Florida Man

8/27/2025

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It’s not just the most recent journalists’ deaths, which has special meaning for me and several of my friends, but whenever innocent people are killed in war. And in the Israel war against Hamas, it seems that more innocents are being killed in Gaza than Hamas killers.

      The military response to these events is one or all of these:  “We regret what happened” “There will be an investigation” and “It was a tragic mishap.”

  It’s hard to believe there are so many tragic mishaps, though admittedly war is very foggy.

    Who has ever seen the results of one of these investigations? No one. That’s either because they are so bad for the investigating side they aren’t released or because they were never done.

And “regrets” are like saying “our thoughts and prayers are with the families. “ Useless, meaningless and demeaning to Florida Man.

The most recent killings of five journalists and 12 other people in Gaza appeared deliberate. As rescuers were cleaning up the debris from the first missile that hit a building, a second one hit the same spot. Now that’s deliberate.

  The world knows by now that Hamas are cold-blooded indiscriminate killers but Jews are supposed to be better than that. The sage Hillel said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” This requires empathy and mutual respect. Jews are not just supposed to  avoid doing harm but to actively do good.

  Today, the news is that the IDF saw a camera. They assumed the camera was being used to spy on the troops. Perhaps, though I don’t know how that would work or be really useful to anyone. More likely a journalist was taking pictures of the ruined building and the effort to dig out victims.

   Anyway you cut it and I’m sure there are many ways, the killing of unarmed people doing their job isn’t acceptable. And it’s not the first time and won’t be the last. I guess the real question here is how does Israel’s right to defend itself jibe with upholding the value of not intentionally killing people? Maybe it’s not possible.

Who Should We Be

Florida Man

8/26/2025

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The distinguished philosopher, David Bowie once said “by the extraordinary process of aging”you become the person you always should have been.

It seems to mean as we age we shed societal expectations, allowing our true, authentic selves to emerge. It's about gaining clarity, wisdom, and freedom from caring about others' opinions, This leads to a more fulfilling life where you understand what brings you joy and what truly matters.

A more distinguished philosopher, Aristotle, saw aging as bringing wisdom and freedom. as a time to harvest what you have sown over the years. Cicero, also more distinguished than Bowie, thought aging was not a burden but brought peace, and the opportunity for continued contributions to society.

   But back to Bowie. 

          Florida Man doesn’t think he always should have been Florida Man. But that’s who I am now, at least part of the time. But who the hell knows if they are the person they should have been.

  I’ve never thought about this before but when I reed it I thought about the people I’ve been and the person I am now and I wonder if I’m there yet. 

         Am I still on the road or are there there still people i’m supposed to be? I prefer Cicero’s thoughts though I don’t know about the inner peace. I think we all can use our collective wisdom to continue to contribute to society. If writing Florida Man is a contribution to my peace and joy and maybe yours as well, I’m going to keep trying.

We Need A Smart Man

Florida Man

8/25/2025

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    Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube. Direct link above. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Give us a review. Subscribe. It’s free. Open YouTube on your TV and tell the TV remote to open @Elderly Brothers(say “dash)”US it will find us.

  Will Rogers, who most of you remember said in the 1930s, “This would be a great time in the world for some man to come along that knew something.” He must have known the Trump type, the know-nothing who used to have his own party, a nativist political movement in the 1850s that promoted traditional American values, whatever they are, and were called the “no-nothings” because when people asked what they stood for they said, “I know nothing.”

    We clearly need a knight on a white steed to come to the rescue. Unhappily, that doesn’t seem to be possible with the dirth of people who know something. In 330 million souls you’d think at least one would know something.

Regarding Intel, isn’t the gov take over of the means and mode of production what happens in socialist and communist countries? It means the state owns the resources and directs the economy to meet a central plan. It’s aim is to eliminate private ownership toward the goal of a better response to the public need.

So, we’re taking over 10 percent of Intel and other companies have to be next. When the 10 percent becomes 100 percent we have Lenin’s dream for a Communist Russia. And how did that work out. Not so well. Soon, except for us olders everyone will be working on a commune.

Right now, it appears the gov is struggling between fascism and communism, but of course they will never say that. 

Fascism, on the other hand, is characterized by what we have, a corrupt dictatorial leader, a cult of personality and an all powerful state armed and taking over our cities. 

We need to wait a bit for the communist wing to abolish  private property, redistribute wealth, eliminate social classes, and let the state wither away. The hang up for the thieves in Washington is the ultimate aim of communism, to achieve true liberation and social justice. Do you think any of the clods in D.C., have read a page of Russian history?

  In college, I thought Communism was a pretty good idea. I remember meeting in a booth at a beer and burger hangout and plotting the overthrown of the university. I’m sorry that the Russian try didn’t work but capitalism seems a better way to go. 

  I’m afraid we’re heading down both paths at the same time and the rudderless ship of state is cruising without a captain and we’re heading for the rocks.

Eswatini for Deportees

Florida Man

8/21/2025

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    The papers say people are being deported to Eswatini, which sounds like a new cocktail but the country was formerly Swaziland in southern Africa with a population of 1.3 million. It is a monarchy so it will feel like home. The king has had 15 wives.

     The country’s prisons are overcrowded, there is violence among inmates and pre-trial detention can last for years. The most popular foods are sour milk which is raw milk that is fermented, corn on the cob and dried spiced meat. The Velvet Monkey a restaurant in Ezulwini offers beer and cocktails and food items that are not cheap. The menu includes burritos, nachos, Thai fish cakes and other international dishes. Check out their website when you go.

Rental property in Eswatini

    I’m sure no one in the gov ever heard of Eswatini but the country was hit by a dart thrown by Smith. In other admin news: 600 CDC employees are receiving termination notices and the intelligence service is being cut by 40 percent. NASA doesn’t care about climate change anymore. As part of the anti-crime movement, people can now carry shotguns and rifles in D.C. without fear of prosecution. White House officials are making public appearances for photo ops with the troops patrolling Washington. Zelensky showed the fraudster a map of Ukraine, something he had probably never seen, to explain the war situation. Trump reportedly said, “Thanks for the map. It was great.”

It costs $17,000 per to deport and immigrant. Could things get more depressing? I’m afraid so. I’m still looking for monkfish liver.

Diplomacy

Florida Man

8/19/2025

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    Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube. Direct link above. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Give us a review. Subscribe. It’s free. Open YouTube on your TV and tell the TV remote to open @Elderly Brothers(say dash)US it will find us.

Florida Man doesn’t pretend to know much about foreign diplomacy or any other kind either, hence the name Florida Man, but I do pretend to know some things and one of them is that the sex predator is too stupid to know any more than I do about it. 

     And why, oh why would foreign leaders deign to come to D.C. to meet at his request to discuss a war of aggression in Ukraine that Putin started. At least Zelensky was there this time and Putin was the odd man out. Did you see the video of the felon nodding as people were talking like he knew what was happening. He looked like he was dozing off to me.

Also to uneducated me, asking Zelensky to give up part of his country is like giving Germany part of Poland as a reward after WWII. Unthinkable.

  Here’s something else unthinkable. Israel plans to displace all civilians from Gaza City so they can finish the war with Hamas. That number of people is estimated at 375,000, about the population of Cleveland.

  Can you imagine the problems evacuating 375,000 people. 

“Grab that painting Abdul, we have to have some art in the tent. And grandma’s tea set too. They said there would be a tent, didn’t they?.”

Headlines on a single page in the WSJ yesterday: “Gazans scramble for clean drinking water.” “Israelis hold nationwide protests, strike against war.”

  Not to be outdone, the NYT had a front page story titled, “In Gaza the joys of childhood dissolve into indelible trauma” with a two-page spread of pix of kids playing in rubble.

  Hard to imagine my kids playing in rubble and water filled ditches. But, that’s war amiright? Just gotta suck it up. Of course I want the hostages released but is this the best way to do it. I don’t know. I said I’m not a diplomat.

Just Stuff

Florida Man

8/18/2025

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    Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube. Direct link above. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Give us a review. Subscribe. It’s free. Open YouTube on your TV and tell the TV remote to open @Elderly Brothers(say dash)US it will find us.

     Update: You’ll recall I wrote about a husband accused of killing his wife with a spear attached to a bed. Well, it took a jury two hours of deliberation to convict him of murder. I still think it was an accident.

      I just noticed that convict is the same as convict depending where you put the accent. What is the deeper meaning of that? If you are convicted you become a convict. So obvious. 

  Florida Man just wants to keep you up on the important news of the day. Speaking of news, I just read that looking at the news on your phone just before bed can have a negative effect on your sleep. Duh.

 So, today looks like a potpourri Monday.

  That’s ok because I’m headed out for an MRI, C-T, X-ray, NBC excursion to satisfy my ENT guy, who I just wanted to clear out my earwax, that I don’t have any brain tumors that might be effecting my balance. He says, if that’s the problem, it can be lasered and I’ll be able to rejoin the Wallendas.

  AI, AI, AI is everywhere. Anthropic AI announced that it is offering access to its Claude assistant to “all three branches” of the federal government for just $1, matching a similar move from OpenAI. I had a ’53 Chevy I named Claude. It didn’t offer much but basic transportation. The windows on both doors were broken and it was winter in Columbia, MO. Freezing but transportation and now he’s back in a new incarnation.

  Two new peeves. (1) The trend toward ads for anything that end up with people eating outdoors. Eight or more people, obviously total strangers laughing their asses off, are eating an elaborate meal in the backyard of an elaborate house. How often does that happen in real. (2) Car commercials where you are supposed to picture yourself driving in the desert or through mud holes or at 75 MPH through the forest. Oh, yeah. Rev up that Toyota Carola and head for the nearest desert and give it a try.

   Finally, I was surprised and gratified by the response to my column the other day about helping and leaving a footprint. I’m so glad you are reading me and moved to let me know.

   Mondays are fun for me.

Foster Care for the Homeless

Florida Man

8/15/2025

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    Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube. Direct link above. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. Also you can open YouTube on your TV and tell the TV remote to open @Elderly Brothers(say dash)US it will find us.

       How many ways can you spell chutzpah. It seems there are many ways and they all relate to one man.

        The  cretin is claiming to be a peacemaker, a crime stopper, a comedian and the greatest golfer of all time. And he wants to change the name of the Kennedy Center to Trump Tower.

        Whatever happens with Putin in Alaska  he’ll claim a Nobel Peace Prize. 

         Crime in D.C. isn’t going down to zero but if it ticks down one percent he’ll claim another peace prize.

          If he’s booed and bombs as host at the Kennedy Center Awards he’ll claim the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Hilarious as that sounds.      

   That’s at least four ways to spell chutzpah. But there are more. He’s limiting the sale of some computer chips to China. He tried to explain what the chips are but was unable to do so.  

    Here’s one of those stories you can’t believe coming out of the admin. From the NYT:  At an Oval Office meeting last week, President Trump dangled an offer to Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia. Mr. Trump said there would be a price for granting Nvidia the licenses it needed to sell artificial intelligence chips to China.“I want 20 percent,” Mr. Trump is said to have said. You know he meant that 20 percent would go to him personally.

     “Will you make it 15?” Mr. Huang, who certainly could eat the felon’s lunch, asked. The cretin recounted the meeting during a press event, He said he agreed to the counterproposal. Two days later, the administration granted Nvidia the licenses it wanted, with the unorthodox payments expected to go to the government.

   The man who has never read a book in his life and knows nothing about history is also trying to tell the whole world what to do. He wants Intel to fire its CEO. He knows more about Gaza than Gazans or anybody else. And in collusion with another deep thinker, worm in brain man, is destroying millions in birth control supplies designated for Africa because . . . . 

    I’m sure we’ll find many more ways to spell chutzpah in the next 3 1/2 interminable years.

Heaven and Hell

Florida Man

8/13/2025

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      Where do I stand on the scales of life. I suspect like most everybody, I’m not good enough to go to heaven and not bad enough to go to hell.

  So where do we go then? I’d say the local bar is a good place to start. Maybe I can get a table with the rabbi, the priest and the proctologist. That sounds like the start of a bad joke. I found the punch line. 

       The bartender says, “What Is this, a joke?”

 Anyway, heaven or hell. The ultimate destination? 

  After a few drinks, the rabbi who was having a double Manischewitz on the rocks said, “While Jews believe in an afterlife, the focus is on living a righteous life in this world.”

    What is righteous?”  I asked.

     It’s a commitment to justice, ethical behavior and fulfilling your obligation to God and others,” the rabbi said as he raised his hand and ordered another drink.I didn’t ask what my obligation was to God but i think it involves following the 613 commandments in the torah. Here are just a few of the easier ones: To love all human beings. Not to stand by idly when a human life is in danger. Not to wrong any one in speech. Not to carry tales. Not to cherish hatred in one's heart. Not to take revenge. Not to bear a grudge. There are 606 more. Maybe next time.

  The priest, who was drinking single malt Scotch, said, “the path to heaven involves God’s grace. He judges each person and salvation is for those who live according to their conscience and do what is good. My conscience says I need another scotch.” Sounds a bit easier.

  The proctologist said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” You guys hungry? I’m ordering a burger and fries. It’s on me.” Everybody ordered but I had the fish tacos.

   Everyone at and chattered. I snorted another line.

    Hell is another story as you might imagine and I was reluctant to dampen the mood but I had a column to finish.

   For Jews, the rabbi said, hell isn’t a permanent place of damnation but a stop for spiritual cleansing and purification. And who doesn’t need that.

  Catholics end up in hell through their own choice, the priest said. “If you reject God’s love and forgiveness it’s your. doing, not God’s.”

           The proctologist wiped some grease off his fingers and said, “I’ll tell you what hell is.” It’s having to treat people who are on Medicaid and Medicare. The paper work is hell. I spend half my time doing the hellish paper work.” 

   "Cheers to that,” we all said.

Black Spatulas

Florida Man

8/5/2025

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Yesterday, I saw on my inner tubes that there was panic over black plastic spatulas of which I have several. I didn’t read the article and certainly wasn’t panicked but I threw all my spatulas in the trash immediately. Then I looked up some history. The problem is BDE-209 which I thought was the name of a rapper, but that’s BDA-209. I think BDE-209 is the name of one of Musk’s kids.

  Turns out, there was a study that said there was too much BDE stuff, a fire retardant, in black plastic and it can cause health and environmental problems. Panic apparently set it, though I missed it. A revision of the study says “Don’t worry. False alarm.” That’s okay because I didn’t like those spatulas anyway. They were too thick to pick up a fried egg easily. They usually broke the yoke and that’s not pretty.

Even if your spatulas are now safe, beware of the chemical because it is powerful stuff. It can interfere with your germ cell dynamics whatever they are. How did they ever find this product to begin with. 

Here’s how it went in the chem lab. “Hey, Jack, I’m looking for a fire retardant for some kitchen utensils. Find me something.” “Okay, boss, I’ve got this smelly stuff in this barrel. I think it will do the job.”

There seems to be no issue that it is in other plastics, like textiles, TV cabinets and car fabrics. It is said to be ubiquitous. So, even though I didn’t like those spatulas, I want a refund.

There are other chemicals in plastic cook ware, especially older items. If you’re concerned use wood, stainless steel or silicone products. Personally, I prefer wood except in a spatula. I use a stainless steel spatula.

  This has been a Monday consumer report from Florida Man’s extensive testing lab.

The Hula Hoop

Florida Man

7/25/2025

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Florida Man is dipping into dangerous territory today. But then everything about the Middle-East is dangerous territory.

Anyway, while I fully support Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, I don’t support the indiscriminate killing of civilians and cutting off food and medical aid to the area.

How can you look at the pictures and videos of children trying to get empty pots filled with whatever food is available. Those pictures aren’t posed. Those faces are truly desperate. 

Can you imagine sending your child out with a pot to walk through rubble to get what little food they can. It’s like begging on the street while bombs are falling. And the aid agencies, 100 or more, are calling for Israel to restore food aid to the territory. They can’t all be wrong.

I don’t think I’m falling for Hamas propaganda and I certainly don’t have any answers but I can’t look at those faces and not say something.

This from Mohammed Mansour, a nutrition manager with the International Rescue Committee in Gaza:

“Amid toppled boxes of therapeutic food, I held a skeletal boy no older than 4 — limbs limp, eyes sunken. Just moments before, I had managed to feed him a spoonful of nutritional, peanut-rich paste. As I was readying another, an explosion knocked the food from my hands and scattered dust into the boy’s open mouth. He didn’t flinch; he was too weak even to cry.”

Mansour is on the front lines. This is his job and his family lives in Gaza.

He says, “It’s not just children who are starving; parents tell me they’ve gone days without proper food. They skip meals so that their children can eat, even if it’s just a few bites of bread, if they can find any. They are not statistics to me. These are people I see each day, the people I live with. They tell me, “We’ve lost everything, but we can’t lose our children.”

You may disagree with me but that sounds like the real thing, the awful real thing.

Mansour says more than half a million Gazans, equal to the population of Louisville, KY, are on the brink of starvation even though Israel ended their blockage of aid in May. He says the food distribution process isn’t working and there are shortages of food and water, fuel and medical supplies.

There is nothing we can do. We’re helpless. We can only watch on TV as a ladle of what looks like food is splashed into those pots. We can only imagine what it would be like if it was our kids. If it was us.

Where is Robin Hood

Florida Man

7/24/2025

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Florida Man has figured it out. If people like something or need something the repubs are taking it away or are going to take it away.

Our neighbors are being kidnapped off the streets by masked hoodlums and American citizens are being deported, Medicaid and food stamps are being cut because our elected representatives don’t need either and the rest of us are moochers.

  They are openly attacking the unhoused, the undocumented the poor, the sick, the disabled, the non-white, the non-Christian, the average Joe and Jane and claiming that it’s what not even half the voters wanted. Millions have their backs against the wall including seniors and people like Eric on SSDI.

Some are calling the repubs Christian nationalists. What is that? it’s someone who believes the U.S. is a Christian country and should be governed by Christian values. Huh!

Of course they are acting totally unChrist-like. They have cut foreign aid, quit UNESCO because who needs education, science, culture or communication to foster peace and abolished other needed programs. Let those damn foreigners eat ICBMs.

They are have banned reproductive freedom and gender-affirming healthcare, they are banning books, attacking the courts and journalism, criminalizing the unhoused, and scapegoating immigrant communities.         

        Doesn’t anyone see the direct parallel to Nazi Germany? I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism and it reads like a textbook for the obese slob except he can’t read. I’ve tried Arendt in the past with little success but she now is totally readable, totally relevant, totally frightening. 

Now you all know that Florida Man is no expert in the bible but I’ve read enough to know that Christ was unhoused, undocumented and a man of the people.

I looked it up. “Woe to you who deprive the rights of the poor, making women and homeless children your prey,” according to prophet Isaiah. 

The Torah says we must care for the homeless and strangers as a fundamental moral obligation. The memory of the time Jews spent in Egypt should be empathetic and compassionate for all.

In Leviticus the Torah says, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

So is there a difference between a Christian and a Christian nationalist? Apparently not. Christ’s teaching be damned. The heathen in charge who doesn’t know which side of the Bible is up is now leading his cult, including congress, away from righteousness into wickedness.

Florida Man is buying a big tent where I can preach the gospel. The new Jimmy Swaggart without the swag.

Indians and Redskins vs. Guardians and Commanders

Florida Man

7/21/2025

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Florida Man was going to write today about something interesting I recently learned but then this came up and I couldn’t resist. My fingers are twitching over the keys.

The very stable genius, the ignoramus running the country, continues to try to move us back to the 1950s when the N-word was in bloom, schools were segregated and there were white and Negro water fountains and waiting rooms in the South.

As you sports fans may remember, way back in 2020 the Washington NFL team changed its name from the Redskins to the Commanders because of public pressure to get rid a name that is a slur against Native Americans. And the Cleveland Indians changed theirs to the Guardians for the same reason.

The Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chiefs and Chicago Blackhawks have kept their nicknames despite controversy. Some say the names honor Native American culture and others say they are harmful stereotypes. The Florida State Seminoles have kept their name with the approval of the Seminole Tribe.

Well, the felon who has no more important things on his agenda wants both teams to go back to their old names immediately.

  In the case of Washington, the owners want to build a new stadium and he says he might not let them if they don’t change the name. What he has to do with the stadium is a mystery to me but I’d bet he wants it to be called Trump Stadium.

  He says there is “growing clamor” to go back to the old name. He always says, “a lot of people are saying” when he repeats what one or two people have whispered in his very receptive ear.

  Here is this one:

  “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

  Don’t you love passion and common sense. What’s the passion here? Where’s the common sense?

  The fraudster says he can stop the stadium but the land belongs to the D.C. government not the feds. The chair of the D.C. council said he didn’t know of any restriction the gov could put on the stadium deal.

  So it’s more bluster from the vulgarian who is trying to change the subject from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking business. 

  The cretin says our “Great Indian people” in massive numbers want the old name back.

  I’m sure that the Native American tribes that pushed for years to have the deprecating names changed are “clamoring” to have it all changed back. After last season a poll found that 62 percent of Commanders fans either “like” or “love” the name.

  With the change, I wonder what ticket scalpers will be called. Perhaps “Ticket Exchangers” would be acceptable. 

Lost History

Florida Man

7/20/2025

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  Florida Man is interested in a wide range of things from archery to zoology but here are some things I’m not interested in that were all in Saturday’s WSJ.

       Coffee being sold in buckets for up to $20 a pop.                    

        Loafers for $947.

       Mobile tea lights. Huh? 

       Million dollar contacts for AI techies.

      A family feud rocking a hotel dynasty.

      America’s public bathroom crisis.

      Burberry sales improving.

     The growing buzz around ancestral wines.

     Chevron buying Hess for $53 billion which could mark the end of the miniature Hess trucks.

But there was a book review that caught my attention, titled Melting Point, about the Jewish immigration to America especially to Galveston, TX. 

A couple of months ago I wrote about my grandfather, a Russian or Ukrainian or Polish refugee, who came here in the early 1900s and lived on the Lower East Side, then moved to Galveston and finally to Kansas City, MO.

The book documents the arrival in Galveston beginning in 1907 of at least 10,000 Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia. Sam Friedberg landed in New York in 1905.

The plan, financed by Jewish philanthropists, was to have Galveston, a one-time important city in Texas, be a stopping off point for the immigrants to move to other cities in the Midwest. Sam somehow became part of that plan, certainly without knowing it but he followed the route. 

The author, Rachel Cockerell’s ancestors were in on the design of what came to be called The Galveston Plan. The interesting thing is, she never knew about the scheme until she began researching the life of her grandfather.

Cockerell says no one in her family knew about it either. The basic idea was for the Jews to avoid the poverty and congestion of New York, live in Galveston for a while and then move. But too many Jews in one place eventually resulted in anti-semitic attacks and an end to the experiment.

 Like me and Larry, she didn’t ask questions about her family. The only people who could tell us.

It brings me back to a familiar theme. The gap in family history that is mostly my fault and the fault of our grandparents for not sitting us down and telling their story. 

But, unfortunately the gap extends to our parents, their lives as kids, how they met and courted, how they played out their roles as young adults during the Great Depression. We could have learned a lot about life. All gone now.

Now It's Sesame Street 

Florida Man

7/19/2025

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If Kermit thought it was hard being green before he hasn’t really seen hard times yet. And he’ll have to put off finding the rainbow connection because it is truly out of reach. If he needs a place to stay he can hang out with me.

The repubs really seem to have it in for kids. First it was M&Ms colors that worm in brain man thinks cause something. Now they want to toss Elmo, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Kermit and the rest of Sesame Street’s brilliantly conceived characters into the dustbin. Probably it’s DEI and animals speaking and valuable lessons for kids and adults too that somehow irritates their fragile, insecure brains.

Their own kids and grand kids and probably they themselves too grew up with those friends and now they want to deprive other kids of the pure joy of Sesame Street.

      I didn’t know it because I don’t know a lot of things, but  the name "Sesame Street" was inspired by the phrase "Open, sesame!" from the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The show's creators felt this phrase, which signifies a magical opening to reveal something exciting, reflected the show's goal of opening up learning and adventure for young children. Well, we certainly can’t have that can we.

I don’t know if cutting federal funds from PBS and NPR will kill Henson’s creations or not but it will certainly make it harder to live on Sesame Street.

   The evil morons in congress are following the instructions of the pouting snowflake, a man who can’t smile only smirk and has no concept of learning. Like lemmings, we can only hope they follow him off the cliff.

And, of course, NPR and PBS offer news that is unbiased and Brit TV shows, and science and technology and cooking and you name it which are anathema to the old white-haired cretins who think they are doing the public’s business.

I hope enough parents are outraged that they organize a Children’s Crusade to march on D.C. and slay the dragon as long as the dragon isn’t a Muppet.

Crazy Pill

Florida Man

7/18/2025

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     Oh My God and OMG and what the freaking freakout. I’m sharing this experience with my friends but please keep it to yourselves because there may be illegal things involved. Consider this a public service.

My back doc prescribed Tylenol with codeine to take if I have back pain after Monday’s surgery. I don’t really have any pain, but I picked the script up at Publix yesterday because I wanted to see what the stuff does if anything. 

      I guess it works for pain, at least you’ll forget about pain and most everything else with one tablet. The little pill is a potent combination of a pint of vodka in one gulp and a tab of LSD which I haven’t touched since I found a good source for cocaine and opium.

      Thirty minutes after taking it I got woozy and dozy and laid down thinking I’d take a nap. And maybe I did get a nap, but I also got a whole lot of dream-like visions, like what I think illusions must be. 

       In no particular order, here are some of the things my brain was pumping out.

       My computer screen lit up with a 3 x 5 yellow card with some kind of unintelligible typing (maybe an old Florida Man column) that had wavy red and black lines running through it vertically. 

A man stepped out of an alley playing  the trumpet. He handed it to me and I immediately played God Save the Queen. I’m  buying a trumpet today.

My robot vacuum started on its own but it was really loud so I turned it over on its back like a turtle and it stopped.

A man was standing in front of me with a cell phone pressed against his forehead.

Not the same person

 I put two ears of corn I had in the fridge in the microwave and they came out black but I ate them anyway sprinkled with cayenne. I was riding my bike past a guy cooking burgers on a grill and caught one he dropped with the spatula I was carrying. A woman gave me a letter to mail but I couldn’t find a mailbox.

      There were a lot more and I should have written them down immediately but I was finally awake enough to get out of bed. Then I was suddenly starving. 

It was like the marijuana nibbles I’ve heard about but never experienced because of my interest in more powerful drugs. I had some peanuts, some potato sticks and some cheese and crackers and was still hungry.

  Anyway, fair warning.  As you can see, the bottle says for “severe” pain. I’ll leave it at that.

Balance

 Florida Man

7/17/2025

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Bagels and Bible last Saturday dealt with a passage that eluded me. There was a talking ass, Balaam’s donkey, that saw the angel of the lord with a sword and got a lot of instructions. Balaam couldn’t see the angel.

  The incident shows many things according the the book’s interpreters, among them that God can speak through anyone or anything (but no me so far), can humble the proud and elevate the lowly, reveal spiritual truth and challenge pride. 

  So, I’m sitting here at the keyboard thinking what would God say through me and I think I hear the sky pilot now.

  “Hey, Ardy, if that is your real name, I understand your dislike for the felon but let up from time to time as your friends have suggested. Keep rooting for the Yankees, you front runner you, don’t forget that fun catcher for the Mariners, The Big Dumper, who is hitting a lot of home runs, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, take care of that back and remember me from time to time.”

I didn’t make that up. Really.

One other thing. After B&B, Norm suggested that I add more balance to my columns.

      Norm is a new reader and hasn’t been exposed to the full range of my distaste, my anger at the way the government is treating us. I admit that I vent and that’s a one way street with no balance, but I told Norm I’m not writing news stories where balance is demanded and it is demanded. I don’t know how many times an editor told me to get a quote from the other side. “Dammit, call somebody and get a quote,” was the succinct yell across the newsroom.

Anyway, it got me thinking about balance and I’ll give it a try though I did see any need for it when I see pix of the cages at Alligator Alcatraz, see the smirks on the face of the sexual predator and his acolytes and hear the cries of the children whose mothers are being handcuffed by masked thugs and being sent somewhere.  

