Took the last can of Noo Yawk hash.

So in addition to getting an Emmy for his portrayal of a tough-tawking asshole, lahge and in chahge, while sending COVID-infected patients to kill grannies in nursing homes, our illustrious Governor Sonny Corleone has received the Edward M. Kennedy Award for Inspired Leadership. And I think that's just great. Teddy is best remembered now as a driving force, literally driving into the river and leaving his girlfriend to die in the car. Cuomo is driving our state with the same vision and apparently the same goal.

I suspect that Cuomo's book American Crisis: How I Screwed New York and Killed Thousands Who Didn't Need to Die (I may have the subtitle wrong) will also garner a lot of awards. I remember how the Grammys sucked up to Obama by tossing awards at him for reading the books he “wrote” (much in the way Teddy's brother Jack "wrote" Profiles in Courage). Cuomo narrated his audiobook, which may have been the first time he ever read it. I am sure the Grammys will toss him an award too.

The Grannys, however, will probably not. His policies bumped off thousands of them.

Bland opening.

Our town, like a lot of towns these days, has an older section that was built up around the old railroad station, and a newer section that has box stores and things. There's always a push on to keep "downtown" alive, but generally it does all right. Hell, it's only about five blocks and it has two pizzerias and four other eateries as well that are going concerns. Which it why it was a nice idea for the town and these restaurants to partition off the main drag (two blocks!) for a combined outdoor dining experience. You can sit at any table and order from any restaurant on the strip. It seems to be popular, but you can't tell from the picture I took, because when I got home I realized I only had a blur. So no picture. 

Anyway, all the stupid 2020 restrictions still apply--masks required except when you're actually placing food in your mouth, tables all socially distanced, hectoring about washing your hands, and the traditional no smoking even though you're outside. New York's reputation for being tough is overrated.

We won't be joining them. My wife hates dining al fresco. She doesn't like eating around bugs or bums or other "bu-" words, or in our quickly changeable summer weather. 

There are other possible reasons.

The town plans to have this dining experience on weekends for while, but maybe not much longer. It fell into the low 50's overnight. Pretty soon it will be in the low 50's all day. Maybe the New York government should have eased up on the dining restrictions in this state a little earlier.

"Evil Eyes" Cuomo finally posted rules to open up New York City restaurants for indoor dining starting on September 30. Eater gives us the run-down:

• Restaurants will be able to reopen at 25 percent capacity, which is half of the 50 percent capacity everywhere else in the state except for NYC.
• Masks must be worn at all times except when sitting at a table.
• Temperature checks will be required for anyone who enters the restaurant.
• Patrons will not be allowed to sit at the bar.
• One member of each dining party will have to leave their information with the restaurant for contact tracers to reach out in the instance that there’s a COVID-19 case.
• Restaurants will be required to have enhanced filtration systems installed, though Cuomo did not immediately clarify what this entailed.
• Tables will need to be six feet apart.
• All restaurants will have to close at midnight.
• Every restaurant will be required to post its full capacity outside and provide a phone number to report social distancing violations, either via voice or text.

This isn't even strict enough for Mayor Warren Wilhelm Jr., who wanted a later start date and a trigger to close everything if "the city’s positive test rate hits 2 percent on a seven-day rolling average," according to Politico, Because he hates the city's restaurant industry and wants it to die, I guess. Maybe he blames it for making him fat. I suspect it's the munchies. 

I'm glad we're not in the city anymore, but we still have to deal with Cuomo. If you don't live in this state, pity us. I heard him on the radio announcing the conditions, sounding as usual like a teacher who is pissed off at his stupid students who can't absorb his genius teaching into their stupid stupid minds.

I have called him Sonny Corleone, but that's an insult to the Godfather character, who was a pretty good liar and cheater until he got the lead special at the tollbooth. Sonny never planted sick people in Grandma's nursing home so that he could clear a bunch of old people off the books while leaving a hospital ship and two field hospitals empty. But I've beaten that drum all summer long. Andrew Cuomo is his father's vengeance on us from beyond the grave, because we deposed Mario I in 1994.

Enough of them. The people I saw dining outside on Friday night looked like they were having fun, but check again on those rainy October nights or November evenings where it drops to 30 and see how many show up.

I think there's a lot more collateral damage with this Chinese Death Virus safety dance we've been doing than we know. The mom of a friend of mine was having lunch outside at a diner. Tented areas set up in the parking lot. She tripped on a tent pole and busted her pelvis. Spent a week in the same hugely expensive hospital I visited last February. I hope she doesn't have Obama-mediated health insurance like mine. I've got two more payments to go.

The year 2020, like our governor, is stupid, thuggish, and persistent, and I hope they will both be shuffled off the stage sooner rather than later, without a lot more deaths. 

Furlough.

I got the sack. Partially. It's a semi-sack. A temporary semi-sack.

One of my clients is the small publishing wing of a big media company. How big? Mid-level vice presidents get paid more for the time they spend farting in the office than I get paid to work for them. And yet I'm too expensive.

