Austin's heinous new logo.

Reminds me of when NYC spent millions on bringing arts and culture back to the city after Covid. It was hard to believe it wasn’t an SNL skit pic.twitter.com/0dYhP2bWna

— King Francis the Turd (@YourTurdliness) September 5, 2025

"A rat walked across my foot the other day. They’re bold. You can stomp your foot all you want, but they’re New York City rats. They are not afraid."

Said one New Yorker, quoted in "Rats in a Stroller: The Central Park Playground Panic/City data actually suggest that rat sightings are declining. But horror stories are everywhere, and a single rat in a stroller is enough to set off a panic" (NYT).

The last 3 paragraphs of this article are about Curtis Sliwa:

"He’s very concerned. How do they say it, this is for all the tea in China. This is serious."

"He" = Trump.

The quote is from John Catsimatidis, "a billionaire grocery and oil magnate in New York," who says he's just talked with Trump about this.

Quoted in "Trump Advisers Have Discussed a Job for Adams if He Quits Mayor’s Race/The conversations have also involved Curtis Sliwa with the goal of giving Andrew Cuomo a better chance of defeating Zohran Mamdani in November" (NYT).

Are New Yorkers going to be responsive to Trump's meddling in their local election? Cuomo wants to return to power like that? Seems wrong. And why would we the people of the whole United States want Adams and Sliwa handling whatever it is they'd be given? Let New York be New York. The people responded to Mamdani. That's democracy. Deal with it.

"And on his head, where a swooping red beret has sat almost every day of his adult life, there was only a cap-shaped tan line and balding pate...."

"In a city rich with sartorial symbols, few have been more memorable than [Curtis] Sliwa’s ruby red headpiece. It helped the Guardian Angels, his subway patrol group, gain notoriety in the 1970s; was his uniform for a career in television and radio and provided an unofficial motif for his unsuccessful first run for mayor in 2021. Yet as he takes a second, seemingly more viable run at City Hall, Mr. Sliwa, 71, is beginning to show up without it... 'For some people, the beret is a defining issue,' Mr. Sliwa said, volunteering that it could evoke a certain Che Guevara-style revolutionary look. 'Guys and gals, I get it. If taking my red beret off will help you just to listen to me, no problem.'... Mr. Sliwa makes a point of wearing his beret underground — he tries to campaign in the subway two hours a day ('It’s the only way') — and on the streets. It makes him more visible.... Mr. Sliwa said he has six berets in rotation. On hot summer days, the wool can create its own small heat dome. 'I don’t mind shvitzing, but my wife does,' he said. 'She says, "oofa, this beret, it can walk on its own by the end of the day."' He is also hearing from friends who think it is worth more on than off.... 'First, I was all for taking his red hat off,' Mr. Dietl said. 'But now I think when Superman came to save everyone, he didn't take his cape off.'"

From "Curtis Sliwa Wants to Be Mayor. He’s Taking Off His Beret to Prove It. The Guardian Angels founder and Republican nominee for mayor has long been a New York curiosity. Can he become a serious contender?" (NYT).

You know who wore a hat? Lincoln. As Trump likes to say, responding to critics who call him insufficiently presidential: "I would say I can be more presidential than any president in history except for possibly Abe Lincoln with the big hat." And by the way, Trump has a damned distinctive hat and it worked for him. 

If the question is how can you be serious in a hat I think we have the answer, and Sliwa made that beret so much a part of his persona that it's the only thing recognizable about him. Without the hat, he's a generic old guy. It's too late to de-hat. He has to convince people he's serious, without de-hatting.

 

Should Curtis Sliwa prove his worth by going without the hat?

No, it's too late now.

No, the hat is good.

Yes, it's a barrier to being taken seriously. Crucial to de-hat.

Yes, but don't concede that it wasn't serious. Take control of the expression.

Who cares? This clown can't win. Move on to Cuomo or Adams.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"New York City’s Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly believe that Israel is 'committing genocide' in Gaza..."

"... and that the United States should stop arming the Jewish state, according to new polling from a pro-Palestinian group.... Asked if the city should 'enforce the arrest warrant' against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani supports, 63% of primary voters said yes."

Semafor reports, in "Poll: New York Dems side with Mamdani on Israel, Netanyahu."

Donald Trump, AOC, and Mamdani are all from Queens. Is there something about the culture/speech patterns of Queens that is political magic?

That's a question I asked Grok early this morning (and posted on X).

