Balancing the summer books
Non-spenders are now home reading.
Mo Rocca — whose mouth is on CBS-TV Sunday mornings — is out with his Simon & Schuster book “Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs.” It’s on doing it again (even if not horizontally) in your 80s instead of staying home crocheting and kvetching.
He drops names like Estelle Getty, Rita Moreno, Diana Nyad, Carol Channing, I.M. Pei, Judi Dench, Morgan Freeman. I don’t know how much the book costs.
My copy was free.
It’s about good shmattas, bad guys, icky stuff even the Vatican probably knows and got good reviews even from designer Nicole Miller, whose clothes I bought at retail.
Free advice
Bobbleheads: Denigrating NYC courts was the stupidity forcing Bragg to bring this case.
Misstating our law compounded the problem.
Friends must shut up about this trial, verdict, DA, judge and judge’s daughter.
It’s a warning from legal people smarter than I.
More. It is libel to accuse anyone.
Refer to an accusation or predict a prosecution — OK, but to call someone a perjurer, extortionist, even a “bagman” is dangerous today unless prepared to prove your assertion.
More: To see if he required representation, this guy asked an attorney who said “no” then sent him a $2,500 bill.
He complained to a second attorney who agreed with the decision then sent the questioner his bill for $5,000.
It was labeled “for legal advice.”
Good hustle
One cranky thing.
Can’t anchors stop babbling when they stop for a station break.
That stupid: “Stay with us,” so you can go pee or ignore a commercial about hemorrhoids?
Like that one lame sentence will keep us from running to a whoopee cushion?
Cold comforts on the streets
To continue my breathtaking news — now Maria Campanella, who hustles a 1976 ice-cream truck around Brooklyn — rain, storm, 10 inches of snow.
Her father started in ’44 on a bike with a pushcart and who, after she finished being a juvenile delinquent, took over from.
Maria: “I do this 12 months a year. Ice cream’s universal. Nostalgic. Makes everyone happy. To get it 1-year-olds cry, scream, throw themselves on the ground, come to the truck with a $100 bill from mama’s purse. My price — including Oreos — is $1.75 to $4. Hard packaged. Like a cookies-and-cream nut cone. Kids fight. Go crazy. All on top of each other. A line’s impossible. It’s whoever gets to the front first.”
“But today streets are declining. Trucks like mine are less. Bad people everywhere. It’s a cash business. Once a little kid pointed a water gun at me. Everything got expensive after COVID. Earlier a box of vanilla pops, 24, cost me $9. Now almost a dollar more. Listen, even I eat all the stuff.”
“One blackout I emptied out. Didn’t go home until lights came on next day. Adults did vanilla pies and sandwiches. Kids, the $4 SpongeBobs and Spider Men. We plug the stuff in every night. When someone stole a vanilla pop other kids ran and got it back.”
NYC official: “I feel toward Russia the way I feel toward my wife. I don’t love it. I can’t change it. But I can’t help dreaming of something better.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.