At the ghetto coffee shop, where the dude behind the counter was saying he is worried about getting deported. I don’t know where he is from but everyone who works here seems to be of similar ethnicity, and I overheard one guy say he was from Yemen. They are probably all illegal. He joked about it, saying “At least that means I won’t have to bring my wife here.” I guess he left his wife back in his country. He is the only guy here who is nice to me. He’s a little fake about it but that’s OK. Yesterday I heard him say that he is 24, and his father is 38. Holy crap, right?

Will this ever truly become a country where all the employees of places like this just disappear? The entire service industry would be imperiled.

I almost shoe-horned my way into a conversation he was having yesterday with an interesting-seeming woman I’ve seen here a few times. I think she does web design, or some kind of freelance graphic design work. I overheard her once talking about a $30,000 gig. My impression was that $30k might sound like a lot of money to some but it really is not, and that was one point among others she was making to whoever she was talking to. My interest in her would be purely business, to learn where she gets her work and all that.

The friendly guy was talking to her about Donald Trump, saying non-optimistic things about the next 4 years. She said “He’s 72 years old,” and implied that maybe he would die in office. She seemed to think he had a really horrible diet. I think he is actually 70 years old and, unless medical reports are fudged, he is  healthy as could be. I wanted to get into the conversation only to add what I knew of his vices: he doesn’t have any. No “conventional vices”, as I saw a former colleague of his quoted as saying. He does not smoke or drink but his obvious character flaws provide plenty of pathways to self-destruction.

Had I entered in to the conversation it might have appeared I was a Trump supporter, sticking up for the guy. Not at all, really, just setting some facts straight. Not that anybody needs facts any more, if they ever did.

Facts, as a famous president once quipped, are stupid things. For me that is the only retort to instances of so-called “fake news.” It was one of Ronald Reagan’s swansong speeches, in which he recounted the successes of his two terms. The repeated motif was supposed to be “facts are stubborn things” but one time he mis-spoke, uttering the immortal words “facts are stupid things.”

I don’t remember anybody in the media picking up on that slip and ridiculing it as they would today. But in political discussion and arguments filled with falsehoods and cherry-picked statistics I think it is perfectly fair to quote slips of the tongue as if they were intentional. It is only fair, right?

There was a hilarious slipup from the first George Bush. He was still vice-president and campaigning on the successes he and Ronald Reagan shared. At one point he added something like “Not everything went as planned. We had some sex…” Then in a uniformly dry voice he corrected himself: “setbacks…” Then he just started laughing. It was a classy way to diffuse the embarrassment. For a moment the mental image of Ronald Reagan buttfucking George Bush (and/or vice-versa) risked becoming part of the presidential lexicon. Crisis averted.

…

It is staying light longer. That merits a little “yay”. I went over to Northern Boulevard and 36th Street last night. That is where my friend Don said a 70-story residential building was going up. There is a new building going up there but it is not going to be anywhere near 70 stories. It looks like 6. As ugly as so much of the new buildings are around LIC this one is actually æsthetically passable, in my opinion.

A few blocks up, at the old Western Beef, is where a tower of 40 or more stories was said to be planned.

I also noticed that the Telebeam payphone company is still kicking. Maybe they got acquired by CityBridge? Who knows. I saw that their payphones all got taken over by CityBridge. From that I assumed the company finally threw in the towel and folded.

…

Speaking of Trump, a friend from Chicago challenged me to locate the burial site of Fred Trump, at the Lutheran All Faith’s Cemetery. It took me a while to remember what my beef was with that place. Their web site has a row of maybe ten images at the top of every page of their web site. Every single one of those images was stolen from my web site. I think I already said this, though I can’t remember if it was here or in e-mail. It’s amazing how long those stolen images have stayed there. I cannot remember now if I ever went after them for this. If I did they just ignored me.

Going to walk around some more. Actually sore from yesterday’s long ramble. That’s a good kind of sore.