You might want to quarrel about how much each of these characters is really from Queens before comparing their style. 

I think the one who most deserves the "from Queens" designation is Mamdani, even though he was born in Uganda.

Feel free to read my chat with Grok — which includes details about the connections each of the 3 has to Queens, an effort to describe what distinguishes the people of Queens, and a search for other celebrities who might be quintessentially Queens —  here.

Let's talk about Zohran Mamdani. I'd avoided even making a tag for him, but times have changed.

BREAKING: Andrew Cuomo has conceded meaning former rapper and socialist Zohran Mamdani will win the New York City Democratic primary.

The 33-year-old state rep has bold new plans for New York City, including city owned grocery stores.

Mamdani has a controversial past, including… pic.twitter.com/9wmHXdaCwL

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 25, 2025

I'll start the conversation with this. The Democratic Party is in big trouble! It has the old guard and the possibly too crazy progressives. Yesterday's primary was a test. 

"Lefty upstart Zohran Mamdani has leapfrogged over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor..."

"... according to a stunning new poll released Monday. In its hypothetical initial round of voting, Cuomo’s lead shrinks to 3 percentage points, with 35% of likely Democratic voters supporting him compared to 32% for Mamdani and 13% for city Comptroller Brad Lander, the Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill survey found.... [S]ince no one garners the more than 50% of the vote needed to win outright, the ranked choice system kicks in. That means that even if a voter’s first choice is eliminated in successive rounds of calculations, their other picks could still be in the mix and emerge as the eventual overall winner. Mamdani finally surpasses Cuomo in the eighth round [!!!!!] of the simulated ranked choice voting — 51.8% to 48.2% — in the latest poll conducted June 18-20...."

I'm reading "Shocking poll shows Mamdani overtaking Cuomo in NYC’s ranked choice primary" (NY Post).

"It felt like the New York Times didn’t understand New York City. It was this strangely conservative law-and-order, traditionalist view..."

".. that totally missed the reality of the city today. My view is people are hurting and affordability is the issue and the Times just does not understand what everyday people are going through. They’ve disconnected from New York City more and more with every passing year. Obviously, they decided they didn’t care enough about New York City to make an editorial endorsement and then they show up with this wimpy, disingenuous editorial basically justifying why people should vote for someone corrupt in Andrew Cuomo, and not even recognizing that other new leaders had worthy ideas. I mean, the whole thing was like, 'Let’s invalidate new young leaders,' right? It was unbelievably ageist and out of touch."

Said Bill de Blasio, quoted in "Bill de Blasio on Andrew Cuomo and That Nasty Times Op-Ed/The former mayor has a few things to get off his chest" (NY Magazine).

"I’ve been wanting to come for weeks and weeks and weeks. I’m excited that the spring is happening and she’s really activating the girls to touch some grass — literally — and get outside."

Said Lydia Burns, a model, quoted in "These New Yorkers Are Touching Grass" (NYT).

I'm a devotee of ritualistic nature walks myself, but I still laughed at:

This Sunday, at 10:30 a.m. sharp, a group of stylish, mostly 30-something New Yorkers gathered at the Hare Krishna Tree in the center of Tompkins Square Park. Despite a few complaints of hangovers, they had made it there on time for a plant and history tour of the park led by Olivia Rose, who handed out tote bags and forest green zines she had made for the occasion....

I loved the video snippet of the stylish, youngish folk walking quite slowly, each holding a disposable plastic cup of something brownish and milky. Plastic cups, tote bags, zines — zines! — nature is so great.

Here's the Wikipedia article on Tompkins Square Park, where I learned that the park is the namesake of Daniel D. Tompkins, who was once Vice President of the United States.

"But there was also strong social fabric in his Harlem neighborhood. It wasn’t just Ms. Brown but his downstairs neighbor, Teddy, a retired seaman..."

"... who had moved into the building in 1936, who stridently guarded Mr. Levy’s parking spot while he was at work. 'He was retired and sat in the window. When people tried to park in front of the building, he would scream at them, "No, no, no. That’s Mr. Levy’s place."'"

I'm reading "A Long Life in Harlem, Made Possible by an Affordable Apartment/Owen Levy says the social fabric has remained strong in the often-tumultuous 46 years he has lived in the neighborhood" (NYT).

Times have changed. You can't get a big apartment near Central Park for $300. And anyone who thinks they can enforce a moral right to a public parking spot is going to become a figure of fun on TikTok:

"I hope Grounded in the Stars will instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity."