  So, Norm, I appreciate your critique, I really do, and I’ll give it a shot but take a look at this and tell me how to find balance. 

 You can have these accommodations for free if you’re brown. Looks comfy.

Hate

Florida Man

7/8/2025

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     As a reporter, I covered dozens of disastes large and small over the years. Last night on the national news I heard victims talking about the flood in Texas. The survivors and others were being interviewed. I know the news people had to be there like I had to be there because it’s their job. When you’re younger it’s exciting. Not so much when you get older.

     I found their questions predictable: “How bad was it?” and “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” and “How does this make you feel?” 

     I tried never to ask those kinds of questions because the answers are predictable too. “Well, the tornado sounded like a freight train” and “I just thank God we got out alive.” The answers should be, “It was fucking terrible” and “Of course I’ve never seen anything like this before you idiot,  but I feel great.”

     The crying and hugging are too sad to watch and I don’t know why I look anymore. 

      I’m reminded of the feeling after every airplane crash, shooting and traffic pileup. And tonight watching the news I was reminded again. I turned off the sound, the pictures were bad enough.

     I retired 25 years ago not long after I covered a tragedy in Hollywood that was hard for me to handle. A father and daughter were riding bikes in a charity event and the little girl was hit by a car and killed in front of her dad.

     It takes some courage for a reporter to knock on the door of a house where survivors are mourning. But, as my reporter colleagues know, you have to do it. Your hand may hesitate before knocking but as I said, it’s the job. 

    The parents invited me in, talked with me, showed me their daughter’s room and gave me pictures of her to use in the paper the next day. They were so kind.

     After that story, I told my editor Bruce that I wasn’t going to cover tragedy any more. No more train wrecks, no more airplane crashes, no more. He said, okay. Bruce was a sensitive guy. 

     But I knew I’d be sent out again and so I quit before it happened. Reporting is a fabulous job, a responsible job, you work with smart, fun people, and it can be a very sad job.

     The news got to me last night. 

The 4th

Florida Man

7/3/2025

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      Florida Man would love to join the masses as they spray starter fluid on their charcoal briquettes in preparation for the 4th of July barbecue but no can do because the apartment might burn down.  

      Still, I’m moved to talk food today though not ribs and steaks. 

       I’m not a total foodie but I’m enough of one to read recipe books, watch food shows on TV and check out the Times food section on Wednesday. 

  With that background, I’ve reached a point where I think the cooks writing books and posting recipes on the internet are just playing with us. They look in their fridge, see a variety of potential ingredients and just throw them together. 

An example: Indian carrot salad with mustard seeds and curry leaves. Now most of these things can be found if you go to your nearby Indian market but it’s a tough dish to make if you live in Odessa, TX and it doesn’t sound that good either.

Example: Steak Montreal requires Montreal steak seasoning which is probably no different than Toledo steak seasoning, fresh thyme, brandy, creme fraiche, coriander seeds, dill seeds and Sichuan peppercorns. Hey, season those ribeyes with salt and pepper and throw them on the grill.

  Or Humm dog with bacon, black truffle and celery root, or sea urchin guacamole tacos or, my favorite, Italian cured pork neck and fermented sausage on toast. 

      I could go on and on with the likes of macha, mango, chia pudding or strawberry and kale salad with blackberry dressing or bloody mary burgers or succotash with sausage and shrimp and I’m not even talking the use of animal parts you will have trouble finding even in a place like South Florida.

       So, here’s my menu for the 4th. Hamburger mixed with diced onion, egg and bread crumbs cooked under the oven broiler, homemade cole slaw and store-bought potato salad. Eric and I both like this menu. Maybe I’ll make some chia pudding for dessert.

Enjoy the day and the fireworks.

A Dangerous Job

Florida Man

7/2/2025

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     Florida Man has a particularly warm feeling for firefighters and paramedics. As I’ve written before, I slept, ate (oh, they eat good), trained and rode on fire calls with the Fort Lauderdale FD for a series of stories that ran in the Sun-Sentinel years ago.

     I’m also grateful to the fire-rescue team that rushed me to the hospital six years ago after a mini stroke. They got me to emergency in time for a clot buster shot that kept me out of a wheelchair and had me on my feet in a few hours. 

     Besides being life and property savers they are a fun bunch to hang out with. They are ribald because you have to be when you’re dealing with life and death and they know that any shift could be their last. They work 24 hours shifts and are off 48 hours, but often hang around in their off time. In other words they’re dedicated.

     That’s why this attack in Idaho is such a tragedy. If you haven’t heard or read about it, two firefighters were shot and killed and a third wounded in an ambush at an arson fire on Canfield Mountain north of Coeur d’Alene on Sunday.

     A 20-year-old gunman who was living in his car, killed two battalion chiefs, one 42 and the other 52, and badly wounded a 47-year-old engineer.  Officials said, the gunman set the fire to draw his targets to the forest and then murdered them. He used a shotgun in the killings, officials said, then he apparently killed himself. They say he acted alone.

     No motive yet, but who the hell cares about a motive when three families, their friends and co-workers, their community and the world of firefighting comrades are devastated. 

       A fire house is like a club and they are all alike in every city and town and they are all connected by their commitment to their jobs and each other. The men and women volunteer in the community and are generous in their charity to everyone when they aren’t working.   

   So, the loss of one brother is a tragedy, the loss of three is a catastrophe.

     The Idaho governor ordered flags lowered to half-staff and condemned the attack as “a heinous direct assault,” while offering the traditional thoughts and prayers to the families.  

       Here’s another thought. Whenever you hear a siren tell them to hurry because they are good people doing risky jobs. Take pizzas or bagels or cookies or a homemade pie to the fire house in your neighborhood as a thank you for their service. You’ll get a great reception.

No Bottom

Florida Man

7/1/2025

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     Did you hear what Florida Man just heard? It was the thud of the repubs wretched old bodies hitting the bottom once again. If they could be more racist I don’t see how, though they probably will before I finish this post. 

     The cause of their latest paroxysm of hate is the recent  victory of Zohran Mamdani in the NYC mayoral primary.  Mamdani, 33,  was born in Kampala, Uganda which is apparently a rarely enforced capital crime in the U.S.

     He’s young and vital, he has a beard, which would be okay if he was a repub like Vance, and he’s smart. But no matter what he thinks or knows, he looks different and he comes from a different place. 

    Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels of the White House, says, “This is the clearest warning yet of what happens when we fail to control immigration.” I guess Melania doesn’t count.

     Randy Fine, a congressman from Florida, said, Mamdani would install a caliphate in New York City if elected. That would make Mamdani a caliph instead of mayor.  A guy named Charlie Kirk who is a repub influencer, called him a Muslim Maoist.

  Loony Laura Loomer, one of the felon’s trusted whisperers, said Mamdani is  a “jihadist Muslim” who has ties Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

   And one more. Andy Ogles, a repub rep wrote a letter to DOJ calling for Mamdani’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported.

    The dems, always seemingly slow to get into the fight did finally. 

Shahana Hanif, a member of the NY City Council said the uproar reminded her of the Islamophobia after 9/11. “I was a kid then, and still the bigotry and Islamophobia were horrifying as a child.” She said the anti-Muslim rhetoric distracts from the progressive energy that defeated the establishment in NYC.

    Other dems had positive things to say but the racist stuff is more fun. Here’s possibly the best example. 

    Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama called Mamdani and other immigrants subhuman. 

    “These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government and it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.” Working hard is something the congress knows nothing about. 

     By the way, Stephen Miller isn’t concerned about New York. What bothers him is the idea of nonwhite people having political power. The convicted fraudster leads a cult of white supremacists who are anti-intellectual bigots and use dehumanizing words to deprecate millions of people who are not like them.

  Remember the Haitians in Ohio eating the neighbors pets? The raw racism is a growing trend in the cultist world.

       I just checked the news and see that the sex offender is looking at deporting Elon Musk. Next, Melania. The bottom hasn’t been hit yet. Maybe there is no bottom.

Alligator Alcatraz

Florida Man

6/29/2025

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On Saturday morning Florida Man reported on the concentration camp being built deep in the Everglades by a strutting governor bent on being  as tough as his role model on undocumented immigrants. 

Well, by Saturday afternoon an estimated 1,000 demonstrators carrying all kinds of hand-made signs showed up at the tent and trailer prison site dubbed Alligator Alcatraz by DeSantis.

The convoy of trucks that was pulling into the road leading to the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport was slowed on narrow Tamiami Trail 40 miles from civilization.

Now, I know it wasn’t my post that brought people out. It was the national coverage on Friday night’s news shows, especially Fox, that stirred the masses to action. I was surprised to see a crowd because when I was there it was me and five or six local news people. 

Their signs carried a mix of messages. The site is in Miccosukee and Seminole Indian territory so many of them decried the incursion on sacred land. Tribal drums carried a steady beat and leaders spread sage to cleanse the ground.

      Others called out the ecological and wildlife hazards. And there were anti-fascism and anti-felon messages. The crowd was lively, cars lined the road for miles according to reports, and the spirit was much like the demos on No Kings day. Even the truckers blew their horns in support. 

Of course, nothing is going to stop construction. The best that can be hoped is slowing it down a bit. But the fact that so many people were willing to drive into the Glades and stand in the heat to deliver a message is encouraging. 

The pure evil of the deportation process has people riled up. The videos of masked thugs tackling workers in the fields and assaulting woman on the street are having an impact. The ICE marauders are like sharks smelling blood. The more they get away with the more vicious they become. They resemble storm troopers. They think they don’t have to identity themselves. Many of them have turned out to be phony.

I took my passport with me to the Glades last week, just in case. I think I’ll carry it with me on a regular basis. 

Nicknames

Florida Man

6/26/2025

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     Florida Man is very impressed by the felon’s uncanny ability to mock, demean and deprecate people by giving them really clever nicknames.  He just can’t control his delightful sense of vicious humor. 

     This psychological trait doesn’t have a specific name but is a characteristic, a defensive technique, that is often used by people who see the world in win or lose terms and to show their  superiority.  It’s also a form of narcissism, a way to get attention, puff yourself up  and hide your insecurities.

     You can give it any name you want but the cretin’s use is cruel, it’s  intended to hurt and lower the status of the target’s place in society.

     Nicknames have been around forever. Look at "Sue" for the T-Rex. I remember giving and getting nicknames in school, all the way up through college, but I don’t remember being hurt by being called “four eyes” because of my thick glasses. I just took them off and tried to see somebody to punch. And most nicknames are based on a form of your proper name, like Bernie or Barney for Bernard, both of which I didn’t like, or Bud, Bob, Chas, Jer and on and on.

     But it was also easy to talk to, and about people, using nicknames. I had a good friend who weighed more than 300 pounds and I called him Fats even after he lost 150 pounds. No problem for either of us. As I said, it had to do with your personality which we knew nothing about as kids. “Stupid” and “moron” were often used to describe people but not to their faces unless you were looking for a fight. 

     Here are just a few of the vulgarian’s oldies but goodies for your enjoyment.

    "Pocahontas" for Elizabeth Warren,  "Rocket Man" for Kim Jong-Un before they became BFFs,  "Al Frankenstein" for Al Franken, "Horseface" for Stormy Daniels and "Leakin’ James" for James Comey. 

    There are so many more but those will whet you appetite for some new ones.

    He’s landed what he thinks are haymakers on "Allison" Cooper for Anderson Cooper, "Dumb" Brian Roberts and "Jonny" Karl which all seem to be a long reach. They are “losers and sleazebags with zero credibility,” he added because almost everyone is a loser to a thug who needs help tying his shoes. And it’s not a nickname but he just called probable NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani a “100% communist lunatic.” Besides, “He looks terrible and his voice is grating,” the predator said in his usual funny manner.

    But we must be careful in giving the sultan of smut a nickname. People are calling him TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) and when he hears that he has to prove he’s really an enchilada by bombing someone. We know that dominant personalities use language to assert power, but bombing? Come on.

Who Is In Charge 

Florida Man

6/23/2025

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     Florida Man wrote this early Saturday but didn’t send it. I said I’m not much into international politics because I really don’t know much. But, I have thoughts on the Israel-Iran war and the prospect of American involvement which I think is imminent. 

    Then the attack that I was pretty sure the insecure, trigger happy cretin would authorize sooner or later became a reality. The real reason has nothing to do with protecting Israel, he did it because he wanted to do it. He wanted to show that he has a really big penis, but everything the TACO does shows he’s simply a schoolyard bully. 

    His qualified intelligence people said there was no immediate danger of Iran finishing a bomb. There was no immediate threat to us though “our national security” is given as one reason for the bombing. After all, D.C. is 10,163 miles from Tehran. The range of an ICBM, which only the U.S., Russia and China have, is 3,500 miles. Head for the shelters.

    No one knows where this goes from here but we have to hope that the prez of less than half the people can be persuaded by someone with a grain of sense that nuking Iran would be the worst possible idea. But then, killing is their game and Iranians don’t look like us. The men all have beards and the women wear that thing on their heads.

    So for now, it’s still Israel against Iran. Israelis and Iranians will do the dying. We’re in the clear unless Iran decides to stop oil shipments, attack Israel with more drones or involve them in a land war.

     Here are some interesting facts. 

    There are 90 million Iranians and 9 million Israelis. Iran is huge, 636,000 square miles of land to Israel’s 8,600 square miles. It is 74 times larger than Israel. According to the CIA fact book Iran has 1,000,000  mobilizable troops to 636,000 in Israel. Bad odds numerically.

      Israel has a technology advantage, but hoards of men who don’t care about dying could be Iran’s advantage. 

   As I said, our charade that this is about Iran’s nuclear program is just that, a fake. We’ve seen it before. It’s the Tonkin Gulf. It’s “weapons of mass destruction” all over again. If you remember, and I’m sure you do, Iraq had WMD according to George Bush and Colin Powell. None were ever found. Israel has an estimated 90 nukes (WMDs) and the planes to deliver them. Iran has none. Those are good odds.

     You have to admire the Israelis. At B&B on Saturday people said they had heard from relatives and friends in Israel that Israelis everywhere are trying to get back home. No one was asking about the danger, it was about Israel.

      I don’t think the cretin gives a damn about Israel or Israelis. The attack, deemed “an incredible success” was just a radical step up from his tragic military parade. Now he can preen and bluster until act two.

War OMG

Florida Man

6/22/2025

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     Quiz question. Who said:

    “I brought our troops back home. I’m the only one who didn’t start a war.” “We were respected.“ “We didn’t get into any new wars." "Everyone said it couldn’t be done.”

     This guy who ducked out of the Viet Nam war with fake bone spurs appeared for the cameras and in less than four minutes last night he told the world that he had gotten the U.S. into a war. Cowardice. Won’t even face questions from reporters. We know that he is incapable of making decisions without being told whato do, so is he listening to generals or his drunk Sec Def.

      Earlier Saturday night he said we can “make peace.” It was a lie like all his other lies. The NYT reports that he had already approved American bombing  of “sensitive Iranian targets.” 

     Before any real determination of the results of the bombing, he boasted, “The strikes were a spectacular success.”Then he said with spectacular hypocrisy,, “We love you God.”

     My totally uninformed analysis is that Iran will retaliate, either against Israel or American troops somewhere in the Mid-East and things will escalate from there. The cretin has always loved the bomb and at one time asked one of his generals why he could’t use them, so you can’t rule out nukes.

      In the past the tough guy who can barely climb the steps of Air Force One, has said, “We are so far ahead of everybody else in nuclear like you've never seen before,” in his usual scrambled speech.

     The press is using “his analysis” of the situation but we know he can’t analyze anything more complicated than a Big Mac. Anyway, real analysts say the attack will end any serious peace negotiations.

     When things start to go south fingers will be pointed at Israel and the Jews. The ubiquitous Steve Bannon, another convicted felon, has said, “The Israelis have to finish what they started,” ergo, if they don’t the blame has to fall somewhere.

     We know there is going to be more bombing so someone has to keep the cretin’s itchy finger away from the red button. To me, this is as serious as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, maybe more serious.

NYT Stuff

Florida Man

6/20/2025

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     Some days Florida Man uses the NYT to line my bird cage, the peregrine falcon loves it, or wrap the small mouth bass I caught in the canal behind the apartment. Sometimes I use the style section to drain  bacon, because it’s untouched, the cleanest section in the paper.

     But some days, like last Tuesday, many stories in the paper are worth a closer read. Here’s what I found.

    The felon is “the most consequential president in history” according to Mike Huckabee, America’s very distinguished ambassador to Israel. “You will hear from heaven and that voice from God,” about how to respond to the Israel-Iran war he told the slouching loser.

      I’m pretty sure the sky pilot isn’t going to talk directly to the cretin because since said cretin doesn’t got to church, synagogue or a mosque and doesn’t know which side of the Bible is up. He isn’t worthy to hear the word. But maybe there will be a message directly to Huckabee who is an evangelical pastor and has a closer relationship with the Lord than the grifter.

    “May God continue to bless Israel, the United States and President Trump in this historic moment,” Huckabee went on to say, trying to strengthen his close relationship with the deity.

     As an aside, it’s always amazed me that evangelicals like Huckabee who are so upright and religious can support a person who is so antithetical to their beliefs. Supposedly they are moral and social conservatives who have traditional views on marriage, sexuality and family. None of these tenets matter to the twice impeached prez.

     Here’s more news from Tuesday.

    The gov closed down the suicide hotline that was set up to counsel LGBTQ people. “Let ‘em kill themselves, we don't like them anyway” is the new credo. There is no bottom so we have to quit wasting time looking for it.

     A message from Pope Leo XIV was shown on the big screen at a Chicago White Sox game. Brain worm man, RFKJr. will cut off vaccines for children because he knows more than any scientist about how to control diseases--vitamin A and castor oil.  The tourists from 46 countries, I won’t list them, are now banned from entry in the U.S. That is a combined population of 1.5 billion, yes billion, or 20 percent of the world’s population. This means none of the 9,816  residents of Tuvalu, some of whom were planning a vacation in Montana this year, now can’t come. By 2100 the islands will be under water because of climate change. By then, the sexual predator won’t be around so they may be able to immigrate.

    Finally, Betty Jochum, a pioneer in women’s baseball during WWII, has died at 104. She was last surviving member of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. You probably know them from the 1992 movie A League of Their Own.Years ago, Jochum told an interviewer, “When I got picked to play in the league it was amazing. I was actually going to get paid for playing a game.”

  The women were paid $50 a month, $1,100 a month in today’s dollars, which was pretty good at the time. At the same time, my dad was getting paid $1.00 an hour at the Boeing bomber plant in Wichita, KS. He wasn’t having fun playing a game.

     Anyway Betty Jochum was a very good player. In 1943 she led the league in base hits and stole 66 bases. After the movie came out, she said, “nobody would have ever heard about us” without the film.

     But she was wrong. I knew about the league during the war because I read the sports pages. I never saw any of their games but I did see women’s softball games in leagues that were sponsored by the war plants. I still remember a woman who was a  catcher on one of the teams who had curly blond hair. They called her, Kinky. That’s over 80 years ago. Now if I could just remember where I put that jar of spicy pickles.

Portia Says It All

Florida Man

6/18/12025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️  

     In the pitiful afterglow of the fake military parade and the stirring memory of the massive “No Kings” turnout on Saturday which is now estimated at more than four million real Americans, Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice strikes me as a perfect coda. 

      Portia is talking to Shylock and asking him to have mercy for Antonio who borrowed money to help Portia’s lover Bassanio in his courtship of Portia, and Antonio can’t pay it back because his cash is elsewhere.

     I won’t quote the whole speech, it’s on the innertubes like everything else, but being a noted Shakespeare scholar, here’s my interpretation.

     Mercy is mightier than the monarch.

     The monarch’s power is only temporal and doesn’t last forever.

     People are in awe of the monarch’s power “wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.”

     Mercy tempers and softens justice.

     Portia isn’t saying that Shylock isn’t due his payment but that he shouldn’t demand a “pound of flesh.” She is pleading for compassion and understanding and for Antonio's life. 

     The pound of flesh is literally a pound of flesh from any place on Antonio’s body that Shylock chooses. For Shylock it was never about the money anyway but about revenge for the way he was treated by Antonio who spit on him and called him a usurer. Portia ultimately saves Antonio’s life, because, after all, a pound of flesh is very serious interest.

     Now, I’m really no Shakespeare scholar as you can tell, but I can see how most of Portia’s speech applies to the criminal in the White House.

     He feels he has been so wronged by almost everyone, that he is due his pound of flesh and we can see how he is exacting it from all of us. There is no tempering of his anger and certainly no mercy or compassion.

     Am I taking this too far? Maybe. But Shakespeare has some other pertinent quotes that can apply to the would-be king.

    “Now is the winter of our discontent,” really should be expanded to this is our four years of discontent. “Be not afraid of greatness,” would apply if the felon was truly great other than in his own mind. He has never heard of this from All’s Well That Ends Well, “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

     Doing wrong to people is what he does and he savors it. He smirks while doing it. He eats cheeseburgers while doing it. The convicted felon is sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador or concentration caps somewhere in the U.S. He is snatching mothers from their children and fathers from their families, his masked thugs are chasing farm workers in the fields. He’s stopping medical research that would save lives and he’s killing people by closing USAID. 

     Like Hamlet the fraudster doesn’t understand that, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” He struts and frets well enough but he will be heard from no more.

     As this post is full of Shakespeare I’ll close with this: ”Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

     But don’t fret, Florida Man will see you on the morrow.

Moonshine Tuesday

Florida Man

6/17/12025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

        Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube@elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And while you’re at it check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet.

         It’s  moonshine Tuesday (it was going to be Moonshine Monday but a parade got in the way), a relatively unknown celebration that Florida Man shares with a few friends left over from the last century. So let’s drink up. 

     I laid in a supply of some of the good stuff from a source in Missouri which is only one of five states where it’s legal to make moonshine. It’s supposed to be for the moonshiner’s personal use only and production is limited to 200 gallons a year but I was able to score 50 gallons for my own personal use because I know an guy and he tossed in a half kilo of uncut coke. Special thanks to Rufus. Use that $2,000 to get your teeth fixed bro.

     Robert Mitchum’s grandson took time off from cruising Thunder Road and delivered on Saturday after outrunning cops in five states. Alabama didn’t care. I finally got rid of the Florida Highway Patrol guys who chased him here after we shared a few shots while watching the Panthers beat the Oilers.

     On Sunday, Eric and I split a pint for breakfast with our spicy sausage, eggs and cottage cheese. Eric didn’t like it much so I finished his half. My throat is a little raw but it should clear up in a week or so. 

        And as I’m sure you all know, moonshine wasn’t invented during the prohibition era which was supposed to keep Americans sober in the 1920s but only made it a lot easier for bootleggers to get rich. I’m sure my folks and their friends went to speakeasies and drank their favorite cocktails, the Bees Knees,  Sidecars, the Last Word, Ward Eight and Mary Pickford. Creative names for bathtub gin. No wonder I like me some Night Train.

     I read that distilling alcohol and calling it moonshine is probably a Scots-Irish invention in the 1700s though it may have come from England, but I feel too mellow to care. Anyway, it’s a high spirited drink that everyone including me thought just came from the mountains of Appalachia. The name Moonshine means alcohol distilled by the light of the moon. That’s a duh.

     I’ve never seen a real still except for the real stills in the movies and on Amazon where you can get an eight gallon stainless steel model for $90. It comes with a thumper keg, built-in thermometer and instruction manual. I was thinking of getting an espresso machine for $499 but now I’m thinking why not a still, especially one with a thumper keg. I can set it up on the patio. Nobody will mind.

             Pretty handsome piece of equipment. It’s undoubtedly illegal in Florida, but lots of stuff is. I’ll have to find 12-16 friends and then I’ll let you know how things come out. Until the, cheers, salud and l’chaim.

Up and Down Saturday

Florida Man

6/15/12025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And while you’re at it check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet.

     Florida Man was exhilarated, depressed and mortified all on one lovely Saturday in South Florida.

     The exhilarating part started with a stimulating Bagels&Bible, and it wasn’t just the lox and bagels, but a lively discussion of the bible led by Cantor Debbie that touched on making war no more, which reminded me of beating swards into plowshares, the importance of numbers in Judaism and maintaining our inner light, a concept picked up by the Quakers. We can discuss war no more and beating swords but it ain’t something that going to happen soon.

    From the synagogue, I headed for a “No Kings” demonstration and found at least 1,200 people, my estimate, lined up on all sides of a major intersection and spreading down several blocks in Coral Springs.       They carried a creative variety of home-made signs denouncing the anti-immigration, anti-democratic craziness of the demented felon who somehow occupies the White House. The crowd was a mix of young and old, trending toward young and we were encouraged by hundreds of honking motorists.

     I approached an older couple and said it reminded me of the 60s and they said yes and the 70s too. They were visiting from Brooklyn. An older women said it wasn’t her first rodeo either. And a young woman who said she had never done anything like carrying a sign and shouting at a demonstration but she was angry. Her sign said, “If this is about criminals then why put one in office.” Others said, “I didn’t become a lawyer to watch Trump dismantle our constitution.” “No king, not ever,” and “Resist Trump.” There were many more, and there was none of that professionally printed stuff the cult members all carry, probably because they can’t spell and don’t know how to make a sign on their own.

     Despite the heat, people were in good humor and everyone was talking to strangers. All in all, a good uplifting morning.

     Then came news from the Middle-East that was depressing. Israelis are in shelters and sirens are wailing in Tel Aviv. Missiles and drones are criss-crossing the skies between Iran and Israel. Innocent people are being killed. I know Iranians, immigrants, who have relatives in Tehran and I’m sure they cringe at every news report as do Jews all over the world.

    And, tragically there was another throwback to the 60s yesterday that was mortifying and frightening, undoubtedly the result of the convicted felon’s mindless encouragement of violence, something he avoided in Viet Nam because of his fake bone spurs. And he has the raw chutzpah to salute marching troops.

      Political assassination is back. It isn’t known yet why a gunman killed a Minnesota lawmaker, his wife and wounded another lawmaker and his wife. The killer is still on the loose. But it represents a huge jump in political violence and Trump is probably eating popcorn while watching the fake news on TV.

     And the scenario is frightening. The killer dressed as a cop and drove what looked like a police cruiser. Who wouldn’t be fooled by that trick? So now, Minnesotans are holed up in their homes, lawmakers are under police protection and all outdoor activities in the area are cancelled until the murderer is captured or killed. That won’t erase the fear in the air.

     I clearly remember JFK’s assassination in 1963. I was in a meeting with the executive board of the Houston Anti-Defamation League. I’m not sure how we heard about it, it must have been a telephone call, but everyone was stunned. No one knew what to say.

    I don’t know what to say now. We need the force of truth, love and justice to take over. It’s more powerful than any would-be king.

Problems on the Horizon

Florida Man

6/13/12025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

        Last night Florida Man called my old friend Basil, and by old I mean like 50 years old, to talk about a new worry I have that doesn’t keep me up at night yet but is serious enough to share.

     Basil was in Army intelligence and worked in the federal government under Carter so he knows some stuff. Turns out we were both worried about the potential problem when the felon’s take over of the military goes south.

     The concern is that a general or a colonel or a lieutenant decides that using his or her forces to occupy a city to quell a fake riot is an illegal order and shouldn’t be obeyed. And the people under that command go along with him or her as they would because that's what soldiers do.

    There is no such rule anymore that says you have to obey an illegal order.

     That commander could conceivably arrest the prez and could pit the military against the military which would represent a real problem.

      The possibility increases as the sex offender continues to prove his small penis isn’t really small by planning to invade more cities, all of them, just by chance, run by Dems.

      There is a section in Dr. Stangelove, a 1964 movie that has suddenly become relevant once again, to me at least. In the film Gen. Jack Ripper, fearing a communist invasion, has his men fight against other units of the Army.  Ripper also claimed that fluoride in the water was destroying “our precious bodily fluids.” Sound familiar?

     Also in 1964,Seven Days in May, had a similar frightening plot. Briefly,

a general and his followers plot a government takeover to stop the prez from signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia.

     We’re not quite there yet but this scenario is about as serious as it can get and nobody knows how it would come out because it’s never happened before.

