Yes, New York’s charming governor, Andrew Cuomo, is paying for the trip to Israel for his staff and himself from his multi-million dollar war chest, while Palestine declares him persona non grata, denying him an invitation. Continue reading
First of all, zolpidem is the active ingredient in Ambien, the sleep remedy. But mostly, it’s not what I’ve been taking for years, to go to sleep, which is a five milligram tablet of diazepam. Because a five milligram of diazepam is relatively benign, I’ve been taking it for years with no side effects. Continue reading
Recently, I keep dreaming about a self-perpetuating war in Palestine’s Gaza by Hamas tossing rockets at the Israelis, who in turn have an “Iron Dome” which triggers explosive responses. Continue reading
In the first part of Walking is life, I disassembled myself psychologically to a shrink named Jerry Sabath. He worked with his positive ways of explaining how to keep your health by walking, stimulating your neuro and vascular system providing life, not to mention sound thinking. Continue reading
At five-thirty on a summer Sunday afternoon, I take a walk down Riverside Drive, past the children’s pocket parks, the time-worn benches, the golden sun shining through the giant elm trees, the couples, families, loners sitting on the green (the sign says don’t sit on it,)—nah and I invariably walk over to the Muslim ice-cream man who automatically hands me my favorite, the giant ice-cream sandwich wrapped in silver foil, which I unwrap to give me a lift. I know I have a limited time before the sun begins to melt it—and the three dinky napkins the ice-cream man has gave me is barely good for daintily dabbing my shirt, shorts and Merrills. Continue reading
At a lunch with some “old friends,” we were talking about our adult children and one of my friends, Vincent Amato, a corpulent fellow with a thick graying beard and longish hair, a wonderful sense of humor and love of history—mentioned that his son had become brutish as some kind of social worker. The son credited that to the fact that Vincent divorced his son’s mother and step-mother. I added that I have a daughter with an MSM from Fordham University and her mother and I were divorced. My other friend Frank Tolopko summed up the situation by saying, “wouldn’t it be funny if the world turned out to be all keepers and patients?” I said,“ It would be a psychological welfare state. We’re almost there.” Continue reading
The most heartbreaking thing is to view Ukrainian refugees on Russia Today (RT.com), children, parents, men, women, crying, still trying to fathom how and why they lost their homes, loved ones, and future. And in addition to this, have seen the Malaysian Flight MH17 with 298 people on board fall out of the air, apparently over the Ukraine. Continue reading
I can’t even walk in the quiet of Riverside Park and sit on a bench with my wife without seeing a field of roided soccer players running about as if it were The World Cup games. We came to the park to catch the sunset-henge flashing its orange-gold brilliance in a beautiful sky over the Hudson River. Too soon the dusk descended like the dark night of merciless Israeli attacks on Gaza, presumably for Hamas shelling. Continue reading
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not here, you’re walking in a dream? But what is here, now, and tangible you think. Is it an unmanageable world of violent yahoos that you see on Russia Today TV tearing themselves apart, here, there and everywhere? What is here but your inner voice that turns your head like a tank top and fires into a crowd? The jolt wakes you up. You recognize you’re in your bedroom. You think this is only your own personal narrative. Perhaps it is. You’ve become a zombie with a passport to cross into all states of mind and, dare I say, being like Jerzy Kosiński. Continue reading
New York News 1 reports that Larry Silverstein, the builder of the Freedom Tower, the tallest building in New York, now wants to turn his deadly hand to building the tallest residential tower in lower New York, with room for over a thousand apartments space, malls and funeral parlors, just in case you’re not familiar with his work on the World Trade Center’s Building 7. Continue reading
First, forgive me Fats Domino for parodying your great tune’s title, but I found my thrill on Wave Hill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York, during a period of extended unemployment. I returned to it over and over again to escape from my Upper West Side residence. My initial impression was that I had found heaven on earth—sweeping acres of impeccably landscaped grass and flowers, that rolled down to, believe it or not, a train rail. Discovered the mansion on it had been provided for people like Arturo Toscanini. Continue reading
There he came, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson Joseph, number eight, crossing home plate on the condensed diamond of one of Prospect Park’s giant meadows. The first iPhone snapshot of the day. This takes place under robin’s egg blue skies that turn to gray clouds, then showers and blue skies again. This as the cheers of my son-in-law, Jonathan, my daughter, Stephanie, my wife and I spur Joseph on. The kid is a natural. Swings a fast bat into the ball, drops the bat and runs to first, rounds it to second, third then home. Continue reading
If scenes of Normandy at war and peace can be called beautiful in any way, it’s in the contrast of the locales from today to 70 years ago. Continue reading
I got the news from my last Time-Warner bill, which is for a 42-inch flat screen and a second set, 23- x 36-inch flat screen. It seems they are changing all the numbers of the stations, introducing content previously shown over a period of years and still changing. I took notes when I talked to the representative about a monthly bill from TW for $142.25. RT-Today, my favorite news station at Channel 135 hadn’t been there for weeks. Continue reading
If you were Robert De Niro you would. You would have known from the time you were a kid, when he left the house and your mother to paint and you would have already read in his notebooks that he was troubled by his homosexuality and hapless search for love. Nevertheless, being the international film star you are, you would have felt the need to share his pain and yours and let people know. A lesser man would have kept his father in the closet, like a ghost, until it tore him apart. But not De Niro. Continue reading