Says the sculptor Thomas J. Price at his website, linked at the New York Times in "Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point. A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity."

Wow! That headline says so much about "meaningful connections," "intimate emotional states," and "deeper reflection around the human condition."

What could be more meaningfully connected, intimately emotional, or more deeply reflected upon than to call you a big old racist if you scorn a monumental statue of a casually dressed black woman?

Price's hopes are dashed. And the Times doesn't even tell us the title of the statue — "Grounded in the Stars" — until the 7th paragraph. After the headline calls it "Times Sq. Sculpture" and "a 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman," the text calls it "the bronze sculpture," "the 12-foot statue," "the sculpture," and — quoting others — "a statue of an 'angry Black lady,'" "a D.E.I. statue." 

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

"The neighborhood has, in recent years, transformed into a fabulous theme park for young women of some privilege to live out their Sex and the City fantasies..."

"... posting and spending their mid-20s away. They all seem to keep impressive workout routines... have no shortage of girlfriends, and juggle busy heterosexual dating schedules. (The boys they consort with tend to be of the fratty variety.) They work in finance, marketing, publicity, tech — often with active social-media accounts on the side. They have seemingly endless disposable income. They are, by all conventional standards, beautiful. Occasionally, they are brunettes. Whatever their political beliefs, their lives seem fairly apolitical; as one 27-year-old lawyer on a walk with her best friend, both wearing identical puffer jackets, succinctly put their collective interests to me one day in April, 'Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.' (They may be more political than they appear: 'You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights,' said one person who lives in the neighborhood.)"

I'm reading "It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl/A new generation has transformed the neighborhood — and reshaped the fantasy of New York City living" (New York Magazine).

For the record: "Sex and the City" was a current TV show from 1994 to 2004. My own West Village experience was long before that: 1976 to 1981.

Back to the article:

"The TV show 'Girls' is a right-wing show.... [That's] some labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact."

"But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences.... about [what]... society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art..."

I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":

 

The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."

Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").

That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."

"Young people in the city are very boring now. I am only in my early 30s but the difference between 10 years ago is stark."

"When I was in my early 20s, you would go out and meet new people every bar you went to. Every night had a funny or interesting story. Contrast that with the Gen Zs you see out: they sit glued to their phones, are scared of speaking to new people, vape constantly, and are only interested in the latest viral tiktok they saw. If you are in New York and spend all your time hanging with other transplants from your same home city, scrolling your phone, and order delivery from a franchise for all your meals, why even live here? You can eat chick fil a and watch TikToks in any city in the US. Guess I'm getting old!"

Says Bud Weiser — if that really is your name — in the comments section of "Why Are These Clubs Closing? The Rent Is High, and the Alcohol Isn’t Flowing/The financial decline of some of the city’s most popular clubs has put a spotlight on the realities of nightlife" (NYT).

Agreeing with Bud is Clark:

Andrew Cuomo "blames the leftists in the State Legislature, who never liked him no matter how many left-wing priorities he passed..."

"... gay marriage, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, a fracking ban, free state-college tuition, legal marijuana, and stricter gun laws—and who were lying in wait to take him down. The allegations [of sexual harassment] were just a pretext, in his view, especially at a moment when the progressive wing of the party had the upper hand in the Democratic coalition."

From "The (Partial) Reinvention of Andrew Cuomo/He says he’s grown and learned. His brute-force takeover of the mayor’s race, at least, looks familiar" (NY Magazine).

"Cuomo... maintains that much of the whole affair was concocted by [state attorney general Letitia] James, whom Cuomo endorsed for the position and who, in a kind of gubernatorial attempted coup, ran for the job herself after he resigned.... 'That women’s issue was so electric that once somebody lights that fuse, you can’t stop it in that environment. Politicians were like dominoes—boop, boop, boop, boop,' he said, mimicking with his fingers the tumbling of the play tiles...."

New York City just legalized jaywalking.

The NY Post reports. 

The decriminalization won’t do much to change New Yorkers’ lives — few people faced ticketing for jaywalking even before the change.

Good then. I don't like to see a law that's not enforced lying around waiting to be enforced on someone. Who? Why?

I'm the sort of person who follows rules because they are rules, and I think it's unfair to people like me to get stuck with limitations that are not restricting the freedom of the people who merely factor in the likelihood of getting caught and punished.