     Well, Basil didn’t have any answers, only worries, like me and the more I think about it the scarier it is.

     He and I have had many similar discussions the the past on very serious subjects like what wine to buy and what to order for dinner at the neighborhood Middle Eastern restaurant. And then there are the Knicks, so we have experience in solving big problems. But not this one.

    Meanwhile, the cretin, afflicted by an extreme case of chutzpah, wrote about the military on social media saying, “You are the righteous sword of American Justice, and the ultimate shield of American Freedom.”

    Who put those words in his demented brain? Sounds like Nero exhorting the Centurions.

Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us or at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUTxvoKGypFF4nBO4V8MQPA or Elderly Brothers There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And while your at it check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet.

6/11/2025

Florida Man

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Florida man may be in South Florida, hence the name, but I feel I’m close enough to the violence in Los Angeles that I’ve been in my safe room most of yesterday and today.  I did go out to dinner with Paula last night but it was in an undisclosed location. The ramen was good by the way.

     As a side note, Paula just got back from Ireland and wasn’t arrested.

     Anyway, people are in the streets of L.A. protesting the ICE thugs who are dragging mothers, fathers and children out of work places, schools and churches. Even my mild mannered sister-in-law Judy called them Nazis when we talked last night. She lives in Omaha which is much closer to the chaos than Florida and she was talking from her storm cellar.

     We’ve seen it all before, the mobs attacking police with flowers, the flaming car, there’s always a flaming car, and rioters holding signs that scare the pants off the general populous. Here are some examples:

     “We are California,” is a real mean one.

     “Anne Frank wrote in her diary about this,” is accurate but too long. Signs should be five words or less.

     “Ice melts under resistance,” is one that may not be accurate but gets ICE on the camera.

     “Immigrants are our backbone. Abolish ICE,” is thoughtful but the crazies in congress and the White House don’t know what a backbone is.

     And my favorite so far, “National Guard LOL.”

     So, besides ICE in their masks, 2,000 National Guard soldiers have been pulled out of Costco, their offices, auto repair shops and gyms to quell the violence. And 700 Marines, sent there by by drunk Sec Def, are also on site. 

     Now, I’ve read that none of these military people have training in how to handle civilians rebelling against government oppression. That will certainly be a problem when they are trying to subdue angry civilians . Many of them probably have family members scheduled for arrest and deportation. They are clearly supporting the wrong side and as they should know, the felon supports them by calling them suckers and losers. 

    Los Angeles is burning according to the liars in D.C. The demented cretin called the mostly peaceful demonstrators “insurrectionist mobs” and said the city has been “invaded and occupied.” Who is invading? The people in the streets who live in the city or the troops arriving in armored personnel carriers?

     Peaceful or not, government forces have used tear gas, flash-bang grenades and rubber and plastic bullets on the rioters who have thrown rocks. I’ve never understood how rioters can find rocks on city streets. 

     Well, that’s all for today folks. I have to go back into the safe room, also called the bathroom, because I hear tank treads and low flying aircraft outside. 

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us or at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUTxvoKGypFF4nBO4V8MQPA or Elderly Brothers There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And while your at it check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet.

Fascism in Action

Florida Man

6/9/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

Florida Man is getting well known. Yesterday morning, Gavin Newsom,  governor of California, emailed me personally to let me know that the state is being invaded by the felon’s troops.

I’m glad he did because we all need to know what’s happening under the Nazi regime.

The governor says 2,000 National Guard troops are pouring into Los Angeles on the pretext of quelling  protests against the sex offender’s illegal immigration raids by masked ICE thugs. 

It’s not clear if the troops, mostly civilian getting a gov check for spending one weekend a month where they listen to lectures, are coming in tanks, trucks or armored personnel carriers and what they are bringing with them to keep order. I suspect M4s, the basic infantry weapon that can fire more than 900 rounds a minute and has a range of 500 yards. Tear gas, pepper balls and what are called crowd control munitions have already been used. 

These “munitions” can include water cannons, chemical irritants, disorientation devices, acoustic weapons, blunt force weapons (batons) and kinetic impact projectiles which are rubber or plastic bullets that can and have killed. A pretty lethal armory. I’ll go into the details of these really frightening tactics as things escalate. 

Newsom: “We have been working closely with law enforcement. There is no unmet need. The president is attempting to inflame passions and provoke a response. He would like nothing more than for this provocative show of force -- and Pete Hegseth's absurd threat to deploy United States Marines on American soil – to escalate tensions and incite violence. They want a spectacle. They want the violence. They think this is good for them politically.

This is not the way a civilized country behaves. It is completely deranged behavior.”

I’m sure we all remember what happened at Kent State on May 4, 1970, so long ago, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Viet Nam war. Four killed, nine wounded.

There’s even a counterculture song about it by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young which I’ve never heard. It’s titled simply “Ohio.” 

         The lyrics resonate: 

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio.”

Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbles of the White House and a certified crazy person, says of the L.A. protests, “This is a fight to save civilization.” What the fuck. A few hundred protesters are a threat to civilization? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—war, famine, death and conquest— are threats.

It’s been reported that the man with bone spurs has been following the entertainment on TV while eating popcorn. That’s what he was doing when his flotsam and jetsam army was attacking the capitol on J6.

I wonder if my Harvard t-shirt is a threat to civilization.

Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us or at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUTxvoKGypFF4nBO4V8MQPA or Elderly Brothers There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And while your at it check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet.

The Galveston Movement

Florida Man

6/8/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️  

Note: You can find the Elderly Brothers at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUTxvoKGypFF4nBO4V8MQPA

This morning Florida Man is digging into the past to tell you about the Galveston Movement, a significant, overlooked and strange part of American Jewish history that I think involved the history of the Friedbergs.

My grandfather Sam was born in Wilno, Russia in 1885. It actually might have been Vilnius, Lithuania or Vilna, Russia but that detail is lost and makes no difference. In 1905, at the age of 20, he sailed from Antwerp, Belgium aboard the S.S. Vaderland.  He registered with immigration on Ellis Island as Samuel Chones.       Nobody in the family seemed to know where he got the name Friedberg. He settled in Brooklyn and married his first wife in 1910.

 From there the history is dimmer. I was always told he moved to Galveston before settling in Kansas City, Mo. but most of the immigrants in the Galveston Movement came directly there not NY. The city was taking refugees before Ellis Island opened in 1892. So my suspicion is he was indirectly part of the Galveston Movement but how he got there is a mystery.

Jews from Eastern Europe who were fleeing poverty, pogroms and the cossacks in Russia were pouring into New York City and other east coast cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Movement was designed to relocate the masses to inland cities to reduce overcrowding. 

The idea of relocating masses of people rarely works. Look at the American history of moving Native Americans from their land to reservations. A disaster and a deadly one.

Anyway, this idea, supported by Jacob Schiff, a German Jewish banker and philanthropist and Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, was in principle altruistic. The program was supposed to provide better job opportunities and mitigate anti-immigrant backlash and anti-semitism. By sheer coincidence I worked for a philanthropic foundation in NYC partially funded by the Schiff family.

ChatGPT says that about 10,000 Jews ended up in Galveston and thousands of others in Nebraska, Oklahoma and Colorado. The movement ended in 1914 because of rising anti-semitism in the cities taking in Jews. It always creeps in doesn’t it.

Any inquisitive teenager would have asked Sam, who had a horse drawn produce wagon in K.C., questions that could have filled in the missing facts. I unfortunately didn’t become inquisitive until it was too late.

My memories: Sam had a thick shock of white hair from the time I knew him, he spoke heavily accented English and had little to say which is a problem that cut both ways. I didn’t like going to his apartment every Sunday morning and eating rock-hard bagel made by his wife Sarah when I could have been out somewhere with my friends. 

My clearest memory of him was when he was taking orders on the phone for Monday delivery. “Case lettuce,” half bushel apples, celery, no celery, carton lemons.” Not much of a memory because there is so some much I’ll never know about him.

I don’t know what he did in Russia, why he decided to come to America, how he found Antwerp, where he got the money to travel and what he brought with him, if he shopped at Macy’s or ate at Katz’s deli while in New York, what he did in Galveston, (if he was ever there), why and how he got to K.C., why he got divorced and remarried, how he learned the produce biz, where he got his horse and wagon, where he kept it and what he named the horse. I do remember seeing his horse and wagon in front of his apartment on Agnes Street. The horse was munching on the radio antenna of our car.

 We do have this picture of the Vaderland and I think Sam Friedberg is the man in the light colored coat in the back of the launch. Thanks to Kelly Friedberg for the ancestry information.

  Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us or at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUTxvoKGypFF4nBO4V8MQPA . There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And while your at it check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet.

Florida Man

6/6/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     D-Day was 80 years ago yesterday, June 6, 1944, and Florida Man remembers it through the haze of time. That was a scary day in world history and it’s scary that I’m old enough to remember hearing the big news on the radio because there was no television and I’m sure at 9-years-old I didn’t grasp the full significance of what was happening over there.

    Of course, I  know now that it was one of the most consequential days in modern history and probably world history. If the invasion had been repelled WWII would have come out much differently with most if not all of Europe under Nazi control. What a terrible thought and we would have been living through it all these years. At the time I had a fascination with the war maps that were in the newspaper most every day. I liked to see the arrows of advancing armies and the battle lines. I don’t think I really knew what they meant but I cut them out and pasted them into a scrapbook until the war ended. I remember showing the book to my 4th grade teacher. She didn’t think much of it and put it aside where it quickly disappeared.

     My Dad didn’t serve in the military. I think the reason was age and he had two kids, but he worked the night shift at the Boeing bomber plant in Wichita, KS and worked days at a jewelry store. I usually saw him briefly when he woke me at 4 a.m. to say hi but that’s all I  remember.

     What strikes me today, and my Elderly Brother Larry and I talked about it in Episode 21 yesterday morning, is that the kids, the 20-year-olds who landed at Normandy that day are now 100 if they’re still alive.

     I checked the numbers. As of this month, the number of surviving veterans of the D-Day landings is estimated to be fewer than 15,000 worldwide. This figure includes veterans from the United States, U. K., Canada, France, and other Allies who took part in the invasion.

     In the U.S., the Department of Veterans Affairs says that fewer than 1/2 percent of the 16.4 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive. That’s about 66,000 vets.

     As the final vets die the history of that huge event will fade. It’s like the Holocaust. Most survivors have died and that horrific event will die with them except in the history books.

      I have a war story, not my own, that I’m saving for July 4th.

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And check out Florida Man at ardyfriedberg.com on the internet. Same FM but prettier.

The Feud

Florida Man

6/6/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     So Florida Man jumped out of bed this morning, rather rolled out, at 6:30, about an hour later than usual, feeling like the Lion of Judah, though I didn’t really know who the Lion was until I looked it up.

     I put in my contacts, brushed my teeth, used the Water Pik, gargled, shaved, dressed in my best bib and tucker, a piece of ornamental lace worn by women in the 17th century that I like. I opened the door to get the Times and found it was too far from the door to hold it open with my foot and grab it so I let the door shut and of course it locked.

     After three tries I guessed the right code, slid the plastic wrap off the paper, opened it and saw a three column headline about the richest, but not smartest man in the world and a rich but truly dumb child-man rolling in the mud in the playground like two fifth graders.

    My first thought was of FDR or Eisenhower or Kennedy or even Nixon, especially Nixon, rolling in the mud and shouting, “Yes, you are. Am not. Are too. Am not.”

    A country of 330 million people elected a game show host of very limited brain, as Pooh would say, who throws out stupid nicknames for people, belittles the handicapped and decorates everything but his body with gold leaf is engaged in a shouting match over who is the biggest buffoon.

     Until a few days ago, the couple who were doing everything but sleeping together are breaking up and breaking up the place. There are words to describe this incredible public scene. Let’s see what works. Will petty, childish, inappropriate, meaningless do? I’m sure there are move but I like petty and childish best.

     The felon is supposed to be running the country, not texting garbage at three in the morning, not worrying about George Clooney, Taylor Swift or if they use real cheese on the burgers at McDonald’s. Or especially Elon. Just kiss him goodbye.

     One repub, Ryan Zinke of Montana said, “It’s like India and Pakistan. It just escalates and neither one of them seem to back down and understand the strength of each other.” Well, unlike India and Pakistan, only the fraudster has nukes and even he isn’t stupid enough to use one on a Tesla factory. Or is he?

     I calls to mind the final scene of the 1962 movie Days of Wine and Roses when alcoholic Jack Lemmon asks his wife Lee Remick, “Remember how it used to be?” before they drunkenly fall off a balcony, crash into a chandelier and die on the marble floor?

    This who cares breakup could well end up on the marble floor. It would be a fitting coda.

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube@elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free.

The White House Faker

Florida Man

6/5/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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       Florida Man is dismayed and sickened when I see headlines about the fraudster’s love for, and commitment to, Israel and his plan to stop anti-semitism at Harvard despite his history of welcoming white supremacists to join him for dinner and saying that if he lost the election it would be the the fault of Jewish voters.

     The fact is that 25 percent of the undergrads at Harvard are Jewish and 10 percent of the grad students are Jewish. In this country Jews constitute about 2.4 percent of the population. We are pretty much overrepresented at the university. Where’s the beef. Just more proof of his unhinged mind and need for vengeance.

     Well, don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth folks. It’s all for show, for money and for votes, and he can change in an instant. He cares about Israel and anti-semitism about as much as Hitler. I know, I know, don’t compare these people to Nazi’s but all they need are brown shirts to make it official.

    The felon’s Svengali and hatchet man, the creep who’s leading the illegal deportation of undocumented immigrants as well as citizens, is a Jew who hates Jews. Florida Man could be wrong, he often is, but I don’t think so in this case. 

    The attack in Boulder, CO,  by the crazed fool who used home made Molotov cocktails, gasoline filled jars, to spray flame on Jews peacefully marching for the release of the hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, is only the most recent violent show of the anti-semitism the fool says he's preventing. Eight people were injured, one a Holocaust survivor. Last week, two Israelis who met while working at the Israeli embassy in D.C.and were planning to get married, were shot and killed. In both cases the message was “Kill the Jews.”

     The statistics compiled annually by ADL are frightening. Vandalism and assault against Jews were up 20 percent last year. There were more than 5,000 rallies last year with anti-Israel themes. Overall, there were nearly 9,000 anti-semitic acts reported to the agency last year.

     The various anti-Jewish movements have many themes.They can be pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist or just plain nameless hatred of Jews but they all want to kill us. The Boulder nut told law enforcement that he wanted to ”kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.”

     I wrote yesterday about the Zoom meeting at the synagogue on Monday night. As a reporter I covered riots and police standoffs, I’ve been to Haiti during a government crisis and Cuba when people were taking to rafts to get to the U.S. and was never frightened but I admit that I was thinking about D.C. and Boulder on my way to the meeting.

     The armed guard at the synagogue door, a visible testament to Jewish concerns, was a reassuring presence. Kol Tikvah and other congregations are spending a lot of money for protection because it’s necessary.

     But it all may be wasted because when the head of the country, a demented, vindictive convicted criminal says there are good people on both sides you know there is trouble ahead. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists are standing by for the word.

    Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free.

Readying for Change

Florida Man

6/4/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     This is going to be a long story. On Monday night Florida man went to a Zoom event at the synagogue to talk about immigration. There were about a dozen people at the synagogue and another dozen on Zoom.

       The discussion was led by the Florida organizer for  the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, a group I’d never heard of until last week but they’ve been around for 60 years working to control climate change, stop gun violence and advocate for  immigration reform among other very positive things at the core of Jewish beliefs. So far they’ve organized 25 reform synagogues representing 50,000 Jews in Florida.

     I thought things were further along in their plans to respond to the felon’s tragic deportation crusade, but they have started though there are as yet no plans to demonstrate in Florida or D.C. or anywhere else. And no specific plans of any kind.

     The evening reminded me of the program I ran in Cleveland in 1967-68 called Project Bridge, an ill-fated attempt to lessen tensions between the Black and the white ethnic communities. I’ll explain ill-fated shortly. Basil will remember this because the Ford Foundation funded the program and he was the program manager. That’s how me met and became friends 57 years ago.

     I’ll give you some details because they show how difficult it is to change attitudes. My staff was made up of 14 mostly young idealistic nuns who wore regular clothes, not habits, and two other men who handled public relations and finances. I haven’t thought much about this for nearly six decades so my recollection may be a little hazy.

     We held meetings in the Cleveland ghetto, that was the year the Cuyahoga River caught fire from years of accumulated trash, and in white ethic land with a rather naive program stressing equality. The nuns did the hard work. They spoke at church meetings and wherever else they could and they were yelled at, especially in the white areas, and looked on with skepticism by Black audiences.

     The women went door to door in largely Catholic areas and were screamed at, spit on and hosed down by the welcoming residents.

     The project’s message was good but not for that time at least in that city. It was the kind of sincere effort that was hard on the staff and my family and essentially wasted manpower and money.

     There is a point here but first I have to tell you a story about a party we held one night at the house we were renting. The entire staff came plus a priest by the name of Ivan Illich who happened to be in town.

      Illich, an Austrian priest and theologian who was an extremist at that time, a Marxist and a socialist, and he pontificated rather brilliantly I think, and he drank scotch and he pontificated and drank scotch. And we all drank with him. I knew the nuns were good drinkers because we had other parties but this was an exceptional event liquor wise. Sometime during the evening we ordered more liquor and paid to have it delivered by taxi.T hat’s really all I remember. But it’s a good memory. I wish I recalled  more.

     The point: I don’t think this RAC program will be ill-fated because of the number of people and faiths involved at the outset, but it’s going to be an uphill fight to dent the fortress these fiends have built. Maybe times have changed enough for this kind of effort to have a chance. I plan to do all I can to help and if I have to use my cane to march I will. It will take the bravery of all of us to do what’s right.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube@elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Friday. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free.

Drugged Up Assistant President

Florida Man

6/1/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Here is a brief portrait of the man who ruined so many lives because, hey, he could do it. He was the other president until he stepped down last week. I’m talking Elon Musk who is always described as the richest man in the world, not the smartest.

     At the same time the felon was shaking hands with Musk and bidding him a fond adieu, the NYT was reporting that Mr. Tesla was conducting his purge while using more drugs than Sting and his band The Police combined.

     The Muskrat’s drug use has been an open secret since he burst on the scene a few months ago as the assistant president. The report listed ketamine, a drug known to induce schizophrenia-like symptoms, Adderall, Ambien and other substances. The other drugs he was fond of, sources told the Times, included but were not limited to LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and mushrooms.

     That is amazing variety of drugs even for a serious drug addict. Take LSD and its effects. It’s called “acid” for a reason. It doesn’t just help you see colors and hear sounds it can cause your heart to race, raise blood pressure, cause sleeplessness, tremors, anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. And the effects can last 12 hours of more.

     Just the kind of drug that can cause you to wear Storm Trooper clothes, dark aviator sunglasses in the Oval Office, give Nazi salutes and brandish a chainsaw like a mad Paul Bunyan. And just the kind of drug you want someone to use while making decisions that guide your band of teenagers as they decimate government agencies.

    You all remember Timothy Leary, the psychologist who promoted LSD so you could “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” In 1966 he was convicted under the marijuana act, sentenced to 30 years in prison and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.

      Of course, Musk, the user of most of the drugs available, won’t face any charges because he’s a friend of a convicted felon who is busy pardoning his white collar criminal friends while he deports American citizens.

     The fraudster was asked about Musk’s drug habits and said he wasn’t aware of them. But he once said he didn’t know some of his “close” friends either. “I’m not troubled by anything with Elon. I think he’s fantastic. He did a great job,” he said. “And you know DOGE continues. And by the time it’s finished, we’ll have numbers that will knock your socks off.”

     Among so many other wonderful traits, the sex offender is a giant hypocrite. He doesn’t drink and has publicly criticized people who take illegal drugs or drink alcohol.

     Florida Man meant to write fluff today but I saw a picture of a smug, sneering Musk this morning and couldn’t help myself.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Fridays. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free.

Florida Man

5/31/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Here's an interesting development in line with what Florida Man has been rapping on for months. Not every day which is a blessing for all of us but this is a broad jump in the right direction and helps me validates my venting.

     My synagogue, Kol Tikvah in Parkland, a Fort Lauderdale suburb, is joining the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism “to raise our moral voices” and join with other faiths “to ensure that every refugee/immigrant is protected and cared for in our communities.”

     In making the announcement and urging attendance at a town hall meeting to discuss immigration issues, a pertinent passage from Leviticus is quoted as a reason and a basis for joining with RAC.

     Here’s the whole section: “When a migrant, refugee or asylum seeker” – a ‘GER’  resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him or her. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”

    The synagogue’s announcement says the Torah tells us that Jews are commanded to care for the “other”, “the stranger”, “the alien”, the “refugee,” and it gives a similar message 36 times. Now that’s a mandate. By the way, the word migrant or stranger in Hebrew is “GER.”  

     I’ve never heard of RAC before but I haven’t heard of a lot of things and in fact, sometimes my hearing isn’t really so good. But they have been doing a lot of good stuff for 60 years. The group’s strategy is to “pursue justice, equity and belonging in 2025 and beyond.” Quite an undertaking since the animals in charge of the gov have just the opposite goals, in short, to harm as many people as possible and afflict the already afflicted and the rest of us too.

     So, Kol Tikvah has joined the movement though it isn’t exactly a movement yet, to do justice and march proudly. Jews especially know the sting and danger of ostracism. It’s been a fact of life throughout Jewish history. It still is, with anti-semitism on the rise and a crazy Jew, Stephen Miller, who whispers in the ear of the convicted felon and probably kisses it as well, telling him how to best punish people who are not white or Christian.

     Am I being too severe? I don’t think so. Anyway, I plan to be at the synagogue on June 2 for a town hall meeting to learn more about the RAC campaign and I've signed up to join a statewide zoom call on June 17 that will launch the campaign.

    Three cheers for Kol Tikvah and Rabbi Bradd Boxman. I’ll keep you all informed.

Shavout

Florida Man

5/30/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Like so many other things about the Jewish religion that Florida Man doesn’t know is the importance of Shavout as a holiday and that blintzes are important to the holiday celebration.

     I do remember getting two days off for the holiday when I worked for the Anti-Defamation League in the 60s, that’s 1960s, but I don't remember anybody mentioning blintzes.

     Anyway I read up a bit  on Shavout which starts on June 1 this year. It comes seven weeks after Passover, and I’ve learned that seven is an important number in Judaism. It celebrates the day the Ten Commandments were given to Moses  on Mount Sinai.

     In those days Jewish men would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to bring offerings to God. It’s much easier today. Jews just go to the synagogue and eat festive meals.

     There’s more to it than that, of course, but here’s something else I learned recently from one of my favorite websites, The Nosher. Blintzes, filled with whipped farmer’s cheese or fruit and topped with sour cream or apple sauce are a Shavout staple.

     Here’s a holocaust survival story I read that will pull at your heartstrings like they all do but it has to do with blintzes.

     In her research for Recipes Remembered, a Celebration of Survival,  author June Hersh describes an encounter with Hanna, a survivor of Auschwitz. Hanna told Hersh how her mother would somehow sneak out of the barracks and bring her food she stole from the camp’s kitchen. Here’s the killer quote: “My mother gave birth to me every day we lived in Auschwitz, because without her I would not have survived.”

     But Hanna’s memories are of also of the blintzes her mother made before the war in Poland. She described it as a thin crepe filled with preserves, nuts and sugar and topped with strawberry sauce. Hersh is my source for this story.

     Here's my blintz story. No heartstrings are involved. My grandmother  made blintzes. I still have the recipe 60 years later. Bema’s recipes were never written down, she just made things up,  but for some reason I asked her to tell me how she made blintzes and I wrote it down. I didn’t ask her how she made pickled pigs feet but I loved them.

     Later I typed up the blintz recipe and I keep it in a folder with a bunch of oldies but goodies including a great recipe for chopped liver. The blintzes are so easy and fun that I make a batch from time to time and freeze the leftover crepes. I fill mine with farmer cheese, a little sugar, a dash of maple syrup and some vanilla. They’re topped with apple sauce or sour cream. I’ll send a copy to any of you guys who want it. It’s part of my Jewish history.

Baseball and Tech and No Tech

Florida Man

5/29/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     It’s sports day for Florida Man.

     I was watching a baseball game the other afternoon and noted how every player had a little piece of paper in his pocket or his hat or a wrist band that told him something about where to play on each hitter, shallow, deep, left, right.

     With the pitch clock now in use the pitcher and catcher don’t use fingers and nods to decide on each pitch they have technology to do it.

     I’ve been wondering how it worked and AI told me. The catcher wears a wrist device and presses buttons to call the pitch. The pitcher wears and earpiece in his cap and hears an audio signal, for example, “Throw it as hard as you can at his rib cage and see if he can get out of the way” or  simply “fastball inside.”

     I thought it might say something like, “Aaron Judge, stand against the fence” or “Juan Soto, just try and get to the ball.”

     But no. Here’s how it goes tech wise.

     There is a runner on second, one out, a left-handed power hitter is up. The catcher taps a button on his wrist  that signals the pitcher to throw a slider low and away. The pitcher hears the signal in his earpiece. No visible signals. Pretty neat.

     Here’s how we did it in the old, and I mean old, days. We called it sandlot baseball, not because it was sandy but because the dust was six inches deep in August in Kansas City and it looked sandy.

We communicated by yelling, “ Move over, this guy always hits to left” or “Come on in this guy‘s no hitter” which was often yelled about me. We had no technology. We had no analytics but we could see and we could yell and we had nothing but fun.

     Since there were no fences, when you hit the ball between the outfielders you didn’t admire it, you didn’t throw your bat in the air, you didn’t point you finger at the sky pilot, you just ran like hell all the way around the bases. There were no coaches signaling you so you kept running like mad and slid into home even if you didn’t need to.

     The point here beyond nostalgia is that athletes don’t seem to have much fun on their multi-million dollar salaries. Oh, they gloat a lot, they yell and beat their chests and maybe that’s fun but it doesn’t look like it.

     Our payback was a milk shake or a cherry coke at the drug store after the game. That was plenty.

Chicken Everywhere

Florida Man

5/26/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     It’s Monday so Florida Man is relaxing and thinking of chickens after shopping at the market across the street. I don't know if you've noticed but chickens are ubiquitous. We’re up to our asses in chickens. Despite bird flu the bins and deli counters in the grocery are full of chicken.

    My grocery sells every part of the bird and every part of every other animal as well, but we're talking chickens here. They have feet, gizzards, necks, livers, teeth and on up to the parts we eat that are cut into every configuration.The deli offers maple honey, chipotle, barbecue and other flavors for slicing. Then there are all those same parts in the store freezers.

     Yesterday I bought a pound of livers to make chopped liver, one of my favorites, and some feet to make broth. Yes, I have quart containers of broth in my freezer. If you need any just send me an email, I have gallons.

      Anyway, that’s just one store. Imagine what an immigrant from Afghanistan would think looking at all the abundance.

      So, the question is, where the hell do all these birds come from and how do growers keep up with demand. There are 26 billion in the world and about 1.5 billion in the U.S. That’s a little more than three chickens per person at any given time. It’s a good thing those birds don’t have access to AR-15s. Their life span is short, between 40 and 48 days, so that wouldn’t give them much time for firearms training.

       To feed us the packing plants kill tons of chickens like crazy, about 25 million every day. That’s about one million an hour, 17,000 per minute and 300 every second. Is this a great country or what. I don’t know if this is TMI or not but it’s something you can add to that rarely visited place deep in your memory bank.

        Chickens are stunned by electric shot or carbon monoxide before being slaughtered. They are given a water bath and killed by a cut to the throat given by a machine. Then their feathers are removed and they move through a line of workers who cut them into various pieces and they are packaged the way we find them in the store.

        The wrapped chicken, whole or in pieces, is placed in baskets and sent through a “blast tunnel” to receive a chill and extend shelf life. Finally, the packages go through a metal detector to make sure there are no hidden messages inside that would help the enemy. Salmonella is rare in chicken according to the National Chicken Council people. This will either reassure you as it’s meant to, or put you off all chicken except KFC.

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Fridays. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free.

