Category: bloomberg

NY Mayor Bloomberg Refused Extra Pizza; Cherry Soda Cowboy Rant

Evidently, someone has a sense of humor, or they really didn’t want New York Mayor Bloomberg to have an extra slice of pizza. Maybe it’s a combination of both. He went into a pizza eatery recently in Brooklyn called Collegno’s Pizzeria and the owners flatly refused to serve him more than one slice of pizza.

According to this article, the owners did this in protest to Bloomberg’s proposed ban on soda where he wants to limit the portion size of how much soda we as free Americans can consume. But when you read more, and you see the exchange between Bloomberg and the owner, I really think they care about poor Mayor Bloomberg’s health and they don’t want to see him eating too much pizza, so they set their own limits on the amount of pizza he should consume the same way he wants to tell us how much soda we can consume. In doing this, they are helping him to eat in a much healthier way. And you can’t argue with that.

Only Bloomberg was not amused:

“I’m sorry sir. We’re serious,” Benito insisted. “We’ve decided that eating more than one piece isn’t healthy for you, and so we’re forbidding you from doing it.”

“Look jackass,” Bloomberg retorted, his anger boiling, “I fucking skipped breakfast this morning just so I could eat four slices of your pizza. Don’t be a schmuck, just get back to the kitchen and bring out some fucking pizza, okay.”

“I’m sorry sir, there’s nothing I can do,” the owner repeated. “Maybe you could go to several restaurants and get one slice at each. At least that way you’re walking. You know, burning calories.”

So, Mayor Bloomberg, a man used to getting his way partly because he’s worth 27 billion dollars, left in a huff and went down the street to a rival pizza shop.

Frankly, I haven’t had a slice of pizza in years. I don’t drink sugary soft drinks or soda. I don’t eat cake, ice cream, or pie. Once in a while I’ll have a cookie, but never more than one at a time. I basically stick to the theory of the Atkins diet, which I’ve been a fan of for many years. And I rarely eat carbs at all unless I don’t have a choice or I’m really, really in the mood for them. In fact, I’ve found I can live without things like potatoes and pasta and sugary things very well. My one weakness is chocolate, and always in moderation.

But in the same respect I don’t tell everyone else how to eat, or what to eat. Tony does not follow this diet like I do and I would never ever hold that against him. Because how much someone eats, or what someone else eats is none of my business. And if I’d been the owner of the pizza place where Bloomberg stopped I would have done the exact same thing. This need to control our food and drink transcends politics and puts freedom at a different level for me. When you start to tell people what they can and cannot eat you’ve crossed a line and you’re putting my freedom at risk now. I would much rather see people educated about food so they can make their own choices based on information. And I don’t think that’s impossible to do to get people to eat better.

So in my own little protest about this I wrote a short story titled Cherry Soda Cowboy and released it on Amazon as an indie e-book. It’s erotica set in the future…about fifty years from now…where we are actually living in a society where sugary soft drinks like soda are illegal, and cherry soda is one of the most premium sodas sold on the black market. That’s right. Soda is being sold fifty years from now like illegal drugs are being sold right now. I know there will be some who don’t like this, and I respect their opinions. But I also did this with what I hope is a sense of humor to show how ridiculous things can get when the government starts to tell us what we can and cannot consume. In other words, I’ll be the first to agree that a lot of food is bad for us, but don’t take away my freedom to eat it. I feel the same way about legalizing pot.

I know this is a little thing right now compared to all the huge issues we have going on. However, when you start to add up all these little things they begin to accumulate and you wind up with less freedom than ever. And billionaire zealots like Bloomberg, who don’t even practice what they preach when it comes to eating healthy foods as you can clearly see from above, only get more control in the end.

Right now the proposed ban on soda is being held up in court. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Bloomberg’s going to get his way eventually and my story, Cherry Soda Cowboy, will one day be more than just futuristic erotic fiction based on my imagination. And, soda will most likely be illegal.

Gay Double Standard: Bloomberg Obit on Koch; Essie Mae Washington-Williams Obit in Time Magazine

I actually don’t like revisiting this topic, about how all things gay were ignored in most obits of former NY Mayor Koch. But I recently read NY Mayor Bloomberg’s obit on Koch in the Milestones section of Time Magazine and I found the same double standard for gays I see all the time right next to an obit for Essie Mae Washington-Williams, side by side, on the very same page. I don’t know if this was an accident, or if this was done on purpose as a subtle hint. But either way it’s the kind of irony I see all the time and I wasn’t going to let it go without posting something.

