Councilwoman Vickie Paladino is demanding that Mayor Zohran Mamdani “not show his face” at New York City’s 9/11 ceremony, insisting that he does not belong on that “sacred ground.”
But let’s remember the basic facts.
When 9/11 happened, Rudy Giuliani was the Republican mayor of New York, George Pataki was the Republican governor, and George W. Bush was the Republican president. The attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda—not by any American political party or child.
Zohran Mamdani was nine years old.
Paladino is obviously not literally claiming that a nine-year-old caused 9/11. But portraying New York’s first Muslim mayor as somehow unworthy of standing at the memorial raises a troubling question: why should a Muslim American have to repeatedly prove his loyalty before being allowed to mourn alongside fellow New Yorkers?
Mamdani moved to New York at age seven. He has designated September 11 as a Day of Remembrance and Service and said he will attend the ceremony to honor the victims, their families, and the first responders who sacrificed everything.
Paladino does not speak for “the people.” Mamdani is the city’s elected mayor—and Muslim New Yorkers have every right to stand at Ground Zero, remember the victims, and mourn with their fellow Americans.
After years of being scam-call free on my personal phone, over the past few weeks it seems that at least once a day I get this same call:
Hello, this is Sarah Jenkins giving you a call back from 5 Step Business Loans.com. Today is Thursday, September 10th. My phone number is 877-577-1143. And our file shows you’ve got some unsecured debt still due. I wanted to let you know that you can enroll to have them consolidated into a 0% interest loan with the new 0 interest consolidation lending program. So any amount, small or large, is not non-collectible through this program. But we have to enroll. So give me a call back and we can get you all set up. It won’t take long. It’s really a one and done setup, so I’ll keep your account open through the end of the week. To connect with a specialist now, press 5 or you can call me directly at 877-577-1143. Again, press 5 to speak with the lending specialist now, or call me at 877-577-1143. You can also visit our website at five-stepbusinessloans.com and apply online. You can also press 9 to be added to our do not call list if you are no longer interested.
Naturally the first couple times this happened I pressed 9, but apparently that made no difference, and once I realized since the name of the loan company always changed this was actually a scam operation and that by pressing 9 I confirmed they’d reached a “live” number.
So a couple days ago I decided to return the call. No longer having to check my language like I had to do when I’d get scam calls at work, I um…well let’s just say the past year’s worth of anger and frustration found an outlet.
“Do you wanna fuck?” I asked “Jason” or whatever his name was.
“Uh…” He was obviously taken aback. Then a few seconds later, “Sure.”
And the bastard hung up on me!
Did I leave it?
Do you know me at all? 😈
“Jason” suprisingly answered again.
“So Jason, when are we gonna hook up and make some wild monkey sex?”
Click.
I called back again.
This time I got “John.”
I asked if he was into anal.
Click.
I called back yet again.
This time It went immediately to on-hold music. After about a minute or so the call disconnected.
I called back yet again.
This time I got a recorded message telling me I’d reached a number no longer in service.
They’d blocked me!
It was then I noticed the callback number they provided wasn’t actually the number displayed on my phone.
So I called THAT number.
Apparently it was a direct line to the scammer call center, bypassing the bullshit message instructing me to press 9 if I didn’t want to received any more calls.
“Jason” answered.
“Hey Jason, you didn’t answer me…when are we gonna hook up…”
Click.
It seems I’d found their kryptonite.
Today when the call came in, I called back.
“Robert” answered.
Hi, this is Robert. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today?”
“Hey Robert,” I said, “I’ve just got a quick question.”
“Go ahead.”
“So…do you take it up the ass as well as your mother does?”
“Oh [long pause] you should not have said that.”
Click.
I called back on both the provided number and the one that showed up on my phone.
Immediately blocked.
I have a feeling this isn’t over yet, but I have found an effective way of shutting them up.
…this one ain’t bad! I think the only thing I’d change is to run the front porch across the entire front of the house, not just 10 feet at the front door.
Have you noticed that over the last twenty years of so that color has been disappearing from our lives? I’m not talking about natural color; fruits, vegetables, sunsets, flowers, trees, and falling leaves are still as vibrant as ever. What I’m talking about is color in our man-made world.