Comfort Zone

Florida Man

5/25/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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         Bagels and Bible is interesting to me despite the fact that I really don’t know what’s going on beyond bagels, cream cheese and lox.

     Still, a few things from Saturday morning struck me as significant. 

    One has to do with all of us being only resident strangers in the world along with God who is also a stranger. I like the concept although I’ve yet to meet God. But we are all strangers until we meet and talk. Even then most of us remain strangers.

     Another is the finiteness of our existence, just the blink of an eye in the great scheme of things. It’s true in the great scheme but not in the smaller scheme of our daily lives, of the way we spend our years involved in life’s important things and life’s trivia. Jobs and raising kids and trying to live a decent, healthy life sometimes seem endless but then looking back they sometimes seem to have passed in the blink of an eye.

     The third is encouragement to get out of our comfort zones and do things we haven’t done or as Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” A magnet with that suggestion has been on the fridge for years.  

     The determination of comfort zones is really relative and most of us do something every day that qualifies getting out at least a little. Just driving on the Interstate can move us out of the zone. A doctor’s appointment and its accompanying anxiety can be way out of the zone, while cooking dinner can be very comfortable along with a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and a line of coke.

     But the discussion that followed focused on things we can do that may be uncomfortable like performing a mitzvah for a street person or helping a stranger with a cane open a door. Hard. I’ve often thought of taking a homeless person home for a shower, some clean clothes and a good meal. I haven’t done it. That zone, so far, is too far.

     On a personal note, I can’t count the times I got out of the zone as a newspaper reporter, those times when you have to push yourself just to do your job, like knocking on the door of a family whose child just drowned in their backyard pool. Your finger can be poised over that doorbell for an eternity.

     My comfort zones are long walks on the beach at sunset, reading poetry in Spanish and digging into a mess of grits. But my most comfortable zone is lighting up a pipe of opium and watching Rambo on Netflix.

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. There will usually be a new exciting episode posted on Tuesday and Fridays. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. 

Among the Things I Don't Know

Florida Man

5/20/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Florida Man chatted with a medical tech yesterday who I met while getting a checkup at my primary’s office. He was wearing a name tag, Abraham Ziv, with an Israeli flag attached. He’s was a middle-aged guy with an accent I couldn’t recognize but turns out he grew up in Peru and left when he was 17.

      We had some time so I asked some questions. He didn't know exactly how his Polish family ended up in Peru but he said he left home in the early 1980s and spent the next 20 years in Israel. He speaks Hebrew, Spanish and good English. He was a medic in the IDF in the mid-1980s and became a registered nurse.

    I asked him how it was living as a young adult in Israel.

    He said he lived on a kibbutz where he met his wife who is an American and was volunteering in the country. Their’s, like many other kibbutzim, specialized in farming and they lived in what sounded to me like a Soviet collective.

    The residents ate all their meals together in a dining hall. “No one cooked at home and the houses were like small cabins,” Abe said. “The children, even the smallest, were cared for and lived in a dormitory. We called them children’s houses. They saw their parents only a few hours a day.”

     I said that sounded like Karl Marx’s ethos, “From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.” I took three years of Russian history and I remember some of it. He said it was more socialist than communist. Sounded like a distinction without a difference to me.

     He went on to explain that people were assigned jobs like working the fields and in then industrial type jobs like food processing and the beginnings of the plastic industry. Routine stuff like kitchen duty was rotated. Equality was the byword, Abe said. Holidays were shared.

“It was a good life but not an easy life,” he said. “Everybody supported the kibbutz and everyone in it and we all had our job responsibilities.”

     I asked if their was money. He said yes, but not much because it really wasn’t needed except for personal items. I like that part though I would need specialty items like fluoride toothpaste and a nail clipper.

     I thanked him for sharing. He went back to work and I went home. I suppose I could have read the same thing in the metaverse but hearing it first hand was more satisfying.

    The things I don’t know just keep piling up.

Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier

Let's All Register

Florida Man

5/18/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     RFKJr, the man in charge of America's health, the man with the worm in his brain and a dead bear in the trunk of his car, a man who swims in sewage with his family (yes, it’s true), the man who thinks castor oil and vitamin A are the answers to all health issues is proposing a national registry of people on the autism spectrum. He wants research done on the developmental disability.

     It seems that little research needs to be done on the cause or causes since heredity is the primary reason people have autism. Research on treatment or a cure would be more useful. But research is out because the brains in the research areas of the NIH have been fired, dismissed, laid off, put on leave. 

     About one percent of Americans have autism, while 40 percent have cancer. But don’t bother with research on cancer let’s look at autism.

     So why is a registry necessary? So the gov can locate the losers who have autism in case of what? Oh, I don't know. Let’s get those names so we have them for reference when we start deporting people with physical and mental handicaps. Medical research can take many bizarre and evil forms as we have seen from the experiments performed on Jews in concentration camps in WWII by the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.

     Next it will be a registry of the deaf, the blind, the deaf and blind, people with small hands, Democrats, gays, Jews, Italians, people who are “politically unreliable.” Lots of groups available for deportation if you have their names and addresses and you know they may not like you and that’s disloyal. 

The “politically unreliable” are already being fired from government jobs because, oh yeah, we have to downsize the bureaucracy.

     Bring anything to mind?

     From 1933 to 1939, Hitler and the Nazis passed dozens of laws restricting Jews from universities, medical and legal practice and business ownership but they only could do this effectively if they knew who was Jewish. Jews had to register their property and in1939 they were forced to wear yellow stars.

     Just sayin’. It’s a slippery slope. When people of color are excluded from the U.S. and white people from South Africa are welcomed and given citizenship. Those persecuted Norwegians who live in one of the happiest countries in the world will be coming soon because they’re white. You can see the way things are going.

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Florida Man

5/16/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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This could be an elaborate spoof. But it isn’t because spoofs are supposed to be funny and this is tragic, not a grin or smile is possible.

     Just imagine this. Kristi Noem, Sec of DHS is working on a TV reality show where immigrants compete against immigrants for citizenship. Let the gladiators enter the arena and compete to save their lives while the rulers laugh, eat cheeseburgers and fries and give thumbs down to the losers. It gives a whole new meaning to the long running TV hit “Survivor.”

     Noem’s  been called 'ICE Barbie' for treating her Cabinet position like a TV production, firing people and requiring lie detector tests to prove their loyalty. But now she’s promoting the idea of an actual reality show that pits immigrants against each other “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship.”

     Her group of crazies has prepared a 35-page outline of the idea. I wrote a lot of books, they never had that long an outline, and I had a good agent but if I had said here’s a good idea Gladys, I’ll write a novel about Christians and lions and guys with swords fighting for their lives only they’re in American in the 21st century, she’d have fired me. The title of the fiasco is “The American.” Brilliant.

     The poor contestants will ride around on a train and do stuff like bake hamantaschen and cook egg foo young, throw axes and play beer pong, wrestle alligators and pick cotton to see who best gets what American culture is all about and that person gets to be a certified murican citizen.

     The author of this monstrosity is a Canadian who created “Duck Dynasty” and says he just wants to “make a show that celebrates the immigration process.” If by celebrate you mean waiting years, taking a citizenship test and biting your nails waiting for the result a celebration of a process.

     The Dailymail.com has confirmed that Noem, 53, a former governor, loves the idea. No surprise, she loves to see herself on TV in military gear and brandishing an automatic rifle, poised to shoot some Guatemalan mother and her child trying to cross the border.

     The man behind the pitch, whose name I won’t mention because he’s an idiot, says he’s confident the show will be a hit. He may be right but that doesn’t make it any less of a Greek tragedy.

     The prizes, like one million American Airlines points, a $10,000 Starbucks gift card and a lifetime supply of gasoline are being called  ‘iconically American.”

     The finale is said to feature the American train puffing into the station in Washington with the winner then walking to Capitol Hill for a swearing-in ceremony.

     Apparently there is some concern in the DHS staff that the optics of turning the use of desperate immigrants into a reality show isn’t such a great idea. Duh, duh and duh.

     But, I bet the concern is voiced with a whole lot of laughter about the poor contestants not even understanding what’s going on because they speak a “foreign” language, look like they just waded across the Rio Grande and don’t even have any shoes.

     This great idea will be followed by “Heroes on Parade” featuring the Jan. 6 insurrectionists tromping to the capitol, climbing the walls, firing bear spray at the cops and breaking the windows.

     We can only hope that Karma is ready to pounce on Noem and her incredibly stupid and downright evil people.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Unreality

Florida Man

5/16/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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This could be an elaborate spoof. But it isn’t because spoofs are supposed to be funny and this is tragic, not a grin or smile is possible.

     Just imagine this. Kristi Noem, Sec of DHS is working on a TV reality show where immigrants compete against immigrants for citizenship. Let the gladiators enter the arena and compete to save their lives while the rulers laugh, eat cheeseburgers and fries and give thumbs down to the losers. It gives a whole new meaning to the long running TV hit “Survivor.”

     Noem’s  been called 'ICE Barbie' for treating her Cabinet position like a TV production, firing people and requiring lie detector tests to prove their loyalty. But now she’s promoting the idea of an actual reality show that pits immigrants against each other “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship.”

     Her group of crazies has prepared a 35-page outline of the idea. I wrote a lot of books, they never had that long an outline, and I had a good agent but if I had said here’s a good idea Gladys, I’ll write a novel about Christians and lions and guys with swords fighting for their lives only they’re in American in the 21st century, she’d have fired me. The title of the fiasco is “The American.” Brilliant.

     The poor contestants will ride around on a train and do stuff like bake hamantaschen and cook egg foo young, throw axes and play beer pong, wrestle alligators and pick cotton to see who best gets what American culture is all about and that person gets to be a certified murican citizen.

     The author of this monstrosity is a Canadian who created “Duck Dynasty” and says he just wants to “make a show that celebrates the immigration process.” If by celebrate you mean waiting years, taking a citizenship test and biting your nails waiting for the result a celebration of a process.

     The Dailymail.com has confirmed that Noem, 53, a former governor, loves the idea. No surprise, she loves to see herself on TV in military gear and brandishing an automatic rifle, poised to shoot some Guatemalan mother and her child trying to cross the border.

     The man behind the pitch, whose name I won’t mention because he’s an idiot, says he’s confident the show will be a hit. He may be right but that doesn’t make it any less of a Greek tragedy.

     The prizes, like one million American Airlines points, a $10,000 Starbucks gift card and a lifetime supply of gasoline are being called  ‘iconically American.”

     The finale is said to feature the American train puffing into the station in Washington with the winner then walking to Capitol Hill for a swearing-in ceremony.

     Apparently there is some concern in the DHS staff that the optics of turning the use of desperate immigrants into a reality show isn’t such a great idea. Duh, duh and duh.

     But, I bet the concern is voiced with a whole lot of laughter about the poor contestants not even understanding what’s going on because they speak a “foreign” language, look like they just waded across the Rio Grande and don’t even have any shoes.

     This great idea will be followed by “Heroes on Parade” featuring the Jan. 6 insurrectionists tromping to the capitol, climbing the walls, firing bear spray at the cops and breaking the windows.

     We can only hope that Karma is ready to pounce on Noem and her incredibly stupid and downright evil people.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Feminated Men

Florida Man

5/16/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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It’s official. American men are in danger of becoming completely feminized. The repubs say it’s a real thing, like Jewish space lasers starting forest fires, so it must be so.

And it could be. After all men are changing diapers and dusting the TV, we’re cooking Marcella Hazen’s bolognese for our pasta, we’re reading books and writing blogs, we watch the WNBA, we’re into field hockey and lacrosse and playing pickle ball instead of tennis. We’d play handball but it hurts your hands even with gloves.

I’m sure we’re doing other feminine things. We just don’t know what they are. But, help is coming for us unmanly men we just have to take off our aprons and listen. The help is in the form of manly men who will change us back into the macho pigs we were.

According to the NYT, the road back to manhood is being paved by crypto bros (whoever they are), tech execs and start-up founders who have “embraced masculinity.” These ore the same nerds we used to be call dorks, goops and dweebs. 

One of their manly activities is fist fighting on YouTube. Yeah, go for it guys. Beat the shit out of each other, bleed on your computer keyboards, sip lunch through a straw, wear steak on that eye bruise. You are men and we respect that even if you’re still dorks. 

Then there are guns combined with fitness and military role playing. It’s staged outside Reno, NV on weekends. Last month 200 men and women decked out in military gear ran, jumped, skipped and fired military style weapons on a gun range. It’s a combination of cross-training routine and playing soldier. The rough stuff is followed by planning the 1415 battle of Agincourt to see if the British can still beat up on the French. I think if they are so manly they should enlist in the Marines.

    I admit I fit the feminized male description that is destroying America except that I don’t change diapers or watch the WNBA. And they left out the nightly use of opium, cocaine, Cuban rum and Adderall which gives me a false sense of wellbeing. Now that’s manly.

     Oh oh.  I’ve got to run.  My bolognese is drying out and I need to  get on line and buy a new pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos. I saw a red pair on Amazon for $1,299 and they have my size.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

The Purge

Florida Man

5/15/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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        Is there another word to describe what’s happening in Washington other than “purge.” The word means “to remove a group of people considered undesirable from an organization or place in an abrupt or violent way.” Undesirable? Abrupt? An Email that says “immediately” is pretty abrupt.

     So far, thousands of people have been fired for doing their jobs, agencies have been shuttered or gutted, judges have been threatened and everyone is living scared of a man who has no ideas of his own and is only doing what the assistant president and his cutthroats say should be done.

     Everything is galling but some things more so than others. A recent head to be lopped off is Shira Perlmutter who has run the copyright office since 2020. Her Email said “Your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately.”

     Well, Shira put those family pictures and that home run ball you caught at the 1999 World Series into a cardboard box and get the hell out. No need to stick around and train a replacement. We’ll find somebody totally unqualified to sit in your office.

     She previously was a policy director at the Patent and Trademark Office and had been in the copyright office since the late 1990s.

     Shira and her sibs attended Quaker schools as kids. She graduated from Harvard, one of the felon’s targets because they educate people, and her brother won a Nobel Prize in physics. Not qualified for the job, probably because of Harvard, the Quakers and Nobel prizes.

     Democrats didn’t like it.

      “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” said Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee.

     The other obscenity from last week was the firing of the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, an African American and the first woman to head the library. She was appointed in 2016 and was the first professional librarian to hold the job.

    Author George Saunders called Hayden’s firing a sign of the disease of this administration. The White House cited unspecified things Hayden had done “In the pursuit of D.E.I” that are “quite concerning things.” Things? They weren’t specific of course. She was also charged with putting “inappropriate books in the library for children.” How many children use the Library of Congress?

     These were no doubt books that talked about race, diversity, equality and sexual preference that can easily destroy a child’s life.

     These two woman are only the most recent examples of the autocrat’s attempt to change America from the best to the worst. He hasn’t done it yet but he and his acolytes are trying hard to get it done before the public fully realizes what’s happening and starts taking to the streets.

     How embarrassing is it for a president to be involved in such petty behavior? Of course, he's afraid of libraries and librarians because he has never been in one and they contain books.

    And this just in. The Haitian man who has been selling ice cream in front of the Washington Monument for years has just had his vendor’s license revoked. He was deemed disloyal for selling chocolate and vanilla cones to kids.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

A Survivor's Story

Florida Man

5/14/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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       An estimated 200,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive but the youngest are in their mid-to-late 80s so the number is fast dwindling. One of the oldest, Margo Friedlander, died in Berlin last week at 103. 

Mrs. Friedlander lived in New York for 60 years after the war, she called it living in exile, before moving back to Berlin in 2010 where she grew up.

She and her husband Eddie were married at the camp where they they were imprisoned when it was liberated near the end of the war. An obituary in the NYT said In all their time in New York they never spoke of their camp experiences. Mr. Friedlander never wanted to talk about it. But when he died in 1997,  Mrs. Friedlander decided it was time to tell people what happened.

Florida Man is always taken aback to hear the stories the survivors tell about the unimaginable, unspeakable hardships of the concentration camps. I’ve read a number of history books about the war and the Holocaust but history books don’t substitute for first person memories. 

      Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels about his father’s descriptions of his incarceration in Germany, Maus and Maus 11, give frightening accounts of the camps presented in cartoon form. I read Spiegelman years ago and still remember the books. And Vasily Grossman’s books, particularly “Man and Fate, tell similar stories in prose. 

Back to Mrs. Friedlander. She was 21 when the Gestapo came for her family. When she came home from work one night her apartment door was sealed and guarded. She hid the yellow star on her coat and went to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had a message from her mother, “Try to make your life.”

She spent 15 months in hiding, moving from place to place in what was the equivalent of a Jewish Underground Railroad. She dyed her hair red, wore a cross and had her nose straightened. Her hosts, who weren’t Jews, never gave her away. Two Jewish men, called Jew chasers, who worked for the Gestapo to save themselves, turned her in.

  Mrs. Friedlander survived a camp in Bohemia and after the war found her way to New York with her husband. Years later she learned her family died in Auschwitz. 

After she moved back to Berlin she decided her story needed to be told especially to young people. She said she was surprised her audiences knew so little about the Holocaust.

  Mrs. Friedlander’s book, Try to Make Your Life, A Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin, was published in 2008. It’s available in English on Amazon. In a recent interview she said, “Look not toward what separates us. Look toward what brings us together. Be people. Be sensible.”

      Right now I’m focusing on her mother’s words, “Try to make your life,” and on her own, “Be People. Be sensible.” Excellent advice for all of us.

The Quakers Are Coming!

Florida Man

5/13/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     The Quakers are coming! The Quakers are coming! And they’re going to shake things up. At least they will try.

A group of Friends, I can’t find out how many, are trekking 18 days and 300 miles from NYC to D.C. to protest the felon’s deportation of immigrants. These folks have a long history of activism, the good kind.

Quakers, as we all know, are members of the Society of Friends, a Christian movement founded in England in the 1600s. There are about 75,000 Friends in the U.S., all citizens I hope, and they have been outsize contributors to change in this country since the Cvil War and before. 

They were the first religious group to condemn slavery and they didn’t allow members to own slaves. They supported equal rights for women and are pacifists who have campaigned to end war and that keeps them busy.

They, like other religious groups, were persecuted in England before coming to American. William Penn, a Quaker himself, founded Pennsylvania in 1681 and proclaimed religious liberty for all. Quakers became an essential part of colonial America, according to the Friends Academy.

        George Fox, the religions founder, believed there is something of God in everyone, that all people are equal and possessed an “inner light.” That’s a tough belief to hold on to right now.

  Anyway, they’re on the way to Washington to protest with other groups in opposition to the admins deportation policy, if by policy you mean trampling on the rights of everyone. The Friends also have joined other groups in a suit agains the feds to stop the Icers from making arrests in churches and synagogues.

The organizers say they are showing their solidarity with migrants and other groups. One marcher, quoted in a N.J. paper, said,  “The march is taking place because of this executive order to change the ICE directive on sensitive locations.  They have them entering churches that were providing sanctuary aid, helping refugees and other vulnerable migrants. There is no place that is safe for someone who is undocumented in America.”

Well, there is some place for 59 South African white people. They arrived in Washington yesterday and like all immigrants were greeted by some gov people and immediately granted refugee status. Refugee status or asylum is apparently given to white people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted because of race, religion or nationality.

The sex offender says white farmers in South Africa are being systematically killed by the government. It’s another figment of the imagination of a  demented mind like the “great replacement theory” which is also a pile of crap.

The Anti-Defamation League says that violence against farmers includes whites and blacks and the rate is lower than the murder rate in the general population in South Africa. 

Musk, the assistant president who was born in South Africa, has accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white. In a social media post, he said, “Some of the country’s political figures are actively promoting white genocide.”

South African Prez Cyril Ramaphosa countered: “The claim that white people are being persecuted in this country is a completely false narrative.”

Back to the Quakers, who will have none of this, the group’s website in Palm Beach has these words from Mahatma Gandhi.

      “These are the blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work (Is that on the mark or what?), pleasure without conscience (bingo), knowledge without character (forget the knowledge part), commerce without morality and politics without principle.” Gandhi, where are you when we need you?

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Health Update

Florida Man

5/11/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     I’ve decided it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness as Eleanor Roosevelt said long ago.

     This is going to be a personal day. Not like the going to the spa kind of personal day. A health update if you will.

      Let’s start with my legs which cause me to curse and stamp my feet. They just don’t work like they used to even two years ago. They’re heavy and sluggish, like I’m walking on sponges. Not all the time but enough of the time. And my balance is keeping me off the high wire despite the Wallenda’s persistent invitations.

       So I’m going to try and stop cursing the problem and sort of accept it as a fact of aging and light a candle. “You’re just getting old,” is the doctor’s new answer for everything from a twitch in the eyelid to a curling trigger finger.

       Overall, I’ve been very lucky health wise. I attribute it to being active all my life, half a dozen Cuban cigars and a quart of rot gut whiskey every day. I’ve never had a broken bone and the only surgery I’ve ever had was that usual childhood thing of having my tonsils out. I still remember eating ice cream in the hospital. They gave it to me because my throat hurt. That was excellent treatment in those days.

       Recently, I’ve had cortisone shots in my back to relieve the pressure on the nerves that are being cramped in my spine by spinal stenosis. I’m told that it’s lucky I don’t have pain because it’s usually a result of spinal stenosis which is supposed to be very common in the olds.

      My crazy ENT wants me to take a food allergy test and a couple of other tests that will run up his billing with the insurance company but I’m not going that route. I just went to him to have my ears de-waxed but he says everything else that may show up in my life is a result of something ENT related.

      Here’s another thing. I now have a platoon of doctors before. For decades I didn’t even have what is now called a primary. Now I need a podiatrist to cut my toenails because I can’t reach them anymore, an ophthalmologist and an optometrist, a pain doc, a neurologist and the aforementioned ENT.

        A little more about the legs. I’m considering “a procedure” that maybe, possibly could get me back to Carnegie Hall. It’s supposed to be a little deal. I’m not going for big deal, a cure that’s worse than the problem. I’ll keep those of you who are not dozing off by now apprised.

       Finally, I read somewhere a while back that older people achieve maximum socialization in doctors’ waiting rooms. I think that may be an exaggeration. I do usually talk to my waiting companions but I’ve yet to make a lunch date with anyone.

  Maybe this week at the dermatologist.

Long and Short Term Relationships

Florida Man

5/9/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     In Believing, a book by Lauren Jackson, a young Australian writer, she says religion offers people three B’s: beliefs about the world, behaviors to follow and belonging in a community or culture. Belonging beats belief and noses out  behavior for me.

      A recent study by Harvard and Baylor universities affirmed what other data has shown: People flourish, they live happier, overall healthier and better lives if they have strong social connections. It also found that religions, for all their negatives, can provide people with robust communities. But the study found that close relationships are the most consistent predictor of long-term happiness. Participants with strong social ties were healthier, happier, and lived longer than those with weaker relationships.

      Engaging in altruistic behaviors, like helping others or donating to charity, also increases happiness, the study found.

     The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasizes that social connections are vital for mental and physical health.     They “help reduce the risk of chronic diseases, improve sleep quality, and enhance emotional well-being.” People with strong social bonds are more likely to make healthy choices and live longer, healthier lives.  

      In short, investing in good relationships, whether with family, friends, or community members can improve your happiness and overall well-being. Even small acts of kindness or brief social interactions can have a positive impact. Prioritizing these connections can lead to a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life, the CDC says.

Looking back on a long life span, I think I can say I’ve had many meaningful relationships and maintained many of those for ages. I have a friend from the 5th grade named Jerry, that I talk to three or four times a year. He lives a long way from South Florida and we’ve led very different lives but when we talk it was like we just had lunch yesterday. Unusual because of its duration? Maybe, but I bet most of us have at least one person that we’ve know for many years and stay in touch with.

But on the way to today we’ve all formed and lost relationships. I met Basil, who is a reader of Florida Man, in 1967 when he was at the Ford Foundation and I was running a race relations program he funded in Cleveland. When Susie and I moved to New York the next year we ended up living two blocks from Basil and his wife Eunice in Brooklyn. The four of us spent scores of evenings together, cooking, eating and drinking (Gallo by the gallon), laughing and crying and became very close. He lives in Florida now and we’re trying to figure out how to get together.

Of course, there are all the wonderful Zoom friends we’ve known most of our lives. We’ve been together, we’ve been apart but we are still close.

Another brief anecdote: I still remember something Jerry said at least 75 years ago. He doesn’t remember it and iI wasn’t particularly profound at the moment because we were kids but it seems so to me now. We were ice skating on a Saturday morning in Kansas City with a bunch of other friends. It was nearing the end of the session and he said, “Let’s make the last five minutes the best.” And we skated like demons for five minutes.

Not a bad motto to live by. We might make it more universal by saying l, “Let’s make the next five minutes the best every five minutes. 

I must be getting soft. As I look back at all the great long and short term relationships of my life, it makes me tear up.

        Let’s all go out and skate like demons.

Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube . Please give us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

No More Canada

Florida Man

5/8/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Damn. Despite all the phony sturm und drang Canada is not going to be the 51st state and Florida Man is kind of disappointed because it would have made it easier to move there. But no luck. On Tuesday, the new Canadian Prime Minister, Mark  Carney, told the felon to fuck off.

     His exact words,  “As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We're sitting in one right now," Carney told Trump at the White House. "Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign the last several months, it's not for sale. Won't be for sale, ever," he said.

     On the other hand, the White House might be up for sale is the sex offender needs some ready cash.

     The prez also said the U.S. loves Canada, a different tone from the social media post he put up just before Carney arrived. He said Canadians are “freeloaders” who couldn’t survive without us. Of course they’ve done pretty well for 150 years being a good country, geographyically bigger than the U.S., without our help.

     Apparently, Trump’s criminals have entertained themselves in recent weeks by calling Canada the next state and the cretin put up maps with the northern U.S. border erased. Ha, ha. What a comedian. But the laughs on them.

     Carney made it clear that he wouldn’t put up with any more nonsense. “There are some places that are never for sale,” he reiterated. Why these foreign leaders don’t just get up and walk out of these stupid meetings is beyond me.

     One other point. There is no end to the idiocy of this admin. It’s reported that they are trying to deport people, including American citizens, to the Ukraine, a country at war. That would be like deporting Jews to Germany in 1939. I’m sure a mother and child from Mexico would do very well unable to speak the language in a totally foreign country with bombs falling around her.      There is clearly no end to the cruelty of these people.

     This is reminiscent of the McCarthy era. In 1954, near the end of that awful, stupid time, the U.S. Army’s counsel Joseph Welsh appeared at a senate hearing chaired by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It was during the Red Scare, largely McCarthy’s imaginary plague. Welsh said, “Until this moment, Senator (insert Trump), I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to interrupt, Welch said angrily, “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last.” How apropos. It’s past time for a Joe Welsh to appear and take down the incredibly dumb, venal, demented person in charge.

        Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please gives us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

The Peace Corps

Florida Man

5/7/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     In his inaugural speech in 1961, President Jack Kennedy asked Americans to commit themselves to service and sacrifice. In deep snow and 20 degree temperatures he spoke these words outside the capitol: “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” He went on to say, “My fellow citizens of the world ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

     I listened to that speech and remember it. JFK captivated me and millions of others at that time in history.

    That was only 64 years ago but the tone and meaning of his speech sound like ancient history. The current guy has a motto for today “Ask not what you can do for anybody but what you can do for me.”

     But that’s not the story here.

     In March of ’61, Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps. Its goals were to provide health, education and agricultural programs to mostly poor countries around the world and to give them a chance to see Americans in a different light.

     My Elderly Brother, Larry was in PC Group 9, among the first groups of  volunteers. He was sent to Liberia where he taught English and helped build a public health clinic and road to the next town along with USAID help. The town was Konia, an “upcountry” village of 700 people who lived in thatched huts. He was there for two years and it wasn’t easy work. There was no electricity and no fresh water. Since his service he has stayed in touch with his group through an annual reunion.They have a common bond.

    So Larry, like every other Peace Corps veteran and those still serving, was shocked to learn that the Dogeers, who know nothing about service or commitment, have targeted the Peace Corps, decimating the staff and essentially destroying the program. There are only about 2,800 volunteers left from more than 7,000 a couple of years ago. During the life of the program, more than 240,000 people, mostly young, have served in 142 countries.