I'm not really down about it, since it's only one of my regular clients, and the layoff is supposed to end (maybe) when the current crisis is over. But it comes at a bad time. Another client can't send out the money they owe freelancers because they are not allowed to enter the building to sign and mail the checks, lest their accountant stagger in reeking with COVID-19. They've also pushed back their publishing schedule a few months because no one can go to bookstores and no authors can go on book tours, which means all current projects have ground to a halt. Book printers, who usually work around the clock, are going to be in trouble.

(The irony is that the big media company's kiddie books, which require bright colors and even toy-like attachments, will probably continue to go to press, because they're sold in places like Walmart, and the vast majority of those are printed in... Can you guess? Yep, you're right.)

All of which is made worse by the fact that I have to cough up money for New York State's clutching tax barons next week. I owe nothing to the Feds but have to pay the state this year. I think New York needs my cash to pay for Andy "Evil-Eyes" Cuomo's nipple ring polish. I think that's why Sandra Lee dumped him -- tarnished nipple rings. But never mind all that.

Actually, I am not so bad off as many others, even other affected by this very same furlough. A number of people who got the heave-ho work full-time for this outfit. Of course, they'll be able to go on unemployment, but if they never get hired back it could be a problem. Virtually no one is hiring right now.

Publishing is a sucktational business to be in. I always quote a late friend of mine, who said that it's got all the ego of the movie business with none of the money. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be editors. If this situation doesn't bother me more than it ought to, it's because I have been laid off or otherwise turned loose (companies closing under me, for example) six times. I can smell the bloody ax coming from two hundred yards away.

Still, a furlough is a furlough; if they wanted to sack us they could have straight-up sacked us. What will happen next? No one really knows.

Do not be hypnotized.

I want to apologize for the possibility that New York's governor will try to inflict himself upon the national political scene in time for the 2020 presidential election. Andrew "Evil Eyes" Cuomo has just made four-year state schools free (subject to means testing and stuff), which political watchers assure us is part of his evil plan to look liberal and caring in time to run for the White House. Of course, the fact that he's doing this by setting fire to our wallets is a matter of no consequence to him. 

Ballotpedia says that our fair state, which is basically composed of fat cats and plebes in the south and plebes everywhere in the north, had $387.5 billion in debt in 2014 (most recent figures available). This despite the fact that "Compared to neighboring states, New York had the highest state tax collections per capita, at $3,898." Obviously there's a big pile of money someplace that Andrew hasn't told us about if he's going to open wide the daycare centers state colleges free of charge to any idiot who can pass through the doors.

I don't mean to say that our state colleges are bad -- yet. Some of them have been quite excellent in the past. Some have been little more than places to park your loser kid for two to four years in the hope that something will finally click between his ears. But all of them are about to become worse, because if there's no tuition cost (leprechauns and unicorns picking up the tab) then there's little motivation to bust your ass to earn your way through school and get out of there as fast as you can. Or in the words of Kingsley Amis, referring to the expansion of education, "More will mean worse."

I know college is expensive, really too expensive; its costs have totally outstripped inflation over the last thirty years, and not because they're installing super-high-tech wonder gizmos everywhere. There are plenty of reasons for the rising costs, such as market distortions due to government interference and just because the colleges can, because we've become a world that spits on electricians with high school diplomas but lauds dingdongs with BAs in Grievance Studies. Some of the parents I know, even of a conservative bent, are hesitating to denounce the Cuomo plan because they are so terrified about the cost of their child's upcoming higher education. Others are furious because they just paid a fortune to put Liam through SUNY Armmpitt. None of these parents are in a position to consider that the "free" education is going to be a debased one -- if you think the BS from Armmpitt State looks cheesy on a résumé now, think of how it will look when prospective employers know you went there for nothing.

And they will have a legitimate concern. How much will the state be willing to pay top professors during the next inevitable New York fiscal crisis? But before the prestige issue comes into play, dozens of fine private institutions in New York will lose potential students who would rather try their luck with an education that won't have them paying off student loans for thirty years.

Government largess has a way of inducing chaos. If you think the cost of food is high, imagine what would happen if the government took over the grocery stores and declared all the food to be free.

But we don't mind; as long as we're furthering the career of Dandy Andy, who cares about the unintended consequences? Just like we didn't mind that Andrew Cuomo, as the chair of the Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, almost single-handedly caused the mortgage crisis that led to a worldwide economic meltdown in 2008, by throwing free mortgages at everything with a pulse, and being surprised when opportunistic bankers tried to monetize the bad debt they were forced to create, and shocked when people you wouldn't have lent a sawbuck to started to default in droves. (Don't trust me about Andrew's involvement; just ask that right-wing rag The Village Voice.)

Yessir, Andy may have Evil Eyes, but he likes helping people, and gosh darn the consequences, intended or otherwise.

So enjoy your "free" college, kids, just like everyone enjoyed the defaults and portfolio crashes and job losses and underwater mortgages following his "help" for housing. Cuomo is nothing but helpful, and I'm sure he'll be a wonderful candidate for president. Ask anyone from western New York and they'll be happy to tell you how great everything is now, and how much they can't wait to pay for some bonehead kid to smoke pot in a dorm in Delhi for four years.

(By the way: If you are looking to invest in New York, I suggest setting up a U-Haul franchise...)