Call it what you will: twisting the facts, denying the expertise of several thousand architects and engineers; it’s all about using yellow journalism to demonize 9/11 truth and truthers. And Jake Tapper took aim on his “The Lead,” leading to new lows in so-called “coverage of AE911Truth’s 9/11 Museum brochure that’s sold at the September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero in New York City.” Continue reading
The day was Memorial Day and we were meeting my cousin and his wife in in Brooklyn’s Botanic Gardens. The price was right at $5 per senior. And in we walked checked by a polite guard. Continue reading
I once had a shrink whose basic axiom was ”Walking is life.” Obviously, if you walk a lot, you exercise your arms, legs, and torso, you also exercise that inner voice, your brain, spirit, call it what you will, that part that reflects what you see in the world around you. Continue reading
Thus spoke my friend, Roz Panepento, returning from the double canonization of two popes. Commenting as Robert Burns first did, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.” In other words, even the cranky 85-year old priest who accompanied her group, and who wanted to dig in the heated soil of mezzo giorno got heat prostration. It reminded her of the lack of perfection anything in life posses, like the priest with this tongue sticking out in thirst. Then, too, The best laid plans of mice and men also comes from John Steinbeck’s 1937 portrait of the intellectual disability of Lenny and George in Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men.’ Continue reading
The sun is pouring down on The Upper West Side, Broadway. The Market is glistening with fresh produce. And life suddenly seems more livable and invigorating. I’m watching the trees blossom, some white, some pink, and it all seems a miracle happening all over again. Life, precious life, is here again. Yet over the rest of the world the same can’t be said. Life in the Ukraine is like a bad dream. Kiev is leaning against Eastern and Western Crimea and outbreaks of hostility are taking place and taking lives. Continue reading
This is a story with which I can identify because I was nearly a victim of a young Catholic priest when I was in my early teens. Continue reading
Ever since it has been observed as a federal holiday in 1986, we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday every year on the third Monday of January. . Born January 15, 1929, he would now be 85 years old if not cut down by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. Yet in his 37 short, incredibly productive years, he gave birth to a movement both nonviolent and revolutionary that changed America irrevocably. To this day his singular voice cries out to our conscience for more: justice, equality, peace, prosperity for all. Will that we listen to overcome the obstacles we face. Continue reading
One of America’s greatest poems and poets, The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, seems to miss the full truth of this April, opening with its famous first line . . . Continue reading
I’m a fly on the wall, really, bzzzzz, and I could hear the breaking news from Newsmax.com. Mama mia! Sharp differences over abortion and birth control surfaced as President Barack Obama held his first meeting Thursday with Pope Francis, even as the president sought to emphasize common ground issues like economic inequality during a much-anticipated Vatican visit. Continue reading
I have read and reviewed several of Daniel Estulin’s books and found them challenging and revealing about the past, the present and now the future. Continue reading
I don’t need an alarm clock, even when we have to get up to catch a plane. The sounds of my Upper West Side neighborhood are filled with catastrophic siren sounds. We don’t need birds before the dawn has cleared away the night; we have ambulance sounds whose decibels scorch your ear drums. We also have police cars that make thumping sounds that are other worldly. And to top it off, we have screaming fire engines with honking horns that can wake the dead. For all this, New York City remains one of the most expensive cities to live in. Ah wilderness, Sleepy Hollow. Continue reading
According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, in 2014, spring began with the vernal equinox on March 20 at 12:57 P.M. EDT. This is the season that brings increasing daylight, warming temperatures, and the rebirth of flora and fauna. Continue reading
I’ve been going to Perazzo’s all my life, from the time when it was family-owned and catered to Italian families, until a few years ago when it was privatized by a corporation. Continue reading
It was Christmas of 1991 and my father was in St. Vincent’s Hospital diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. My daughter Stephanie who was at NYU film school at the time was charged with helping clean out his apartment. As luck would have it, she found a wooden box full of super-8 films that he had shot of my mother (who would tragically be gone at 38) leaving my uncles, aunts and grandfather in Brooklyn, NY. Continue reading
The noted Peter C. Gotzsche, MD, wrote in September 2013, “There are many good books about the crimes in the drug industry and the widespread corruption of the profession to which I belong: doctors. I had therefore promised myself that I would not write one.” But two things in particular made the good doctor change his mind in the summer of 2012. The sins of Big Pharma and the bad karma it never ceases to emit. Continue reading
In the Feb. 23 The New York Times, Stephen P. Hinshaw and Richard M. Scheffler point to “the writing is on the chalkboard” with their op-ed Expand Pre-K, Not ADHD: “Over the next few years, America can count on a major expansion of early childhood education. We embrace this trend, but as health policy researchers, we want to raise a major caveat: Unless we’re careful, today’s preschool bandwagon could lead straight to an epidemic of 4- and 5-year-olds wrongfully being told that they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” Continue reading
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Are cops killing more people than ever?
Posted on August 18, 2014 by Jerry Mazza
Here’s a pitch for a procedural: How many cops are involved in police shootings in the United States in a given year? Why should that require any detective work? First, there are currently no national statistics on how many people are shot by police each year—and they are sorely needed—both to protect innocent people mistaken for law-breakers and the police themselves. Continue reading →