We need to worry about "'pretext offenses' — acts that are criminalized to give cops a pretext to stop, arrest or otherwise manage an unruly or dangerous actor," which may be "a license for cops to harass innocent New Yorkers, particularly black and brown ones."

And: "Jaywalking is, as many have claimed, a 'New York tradition.'"

"Before, it was too much, there was honking of horns without reason. Now, it’s better for everybody."

Said Syed Ali, 49, who works at a halal food cart in midtown Manhattan, quoted in "Honking Complaints Plunge 69% Inside Congestion Pricing Zone/In the first two months of the Manhattan vehicle tolls that Trump wants to nix, gripes over blasting horns sunk when compared to 2024" (The City).

"You might think such a scene — lines of strangers ogling an exposed female body lying in the middle of the street — would feel unsettling or prurient...."

"Instead, the atmosphere felt mildly jovial, as people exchanged amused glances, shrugged, and snapped photos. Nothing untoward was happening here, because Balloon Kim seemed protected from any personal transgression. Naturally, being 60 feet long helped.... But Balloon Kim seemed impervious to transgression [because] Balloon Kim did not so much depict a person as it did a commodity, an abandoned outer shell.... By covering her famous face, Balloon Kim refused to return the onlookers’ gaze. She depicted no personal expression, and blocked even the depiction of any access to her interiority. This structure was not a portrait or a sculpture of Ms. Kardashian, but rather a very faithful recreation of the workings of Ms. Kardashian’s empire, which is built on the meticulously crafted project she has made of her body — a collection of highly public, highly exposed curves and spheres, sculpted and polished to perfection, displayed according to Ms. Kardashian’s diktats, and offered up as a series of ideals to be aspired to and emulated via the purchase of products."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "About That Giant Kim Kardashian in Times Square/The seamless, poreless, sanitized effigy of a capitalist titan was a startling piece of marketing for Skims" (NYT).

1. That last sentence — "This structure was not... " — is a doozy. Have I ever written "doozy" on this blog? Yes! And I've written it in the context of a long sentence that needed diagramming. So now, here's another item for the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Diagram this sentence...."

2. "Interiority" — You might remember just last month I was asking "What kind of people use the word 'interiority'?" Encountering the word in a NYT article (about Dylan Mulvaney), I searched my blog archive and extracted the history of the word "interiority" on this blog. There were 5 earlier appearances, all of them in quotes, never used by me. One day I'll use it!

3. This post gets my "big and small" tag — which is, regular readers may know, my favorite tag. I  am amused by absurd and radical size variations. 

4. The NYT writer is doing something I've seen a lot of over the years — crediting a woman for doing something other than what you might think she's doing: selling her sexuality. 

I was reading Trump's social media posting — "'Congestion pricing is dead. Manhattan, and all of New York, is saved. Long Live The King!"

"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"
–President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 19, 2025

That's it. Remembering the movie title, "King of New York," and sensing that there was a cultural reference out of my reach, I asked Grok, "What does 'King of New York' refer to?"

"King of New York" can refer to different things depending on the context. Here are the most common meanings: 

1. Cultural/Historical Figure: Historically, it might evoke someone like Alexander Hamilton or other influential New Yorkers who shaped the city or state, though no one is officially titled "King of New York." It’s more of a colloquial or symbolic label for someone who dominates or represents New York’s identity. 

2. Hip-Hop Culture: In rap and hip-hop, "King of New York" is a fiercely debated title among artists claiming dominance in the New York rap scene. Notorious B.I.G. famously used it, especially tied to his track "Juicy" and his Brooklyn roots. Others like Nas, Jay-Z, and even 50 Cent have been in the conversation, with fans and critics arguing over who truly holds the crown based on influence, lyricism, or commercial success. 

3. Film: It’s the title of a 1990 crime movie directed by Abel Ferrara, starring Christopher Walken as Frank White, a drug lord who returns from prison aiming to reclaim power in New York City. The film’s a gritty take on power and redemption, and its title ties into the idea of ruling the city’s underworld. 

4. Sports: Occasionally, athletes like Derek Jeter (for his Yankees legacy) or Patrick Ewing (with the Knicks) get dubbed "King of New York" by fans or media for their outsized impact on the city’s sports culture. 

5. Slang/Bravado: More broadly, it’s a flex—someone calling themselves or being called the "King of New York" is asserting they’re the top dog in whatever field or scene they’re in, from business to street cred. 

Which one are you thinking of, or did you have a specific context in mind?

At that point I revealed my interest in the Trump tweet.