     Now, we have descended into the depths, we are degrading everything that is good and installing the bad. What was once a government of the the best and the brightest has turned into a melange of the worst and the dumbest.

    The thugs say some of these cuts are temporary but we all know they are permanent until a Democratic admin can get elected. The list of seeming random destruction is long and growing and so far includes USAID, AmeriCorps, Voice of America, the U.S. Institute of Peace, education and art programs and threats to public radio and television.

    “Dear President John F. Kennedy,

      We saw you on TV when you were inaugurated. We wished you would put on your coat, so you wouldn’t get a cold. Mrs. Hansen is our teacher and brought her portable TV. We watched the parade, too.

     We know you will be our best president and wish you good luck.

     Love, Brenda Sue Wesson”

     I tried to locate Brenda Sue. She probably married so her name would not be Wesson but there are three Wesson’s in Miami. I talked with two of them and they didn’t know of Brenda Sue. Too bad. I’d like to know how she feels about things.

       Here’s a copy of her letter.

Corruption

Florida Man

5/6/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

    There’s some strange stuff in the Bible and we talked about some of it last Saturday morning at B&B. It can be perfectly relevant today, that is, things you will recognize.

    Try this: “An amplified sense of self intoxicates us with overconfidence, which unless checked, will corrupt in many ways.”

     Hmmm.

     Florida Man has always found corruption a strange thing. I don’t know why it’s hard to be honest in business or professional dealings. Being honest means dealing fairly with people, not cheating them, not taking bribes or kickbacks or whatever you want to call them. 

     But it’s as old as human history. Power, wealth and influence often result in corrupt behavior. I looked it up. The Code of Hammurabi, which we all remember, has 282 laws that covered corruption in many forms, including economics, marriage and divorce, criminal and civil law. Good thinking but all 282 have been long forgotten.

     Regarding corruption, however, there was a frankly draconian rule at the Sun-Sentinel and I think at most other legitimate news organizations. No gifts of any kind. No free meals, not even the whisper of impropriety. Don’t mix news with advertising.

     An example: People sometimes sent flowers to a reporter who did a particularly nice story about them or their business. Those flowers were sent to nursing homes. If you took a source to a meal, you paid even if they were millionaires. We did have expense accounts but still.

    Another: I was flown out to an aircraft carrier to do a story during Navy week one year. A photographer and I spent two days on the ship and when when it docked in Fort Lauderdale, the captain gave us ball caps with the ship’s name on them. We weren’t allowed to keep the caps because it was considered an inappropriate gift. They are probably still in somebody's desk drawer at the paper.

     Other professions have rules about bribes and such but I doubt that any are as strict or enforced so completely as in journalism.

     So let’s talk about giving or taking bribes, emoluments or any actions designed to give you the upper hand in business, politics or any job. Clearly, politicians are particularly susceptible to accepting gifts and in the past they have often been caught, prosecuted and sometimes sent to prison.

     Is it overconfidence, arrogance, a sense of grandeur or some other psychological shortcoming that makes them think it’s all right when it clearly isn’t though they would be happy to send you to jail for doing the same thing they do.

     In the Bible there is a section about physical affliction and a list of things that can cause one to be have serious problems like erosion of the skin or leprosy. We better look out for impending erosion because the causes are everyday transgressions. They include using the name of God in vain, as in yelling God Dammit when you bang your toes agains the bed frame, stealing, slander and false thoughts. I’m not sure what false thoughts are but beware anyway.

     This is a rather superficial look at the problem of corruption. I intentionally didn’t get into today’s obvious abusea of power at all levels of government and business. Hammurabi would not be pleased. He knew that power corrupted but he didn’t know it corrupted absolutely.

        Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please gives us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Mondays Are Different

Florida Man

5/5/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Florida Man is starting a new approach to Mondays. I’m going to make it “Everything but politics day.” So let’s start off with something that doesn’t even rise to the level of a pet peeve.

     Now, I enjoy a trim gam and a well turned ankle as much as the next old coot but TV sports talks shows wouldn’t be on the air unless they had some young woman with great legs showing them off while explaining the spin count on a pitcher’s fast ball. Many of you will relate to a trim gam but maybe not to the spin count.

  I don’t watch daytime TV.  I know they have a lot of sports talk shows, but I catch a glimpse in the evening when I settle down with a line of coke and a crisp $100 bill rolled into a straw to watch a sports show with two old guys zooming from somewhere. They are followed by another show where the women, who don’t have trim gams, wear very short skirts.

     The men who wear suits and ties while talking or announcing sports look equally out of place. Sports is a down and dirty business so clothes should mirror the activity and they rarely show any leg.

    Hockey coaches wear suits and ties. Standing behind their sweating, bleeding players all decked out for a business meeting or a three martini lunch and it looks just plain dumb.

    Basketball and football coaches used to dress up but recently they’ve changed and are now appropriately garbed in sweats with team logos.

    And while I’m on the subject of dress, or lack of it, take a look at the perfume commercials that are everywhere because Mother’s Day is coming and all mothers need to dab on some Chanel No. 5 to give the kids a bath.

    But this isn’t about mothers. It’s about the craziness of the commercials themselves. They are different than any other ads on TV, so different they are hard to explain. There is usually a lot of swirling around in low-cut, lame dresses with male and female courtiers playing some role or other and men with six-pack abs shooting arrows. They use quick cuts so you can’t really see what’s happening but that makes it so disorienting you don’t remember which brand you’re supposed to buy for the little lady who just came in the door exhausted form a 10-hour day and a two-hour commute.

    And talking about commercials, what about Jake from State Farm, the ubiquitous face of the insurance company. His name is Kevin Miles. He grew up in Chicago and is a graduate of the Chicago Academy of Arts. He has made a career out of commercials, appeared in TV dramas and is a  guest on talk shows. At least insurance does something for someone.

     Well, enough light fare for this Monday. By the way, I didn’t pay $10K for my new mattress, but $1700 still seems like too much.

        Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please gives us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

A New Mattress

Florida Man

5/4/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Florida Man bought a new bed this week. It’s a queen with one of those frames that raises and lowers until it breaks. I tried it out in the store which was either Mattress City, Mattress World or Mattress Universe. There are as many mattress stores as there are Starbucks.

     I laid on it a while and it was not too firm, not too soft, but just right, somewhere between firm and not firm enough. The salesman seemed to know what he was talking about and had been on the job more than a couple of days. He said ten years but who knows. His name is Erik and he is a  “Sleep Expert” according to his name tag.

     Like a lot of stuff we buy, like mattresses are blind items because you can't see inside or kick the tires. They have names like Serta and Sealy and Blah. Many are not ones an experienced mattress buyer like me has ever heard of. The old mattress is at least 20 years old but things don’t look like they’ve changed store wise. Fifty mattresses and no cumstomers.

     So as we were doing the paperwork, I said I figured out a while ago that I’d slept 30 years of my life sleeping.  That's amazing to me. We spend one-third of our lives asleep. For all the great things the body does for us it makes us sleep we have to sleep a lot to make it happy and healthy. That's not very efficient. If we only needed four hours of sleep we’d get a lot more done. Erik didn’t quite seem to get it though I don’t know what’s hard to get. It’s your age divided by three.

     Well, anyway, he thought about it a bit and said we must also spend years on the toilet. I did the calculations. It’s not really years unless there’s something wrong or you just like to read in a quiet place. For ease of computing let’s say you spend 60 minutes a week on the toilet, a low estimate but that’s 52 hours a year, a little over two days. In 90 years that's 180 days or 6 months. Another inordinate amount of time but not as much as sleep and at least as necessary.

     All the other stuff miscellaneous time we spend time eating, talking on the phone, watching TV, isn’t exactly wasted but it’s not very productive either. 

     Enough. The mattress is coming on Wednesday. In the meantime, I have to buy new sheets and what not and figure out how to get rid of the old bed. The maintenance guys at the apartment will probably help out with that.

     Overall, I think I got a pretty good deal for $10,000.67. That’s without sheets of course.

Fake Concern

Florida Man

5/2/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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I hope none of Florida Man’s friends, especially my Jewish friends, think the grifter really gives a damn about anti-semitism or Israel. It’s all an act.

He has surrounded himself with people (I’ll try not to call them Nazis) who don’t like Jews. Stephen Mille, his primary ax man, is a Jew who hates Jews and Muslims more than he hates immigrants and that’s saying something. A white nationalist, he recently said, “We have to remove these terrorists from out communities and we can do it instantaneously.” Then he said they have made no errors except fo the citizens who have been wrongly arrested and disappeared. 

When I was covering cops for the Sun-Sentinel a detective once told me anyone can do anything to anyone at any time. That’s Miller. He enjoys seeing pictures of children being separated from their parents, a colleague said.

   Musk, the man of the Sieg Heil salute, grew up hating Blacks in South Africa and now hates Jews as well. Like so many of Hitler’s (see I didn’t say Nazi) closest associates, Musk is handicapped. He has Aspergers, a form of autism and his face is somehow distorted.

His clumsy, uncoordinated movements, his verbal outbursts and tantrums like his chainsaw fiasco, and not understanding other peoples feelings are symptoms of Aspergers.

I’m just sayin Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Miller, had a large head, a crippled foot and a fragile body according to his biography. No comparisons please.

    Musk’s DOGE commandoes don’t care who they are harming  so they have gone after everyone. It’s “Ready, Fire, Aim” with them. Of course, like in any dictatorship they will eventually be purged so they better enjoy themselves now.

It’s beside the point but it’s interesting that none of these people can smile and laugh unless they are hurting someone. 

Back to anti-semitism and the felon’s pretend efforts to stop its spread primarily in academia. Remember when he said he’d protect the LQBTQ community. Remember when he turned on them, particularly trans gender people, even accusing schools of doing medical operations on kids during the school day. Could that be more deranged. He is clearly a very sick, demented man. He even looks physically sick in recent pix.

Anyway, the same is going to happen with his campaign against anti-semites and his support for Israel. He has chummed up with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes who openly extol Hitler’s  supposed virtues. And don’t forget the fine people on both sides in Charlottesville in 2017. The marchers, who wound through the Jewish community carrying torches included Neo-fascists, white nationalists, Neo-Nazis (there’s the word), Klansmen and far-right militias. Fine people indeed. 

So Trump’s thinly veiled anti-semitism and his verbal support    of Israel are warnings. He can, and will, turn on Jews as soon as they aren’t useful. That’s what dictators do.

Massive Voter Fraud

Florida Man

5/1/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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      Note: For those of you who are concerned about my ICE job, rest easy because I got an email from the Musks yesterday firing me. I’m appealing of course.

    So, today Florida Man has some good news. It’s been conclusively proved that he 2020 election was stolen from the felon in the White House.              The evidence was uncovered by Musk’s heroes at DOGE. They’ve found a voter who may have cast a ballot illegally. That’s right. A single voter threw the election to Biden. People often say every vote counts but this was one helluva big vote.

   The alleged scheme was for this Iraqi man who isn’t a citizen to cast hundreds of thousands of votes for Biden, but he made a mistake and voted just once for Trump. That was his really big mistake. Clearly some more investigation is needed. There must have been accomplices because it would take one person at least 10 years and hundreds of costumes to cast all those ballots. He would certainly get writer’s cramp and more likely carpal tunnel problems.

      Voter fraud is a misdemeanor but  carries a hefty penalty of up to a year in jail and up to a  $100,000 fine. Pretty stiff punishment for one vote. The dangerous criminal, who has lived in upstate New York for 25 years, did not register to vote until just before the 2020 election, the charge says. Non-citizens can’t vote though many do.

     The U.S. attorney for the northern district of NY said the crime was “a callous and illegal act.” No doubt the perp will be dealt with harshly for this victim-less crime.

     I can hear the first conversation he has with his cellmate in prison. “Hey, what are you in for Bro?” “Surely you know I got three life terms for jay walking.” “Don’t call me Shirley but that seems a little excessive. I only got a year and a big fine.” “What’d you do bro?” “I voted.”

   Musk is gloating like he just caught Al Capone except that he wouldn’t know who Capone is. ”Great job for prosecuting voter fraud where a non-citizen voted In a federal election,” he said while restarting his chainsaw.

        Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please gives us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Part-Time with ICE 

Florida Man

4/30/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Nobody knows this about Florida Man except my shrink and my cocaine source but I’ve been a ICE agent since Jan. 20 of this year and believe me I’ve been busy. Those pesky college students overstaying their visas and those mothers and fathers whose children are U.S. citizens, the child left behind when his parents were shipped out have been special problems but we know many of them are terrorists so away they go.

    It’s not an easy job what with writing this blog, lunching with old friends, going to retirement parties and trying to find fresh octopus. Not to mention getting my toenails trimmed and my back straightened out. I’m exhausted most of the time.

    Still, on Tuesdays and Thursdays between one and three in the afternoon I’m on the prowl for illegals who are flooding the country and my neighborhood, working in construction and the oil fields, emptying bed pans at hospitals, mowing lawns, making beds in the hotels and harvesting the fruit and vegetables we all demand especially the veggie and vegan communities.

     But yesterday I thought I found some targets. It was a mother walking her little girl home from school near my apartment complex. They looked suspicious, especially the backpack the little girl was wearing with Minnie Mouse on the flap. I’ve seen that before and it’s usually a signal for the MS-13 gang in California to make a pickup at the corner Publix.

      I took off my Elderly Brothers cap and slipped on my black mask and quietly came up behind them. The mother turned and said, “Oh, hi Ardy. Haven’t seen you for a while.” Little Maria said hi too. Turns out they are my upstairs neighbors. I just didn’t recognize them from the back. My mask didn’t seem to bother them although Serena said, “What’s with the silly mask?” I said, “Excuse me. Let’s have dinner soon,” and hurried away.

     So, looking for some curried goat ribs for dinner, I went across the street to the Latino market where I was greeted by a man at the door who said, “Good afternoon.” I didn’t know what he meant by that. It seemed foreign to me so I put on my mask and said, “Papers please.” He said, “We don’t carry the papers anymore. Maybe you can find them at the Walgreen’s. And what’s that silly mask you’re wearing all about?”

     I spun on my heel, as well as I can spin anymore, and hurried back to my car where there was an ICE agent, all decked out in a shirt that said “Police,” waiting for me. “Papers please,” he said. “Oh, c’mon Joe,” I said. “This is your buddy Ardy from the synagogue. We have bagels together every Saturday morning.”

     “I know,” he said. “But I need to see your papers, please.”

     Will somebody please call my lawyer and tell him I’m in a detention center somewhere in Arizona. It’s really hot here but they say it’s not the heat but the humidity. No. It’s the heat.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review and subscription. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier

Hallelujah

Florida Man

4/28/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     At Passover services last week there was a lot of “Hallelujah” happening. I’ve been to a lot of synagogues, temples and churches and Hallelujah is in universal use. No wonder. It’s a great word that’s a lot fun to sing in full voice and lends itself well to music. It also praises God.

The word comes from the Hebrew and means “Praise Yah” or “Praise the Lord.” In Christianity, the word “Alleluia” means the same. According to the God Questions website, the word appears 50 times in the  Old Testament but only once in the New Testament. It’s voiced at least 50 times in the Passover service. I like it because it’s the only word I feel comfortable singing.

    In the Catholic Church it means “Praise the Lord” and is sung throughout the year except during Lent. Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Baptists and others all praise the Lord with some form of Hallelujah. Muslims use “al-Hamdu lillah which means Thank God.

    My daughter Ruthie remembers it in a Leonard Cohen song she heard at Camp Golden Arrow a whole lot of years ago. She also came home that summer missing a sneaker she lost in the mud, but that’s a different story. She said she hated the song, but the lyrics, a mixed bag overall, are good when it comes to Hallelujah in the first and third verses.

  “Now I've heard there was a secret chord

     That David played, and it pleased the Lord

     But you don't really care for music, do you?

    It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

    The minor falls, the major lifts

    The baffled king composing Hallelujah

     Hallelujah, Hallelujah

     Hallelujah, Hallelujah”

“You say I took the name in vain

     I don't even know the name

     But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?

    There's a blaze of light in every word

    It doesn't matter which you heard

    The holy or the broken Hallelujah

    Hallelujah, Hallelujah

    Hallelujah, Hallelujah

    And of course, there’s Handel’s Messiah and it’s Hallelujah Chorus. Hallelujah is used in joyful and triumphant contexts and that’s when I sing it and as for the rest of the words, as my high school music teacher said, “Don’t bother young man.”

  Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. Please gives us a review and subscribe. It’s free. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

 A Very Busy Friday

Florida Man

4/25/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     So, here’s a rundown of Florida Man’s busy Friday. That is if you call doctor’s appointments busy.

     It started with an 8 a.m. visit with my podiatrist. Since I can’t cut my own toenails anymore because got too far away. How did my feet get farther away from my hands? Anyway, I go every 10 weeks or so for a trim. The good thing for me the doc says is my nails aren’t as thick or growing as fast as they did. I feel really good about that. I had plenty of time before my next appointment with an electromyographist who’s going to check for neurology in my back and my lower legs. It’s kind of a witch doctor thing.

     Still early so I went for breakfast at an old favorite called the Diner by the Sea. It’s near the sea but not by it but it has great breakfasts and the owner and chef knows most of his customers including me. Diner is a throwback with a counter and stools and an open grill in the front that is at least 50 years old.

     I had a three-egg omelette with bacon, onions, veggies and cheddar cheese. There also was a heap of crispy hash browns, an English muffin and coffee. All excellent. I left the server a big tip because she looked like she need it. A little mitzvah.

    There was still some time before my 1 o’clock with the electro doc so I bought a new pair of Skechers slip-ins. The pair I’ve been wearing for a year have holes in the toes. They are great shoes. I don't know why it took shoe people so long to make a slip-in.

    Next it was on to the doc who put electrodes on my legs and back, stuck in some needles and had some kind of shock machine that you could hear and feel buzzing. Her findings seemed pretty good to my medically trained ear. I have minor problems in my legs but more in my back. The good of that is that you really can’t do much for the lower legs but there are treatments for the back.

     Next appointment with the back doc to see what she has to say. I hope soon. I think she’ll suggest an out-patient procedure where she puts a thing called a space in my lower back to relieve the pressure on the nerves in the spinal column. 

     Got home mid-afternoon and had a toasted bagel with cream cheese and considered a nap because I’m going to a retirement party for an old Sun-Sentinel colleague later. She’s an interesting women. Serious Jew who never married but had three kids by IVF and has raised them while working and taking care of her dad. Pretty remarkable. No nap.

     The party, at a sports bar, was like a class reunion. Saw at least a dozen old friends and co-workers and of course we talked journalism and health issues. Had a cheeseburger, fries and two glasses of Guinness. A fun evening. Watched basketball when I got home. Did a couple of line of coke and went to bed at 11:30. Now that’s certainly more than you ever wanted to know about Florida Man's Friday.

     On my way to Bagels and Bible the morning. I hope there’s enough lox.

Zooming with the SecDef

Florida Man

4/25/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     About 11 last night Florida Man’s computer beeped with an invite to a Zoom meeting with the SecDef, his wife and brother, his lawyer, Homer Simpson, the editor of the Atlantic Mag, several generals and admirals, Elon Musk and the son he drags around like a dog, and half a dozen Jan 6 criminals. Btw, I saw a pic of the Musk kid, I think his name is X35Y eating out of a dog bowl on YouTube.

     The subject of the Zoom was the planned U.S. military attacks on targets in the U.S. Sounded interesting if a bit frightening. I got my recorder out and was let into the meeting at 11:15. It started with some chatter about their girl friends and prostitutes they recommend, that $250 bottle of wine one of them had for dinner and a junket to Dubai.

     Nobody asked who I was but one of the Jan 6 good ole boys wanted to know if there were any Jews on the call. I kept quiet because I wanted to see if South Florida was going to be bombed.

     When things simmered down the drunk Sec Def, raised his glass, it looked like scotch, and welcomed everybody saying, “I think it’s late but who cares. I don’t have to get up early.” He was in his pajamas and there was a bed with crumpled sheets in the background

     I heard a general muttering but only made out two words, “Fucking Idiot.”

     Down to business. The country is at Defcon 1 in Springfield, OH due to the Haitians continued preference for their neighbors household pets for dinner, the Sec said. Plan A is to send Seal Teams in to take out the leaders of the pet eaters including the clergy members who may be promoting the heinous activity.

     Elon interrupted to say that wouldn’t be possible because all the Seals had been fired by his DOGE program. Okay, the Sec said, if that can’t happen we’ll go to Plan B, which includes strategic bombing. Plan C if need be, we’ll use voodoo.

     “That should do the job,” the Sec said with a snort. You could hear the gurgle of the whiskey pouring into his glass in the background.

     Next up, Harvard a much easier target because its buildings have no anti-drone or missile protection. Several people, not including the Jan Sixers, spoke up saying they were graduates and enjoyed going back for class reunions and seeing their names on buildings.

    “You’ll just have to find another school, like BYU or Oral Roberts to fund and I’m not so sure about BYU,” the Sec said. “The attack is scheduled for the day after graduation because we don’t want any Christians to be hurt.”

  Just after that, a young man in pajamas, whispered in the Sec’s ear and he look startled but didn’t spill his drink. “I understand there are people, including Jews, who aren’t authorized to be on this Zoom,” the Sec said.                  I quickly clicked off and shut down my computer. If I don’t hear a loud knock during the night I think I’m safe and knew I'd have a real good story for Florida Man today.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com.

Rich Scared Ninnies

Florida Man

4/24/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️   

     Big money. Scared money. Stupid money. How do the Richie Richs think they were able to earn enough to donate large sums to Harvard and maintain their drug habits.

    Well, first, their parents had the goods to endow the new science building and send them to Harvard where they got a good education. They partied with influential classmates and were invited to join The Porcellian, the school’s most exclusive club. They can proudly say they graduated from Harvard and even wear a Harvard t-shirt. I’m thinking of getting one myself.

    Now, they want the one major university that has challenged the felon at the risk of billions of dollars in grants to back down and they’re threatening to stop donating to the school. How can people who have given money to higher education be against Harvard’s stand against tyranny? 

   I guess like the big techs, the big law firms and others in the wealthy class they’re afraid of a buffoon whose only skills are sneering, making up stupid nicknames and signing his name in a giant scrawl. So what if he says bad things about them, cancels contracts and pulls other crap on them, they are bigger than he is and will last much longer. They’re supposed to be smart. Don’t they know that?

   That, of course, is true of Zuckerberg and Bezos and the others who have knuckled under which just encourages more petty nastiness. Pretty soon, the sex offender will  have finished off the big guys and will go after the corner store like any average Mafia Don.

   “You’ve got a nice little place here Mario and the ice cream looks good. Be too bad if there was an accident. I’ll expect an envelope every Saturday.”

   There is no sign that the moneyed class will show any backbone soon. They’ve joined their friends in congress who have already capitualted. If they smart enough to be billionaires why aren’t they smart enough to realize if half a dozen of them got together they could beat up the bully.

   On the other hand, there is some good news out there. Sarah Palin, you remember her gotcha wink and the brainless chatter, lost a second try at a defamation suit against the NYT. It took a federal jury just two hours to dismiss her 2017 suit against the paper for an editorial they wrote criticizing her.

   And another little hit of goodness. Tesla’s net income dropped 71% in the first quarter of the year, apparently largely because Musk and his soldiers are screwing up so many lives.

   Whether it seems like it or not, I’m really an optimist and I’m looking forward to more good news.

Guns and More Guns

Florida Man

4/23/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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    Florida Man mentioned my gun collection and my drug habit yesterday and it made me think how many people I know who own a gun, let alone a collection like mine. I think the answer is probably zero.

Since my collection and my drug exist only in my on the internet, I think my readers and I are the exceptions to "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands" as Charlton Heston said.

  Here are some rather startling and upsetting gun facts.

  Only six million firearms are registered in the U.S. because registration isn’t required in gun country and you know what I mean by gun country.  So how does 82,880,000 gun owners sound. That  in 2023, so since the Jan. 6 criminals are on the loose again I bet the number has gone way up. They need guns after all as well as knives, poison gas and tanks.

   So, about one-third of us muricans own Glocks and AR15s, the most popular weapons for self-protection from the Black Lives Matter folks, the Chinese paratroops and the Martians. Three years ago the gun makers put another 13.4 mil guns on the market. I’m sure they haven’t cut production since.

   On our road trip, my Elderly Brother Larry and I stopped at a gun store called Family Firearms in Troy, Alabama. We stopped because of the word “Family” which seemed like a bit of an anomaly. No quite like “Family Diner.”

   The shop had a sign on the door that said, “No children under 10 allowed.” We went in anyway. As his wife restocked the ammunition shelves the owner explained to us that it doesn’t take much for people to make a run to the gun store.

   Every time there is some kind of major incident, like a mass shooting or a big demo, gun sales go up, he said. He seemed like a reasonable sort who said he isn’t a hunter and only had two guns, one he was wearing at the store and another at home. I think that classifies as reasonable considering his line of work.

   So unlike his clients, he owns fewer guns than 62 percent of the pop. He acknowledged that it was as easy to buy a gun in most places in the country as an ice cream cone and he had customers with dozens of guns.

    It’s so easy that Charles Manson could walk into a gun store today and get one. “Oh, hi Charlie. Nice to see you. How was prison? You want that AR-15? Sure. No problem.”  t takes a “sick” person to kill. But whatever the reason -- real mental illness, anger, revenge -- it’s the gun that does the killing. Guns do not shoot themselves contrary to the NRA that maintains that guns don’t kill people, people do.

     Republicans will not admit guns are the problem. They can’t admit it even to themselves if they want to keep their jobs, if you call working three days some weeks a job. They’ll continue to toss out the same old talking points about “mental illness,”“gun free zones” and “law abiding citizens” versus “criminals.”

    So, there must be some other reason why 49,000 people were killed by guns in 2022 and 46,000 in 2023. Perhaps it’s lax gun laws that let you carry a deadly weapon into a bar, a church or a hospital in many states.   More people are killed by guns than in car crashes. More kids are killed by guns than by falling out of high chairs and all the childhood diseases combined.

    Is this so hard to see? I guess so. I’m going out for a pneumonia shot. At least it won’t kill me.

More on Mitzvahs

Florida Man

4/20/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

Addendum to yesterday’s post about what’s a mitzvah. I think I’ve answered the question for myself, at least partly. Having Eric over on the weekends to hang, watch sports and eat dinner is certainly a mitzvah for me and I think for him too. Having coffee or dinner with my neighbor Karen is a mitzvah for me. Making a point of acknowledging people having trouble getting around, like me, is a mitzvah. Volunteering at the food bank is another. I think I’ve been reading too much into it, making more of the quality than the quantity.

Here’s another confession of sorts. When Florida Man writes about religion in any form, I feel half a hypocrite because I’m in deep water and I don’t know how to swim.

  Generalities I can handle, specifics, no way. But I’m going ahead anyway after yesterday mornings service at Kol Tikvah.

I guess this is not so much about religion but my feelings about Jewish tradition which I know only enough about to be dangerous.

  Saturday was the last day of Passover and included a mourner’s kaddish, a prayer for the dead. The service was quite long for me because I can only take about an hour but I managed for two hours plus.

  There were about 35 people there, mostly grey heads or bald heads and I think everyone knew more than me about the service and about Judaism as well. They knew when to stand and when to clap as the cantor sang in Hebrew and English and when to rock and bow at the waist. I followed along except for the bowing because I don’t know what it signifies.

The cantor’s renderings, she plays guitar too, are quite good. I have to ask her next time if the music is standard or if she offers her own renditions. 

There is a lot in the ceremony that has to do with the Jewish exodus from Egypt and the cruelty of the pharaoh. In his brief sermon the rabbi compared the felon to the pharaoh saying we need to be watchful for the person who thinks they are above the law. I think it was pretty subtle, he doesn’t want to offend, but most people got the message.

The service concludes with the Torah taken from the Ark and a portion read in Hebrew. The Torah is written in small characters and you need a yad or stylus to read it. Even the rabbi hesitated over words here and there. I reminded me of my bar mitzvah when I was reading the torah and stumbling over half the words.

