time.

Left to right: Don Iglasias, Rob Butterfield and Tony Loreo ham it up at the Three Princes surf exhibit currently showing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History through January 5. The exhibit chronicles the history of surfing in North America that began in Santa Cruz with three Hawaiian princes (not these guys). The show features replicas of early surfboards made by the Hawaiians, reproduced here by local shaper Bob Pearson of Arrow Surfboards. Also on display: a retrospective of early surf shops and key local surfers as well as the "guns" (big wave surfboards) that were ridden on the 30-foot wave faces at world-famous Mavericks. A tribute to Johnny Rice is shown in the background.

 

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all from the Surfer Statue on West Cliff Drive in the Westside of town. PHOTO:KCS 2023