I hadn’t noticed this until it was succinctly pointed out in various memes. But if you take a moment you’ll notice that everything has adopted a decidedly monotone color palette. While I was waiting for the light to change on my way to a doctor appointment yesterday, I looked around ,and with the exception of a single maroon car on the opposite side of the intersection, I was surrounded in a sea of white, black, silver, and gray. As I drove on, this continued, punctuated by only a single blue vehicle. To paraphrase Henry Ford’s famous quote about the Model T, “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s white, black, silver, or gray.” The only exceptions to this grayscale rule (granted I did not visit every manufacturer’s website to verify this was uniform across brands), were MINI, JEEP, and the Chevy Corvette. Even then, the craziest colors offered (from JEEP alone) are bright orange, lemon green, and a deep purple. (If you’ve seen these in the wild, you’re not likely to forget them.) They were also uniformly an additional $600-900 per vehicle.
Thirty years ago the streets were swimming with color.
What about our interior spaces? Again, we seem to have boxed ourselves into a monochrome hell, with stone floors, white, gray, or black marble countertops, and white or black cabinets. This black and white palette was something I wholeheartedly embraced in the mid 80s, but at that time it was almost impossible to furnish your space only in black and white. If you want color on your floors, you can get different shades of brown stained hardwoods, but that’s the extent of it. Kitchen appliances? Forget the 1940s and 50s with their pink and aqua, or the lemon yellow so popular in the 60s, or even the 1970s harvest gold, avocado, and coppertone…or ven the 80s almond. Now you have a choice or white, black, or your most likely only choice, brushed stainless steel.
If you look at any of the architectural interior photos I’ve posted, all of them are uniformly white (or gray) walls, with the only color appearing in their furnishings
Clothing? I went into Target several years ago to buy some polo shirts (because of their cost and the way they fit me) and discovered I had a choice of black, white, heather gray, slate, or brown. It’s no wonder I started buying second hand IZOD at the time; they’re at least available in a rainbow of colors.
Am I just losing my mind, or have you noticed color slowly disappearing from our lives as well?
The trailblazing cult classic To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar! was released in theaters on September 8, 1995. Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo star in the film that brought drag culture into mainstream Hollywood.
Eventually the thief will have to plug it in to charge.
Imagine if at that moment, the front camera snaps a photo and sends it to your email along with the exact location?
This isn’t an app.
It’s a built-in phone feature that you can set up in just a few minutes.
Here’s how to do it:
Open the “Shortcuts” app.
Go to the “Automation” tab and tap the plus sign in the upper right corner.
Scroll down the list and find “Charger.”
Select “Run Immediately” and turn on “Run Notifications,”
Go to the next page and create a new shortcut.
Next are the specific operations:
1. Airplane Mode: Search for this setting and turn it off.
2. Cellular Data: Set it to automatically enable network connection when the charging cable is plugged in. If the phone thief turns off all networks, this shortcut will automatically turn it on. Without a network, the photos and location cannot be sent out.
3. Get Current Location: Select the highest available accuracy.
4. Take Photo: Select the front camera and turn off “Show Preview.”
This last step is crucial; the other party won’t see anything on the screen.
5. Store Photos: Photos will also be saved to your photo album at the same time.
6. Send Email: Fill in the subject and the email address where you want to receive the information.
Enter the options for this action and turn off “Show Edit Draft.”
Save this automation, and you’re done.
Since then, every time someone plugs in this Phone to charge it will automatically turn on networking, acquires location, takes a photo with the front camera, and sends all the information to your email.
When I tested it for the first time, I received an email with a photo of my own face, taken in very poor lighting.
It really works.
To sum up: This is a Shortcuts automation, with the trigger condition set to “Charger,” enabling network access, acquiring location, taking a front-facing photo, and sending an email.
It’s been a full year since I underwent a split-lip manibulotomy to remove the tumor on the back of my tongue.
Photo taken by Ben when i came out of the 10 hour surgery.
Knowing what I know now, would I have still done it?
Probably not. Well, maybe.
I’m 68 years old. According to Cindy, my nurse friend (whom I trust more than any surgeon), untreated squamous cell in the pharynx has a ten to fifteen year survival rate. My Mom passed at 78 from Alzheimer’s; my dad at 87 from a heart attack. You do the math. Yeah, things might’ve gotten nasty toward the end of that timeframe if the cancer spread, but looking back over the past twelve months, there are definitely days I think I should’ve risked it.