After the Torah is returned to the Ark the services concludes with the kaddish and the reading of names of the people who died since last Passover. The rabbi goes around  the room and asks people to say the names of family they want to remember. I said, Susie Friedberg when he came to me. Her name  came out of me in a chocked voice. I’m sure most people had tears in their eyes for their loved ones.

I’ll end this with Happy Passover to my Jewish friends and Happy Easter to my other friends.

Postscript: I’m sharing this with you guys because it shows what kind of mensch the Rabbi is.I wrote this to him after yesterday’s service.

Hey Rabbi,

I really enjoyed services today. You and the cantor are a good team. Your sermon, though short, hit the mark for me.

I know you were hurting. Me too. It’s been 14 months since Susie died or 14 minutes.The grief is very fresh.

I think you might enjoy today’s Florida Man. I hope so.

Till next week. I hope all your shots find the net. (He plays hokey at 64.)

      Best,

      Ardy Friedberg

Late last night he wrote back.

Shavuah Tov Ardy

Thank you for your kind words.

Yes it was an emotional time.

My first Passover without my mom.

I know you were hurting too.

I love your Florida Man column!

I love your stream of consciousness way of communicating.

Thanks for Sharing.

Rabbi

Rabbi Bradd Boxman 

Pretty nice I think.

Is It A Mitzvah?

Florida Man

4/19/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     I think Florida Man has talked about mitzvahs before but I need to bring it up again. You remember the meaning as doing a good deed, a conscious act of kindness without any reward other than the one you may get by doing something for someone else. I guess it’s a Purim thing for me.

     But I maintain it’s hard to find a good mitzvah to perform.

For example, last week at Bagels&Bible at Kol Tikvah Synagogue my brother and I gave $20 to Allison for her PB&J program. 

    Once a month people in the congregation get together and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that are bagged with chips, a fruit, a bottle of water and a napkin and distributed to South Florida agencies feeding the homeless.

    That’s a mitzvah. But was giving money to buy peanut butter and jelly a mitzvah? Would it be more of a mitzvah to show up and help make the sandwiches? I don’t know. Is giving a couple of bucks to a homeless person as you get off the Interstate a mitzvah? I don’t know. Is any gesture of kindness, like holding the door for a man with a cane a true mitzvah? I really don’t know.

    Maybe common courtesies, almost unconscious acts, are and maybe it’s not that important but I wonder.

    Rabbi Moses Maimonides, also known as Rambam, who lived in the 1100s, formulated eight levels of charity which I think could be called mitzvot, the plural of mitzvah.  

    The highest level of giving is to a fellow Jew in the form of a loan, a job or a gift. I don’t like that one, but I do like level two which is to give to someone who doesn’t know you made the gift. I’ve done that before by picking up the check of someone in a diner who doesn’t look like they can afford their meal. It’s a nice feeling. I don’t think you’re supposed to know who got the gift but these things need to be flexible.

     The lowest of the eight levels of charity according to Rambam is when you give unwillingly, like when kids outside the grocery ask for donations to send the school band to Paris for two weeks. And even that’s worth a dollar.

     But the problem remains. How do you find a good mitzvah, one that benefits a person or a group, doesn’t cost a fortune and makes you feel good too.

     If you have any good mitzvahs I’d appreciate it if you'd share them. I need some help on this.

The Industry and Fear of Immigrants

Florida Man

4/18/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Florida Man's apartment complex holds a couple of food events a month at the clubhouse. Sometimes it’s a food truck that has surprisingly expensive food and sometimes like the other night when they had charcuterie platters and wine and Jack Daniels for the residents.

     It’s was a good idea but not too well attended which left a lot of foodie snacks for those of us who decided to hang out. 

     The nibblies—cheese, fruit, salami, prosciutto and hummus and other stuff— which were good and artistically presented, were provided by a place called Graze Craze. A pretty cute name. The store isn’t  far from the apartment so I went there the other day to check it out.

     It’s just a store front, take out and delivery only. GC is owned by a slight, very friendly woman who was sweeping the floor when I walked in. She put her broom aside and showed me the array of trays she, with a helper, prepare in a huge stainless steel kitchen that looked like it had just been steam cleaned. 

     She wasn’t busy and since my schedule isn’t very tight, we chatted for a while. She’s from Caracas, Venezuela and has been here for eight years. She learned the food business from her father who is still in Venezuela with many members of her family. Her English is near perfect with very little accent.

     Like Kafka, I’ll only use her initials RK, because I don’t know her legal status which in fact may make no difference to the masked guardians protecting us from foreigners like RK, an industrious women with her own business.

     We talked food. RK said she sources her meats, cheeses, veggies and breads locally and starts every morning except Sunday at 4:30.

      I asked how things were at home. She said her family was okay but Nicolas Maduro, the president, is acting like a dictator, who, like someone we know close to home has said “there would be blood” if he wasn’t   elected.

      I didn’t ask if she was a citizen because it’s certainly none of my business but I bring this up because there are millions of people in this country like RK who are concerned about their future here even though they shouldn’t have to be. 

      I’m concerned about me and my kids future here. I’m quite sure Jews are number three or four on the govs target list for, what’s the word, oh, persecution, which is defined as hostility based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or political beliefs.

     Many, if not all, of Florida Man’s readers are directly in the target zone.

     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

The Importance of Toothpicks

Florida Man

4/17/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Florida Man ran out of toothpicks last night. I used the last one to get the spinach out of my molars so this morning I bought a box of 800 which should last a while. I mean what will I do with them besides clean my teeth and check to see if the muffins are done.

    Well, today, as part of my effort to lighten up, I’m going to tell you more than you thought you needed to know about toothpicks.

     First, here’s an abbreviated version of how the smooth little devils are made. (Check it out on YouTube, it’s neat.)

     Toothpicks go through a pretty cool transformation from tree to tiny pointy stick. Surprise, it’s starts with wood, usually birch because it’s strong and doesn’t splinter.

     First the logs are steamed and then peeled into sheets a little thicker than paper. Then they’re cut into little sticks that are fed into a machine that shapes them into a pointy things, polishes and packages them into boxes, paper sleeves and dispensers.Some factories make millions a day, according to toothpick central. Of course, China makes the most picks.

    Believe it or not toothpicks are a $2.5 billion dollar industry world wide. I believe it because one of my old high school buddies used to have a toothpick in his mouth at all times, even while sleeping. And baseball manager Dusty Baker had a toothpick in the corner of his mouth during games. That’s a lot of picks right there.

     Now that we know how they’re made, what else can they do for us besides get food out of our teeth. By the way, the Academy of General Dentistry, says it's okay to use a toothpick if you don't have other options like your finger or a water pick, but “you should still use extreme care, and you certainly shouldn't rely on them for regular use.”

     Anyway, there’s also gum stimulation but that sounds like an ouch to me. They’re really good for sticking into appetizers like cheese, mini sandwiches, picking up Swedish meatballs, shrimp, olives and other stuff on party plates.

    Those are all things that end up in your mouth but there are other things you might not have thought of.

    They can be used for small model building projects to apply glue. I remember using picks to glue strips of balsa wood into model airplanes (Are there still model airplanes?) but I was always kind of messy with my glue.That was about the time Elmer’s Glue came on the market. When you squeezed the bottle Elmer’s came out in little squirts that you could aim in the right spot but it was still kind of messy.

     I’m sure you all know this but picks can be used to clean tight spaces around faucets, grooves in the stove, spray can nozzles, the grooves in golf clubs and your computer keyboard.

    I’m now into toothpicks. I’m already down to 430 picks and I’m just getting started on the first floor of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

Some Good News

Florida Man

4/15/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

     Well, Floria Man has found some good news today. Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe. Okay, It’s good but it’s not great news.

     Anyway, here it is. TSA, the guardians of air travel, the people who have made us take off our shoes for years because one crazy put some kind of explosive in his shoes, is loosening its guidelines for some carryon items.

     You probably remember the incident in 2001, a British guy, a wouldbe member of al-Qaeda, tried to blow up a transatlantic flight but was subdued by passengers with no damage done. He’s serving three life terms plus 110 years in Florence, CO, a supermax prison. It’s really supermax. I know. I interviewed the warden there in ancient times and had trouble getting in and getting out and I was an innocent man with an appointment.

     The TSA list includes several extremely vital items to Americans: body wash, sunscreen, perfume and shampoo. Maybe not really vital but useful.

     Then there are some things that are important like prescription and OTC meds in liquid or aerosol form, breast milk and baby formula and food and drink for toddlers. And the three ounce rule doesn’t apply any more.

     Then there are also new okay items of questionable importance like live fish in water. Why you would need o carry live fish with you or why they are on the list is a bit of a mystery. Then there are ice packs but they have to be for medically necessary items, fresh eggs, I assume in the shell, and wet batteries. I looked it up and wet batteries are called wet because they contain an electrolyte solution of water and acid.

     You can also now carry on biological specimens like blood, cells, saliva, tissue and bone marrow. Again, who knows why you would but I don’t want to sit in that row, thanks.

     The new rule is already in effect at JFK, LAX and Atlanta and it’s a good thing, but here’s a new little wrench in the air travel machinery. The FAA has issued an urgent travel warning about delays resulting from government layoffs at airports.

     Well, that was a break from the heavy stuff and certainly informative and fun. Wasn’t it?

Too Much Golf

Florida Man

4/14/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

      Florida Man, his brother Larry and his brother’s wife Dorcas in Florida for the sun, spent an inordinate amount of time over the weekend watching the Masters golf tournament on TV. We all were cheering for Rory McIlroy to win, cheering his good shots, of which there were many, and groaning at his bad ones which fortunately were few. Anyway he won by one stroke in overtime and we were almost as relieved as he was.

     But aside from our interest in the competition we were fascinated with the manicured beauty of the Augusta, GA golf course the size of the crowd and the fact that we could see the action much better than people who paid big money to stand with thousands of others in the 50th row of the mob at least 50 yards from the players.

    Here are some facts about the tournament for your entertainment:

   The actual cost of tickets, which you get in a lottery is a modest $140/day but tickets are resold for up to $10,000 for the four days of competition. About 40,000 tickets are available each year.

    Cell phones, shorts, denim, five pocket pants (I wonder about six pocked pants) and backward baseball caps are not permitted.

      I didn’t see a single person eating on the course but the cost of concessions is minimal with egg salad and pimento cheese sandwiches selling for $1.50, club sandwiches for $3,00, chips and peanuts $1.50. This makes $15 beer and $7.00 hot dogs at the Washington Nationals ballpark as ridiculous as it sounds. Supposedly the pimento cheese is excellent. I haven’t had any since it came in those little jars you used for drinking glasses when the cheese was gone.

     Amazingly, parking is free at Augusta.

    It’s also amazing how huge golf crowds can be totally silent when a players is ready to hit the ball. If anybody made a sound at the wrong time they’d be banned for life.

    Three other things come to mind. I’m going to try not to spend too many of my remaining hours watching sports on TV. It’s diverting but really a waste of valuable time. Remember Mark Twain said,  “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow,” and “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

     Finally, the ticket lottery for next year’s Masters is open. I’m trying to decide whether to enter.

Scary Seder

Florida Man

4/13/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same Florida Man column only prettier.

     Florida Man went to Bagel&Bible yesterday and took his brother Larry and Larry’s wife Dorcas who are visiting from New York. The subject for the morning was”Passover Insights to share at the Seder table.”

     Cantor Debbie Hafetz led a lively discussion that focused on the story of the Exodus from Egypt but included some stuff about the enslaved Jews and the ten plagues that you don’t want to share at a Seder with young kids.

     Phrases like “broken bodies groan in pain” and “whips crack” and “Jews are regularly killed for sport” and “taskmasters rip infants from their mothers and plaster them alive into the walls.”

     Read that at the Seder and kids will run screaming from the table before the matzo ball soup.

     Of course, It really doesn’t matter if this version of history is exaggerated or even basically true, Jews have been treated that way and worse for 2,500 years or more. The Nazis and the Russians are the most recent perpetrators of the mass murder of Jews and that history is imprinted on all our memories.

     As for the plagues that God sent down on the Pharaoh and the Egyptians, well, judge for yourself.

     The water in the Nile turns to blood and there is no water to drink, frogs and crocodiles are everywhere even crawling down the Egyptian throats, wild beasts from around the world somehow got to Egypt and attacked only Egyptians.

     I’m going to give you some more plagues, but I just want to point out that none of the B&Bs had ever heard the plagues described in this way and they know a lot more about Jewish tradition than I do.

   So here’s more. The Egyptian’s skins erupt in boils that scar every inch of their bodies, fireballs incased in ice destroy building and crops, massive swarms of locusts eat everything that’s left and then God kills every Egyptians’ first born child.

     This is some nasty Seder reading. I’ll settle for the Publix version of the Haggadah and stick with the four questions. Now, please put some more wine in my glass and pass the brisket.

Visit Elderly Brothers on You Tube

Florida Man

4/11/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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      Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same column only prettier.

    As you know Florida Man is also the elder Elderly Brother, with my biological brother Larry, in our highly acclaimed podcast @elderlybrothers-us on You Tube.

    I use the word “biological” because people keep asking us if we’re really brothers. I wonder why because nobody every asked the Brothers Karamazov, Frank and Jesse James or the Smothers brothers (who didn’t look at all alike) if they were brothers. A stranger approached us in a restaurant not long ago and asked if we were biological brothers. Odd.

    And when I say “acclaimed” I may be exaggerating a bit but I suspect the acclaim will be pouring in before long.

    The Elderly Brothers came about rather spontaneously a few months ago. We were talking and laughing on Zoom and decided other people might be entertained by our blather.

     Larry came up with the name which I think is really clever and we had T-shirts and hats printed advertising our brotherlyness. But some people that see our shirt think it says Everly Brothers, the rock and roll, country and pop duo that had a number of hits in the 1970s. When that happens we sing a few bars of "Bye Bye Love" and they know they've made a mistake.

    For those of you who haven’t listened to us on You Tube, we don’t sing or play instruments, we just gab a couple of minutes on four or five subjects, maybe 15 minutes total. It’s light fare but “we know of lot of stuff and some of it’s true” which is our tagline.

     When we get our production values ironed out a bit more we'll have guests who know more than we do about subjects of interest to our age group, like doctors, lawyers, accountants, butchers and bakers.

     So, today Florida Man is promoting the podcast and urging you to check it out on You Tube @elderlybrothers-us or just type @elderlybrothers-us in your browser. And let us know what you think. We welcome all comments except criticism. Just kidding!

Extremes

4/10/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same column only prettier.

      Florida Man is taking another break from “breaking (read disgusting) news” today to discuss two sections of the New York Times, one a weekly I used to love and the other a one-off.

     The special magazine was titled “The Extreme Voyages Issue” which highlights the exploits of people taking risks because they can afford it. It’s clearly illustrates another of my pet peeves, careless rich people.

     Here’s a headline: “30 hours in a hurricane on a race with no course.” Huh? Another: “Diving for ancient bones in -60 weather.” One more: “A 10-day crash course in surviving anything.”

     But it’s also less thrilling events that give me trouble like people taking hikes by themselves in uncharted areas and then having to be rescued by search parties whose members risk their lives to save the dummies.

     It’s mountain climbers whose deaths are mourned by family and friends after they’ve fallen hundreds of feet from El Capitan in Yellowstone.

     It’s divers who try to go deep without air tanks and float to the surface. It’s daredevils like Evel Knievel who somehow survive their tricks but break their bones trying. And don’t forget sightseeing at the Titanic in a capsule. We know what happened there.

     Maybe i’m just jealous but I’d much rather stroll on the beach or hit a golf ball.

     The other peeve, not so much a peeve as a frustration, is the regular Wednesday food section of the paper. It’s sometimes worth reading, sometime pretentious and sometimes useless.

     Two recent headlines: “Can lowly steak fries sizzle again?” “The search for a booze-free unicorn.” I didn’t bother to find out what either story was about.

      But it’s not just the headlines it’s the recipes. There’s one for tinned fish hand rolls, whatever that is. Another is chantilly lili, aka vanilla pudding.

It seems like chef’s or whomever have run out of recipes and are just throwing whatever ingredients they have on hand into the skillet or pot.

     Try broccoli walnut pesto pasta or broccoli rabe pesto pasta or cod celery and potato stew with coconut.

     I may be getting lazy and just don’t want to gather the ingredients but the combos just don’t appeal to me. The food section used to be a basic guide to a weeks cooking but I don’t get that old tingle any more. 

     So for lunch I think I’ll peel a mango and toss it into some ginger-scallion tofu and greens with a side of pork belly. Sounds yummy.

Florida Man

4/9/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your opinion. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s this same column only prettier.

     Today, Florida Man is focusing on chutzpah, sometimes spelled chutzpa, hutzpah or hutzpa, which is a Yiddish word that means nerve, gall or audacity. It’s from the Hebrew and no matter how it’s spelled its very expressive.

     So here’s a real-life screaming example of chutzpa.

     Worm in the brain man, or as you may know him as bear in the trunk man, attended the funeral of an unvaccinated 8-year-old Lubbock, TX  girl who died of measles. This creature from the black lagoon who says the measles vaccine can kill or cause autism confirmed his craziness by using tax dollars to show his ignorance and got to Texas to console the family in his words, “In their moment of grief.” For him a moment, if that, for the family, a lifetime. These fools can’t help stepping on their tongues.

     He didn’t have the guts to speak at the child’s funeral to admit that he was wrong. There are 480 measles cases reported in West Texas and 56 hospitalizations so far. Because of vaccinations, the disease has been gone in the country for 10 years.  But, just move along, nothing to see here except sick people.

     The NYT reported that an anti-vaxxar in the Lubbock area blamed the child’s death on the hospital. But a doc, a former HHS official, said nonsense, something any thinking person would say. He said this was not a medical error and it “Sits squarely on the backs on anti-vaccine voices that have continued to spread disinformation.”

     Did parents in our day ever object to vaccinations? No. Certainly not Jewish parents. They always made sure we got them and had the vax card to prove it. I think I still have one of mine somewhere. Btw, of the eight states with the lowest vaccination rates five are in the deep south.

     So the epidemic continues to spread in West Texas and New Mexico and the gov sits on its hands and continues to fire researchers in the CDC because they might be able to pound some sense in the heads of the likes of Jr. who continues to claim that vaccines are dangerous and recommends cod liver oil and Vitamin A for prevention of the disease and a cure for it.

      I remember being threatened as a kid with cod liver oil if I didn’t want to take some other medicine because cod livers taste so terrible. It has probably improved in taste but it is still given as punishment to the loser of a boat race in Germany. It’s also used as a base for red paint in Newfoundland, a country we haven’t threatened to invade yet.

      We are saddled with people in the gov who know nothing. It’s time to boot the whole bunch.

Are They Learning? Maybe.

Florida Man

4/8/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     This from Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist: “As we wait to see what fresh hell awaits us this week one obvious question is, who put these malevolent clowns in power? The short answer is ignorant people.”

     Well. A Nobel prize winner is learning from Florida Man. Krugman is picking up the appropriate epithets, I especially like “malevolent,” the right words to describe the drunk, the fraudster, the sexual criminals “governing” us. I’m sure he’s been thinking them but just reluctant to use the best of them until things cratered.

     He says, “Many of these voters believed Trump’s fabulist promises. They are only now beginning to understand what they voted for.” Slow learners indeed. They had 16 years to learn all about the scam artist. 

    The brilliant big tech dudes, Bezos, Zuckerberg and others jumped on the felon’s bandwagon with both feet and pockets filled with cash. If they had gotten together and had some backbone we'd be rid of the scum. I wonder how they feel this week.

     At least one hedge-fund billionaire, aren’t they all, and cretin flunky is learning. He said recently "the tariffs on every country are hurting the U.S." and by that he meant the wealthy. He said he didn’t “think this was foreseeable. My bad.” 

     He’s dismissing his ignorance with a casual “my bad” which is like saying my bad when you spill your champagne at the country club fund raiser. How the hell did he and his ultra rich friends, so-called financial wizards, fall for the putrid garbage coming out of the twice-impeached flab when he was running for prez.

     It’s like the probably apocryphal baseball story of the batter being called out on strikes and saying to the umpire, “Thou has’t eyes to see but seeth not.” The batter was kicked out of the game and these guys should be too. 

     Krugman calls the hedge-funder a petty fool and that’s being kind. The only reason the oligarchs are pissy is they won’t be making as many millions and may have to apply for food stamps.

    How petty can the rich get. Try this one. A couple of months ago a “top banker” is quoted in the “Financial Times” as saying, “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

    If that’s liberation for him he has a serious problem. 

Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast on YouTube @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same column only prettier.

Florida Man

4/7/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

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     Florida Man took a break from TV sports, politics, romcoms, Orwell and McKinity, an Irish detective, and went across the street the other night to a local watering hole, interestingly enough, called “The Watering Whole.”

     It was trivia night and I’m pretty good at trivia if I do say so myself. It’s a lot easier than deep thoughts.

     So, after you buy one beer at “The Whole” you get a free beer for each answer you get right. It isn’t an easy contest and there were about 50 people entered. They give you a beeper to press with your answer. Entry is $50 but what the hey.

     I did pretty good. Here are some of the answers I got right.

      Q: What is the only country that is also a continent?

      A:  Australia. Not really a hard one and it earned me a Guinness.

      Q: What is the smallest bone in the human body?

      A: The stapes bone located in the ear. I knew the answer because I just had my ears cleaned and the doc and I were discussing the ancient ear chart on his wall. Another Guinness that I gave to the guy next to me. I think his name was Sean.

     Q: What element has the chemical symbol "W"?

     A: Tungsten. Bing, and I was ready for another Guiness of my own.

     Q: In what year did the Titanic sink?

A:  1912. That was a real easy one. There was a lot of yelling behind me and I don’t know if the crowd was cheering me on or angry that I was getting all the beer. I was sharing after all.      

      I took the next few rounds off because I didn’t want someone to think I was cheating and demand to see my ID. It identifies me as a black belt in trivia.

     My penultimate answer was naming the capitol city of Mongolia? A: Ulaanbatar it is, and I spelled it right too. One last beer.

   The finale:

  Q: What is the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth?

   A: Astatine. A word I learned doing crosswords. It’s radioactive and used in treating diseases of the thyroid.

     That one earned me $100. I was a little wobbly at that point and two bouncers escorted me safely out of the bar and into my car.

     Well, that was fun and a nice break from bizarro world. The hangover and the cash were well worth it.

  Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same column only prettier.

Billionaires Need More Money

Florida Man

4/6/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️  

     It’s Sunday. A day of rest but not for Florida Man. I know, I know. Let up willya. I will when things calm down, if they every do under a administration run by morons. They think everyone but them is stupid, but they’ve got it backward.

     So, today I have a request. Please tell me again why billionaires need a tax cut.  A little louder, I can't hear you. Your silence is not golden. Okay then, tell me how tariffs are going to create wealth for us poor slobs. I know you can’t because the top economists in the country who are not sycophants can’t either.

     From what I read, these tariffs are destroyers. American auto makers are facing a 25 percent duty on car imports, car parts and higher steel prices.

      If you’re planning on buying a new car do it today, no yesterday. One car company exec is quoted as saying there are three possible results from these tariffs, “Ok, bad and Chernobyl.” Looks more like Chernobyl to me. 

     Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a former law prof, says if we get into a trade war with China, which I think we already have, the ingredients in our medical prescriptions that came from China won’t be coming or will be too expensive. “All of a sudden there will be no antibiotics for little kids with ear infections,” she said in an interview with economist Paul Krugman.” And

     And how can we forget how much fun it was to get mumps, measles, diphtheria and especially polio. I still remember pressing my chin to my chest to check for polio in the 50s. But it all may be okay if you listen to bear in trunk man. Large doses of Vitamin A is his preferred prescription for all ailments.  Maybe that and cod liver oil will protect the little tykes.

     Warren says, “Donald Trump's attempt at tariffs is just dumb. It's broad. It makes no sense. What do we gain by putting a big tariff on lumber from Canada, except that the cost of building a new house goes up?”

     The tariffs also are supposed to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. Even if it does bring some companies back from India, Mexico and Thailand it will take years for them to build new facilities that will be manned by robots. The Sec of Commerce, a billionaire of course, says robotics will make workers more efficient. What workers? Robots are the workers. They are inherently efficient. Workers look elsewhere. There may be fast food jobs available. 

     Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in 2008, says, “The tariffs are being sold as a cure for everything. They're being sold as a revenue source as part of this huge Republican tax cut plan” for billionaires.

     “The Republicans know that cutting taxes for billionaires is really unpopular,” Warren says. “And I don't just mean with Democrats. I mean Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians, vegetarians, everybody hates this, except the billionaires and a handful of their suck-ups.”

     In case you missed it,  the possible income from the tariffs is supposed to pay for the tax cut desperately needed by the wealthy. The rest of us won’t need a tax cut because we won’t have any income to report to IRS after the markets tank and Social Security is ended.

     This is more of a news story than I’m used to writing but the really smart people are talking about the chaos ahead and we need to know it even if the dullard in charge doesn’t.

       I just peeked into the kitchen and Marie Antoinette is up to her elbows in flour preparing the cake for the us plebes.

Witch Doctors and the Economy

Florida Man

4/5/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     The felon’s economists are witch doctors only they can’t make it rain or cure a headache like a real witch doctor.

     The crazy narcissist in charge, who probably can’t spell tariff, has unleashed tariffs on the world that caused the stock market to plunge 2,231 points yesterday. It might cause “a little pain” the dullard says. This is more than an owie.

     Yeah. The market and the possible end of Medicare and Social Security won’t be a problem for the common American except that it will throw millions of people, including the idiots who voted for him, onto the local landfill competing for food.

     Add this to brain worm man handling our health and we’ll all get sick from too much Vitamin A, our teeth and gums will fall out from lack of fluoride and Covid will get the rest of to which Jr. is oblivious. Medical research and mental health teams also have been sacked by the chainsaw prez. 

     The felon has said, “I couldn’t care less” and “Only the weak will fail.” That’s the way he feels about the people who voted against him and for him. As the commoners struggle he plays golf. He’s never heard of Nero either.

      Here’s what my financial guy had to say in an email on Friday.

“Today the markets are reacting nervously to the continued uncertainty of the current administration’s economic actions and plans.”

     Well, that’s a duh, but Baird’s job is to calm their clients. It is soothing to know that they have plans which sound reassuring.

     “We have built your portfolio with the understanding that markets go up and down.” Up and down is putting it mildly. Today’s nose dive wasn’t the biggest ever but it was terrible to see and no amount of “up and downing” helps the psyche.

     Here’s the good part. “We utilize the two-bucket approach to ensure that nothing you need over the next five to ten years is invested in the volatility of the market .  .  . I urge you to keep everything you are seeing in perspective.”

      I’m somewhat placated by the two-bucket approach but I’m still scared the cretin will bring everything down. I think I’ll try and get a hold of the God of the stocks and bonds at Bagels&Bible and ask for some personal guidance.

      For several years I’ve been thinking about taking all our investments out in cash, paying the taxes, and putting it under the mattress. It wouldn’t earn any interest but at least I’d have some on hand when the price of a loaf of bread reaches $12.

      I read a book years ago and don’t remember the title but there is one passage where a college kid goes into a burger joint and asks how much a cheeseburger is. The guy behind the counter says $500. The kid says not bad let me have two.

Don’t forget to check out the Elderly Brothers podcast @elderlybrothers-us. We think it’s pretty good but we need your review. And also take a look at ardyfriedberg.com. It’s the same column only prettier.

Tariffs on Penguins

Florida Man

4/3/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️

      The Attorney General of Florida, a man named James Uthmeier, a former chief of staff for the gov., has come out strong against the villains who are pillaging Musk’s Tesla dealerships.

     “Our state law enforcement stands ready to bring the full force of law against anyone who causes destruction to Florida businesses. Today it’s Tesla, tomorrow it will be something else-if the woke mob comes out in Florida, we will be ready.”

     What the hell is the woke mob? The Tesla demo I went to a couple of weeks ago was certainly mob like. I saw several people carrying lighted torches and some were wearing their full-body armor but most were dressed in shorts and tees and carried signs and chanted.