And even though I would rather have ignored this and written a more positive post on something like full frontal nudity in Shameless, or something about Matt Bomer and Fifty Shades of Grey, I find that because of the way we ignore these things all the time our rights and our dignities as gay people keep slipping through the cracks and nothing ever changes much. In a recent episode of Downton Abbey, the subject of a gay servant was approached, and words like “revolting” were used with regard to the gay character, and I’m still seeing that sort of thing nowadays almost 100 years later. And it comes, as it has always come, in the form of a cover up (ignoring it and playing it down) because being gay has always been considered such a “revolting” negative thing to be. The biggest cover-ups have been in either politics or entertainment or professional sports, where image is always more important than anything else.

First, there was no mention of anything LGBT related in Mayor Bloomberg’s obit for Koch, not even a line or two about how Koch was mayor of New York at the beginning of the AIDS crisis or the fact that it was rumored that Koch himself was allegedly gay and in the closet all his life. Bloomberg is not the first to ignore these facts in an obit about Koch. I posted here about how Twitter went wild when the NY Times basically did the same thing, and then they updated the original obit for Koch with a few inaccurate lines about AIDS. Frankly, I expected this obit from Bloomberg, so I wasn’t surprised.

What I find interesting in a general sense is that the present mayor of NYC, who seems to be so interested in how many sugary soft drinks we consume, couldn’t even mention the AIDS crisis once. When you read this obit the only thing you walk away with is this surreal impression that former Mayor Koch, man about town, turned NYC into this frolicking city of peace and love. The only problem with this is that I was around back then and I remember NY well. While Koch was mayor of NY you couldn’t get out of the Lincoln Tunnel without being stopped by thugs, holding knives and wet rags up against your windows. If you didn’t pay them to “clean” your windshield, they would pull the knives on you and make threats. Trust me, you paid fast. That’s not hearsay, and that really happened to me many, many times at the tunnel. So the NY Bloomberg remembers during Koch’s time in office is not the same one I remember.

Ed was a savior for a city in desperate need of one. Through his determined leadership and responsible-fiscal stewardship, he helped lift the city out of its darkest days and set it on course for an incredible comeback. And no mayor has ever embodied the spirit of New York like Ed: brash and irreverent, full of humor and chutzpah.

I think Rudy Giuliani did far more to make New York a safer city to be in, but that would be a different post. I’m focused on one thing here: the fact that Bloomberg mentioned nothing at all about AIDS, or that frightening time in the history of the city of New York, and that he still gets away with ignoring that terrible time over thirty years later. By remaining silent it makes it sound wrong, and that’s what I’m tired of. And I’m not even talking about the gay allegations directed toward Koch all his life. I’m only talking about AIDS right now. It’s still obviously a place where politicians and the press just do not want to go unless there’s something in it for them…some kind of grand standing that makes them look like heroes.

In any event, you can read more about the gay allegations directed at Koch here.

He was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS pandemic ā€“ā€“ which emerged in 1981 on his watch ā€“ā€“ has never been forgiven by large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to the virus.

I could tell tales out of school so to speak (the rumors run rampant to this day), but that would all be hearsay at this point. If Koch had been gay (we really don’t know for certain) and he’d been in the closet all his life to protect his political career and image I would understand that. I might even respect it because of the times in which he lived. But I cannot respect the fact that the cover up never seems to end. And it’s the kind of cover up that makes being gay look “revolting” and that’s what I’m talking about right now.

But here’s the most interesting/ironic thing about the recent Koch obit in Time Magazine. Right next to what Bloomberg wrote about Koch, there’s an obit about Essie Mae Washington-Williams.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a Los Angeles teacher and school administrator who was 87 when she died on Feb. 4, made headlines in December 2003 simply by declaring: “My father’s name was James Strom Thrumond.”

To sum it up: she outed him. She did this right after Thrumond’s death, not while he was alive. For those who don’t know, Essie Mae’s mother was of African descent and Thrumond was a white senator from South Carolina who fought against integration. You can read more about it here.

Of course I see nothing wrong with Essie Mae Washington-Williams announcing that Thrumond was, indeed, her father. In fact, I applauded her for doing it at the time because interracial relationships have always been on the taboo list, too. Oh, you don’t talk about that, not even in death. So we wind up rewriting history once again.

It takes courageous people like Essie Mae to stand up and break the old rules and come out with the truth, so history is not rewritten. I just find it ironic that her obit was on the same page as the Koch obit written by Mayor Bloomberg who obviously doesn’t think breaking the old rules is all that important…not even enough to mention AIDS. I think it would be nice if there were an Essie Mae Washington-Williams in Ed Koch’s past who would be willing to stand up and say, “I was Koch’s lover.”