That being said…
I’ve made my peace with the fact I may never be able to chew and swallow real food again. The G-tube is an annoyance, but not an insurmountable annoyance. I’ve found lots of ways to augment the plain vanilla nutritional formula I’ve been on since last September (I’m eating more fruit now than I have at any other point in my life) and I’ve learned that anything can be put in the Ninja and pureed if I’m willing to put in the work. Since I do somehow still get a hint of flavors even though the food is reaching my stomach without passing over my taste buds, I can live with that. But most desserts and snacks are things of the past. (Yeah, even they can be pureed, but the cost-to-benefit ratio isn’t worth the trouble.) That’s why I still get pangs when I see Ben grab the onion dip from the fridge and a bowl of chips from the pantry or when he brings home a box of cookies.
What I miss most about not eating is the social interaction that dining affords. For instance, there’s a great little Mexican hole-in-the-wall restaurant out by Cindy’s house where we used to meet up for lunch. We’ll never be able to share that again—at least not in the same way. Sure, we can still get together for lunch and I can order my meal to go for mash-up at home later while watching her eat, but where’s the fun in that? I’ve done that with some family gatherings, and it’s just not the same. It’s so awkward that now I’ll just not go rather than subject myself to it.
Now as far as the followup immunotherapy goes…
Back in 2003 when I was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, my options were radiation or chemo. The doctor didn’t want to do surgery unless it was absolutely necessary in order to preserve my ability to speak. After much discussion, I decided on radiation as it seemed to have the fewest side effects of the two options.
Little did I know. But I digress.
A year ago, my first thought after hearing the surgery described to me was a big NOPE and go straight to radiation. I knew that twenty-two years ago I’d asked if they could do radiation twice in the same location should my cancer return, and the response was an emphatic NO. But two decades of progress had passed and it was worth asking the question again. And this wasn’t the exact same location…
I met with the radiation oncologist prior to committing to the surgery and he said that yes, he could do the radiation in the same area again, but it carried the risk of—as he so succinctly put it—”blowing out your carotid artery.”
So that was another big nope. Radiation was off the table.
I flat out refused traditional chemotherapy immediately, having seen and heard too many horror stories over the years. And my oncologist felt that the third option—immunotherapy—alone wouldn’t be enough to get rid of the tumor. [After seeing what six months of immunotherapy has done to my body, I can’t imagine what the full course—nearly a year—would’ve done.]
So surgery it was, saving the immunotherapy (which sounded pretty benign in comparison to chemo, i.e. “the most common side effect is a skin rash”) for the followup treatment.
So again…knowing what I know now, would I have done the followup immunotherapy?
Abso-fucking-lutely not for the obvious reasons you’ve all read about in other posts.
I would’ve said, “Let’s wait six months after surgery and do a PET scan before moving forward with anything.” And as we now know, in March my PET was perfectly clear. In all honesty however, I do have to ask was that because of the six months of immunotherapy I received or in spite of it?
Now, one year on, the place on my wrist and forearm where they took tissue for the flap used to patch the hole created at the back of my tongue when the tumor was removed is almost looking normal again. The spot on my thigh where they took a skin graft to cover the spot on my wrist has also become nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding area as my plastic surgeon promised it would.
I still have no feeling in my lower left jaw and lower lip and probably never will since that particular nerve had to be severed as part of the procedure.
While I lost way more weight than I would’ve liked when I was initially put on the g-tube, over the last month or so with the changes I’ve made to my diet, I’ve put back on about 12 lbs. and I’m now at my ideal weight. Hopefully I can stay here so I don’t have to go out and buy all new clothes again.
The pemphigoid rash is slowly coming under control. I’m on my second-to-last week of prednisone, currently down to 20mg/day from 70mg/day at the start, and on the increased frequency of Duplixent. Every morning I still wake up to discover a few new blisters have formed overnight and there are afternoons I want to scratch all my skin off from the itchiness, but it’s improved significantly from where things were a month ago.
My only fear is that once I’m off the prednisone completely, like last time, the blisters will return in force. On the other hand, I’ve now been on the Duplixent longer and at double the dose that I was when all this first flared up, so I’m hoping that will prevent—or at least mitigate the severity—of the rash if it does return. Thankfully I’m seeing my dermatologist a week after my last dose of prednisone, so if the blisters do return, the timing couldn’t be better to address them. (I have a feeling I’m going to be on the steroids until the fucking Keytruda finally works its way out of my system completely, and according to the literature, it may take up to nine months for the Duplixent to fully do its thing.)
Fun times, right? As I tell people, this is not how I envisioned retirement.