    The question here is what causes destruction? Is demonstrating in front of a Tesla Agency destructive? Probably, because it may deter customers from buying cars and thus destroy business if not property. That interpretation is based on Florida Man’s very limited legal education.

    The Florida law is pretty broad. In 2021 an anti-protest law was passed that creates criminal penalties for “mob intimidation” and damaging or pulling down historic objects, like monuments. You still have a constitutionally protected right to protest, peacefully assemble, and petition the government with your grievances but be careful, these rights can be challenging, especially when you may face violent counter protesters.

      But the ACLU says knowing your rights is the most powerful weapon you have against police abuse. That’s fine if the cops know your rights and think it’s not destructive to wear shorts and t-shirts while demonstrating.

     Laws also can be elastic however.

     Last month, Uthmeier started a  criminal investigation into Romanian brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate for human trafficking, rape and sex with a minor apparently none of which occurred in Florida. These guys, wanted in Romania and the UK, are such bad actors they were welcomed back in the U.S. by the felon who loves misogyny (grab them by the pussy) as much he loves cheating at golf and eating burgers.

     How Trump even heard of the brothers is strange because he doesn’t read anything. They are “famous” for promoting the fantasy of masculinity where men are tough and dominate women. This is a view shared by the fraudster.

     Anyway, these thugs scurried to Las Vegas after calling Uthmeier a communist and taunting him to arrest them in Miami. But undeterred, the AG said he would “use every tool we have within our legal authority to hold them accountable.”

     The point here is that the government is ready to expand any law to accommodate its desire to arrest people and get them to shut up and stay at home. So when you go out to protest have the name and number of your lawyer in your shoe.

Protest at Your Own Risk

Florida Man

4/3/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️

      The Attorney General of Florida, a man named James Uthmeier, a former chief of staff for the gov., has come out strong against the villains who are pillaging Musk’s Tesla dealerships.

     “Our state law enforcement stands ready to bring the full force of law against anyone who causes destruction to Florida businesses. Today it’s Tesla, tomorrow it will be something else-if the woke mob comes out in Florida, we will be ready.”

     What the hell is the woke mob? The Tesla demo I went to a couple of weeks ago was certainly mob like. I saw several people carrying lighted torches and some were wearing their full-body armor but most were dressed in shorts and tees and carried signs and chanted.

    The question here is what causes destruction? Is demonstrating in front of a Tesla Agency destructive? Probably, because it may deter customers from buying cars and thus destroy business if not property. That interpretation is based on Florida Man’s very limited legal education.

    The Florida law is pretty broad. In 2021 an anti-protest law was passed that creates criminal penalties for “mob intimidation” and damaging or pulling down historic objects, like monuments. You still have a constitutionally protected right to protest, peacefully assemble, and petition the government with your grievances but be careful, these rights can be challenging, especially when you may face violent counter protesters.

      But the ACLU says knowing your rights is the most powerful weapon you have against police abuse. That’s fine if the cops know your rights and think it’s not destructive to wear shorts and t-shirts while demonstrating.

     Laws also can be elastic however.

     Last month, Uthmeier started a criminal investigation into Romanian brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate for human trafficking, rape and sex with a minor apparently none of which occurred in Florida. These guys, wanted in Romania and the UK, are such bad actors they were welcomed back in the U.S. by the felon who loves misogyny (grab them by the pussy) as much he loves cheating at golf and eating burgers.

     How Trump even heard of the brothers is strange because he doesn’t read anything. They are “famous” for promoting the fantasy of masculinity where men are tough and dominate women. This is a view shared by the fraudster.

     Anyway, these thugs scurried to Las Vegas after calling Uthmeier a communist and taunting him to arrest them in Miami. But undeterred, the AG said he would “use every tool we have within our legal authority to hold them accountable.”

     The point here is that the government is ready to expand any law to accommodate its desire to arrest people and get them to shut up and stay at home. So when you go out to protest have the name and number of your lawyer in your shoe.

Going Batty

Fact or Fiction

3/31/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️ 

     Florida Man is far from a philosopher. I’m  just a writer. I wrote non-fiction books and reported on real things when they happened for a daily newspaper. I just finished Arthur Miller’s 2002 play, Resurrection Blues, and despite having worked in the "real" world, it raises questions in my mind about what is true and real and what we imagine.

     It’s a short work about an unnamed South American country run by a General, and the leader of rebels who want to overthrow the oppressive military government. 

     We’ve all seen this story many times in history but the twist here is that the suspected guerrilla leader is thought to be Christ by the peasants in the mountains though they call him Ralph and later Charlie. Ralph’s credo is “Just don’t do bad things.” Not bad as credos go. I found myself grinning  then chuckling at the black humor of Miller’s portrayal of the inherent evil in the way politicians manipulate poor people and the cynicism of the mass media.

    The plot revolves around the attempt by the leader of the country’s ruling junta to capture Ralph and crucify him for his crimes, a method of execution common in that country.  A film company is hired to shoot the crucification and sell it to advertisers who expect to attract millions of viewers worldwide and advertise consumer products. Felix, the military dictator sells the rights for $25 million.

     Ralph is never seen as a human in the play only as an occasional blinding light. It’s unknown whether Ralph is real or imaginary.

     The play is as much a damnation of television as it is of dictatorship.

Miller, in an interview said, “The more I observed the United States the crazier it all seemed and the more absurd it all seemed, the more tragic.” Miller said he chose to portray television as an exploiter and a trivializer of everything including a crucifixtion. “The only way to approach it is to ridicule it which is more than it deserves,” he said.

     He has less to say about politicians and dictatorships. But he shows how money controls even the cruelest of rulers. 

     Anyway, Felix captures Ralph, at least he thinks he does, but somehow Ralph escapes by walking through a wall. Henri, the philosopher in the play says, “I have the feeling he has never been in the cell.”

     Henri then compares the ephemeral Ralph to the Jews in Egypt. “There are lots of images of the peoples the Egyptians conquered but little of the Jews. Then one day it struck me that the whole story of the Jews in Egypt may have simply been a poem. Ancient peoples saw no difference between a description of marvels and what we call reality. For them the description was the reality.”

     Skip, the producer of the TV crucification then says, “Are you telling me Ralph doesn’t exist?” And Felix says, “That depends on what you mean by exist. He certainly exists in the mind of the poor peasant. For the General his death is important.”

     But for Miller he is only a character in his play.

     That brings me back to what is true and what is imagined.

Billions of people throughout history have believed in a supreme being, a creator, an avenger, an all knowing figure, etc. 

     For me, as I’ve said before, the Bible and the Torah are good novels written by hundreds of people, probably all men, over at least 2,000 years. Every one of those writers, like me, have had their own opinions and written their own interpretations into the books. 

     So is what they wrote real? Is some of it? Or is some or most of it or even all of it imaginary?

Bye Bye History

Florida Man

3/29/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     As part of the re-writing history program at the Oval Office University there is a new executive order that is certainly going to make American great again.

     The felon has ordered the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.” Get those goddamned bonobos out of there. I’m sure he doesn’t know that bonobos and chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans.

     Of course the target is information about the history of racism, civil rights, gay and transgender rights and in general anything that isn’t about straight white Christian muricans.

     There’s more: ”The prior administration pushed a divisive ideology that reconstrued (sic) America’s promotion of liberty as fundamentally flawed, infecting revered institutions like the Smithsonian and national parks with false narratives,” the order says.

     False narratives? Those monuments of southern civil war seditionists like Robert E. Lee will be restored because their removal helped “perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events.” No matter that Lee and others tried to overthrown the lawful government and killed tens of thousands of their fellow Americans.

     References to Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Enola Gay and the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima are not real muricans and guess what, they are all minorities. The statues to be restored are all of white men who had said Black people were not American citizens and kept them enslaved.

        Langston Hughes, the poet, novelist and playwright who wrote about Black life in America from the 1920s through the 1960s, had this to say in his poem “Let America Be America Again.”

”Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed.”

    There is much more of this poem and it’s worth Googleing.  Hughes died in 1967.  How did he know these people in charge before they even appeared on the scene. He didn’t, but he knew the people just like them who had come before this current batch of Nazis. It isn’t Make America Great Again and never has been for them. It’s Make America White and Christian Again.

        Can’t you feel it in your blood, in your soul. Can’t you feel the world that Hughes was writing about coming back in force.

What A Gang

Florida Man

3/28/ 2025

afriedberg1@mac. com

Copyright©️

     “Now, Donnie, remember not to push that red button,” the drunk rapist told the felon. “Ok, but can’t I push it just once Pettie?” Donnie asked. “No, don’t touch it,” the incompetent told the incompetent.

     That’s among Florida Man’s big fears with the dumb and inexperienced bumblers in charge.

     Remember Jimmy Breslin’s 1969 novel,The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight? Well, that these creeps not only can’t shoot straight, they lie about their misses. It’s long past time for the fraudster to give up on the lessons he learned so well from Roy Cohn, he attorney and guru, in the 1960s.

     You may remember Cohn as a gay man who persecuted gays out of government jobs in the 1950s. He was a bully just like the apprentice who learned at his feet. Cohn died of AIDS in 1986 while insisting he had liver cancer.  He also denied that he was gay despite taking his lovers to public events and admitting he slept with men because he was powerful and “homosexuals are men who have zero clout.”

     He taught the fraudster the principle of “deny, deny, deny.” If someone wrote a song about these people that would be the chorus. To them accountability means someone good with numbers.

     We've learned that their plan to attack the Houthis in Yemen was discussed on Signal, a publicly available messaging app, and one of the invitees, mistakenly, was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic magazine.

     The Houthis as you all know, but I doubt the felon knows, are an anti-government movement that opposes the U.S. and Israel and has been firing missiles at ships in the Red Sea for more than a year. We’ve been bombing them for months and they continue to fire on the ships.

     Being a journalist, Goldberg published the details of the meeting and the security breach has become a total embarrassment for the drunk Sec Def and other high level people in the intelligence industry. The Sec has gotten red-in-the-face angry with reporters for asking him questions about the slip up that could have cost American lives, the most precious lives on earth.    That’s really what we need. An angry drunk in charge of the military.

     Of course, Goldberg, who served in the Israeli army, is the scapegoat in this. It’s his fault they invited him to this semi-public meeting. He was immediately attacked as an incompetent journalist running a failing magazine.

     The felon’s take is the usual deep state working against him. He said at first that he didn’t even know about the meeting and all the rest is fake news. It’s the predictable, “I didn’t do nothin’. Move along. There’s nothing to see here.”

      I don’t know if it’s hypocrisy or ignorance or a combination but this is another illustration of the way Roy Cohn’s influence lives in the mind of the twice-impeached criminal. Of course, the people in charge of this fiasco are the people he says are the best and brightest, an appellation that is overused.

      Note: Thanks to everyone for your warm comments about Eric and me in yesterday’s post.

Careful What You Read and Where

Florida Man

3/26/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

    Today’s headline: Holden Caulfied, a fictional character we all met in high school in Catcher In the Rye is being run our of Texas. 

    State lawmakers (if by lawmakers you mean frightened children) are considering a bill that would make it a jailable crime to teach J. D. Salinger’s classic coming of age novel. 

    When we were teens we identified with Holden because he is a discontented kid who disdains authority and is unconcerned about his future. Maybe identified isn’t the right word. In my case at least, I think I envied him because I did respected authority too much. 

    The reason for outlawing the book: sexually explicit content.  Now, I don’t remember any sex in the book but I looked it up and there is sex in the context of the 1950s. Holden is very interested in sex, weren’t we all, and he goes to a prostitute but ends up talking to her. How freaking sexy can you get.

     Anyway, teachers and librarians face up to 10 years behind bars for providing the book to students let alone teaching about it. It used to matter in Texas if the book was considered to have “educational value or literary merit” but that doesn’t matter any more.

    Does this prevent parents from giving the books to their kids? Don’t know. But if they do they could be turned in by a neighbor whose son Timmy told her that Jimmy got this book about sex but I couldn’t read it because I never learned how.

    Here’s something laughable about the law. There is an exception. If the adult providing the “sexually explicit content” is married to the child, which is legal in Texas. Still, a judge has to approve. 

   So how does that go? Man: “Judge, I gave Betty a dirty book. Is that okay.” Judge: “I don’t know. I’ll have to read it first and I’ll need to talk to Betty privately in my chambers where I keep my etchings.”

     Of course, Holden isn’t the only one under attack. Odysseus from The Odyssey, John from Brave New World, R.P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and many more are in the sights of these book burners.

      But don’t blame just Texas. Indiana, Alabama and Arkansas have similar laws.

     And here’s one more scary thing. The Texas senator sponsoring this bill, when is isn’t masterbating while watching TV cartoons, also is promoting one that sets up boards of parents and community members to decide which books should be read by their kids. What could possibly go wrong with that?

     My parents only went to parent/teacher meetings to see if I was doing okay. They didn’t care what was in the school library or what I was reading. And I think they were damned good parents.

So This Is Health

Florida Man

3/25/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

    Ever heard of the MAHA Moms? I haven’t either but they are big with the crazy man who is Sec. of Health. You may remember RFKJr. as the man with the dead bear in his trunk but the MAHAs, Make America Healthy Again, are just more proof that the totally incompetent people now running the government can be influenced by even less experienced and less competent people.

    Anyway, the moms met with nutso in the White House recently to discuss nutrition and the worm in Jr.’s brain. Well, maybe not the worm but other things like infant formula which the mom’s claim is better in Europe. It may be. Many things are. So, I’m sure Jr. will be impressed.

    He, it seems, is open to any thinking that is contrary to medical research. He’s a big promoter of Vitamin A as a treatment for measles and beef tallow instead of oil for frying even though cardiologists say it’s risky for the heart.

    He says he’s following the science,” said Dr. Wallter Willett, an expert in nutrition research at Harvard. “If you look at the scientific evidence, that doesn’t take you to the conclusion that beef tallow is better than seed oils.”

     Frankly, beef fat sounds tasty to me but I like fried a lot.

    The anti-vaxxer has announced to food executives that “There’s a new sheriff in town.” I suppose that will frighten some of them enough to load their products with Vitamin A.

    But public health experts have more serious concerns about his support of the Muskrat’s firing spree.

     “I think he has to take the blame for it. He’s destroying science in America,” Willett said.

     Some of Kennedy’s ideas about public health are just plain wrong experts say, but what do they know. He has said measles  shots wear off therefore older people are unvaxxed.

     Of course the CDC says measles, mumps, rubella vaccines protect people for life. An infectious disease doc at Vanderbilt U. said  “The data continue to support that measles vaccine protects the vast majority of people lifelong.”

     The NYT reported that after the MAHA Moms meeting, the White House posted video of Mr. Kennedy stumbling over how to pronounce food ingredients like riboflavin.

     Here’s the question for me and I’m not stumbling. Will a vaccine, or eating beef tallow, or anything protect us from Jr.?

Things Do Get Worse

 Florida Man

3/24/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     The words “equality” and “equity” are being expunged from the dictionary. Well, not officially, not yet.

     It started with DEI and has moved swiftly to civil rights protections. This time it’s the Department of Homeland Security cutting three offices that oversee civil rights protections because they are “impeding immigration enforcement.”

     That is, they are protecting the rights of immigrants. A spox for the agency says they will still be protecting people but they just won’t have anybody doing it. More of the doublespeak of the felon’s hence people.

    There also was an ombudsman in charge of making sure detention facilities are safe an humane. Gone. In all, more than 100 workers have been laid off in these offices.

  Try this for a logical explanation: “These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” the spox said. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.“

     So how are those deportations going?

     A non-prorfit tracking flights out says there have been 258 as of March 22, about the same number during a similar period of the Biden aministration. Of course, in line with their humane efforts, many deportees are being flown to countries other than their own. So, I may be from Guatemala but I end up in Angola. I can’t imagine how that feels, no language, relatives, no countrymen.

     In another humanitarian move a contract to provide legal aid to children who have come here without a parent of guardian has been terminated. Kids will now have to work their way through the legal system by themselves. It’s okay though because it only effects 26,000 kids under 18. 

     It’s not easy to keep up with the tragedies of fired workers, deported migrants and abandoned kids. Thousands of lives are being destroyed willy-nilly. Forget the importance of the job and the years of loyal service, forget that these are real people.

     And don’t forget their coming for Social Security and Medicaid. We’re going to have to find our canes and walkers and oil up our wheelchairs because street demonstrations may be the only answer.

A Couple of Pet Peeves

Florida Man

3/23/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Florida Man doesn’t dream much but when I do it’s often about things I’ve spent the night thinking and worrying about that don’I even exist.

Like last night, it was scrolling endlessly through the iPhone screens trying to find something that I knew wasn’t there. Fortunately, when I wake up I only remember the bare outlines of my fruitless and annoying efforts.

     And talk about annoying. Sideline sports reporters have been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. They are mostly young women trying to get a start in a man’s world and some are even veterans at it. It’s a humiliating job though sometimes they do get 20 or 30 seconds camera time for their demo reel.

     “Coach, you’re down 26 points with 12 seconds left. How are you going to win this game? Well, Diane, I think we’ll just have to throw in the damn towel, don’t you?.” “Thanks a lot coach. Back to you guys in the booth.”

     Now tell me how that is not only a waste of time for everybody but how it isn’t demeaning to everybody as well.

     And while I'm talking about pet peeves here’s another big one.

It's authors, like Lee Child, who have Superman vision. Which, by the way, Superman doesn’t use very often in the old movie serials unless he can’t use it because it doesn’t work through lead.

     Anyway, in observations across a crowded room he analyzes, “His hands are calloused, probably a farmer or a weightlifter. His eyes are a a cloudy grey but they aren’t very good because he missed the carrot strips and put his finger in the ranch dressing. He looks young, maybe 20 or 25 but he might have been older because I could hear him  expounding on Shakespeare, Milton and Yogi Berra to a group of attentive listeners. He laughed heartily at his own jokes and had a twinkle in his cloudy eyes.”

     So I asked Child to take a look at a video I made of me across a crowded room and describe what he saw.

     Here’s his description. “He appears to be in his mid-70s and looks good for his age,” Child wrote. “He’s not tall but has a solid build, not fat, not thin, sturdy. He has deep blue beautiful eyes, naturally set in a face that is lined but not as old as he is. He has an open and inquisitive face. He has gray-white hair cut short but not too short. He’s clean shaven, but not too clean shaven, and casually dressed, blue jeans, light-weight long-sleeve shirt, Sketchers sneakers. He walks with an unsteady gait but seems to get around and carries himself in an eighty-nine degree upright position. He speaks well, intelligently, uses words of two syllables and has an accent that sounds like Jasper County, Arizona.”

     v“Right on,” I wrote back, “except you left out the calloused hands of a farmer, obviously well-read with a keen sense of humor and likes Louisiana Hot Sauce.”

  Enough rambling for a cloudy morning in South Florida. I have more pet peeves to share later. Maybe tomorrow I can get back to the depressing stuff you expect from me.

Is It Really That Bad?

Florida Man

3/22/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Florida Man has been thinking about this great divide in American society. I know it exists but it’s below the surface in most of our daily lives. We don’t see it. At least I don’t.

    Take yesterday. Ruthie said she was offered a cup of Turkish coffee while doing a story the other day in Odessa, Texas. Yes, there are Turks in Odessa.

     So I decided to find a a store with Turkish products in Fort Lauderdale. Turns out there are several so I picked one. It was a restaurant rather than a grocery store so I bought a Turkish Pide, a pizza-like dough with mushroom filling, from a very pleasant and friendly young man who spoke good English and good Turkish. The pide was okay and the place was busy with Turkish men watching a soccer match on TV and cheering at 2 in the afternoon. The clerk gave me the name of a Turkish market.

     The restaurant is right across the street from a deli that has very good bagel and herring filets with onions and cream sauce. Everyone there was very friendly including the people in line to pay.

     On to the Aslan Bazaar. Nice store and Tommy, the clerk/owner was very helpful. He picked out the kind of coffee he said I needed and one of those little Turkish pots to make it in. I also got a jar of some young gerkins. I never knew gerkins were young or old. I also bought and some halvah. My dad loved halvah. I never liked it as a kid but it’s good now.

     This morning at B&B we talked about the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty. People were peppy talking about it but frankly I don’t get it. What is holiness and godliness anyway? The rabbi said it means to separate or cut off the things of daily life and celebrate God on the sabbath. He also said it meant peace with ourselves. I’ll buy that part. We all enjoyed the bagels and lox and chatted afterwards. Anyway, my point here is that if you go out on the street or look out your window you aren’t likely to find that great divide that we hear about every day. That's the one with people holding knives at each others throats, shooting each other on the freeway and cutting in line in front of you at Burger King.

    I’m not sure that the divide is between people as much as it is between government and the people.The radiation from D.C. spreads over all over us like a miasma and the media is all for it because it makes for headlines and stories. I’ve been there. I know how that is. It’s “Hey buddy. You hiding under your desk. Go out and get us a story with pictures. We need it for the weekend.”

     So is the divide manufactured by the media? I don’t think entirely but I do think a good big of it is being sold by newspapers and TV. I think this is pretty upbeat for Florida Man. I’m trying hard to get away from the miasma.

The Drama of the Ears

Florida Man

3/20/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Here’s another episode on Florida Man’s ear drama. It’s not really dramatic, I’m just trying to create some drama around earwax, a little discussed dinnertime subject that deserves more attention.

     I’m pretty sure most of you have had it. It’s another one of those aging things that you never heard of until the doc says, “That’s just an aging thing.” Which is better than him saying, “Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

     Anyway, those of you who have been following the story closely remember that in a previous episode I was strapped Into a chair and spun around and masked up and told to follow the red dot with my eyes. I also turned down the chance to be tested for food allergies and have a camera put down my throat to look for acid reflux.

     Now it’s on to more tests that I’m turning down. This is like taking your car in for an oil change and being told you need a new front axel, a new transmission and your knewton valve is totally out of whack. Thanks to Kevin for inventing the knewton valve.

     The new suggested tests include an MRI ($850) to see how bad my sinuses are, a C-T Scan ($2,000) to see if I have fluid on my brain that has to be drained by drilling a hole in my head, and a second chance to have my food allergies removed. The doc is also recommending physical therapy and some anti-biotic pills for something. It’s all covered by insurance but there is something wrong here.

     Really. I don’t care if I have allergies or rotten sinuses or fluid. If those things are going to kill me it’s not going to be instant. I can live with them. If you get another 30 minutes of life out of these procedures that’s fine, but you just don’t know when that 30 minutes is going to be.

      Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not accusing anybody of anything but I’m just sayin’ it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the doc, who seems like a nice guy as do all con men, is running a Medicare scam? This is Florida after all, where Medicare scams were born.

     My friend Karen goes to the same guy and he ran some of  the same tests on her. So counting whatever he charges for visits and the cost of tests it comes out to a pretty penny, a term that goes back to the 16th century.

     A little more about this doc and his office. I waited 20 minutes to get into an exam room. Another 20 minutes to get a glimpse of the him when he stuck his head in the room to say hello. I said, “I’ve been here 40 minutes let’s get going.” He said, “Forty-five minutes is okay,” and disappeared. It was another 15 before he showed again. 

     Before I left I told him his office furniture and decor was 1970s shabby, his computers were 150 years old in tech years, the charts on his wall looked like Leonardo’s work and the faded paint was not attractive. I added that “It doesn’t look very professional.”

     He seemed surprised. I guess he thought the unmatched chairs with badly worn seats in the waiting room, exam chairs that look like they came second hand from a dentist’s office, the duct tape on an exam table and a bathroom that looked dirty and smelled worse is okay, like waiting 45 to be seen. There  may be more on this later, but I hope I don’t have to vent again, though it is cathartic.

No Raise

Florida Man

3/19/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     The twice-impeached liar in the White House is always looking out for the welfare of Joe Six-Pack and the rest of his wage-earning cult. He has a real warm feeling for the working class. They should be thankful they voted for him.

    To help them, on Tuesday he revoked a Biden order that would have increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $17.75 an hour from $15.00. This cheats 300,000 construction workers, electricians, plumbers and other wage slaves out of a substantial raise. The Federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25 and hour. Try and live on that.

     Many of these contractor jobs are in low-wage service jobs like cleaning government buildings and working in cafeterias or restaurants in federal buildings. The raises were negotiated by the Service Employees Union (SEIU). They argued that the federal government shouldn’t underwrite poverty jobs.

      In the incredible twisted logic of the cretin and his servants this move will somehow benefit workers. Since he doesn’t know what real work is, or what $110 a week more in the pay envelope means, it’s all immaterial to him. To the worker it pays bills.

     He said, “This will restore common sense and unleash the potential of American citizens.” Tell me what the freaking hell that means. Wait. I think I can figure it out. It means lower pay for workers and unleashes their potential.

     “This is yet another anti-worker move from an administration that promised to deliver jobs with higher wages, lower the cost of eggs and improve our economy for working families,” said April Verrett,  president of the Service Employees Union. “This executive order does none of that. Instead, it makes life harder for hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans who keep our government running behind the scenes in good and bad times,” she said.

      The “very stable genius” has flip-flopped repeatedly on the issue of raising the minimum wage. Sometimes he's for it and then he isn't. He once said he wanted to raise it and not raise in the same garbled mouthful..

   The minimum wage started in 1938 at $.25 and hour which is more than $5.00 today but it has never been a living wage according to economists. I worked for that $2.00 a day rate in high school but of course I as living at home so it was all gravy.

   When I worked as a copy boy for the NYT in 1958 I was earning a barely livable $45 a week. That’s almost $500 a week today and still not enough to live in a city and take care of a family.

    So, the minimum wage really is a minimum. And the billionaires want to keep it that way. I say again, I hope the cult is glad they voted for the felon.

Where Are You Robin Hood?

Florida Man

3/18/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     Don’t ask me why, but Florida Man was, for the first time, reading Martin Luther’s 95 Theses yesterday. You know how suddenly something pops into your head and thanks to the innertubes you get satisfaction in a few clicks.

     That’s how I thought to look at the theses. It just popped in. Truthfully most of the 95 are way to religious for me but one thing stuck out. 

It’s the concept of indulgence. Luther says, “Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.”

     Further he says, “Christians are to be taught that he who sees a needy man and passes him by, yet gives his money for indulgences, does not buy papal indulgences but God's wrath.”

     Just sayin’, I think God may be wasting his wrath on people who eat too much chocolate or buy a Corvette rather than pouring it down on people who are taking from the needy to give to the indulgers. 

    Of course, I’m referring to the really big indulgers, the felon and his congressional followers who are taking from the poor and giving to the rich. 

     They are going to cut Medicaid and use the savings to give a tax cut to the 1 percent for whom it’s a mere bagatelle, something of little or no importance, a trifle. Why a billionaire needs a tax cut has been a mystery to me ever since I knew what billionaire and tax cut meant.

     The thieves have already destroyed USAID which in turn is destroying lives of the poor all over the world. The aid feeds the hungry, supplies medicine and medical supplies to millions, builds schools and provides disaster relief. All of this amounts to half a percent of the federal budget.       Any one of these billionaires could fund USAID with pocket change.

     The agency made a lot of friends for this country and we certainly need all the friends we can get. When Canadians boo our national anthem you know you’re in trouble.

     The Department of Education that gives grants, loans and other assistance to 4,400 public schools serving 2.8 million kids is also on the way to the trash heap. Take from the poor and give to the rich. 

     A food bank in North Carolina that serves 34 counties has had it funds cut to zero. Pubic radio in the state says that $11 million that would go directly to farmers to buy fresh food to distribute is gone. I’ve volunteered at food banks and I know the are grateful for the relative pittance they get. They need the lettuce, potatoes, fruit and canned goods. They aren’t begging. They just need help.Take from the poor and give to the rich. 

     Martin Luther said, “Indulgence is doing something you enjoy even if it has negative consequences.” He certainly nailed these incredible un-Christians who always put on a God fearing front. They clearly enjoy their work hurting people. Just take another look at the Muskrat in his Nazi garb wielding a chainsaw and laughing his head off. Consequences be damned.

      How incredibly mean it is to take food out of the mouths of the poor, to take minimal medical care away and give the money to the rich so they can hire another crew member for their yacht. 

      Where is Robin Hood when we need him?

Courage

Florida Man

3/16/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️  

     Bagels&Bible often gives Florida Man the idea for a post.

     Saturday morning’s session was one of those. We moved from the reading of the parashah, the weekly portion of the Torah, to today’s crazy world. Something I wish the rabbi would do more often but I think he wants to stay away from the open discussion of politics.        

     The Torah portion dealt with bravery and resistance in the face of wrong and emphasized love, compassion and strength. The rabbi brought the ancient writings up to the present with the Mahmoud Khalil case.   

     Khalil, a pro-Palestinian leader of the anti-Israel, anti-semitic demonstrations at Columbia U. In New York has been arrested by ICE and faces deportation because of his role in the often violent protests. He has a green card which makes him a legal resident and hasn’t yet been charged with a crime. It’s a PR move like so much of the other garbage the felon is throwing at the wall. 

     But deporting a legal resident is different. That’s us. We can become fair game. The Supreme Court has ruled that "once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he become invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within borders."

     There are limits to green card protection. You can get kicked out if you’ve committed a violent crime, marriage fraud or have abused controlled substances. The violator goes to court and if convicted usually serves time in the U.S. and could face removal after that.

     The law says nothing about demonstrating in a lawful fashion and exercising your right of free speech. But here we are. Waving signs in front of a Tesla car lot could get us arrested. We are nearing or have already passed the point of no return. The felon’s tiny hands are filthy with violations of the Constitution. 

     Back to the Kahlil case. 

     Columbia Professor Shai Davidai who is Jewish and an advocate for Israel opposes the demos which he describes as Hamas propaganda. Nevertheless, he says Khalil deserves a fair trial with media coverage, sees this as an “opportunity to balance accountability with proper judicial proceedings” and is calling for due process and transparency. 

     How does this relate to Sunday’s B&B?

     Well, Davidai. 41, an assistant professor of business, is taking a brave and principled stand against an oppressive state. That’s a statement that I didn’t think I’d be applying in the U.S. Not only is Columbia being penalized by the twice-impeached liar but Davidai is Jewish and a faculty member and in jeopardy.

     “While I strongly disagree with Khalil’s actions, I refuse to strip him or his wife of their humanity,” Davidai said. Khalil’s potential deportation is a direct consequence of his actions, he said.

     But Davidai also said, “This is not about Khalil. He is neither a hero nor a villain. This isn’t about free speech. It’s about respecting and upholding the rule of law.”

     Strength, courage and compassion. Shai Davidai is leading. We’re going to need to follow his example.

More Voodoo Medicine

Florida Man

3/15/2025

afriederg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

I’m not going to turn this into a medical journal but for the last ten days I’ve been caught in the maelstrom of doctors appointment and I ran into another incident of voodoo medicine yesterday morning.

This is Florida Man’s fourth visit to a doc I just wanted to clean the wax out of my ears. He says, “I’m a thorough guy. I’m an ENT and I’m going to ear, nose and throat you for all it’s worth.”  That’s not exactly what he said but that was his meaning and what’s happening. Of course, I could say no and I did to an allergy test on Tuesday.

But anyway, I went  yesterday for a “rotary audio.” I sat in a barber-like chair and got strapped in. The tech slipped a mask over my head and put on a black cover over it so I was blindfolded. Then I was circled right for one minute at very low speed, eyes open, and then left for a minute. That was it. I was in and out in 10 minutes.

I asked the tech what this little activity proves and in typical informative fashion he said, “It checks the way your eyes react to the motion. It’s recorded and the doctor will interpret it for you.” I said, “I know you know the results so tell me.” He said, “I really don’t. I didn’t learn that.” Me either because it’s voodoo.

Next Tuesday it’s videoscopy day. I looked it up. It’s a tiny camera used to look at your vocal cords to check for swelling, irritation and acid reflux and takes three minutes. It also checks for “misuse.” Question: How do you misuse your vocal cords?   

      I looked that up too. I’m just not sure this stuff isn’t made up. Screaming and shouting, talking too softly or too loudly, not using your diaphragm correctly and talking too much is considered misuse.

     “Well, your honor I’m guilty on all counts except speaking too softly.” But how much is too much screaming and shouting for instance and I’m not an opera singer.

  Here’s the point. I went in to have my ears cleaned. The doc did that, removing a couple of pounds of wax. Then there was this deluge of pills, nasal sprays,, ear drops and ointments, $47 worth which is not bad, and a half dozen office visits at $45 per. Now if he isn’t running up the insurance bill, I’m not a trained observer any more.

     I can’t wait to hear the diagnosis. “Florida Man,” that’s what he calls me because I sign in with my professional name, “I’m afraid I have bad news. We’re going to have to schedule a noseectomy, an earectomy, a throat vacuuming and we need to have a further look at those essential tremors. They may have to be removed.”

That session is scheduled for next week. I think I better take my solicitor with me.

Baseball Season

Florida Man

3/14/2025

afriedberg1@mac.com

Copyright©️

     It’s almost baseball’s opening day and Florida Man used to be very excited. I’m not anymore and I know why and I’m going to tell you guys. 

      On Wednesday my friend Tom and I went to a spring training game in Palm Beach. It was a beautiful cloudless day in South Florida. Temps in the 70s and low humidity. There may have been 2,000 people. Great little stadium, red dirt, green grass, white lines. The beer, the brats, the Cracker Jacks were excellent. By the way, a bag of Cracker Jack was $4.79. And you thought eggs were expensive.

     A group of nameless, to me and anybody else except relatives and friends, young men representing the Houston Astros and the Washington Senators played nine innings. The score was Sens 9, Stros 3 but the score meant nothing. It’s a bunch of guys trying to become big leaguers. You have to feel for them. Fabulous opportunity and what could be better than wearing a big league uniform even if it only for a month. I envy them. I really envy them. 

     The reason I’m not excited about new seasons any more is related to the namelessness of the players. It’s not just because I’m an old complainer, which I guess I am, it’s because players change teams so often you can’t count on seeing the same team two years in a row. And players come and go pretty fast. The average career is about five years but there are obviously exceptions. There are guys who play 15 years or longer.

Another negative for me is the fact that mediocre players make millions. If you know baseball, you know that a .250 batting average is pretty good these days. In my time (I hate the phrase but anyway) the good players hit in the low to mid 300s. The average guys were around .275.

     I’m going to reminisce here  The time machine is set on 1950. 

     I was a dedicated baseball fan and player In those days there were fewer teams so it was easier but I memorized the standings in the newspaper every day and I could tell you most of the scores from the day and night before. Of course nobody asked. We lived in Kansas City, where there was a Yankee farm team at the time, and my grandfather, Moe, took me to games on Sundays. We saw all the future Yankee stars of the era on their way up to the majors.

     A word about Moe. He was badly injured in a car accident and had extreme pain in his legs. He used to soak his thighs with hot wash clothes in the evening. But he still got it together enough for us to take the streetcar to the games because I wanted to go.

     I’m afraid I never thanked him enough for that. I know I didn’t. I’m not going to make any excuses because there aren’t any.

     But I also played ball with friends from dawn to dusk every day in the summer and thought I had a future in the game. My Dad set me straight the summer of my 17th birthday.

     I’m going to drag you further into my baseball past. I wrote this a while back during a period of extreme nostalgia about baseball.  It’s supposed to be poetry.

In my mind a picture,

My dad, in his suit and tie

slips off his coat and lays

it on the grass near the car

he has just parked in our driveway.

I’m 12 years old.

I’ve been waiting for him to come

home and play catch.

I thought I was a pitcher. I had all

the moves, and i could throw okay

but didn’t have the size to be a 

real player. I didn’t know that.

He did, but played along anyway.

I handed him a catcher’s

mitt, a gift from a friend of his, and

he squatted in front of the garage door

behind a plate I outlined with white chalk on the concrete.

I long ago had nailed wood strips across

the garage windows because I wasn’t always accurate.

My first throw was right over. He gave a thumbs up.

My second was right over too.

The third hit the concrete inches in front of him

and smacked him in the  ankle. 

He winced.

I know it hurt. It was my best fast ball.

Maybe 40 mph, but off the ankle over his 

wing tips. He shook it off. 

He always did and got ready for the next one.

     So my baseball fanaticism is deeply rooted but I don’t think I’ll ever get that old feeling back. The thrill of seeing the same players on the same teams every year. Maybe other older fans don’t feel that way but I bet some do.

Voodoo Medicine

Florida Man

3/13/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️

     Florida Man had my second encounter with voodoo medicine on Tuesday and it was in Fort Lauderdale not Louisiana, Cuba or the Caribbean.

     No Rastas were involved. There were no chicken bones being read like tea leaves. No ganja being smoked. Not really any dark magic. Just strange procedures that I’m calling voodoo, not deprecating the religion, just the medicalness of the procedures.

     First I’ll tell you about my introduction to voodoo medical practices. It took place at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, a well-known hot-bed of occult medicine.

     I was there because I was having tremors in my left hand and I wanted to see if it was the beginnings of Parkinson’s. Now, Mayo is a giant and impressive operation known for its development of advanced medical treatments. People from all over the world go there. They have apartments for the rich and famous. They are not known for any voodoo.

     So their main test for Parkinson’s involved sticking tiny pins in my arms and reading the squiggles they made on a computer screen when activated by a battery. Before computers I don’t know how they did the test. It didn’t hurt but I could see the screen and it looked like electrical interference on television. Nothing to see here. Keep moving. A tech watched and apparently could read the results. The verdict: harmless essential tremors. I’m still trying to figure out why they are essential. I don’t see any real use for them.

     Back to Tuesday in the office of an ENT testing for problems with my ears and my balance. I stood on a pillow, marched in place with my eyes closed. Touched my fingers to my nose. Wore a mask and followed red dots with my eyes. Had electrodes taped to my forehead and some other things I can’t remember. How these techniques were developed is a mystery to me. For example, who discovered that standing a pillow was a good test for balance. I want some answers on that.  

     To me it qualified as voodoo and I’ve had semi-extensive experience.

     One day years ago, I was walking up the stairs in the Fort Lauderdale court house to cover the murder trial of a Cuban man and found the family of the accused hovering over a pile of chicken bones on one of the landings. Later that day, the accused was found not guilty. So keep your chicken bones just in case.

     Further, I worked with a reporter in Miami who was a practitioner. She seemed like a normal person although some of her stories had a strange ring and chupacabras were often mentioned. You know like the legendary Sasquatch or Locn Ness monster only more like vampires. For those of you who don't always know when I’m kidding, I’m kidding about the chupacabras but not the Loch Ness monster. 

    Anyway, voodoo has long been misunderstood as a sinister practice involving curses and zombies but it’s a faith-based religion focusing on community, healing and spiritual connection. And there is ganja. It’s a part of the identity of millions of people in the U.S., Africa and Haiti. (Thanks to ChatGPT.)

Stereotypes 

Florida Man 

3/12/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️

     Whether we admit it or not, stereotypes are deeply ingrained in us. We’ve got em’.

     This became clear to Florida Man once again yesterday when I was walking into the ear doc’s office in Fort Lauderdale. I saw a Black couple walking toward the door. I waited and held the door because the man was kind of stopped and the woman wasn’t moving very well either. Not that I’m moving like a well-oiled machine.

     I really wasn’t even thinking about it, just holding the door, but I was surprised when he thanked me in what I thought was a cultured voice, no southern undertones, no real accent at all. From a distance I thought the couple looked rather shabbily dressed. It was a cool morning for Florida and they both had on light weight jackets.

     Inside I sat in a chair next to him and as a trained observer (reporters like to call themselves trained observes) I saw that he had on some good looking light brown canvas shoes, nice ribbed black socks, new or freshly pressed blue jeans, a Columbia jacket and a ESPN baseball cap. I couldn’t see anything but the woman’s shoes and even I knew they were Chanel.

     In contrast, I was wearing Sketchers with a hole in the toe of the right shoe, kinda’ old blue jeans, a long sleeve shirt and my Elderly Brothers hat. They must have thought I was a poor bubba on Medicaid. 

     Now, I didn’t grow up around minorities except an occasional maid and didn't go to school with any recognizable minorities until college. And then there were very few Black kids and I don’t remember any Asians or Latinos. In my summer jobs I worked with white people. 

     When it came up, my dad who hired Blacks to work in the back and the basement of the jewelry store he managed often used the word “schvartze.” I think it was common term among Jews who grew up in the 30s and common until the 60s. I don’t think he used it with prejudice but it certainly wasn’t a good reference.

     My first real exposure to Blacks and other minorities was in the army when I was 19-years-old. I don’t remember being shocked or mad that Black sergeants were telling me to peel potatoes but it was a new experience. 

    After that my life was filled with minorities. I ran a foundation in New York that made grants to mostly Black groups in the south. At one point I ran a race relations project with a mostly black staff and we worked in the black areas of Cleveland.

     Back to my point of ingrained stereotypes. From childhood our parents are role models. If they're bigots we’ll be bigots. If they aren’t we have a chance to be good people.

     Of course, this is a complex world and stereotypes can be formed at any time in life. Societal norms, culture, media and personal exposure to others unlike us form our opinions. Sometimes a particular incident can effect us positively or negatively and they can last a long time.

     I worked with a reporter in Florida who had never met a Jew until he went to college. Until then he thought Jews had tails. He learned differently in the dorm shower room. Now where did he get that idea?

     I didn’t mean this to be lesson in sociology because, in like so many other things I’m not an expert, but I learned a good lesson yesterday. Despite all my life experiences I’m still storing stereotypes somewhere in my brain. I’m afraid they can’t be unlearned but I do think I’ve mitigated them.

Cattle Are Interesting

Florida Man

3/11/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️

      Today Florida Man is off on a relaxing jag, wondering where those cows I was talking about a while back came from and what their purpose is besides baloney and hamburger.

     The internet is full of cow dope. First, a lot are foreign cattle breeds imported for their unique genetic traits, such as superior meat quality, disease resistance, or adaptability to certain climates. They contribute to the diversity of cattle farming, sort of the DEI representatives of the animal world.

     Getting these breeds here is a complicated process. They have to meet health standards and be free of diseases like tuberculosis. Pretty much the same for people trying enter the country.

     These foreigners come on special livestock boats and the more prized breeds are flown here. They go through customs where their passports and health certificates are checked. Then they’re sent to the farms and ranches   that bought them.

     Sounds like slavery but they’re just animals, amirite.

     More and more this looks like a case for ICE. I say this in jest but who the hell knows what’s in the minds of the jack-booted thugs.

     This is all first world stuff but if you drink milk and eat meat you’ll find this interesting. The details come from a variety of cattle breeding groups like the American Angus Association and the National Association of Animal Breeders.

     If you are vegan or a vegetarian this info isn’t for you. I’ll see you tomorrow.

     So, for those of us who are carnivores here are a few of the most popular breeds:

     The Angus, originally imported from Scotland is prized for the high-quality, marbled, tender and flavorful beef it produces. A cow weighs about 1,000 pounds when full grown and stands five feet tall. I never knew they were taller than me. They produce about 500 pounds of steaks, chops, etc.

     The Hereford is an English breed also known for quality beef. They are about the same size and weight as an Angus.

     France sends the Charolais. Farmers like the breed because it grows fast, is big and yields a lot of lean beef. A cow can weigh up to 1,800 pounds. They are 7 feet 4 inches tall and can dunk a basketball.

     One more example.

     From Switzerland comes the Simmental, a breed that produces both beef and milk. They grow fast and are good for crossbreeding. The are about the same size as the Charolais but they traditionally haven’t been interested in playing basketball.

     There is much more to say cow wise but it’s better to get on the road and see these guys in the fields for yourself. They are hearty eaters. If you happen to spot a cattle auction along the way be sure to stop. Go in and sit next a a buyer and ask questions. He/She will gladly point out which cow is good for T-bones and which for hotdogs. Or you can go to your grocery’s meat department and see them in a different form.

     That’s all for today class. Don’t forget to bring your text books tomorrow. There may be a pop quiz.

Orwell Predicted It

Florida Man 

3/7/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

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     Florida Man has written before about the den of thieves fear of DEI. Now their frightened little minds are erasing history. They are more afraid of the word “gay” than they are of China. I don’t know if Orwell is excited or dismayed by what’s going on. I think he’d be mortified.

    The drunk, sexist, bigot Hegseth who is in charge of the military has ordered the removal of everything that is a reminder of diversity in the ranks.

     AP reports that the order includes as many as 100,000 images or bases that include the names of women or minorities. Some photos to be purged have the dreaded word "gay" including people whose first or last name is Gay and a picture of the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay. 

     The bomber is on display in the National Air and Space Museum. I suppose it will be destroyed. There is no end to the vindictiveness of this group of frightened chickens.

    Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photo of Marines planting the American flag on Iwo Jima in February 1945 is no doubt in danger because one of six is a Native American and another is a Jew. I just checked and the Dept. of Def. has already taken down the web page recording the heroism of the Marines. Holy fucking shit.

     There is also a statue of the Iwo Jima flag raising outside Arlington National Cemetery in D.C. that will have to be removed as well as the graves of other than white people buried there. What will families do with the remains? Will they be shipped to Guantanamo? If there are no families to claim the bodies will they be dumped into the Potomac?

    There are a lot of questions. What about the 20,000 Civil War graves at Andersonville? Surely some of them are minorities. The Confederate cemeteries, of course, won’t be touched because they were all brave white men.

     Could I be angrier? How? I’m enraged. There’s more of course.

    Any celebrations or recognition of the military’s diversity including Black History Month. A third of the two million men and women in the service are minorities. Biographies of military leaders past and present and stories advocating for women, racial minority groups, and LGBTQ troops will be tossed in the trash.

     It’s even personal. The cowards have fired the first Black officer to lead a branch of the military and a woman who led the navy. Doesn’t that scream discrimination?

    The drunkard’s order says “Information that promotes programs, concepts, or materials about critical race theory, gender ideology, and preferential treatment or quotas based upon sex, race or ethnicity, or other DEI related matters with respect to promotion and selection reform" are done with. Critical race theory and gender ideology are a bit hard to define and certainly beyond the grasp of the fevered brains of these ass-holes.

     I’m at a loss to describe how incredibly ignorant and vicious this regieme is and will become if not stopped. If I was a minority in the military now I would rip off my uniform and walk out the door. They obviously don’t want me and they think they don’t need me. A huge blunder.

Social Security?

Florida Man

3/6/2025

afriedberg1@email.com

Copyright©️

      Are you worried about getting you next Social Security check? Florida Man is damn worried about next month and the next few years. I can make it without SS for a couple of years, maybe three, but Eric can’t do without his SSDI for even a month. He only makes about a thousand a month bagging groceries at Publix but his expenses, rent and supported living help are way more than that. SSDI makes up the difference.

     He, of course, is far from alone. There are currently 9.2 million disabled workers, disabled widows and disabled adults receiving benefits according to SS stats. So, if those benefit checks aren’t sent every month people won’t have enough money to live. But what the hey, they’re only old people who don’t produce anything for the billionaires.

     President Musk’s team of unqualifieds couldn’t care less. They don’t know what people actually do in the SS jobs they are cutting or any other government jobs, and they don’t care about people in general. So as many as 90 million people may not receive checks in the near future.

     That’s a big number and the slugs can celebrate with bottles of Dom Perignon 2013 Brut.

     It will be interesting to see the reaction of the Magas when they can’t buy steaks and whiskey for a few weeks, months or ever again. Oh, and don’t forget rent and mortgage payments to be made as well.

     We can only hope that Musk and his assistant reap what they have sown. We’ll know when repub reps start to receive death threats, not that I’m advocating that, but the Magas haven’t been reluctant to threaten Dems for much less serious offenses.

     That’s the only answer I see to ending this willful destruction of the safety net that has been so carefully maintained since FDR signed the SS Act in August 1935, ten days before I was born. The first payments began on a regular basis in January 1940. So, this is a pretty damn successful, long running program.

     Before SS, seniors had to scramble for survival. They may have been able to negotiate “old age” pensions based on financial need but mostly they had to rely on the kindness of others. Some probably had a few dollars in savings accounts or relatives and families with a few bucks or they moved into poor houses.

     Poor houses, by the way, were not exactly the Hyatt. Conditions were grim so that only the most needy wanted in. Families were split up, residents had to wear uniforms and food was prison quality.

     None of us can remember any of this, of course, and I don’t recall every reading about it. My parents were luckier. They were in their 30s when SS began so they could have been among the early recipients. I don’t remember them ever talking about getting SS though they may have. But what did we know? We never asked the right questions about anything because we were so damned smart.

     That’s a topic for another Florida Man. I have great regrets about not asking my folks about their lives, their dreams and their ultimate realities. My Elderly Brother Larry and I have discussed this and though he is younger and smarter than me he doesn’t remember asking for any details about Eddie and Dolly Friedberg’s lives either. What an incredible loss for us and probably for them as well.

Fired

Florida Man

3/5/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️  

     Florida Man keeps thinking about the federal workers who are sitting in their cubicles just doing the jobs they’ve been doing for 15 years when a twerp walks up, pulls the plug on their computer and tells them to pack up and get out.

     I don’t know if that’s the way it happens, since the cutthroats are all cowards so it’s probably done by email, but the result is the same. You are stunned like you’ve been hit on the head with a hammer. No warning, no sorry Jose or Gladys.

     It’s like the mafia only the mafia enforcers give you a chance. “Nice little restaurant you’ve got her Pierre, it’d be a shame if something happened to it, like a kitchen fire. We can insure you for $500 a week.”

     I have had a dozen jobs at least and I haven’t been fired from any of the them but I’ve come close and I can tell you that the threat raises your anxiety level to Defcon one. My problem in those days was that I was a smart ass who knew more about their business than they did. I learned better but now I’m a smart ass again.

    The problem with president Musk’s method is you don’t get a chance to try and improve your performance because it’s not your performance that’s getting you fired. It’s the superciliousness (I have to look it up every time) of the Musk goon squads who don’t even know what your work is and don’t care. The goons clearly have the empathy of a shark but not the brains and how they got that way I don’t know.

     Who are the axe wielders? Mostly Musk employees at other jobs and the felon's picks who I’m sure he’s never met.

     Examples from the NYT: 

     Scott Langmack worked in real estate technology, whatever that is.

     Adam Ramada has a background in financial startups.

     Alexandra Beynon worked at a company that prescribes ketamine therapy.

     Gavin Kliger who has no previous experience at anything.

     Stephanie Holmes, a consultant who focused on fighting corporate diversity.

     Enough. They all have one ugly face.

     I like to think if one of these mugs confronted me, I’d tell them to fuck off, If’m busy. In fact I know I would. I’d get escorted out by security people, who better watch out for their jobs too, but I’d feel better about things.

     So, what are the next steps for the unemployed? I have no idea where they go for help. I’m sure it won’t come from the government agency that works on job placement because its been closed and their workers are looking for work.

Health and Aging

Florida Man

3/4/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.co

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     Florida Man doesn’t read many blogs, but one I do read is by a smart guy named Kevin Drum. He’s good at statistics but also gets deeply into my kind of politics. A plug here: I also read a blog by Tom Swick, a friend and colleague who was travel editor at the Sun-Sentinel. Tune in. You’ll like it.

Anyway, Drum, who was diagnosed in 2014 with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow that’s currently incurable, gives a regular health update that’s worth reading.

He’s getting all kinds of experimental treatments and spends a lot of time in hospitals but keeps writing. Credit to him.

    So, today I’m deviating from the horrific things that the assistant president is doing to talk about health and aging issues.

     I have spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spaces between the bones that puts pressure on the spinal cord in the neck and back. It’s very common problem with aging and there are no symptoms until it gets painful and you have tingling or weakness in you hands, arms and legs. It can be very painful.

     Fortunately, I have no pain but my lower legs feel like lead and I can’t walk more than a hundred yards without stopping. What’s depressing to me is that I was a decent athlete and ran marathons and was jogging and walking wherever until two years ago.

In the last eight months I’ve gotten steroid shots in my lower back and they help a lot but not enough to get me moving very well. I got two more shots yesterday and they aren’t supposed to kick in for 5 to 7 days but, unless it’s mental, I already feel better.

     I don’t know if it’s the shots, the local anasthestic or the fact that I went to sleep about eleven last night but I woke up at 4:30 this morning and “feel like ox” or some other beast of burden. But I don’t want to be a camel.

     Speaking of mental, I’m sure my older friends and probably some of the younger ones have some trouble with short term memory.

  For example, I think of something really important, like the plot and title of the next great American novel, and if I don’t write it down immediately it’s gone. I’ve lost many best-sellers that way. The same with a cure for Alzheimers. Had it, but it’s gone.

      And I’m having real trouble remembering names, not those of people I’ve known forever but names of people like, what’s his name. I had it and lost it. Oh, it’s Ethelred the Unready. Whew. 

  The method I use to remember names is toI run though the alphabet to find them and sometimes it works. I remembered Chet Huntley when I got to H the other day. If you try it, don’t worry about names that begin with q, u, x, y, or z because you don’t know anyone named Quixote, Ulf, Xena, Yerba or Zelensky. Just keep running through and it may come to you.

Other strange older stuff. My fridge is right next to the trash bin. I open the fridge door with trash in my hand. I open the trash bin with a filet mignon I’m planning on having for dinner. I still haven’t put my car keys or billfold in the freezer.

And you know where stuff is, like in what drawer you put the potato masher but it’s not there because it’s in the other drawer.

 You ever look for your car keys and there on your finger? Oh, yeah, happens a lot. Leave you cell in the car. Of course.

I’m sure you’ve walked into the bathroom or any other room  and wondered what the hell am I doing here.

    There’s a lot of other stuff but I’ve forgotten what it is.

But here’s a fun fact I learned from the pain doc who shoots me up and by the way is very good. She’s young and bright and Cuban. I hope she’s a citizen.

Anyway, she flicked the tip of the middle finger on my right hand. If the pointy finger or thumb moves when the finger is flicked if can be a sign of spinal cord compression. It’s called the Hoffman test but how Hoffman figured it out is a mystery to me. So one day he flicked and his leg went numb. What a brilliant connection.

It turns out that, duh, aging is a strange process. One day you feel fine and the next you wonder what the hell happened over night. I haven’t accepted it yet, but I’m trying to ignore every little tic and tock and move on.

  Don’t forget to tune into the Elderly Brothers on You Tube. The address is: https://www.youtube.com/@ElderlyBrothers-US

Things Are Getting Worse

Florida Man

3/3/2025

afriedberg1@gmail.com

Copyright©️       

     When you’re driving around with the windows down and the fresh air seems especially fresh, all seems right with our world unless, of course, you’re a government worker who’s been fired arbitrarily.

    Still, people aren’t casually shooting each other, tires aren’t smouldering in the intersections, tanks and soldiers with fixed bayonets aren’t patrolling the streets. Not yet.

     But like a flaming driverless semi, this country is heading down a one-way road to fascism at full throttle. The anger, resentment and depravity of the Muskrat and his assistant are enough to make you want to hop on that semi as it crashes into democracy. They have zero humanity. They just want big numbers. And our elected reps are so afraid of something all they do is watch goggle-eyed and crawl under their desks.

     I didn’t see the so-called meeting with Zelensky but I’ve read enough about it to realize it was much worse than I thought. It was an ambush intended to humiliate the Ukrainian president but it was a total humiliation of the U.S., of all of us. He’s the leader of a democracy and we are fakes.

     Where does a draft-dodger, a rich boy with invisible bone spurs, get off pointing accusing fingers at a man who has witnessed tens of thousands of his fellow citizens, soldiers and civilizations, killed by the murderous Russian tyrant of whom the felon is so envious.

     Ukrainians in the U.S. should be angry enough to break down the doors of congress like the Jan. 6 insurrectionists did so violently four years ago In support of their beloved lying, demented ignoramus.

     Well you can rest easy about one thing. English is now our official language. How progressive can you get? That kind of mush is tossed out there for the drooling cult. Talk American so we can understand you, dammit.

     But while the cheap bait is being thrown out there reporters are being barred from media events and news organizations are being chosen to echo the administration’s drivel.

     President Elon is hot on free speech but it’s his speech he’s extolling. He or somebody near him said the are, “Capitalizing on the censorial strains of the left.” I don’t think this expression is in the official language of the U.S.

     We’re looking into the maw of oppression of expression.