Lucky

Singer Justin Bieber sang at the Grammys. Although he didn't dress the same as on the Red Carpet, he did gain some attention, singing in his briefs and socks, apparently to show off his new back tattoo.

Corrupt lawyers in Queens? Why has the OP not told us about this? I am shocked! From the nytimes.com: A luxury penthouse apartment, with polished stone countertops and stunning views of the New York City skyline, would seem like an odd expense for a public defender organization whose clients are poor defendants who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. But Lori Zeno, the founder of the public defender organization Queens Defenders, paid to rent a luxury apartment and many other things, federal prosecutors said, with stolen public money. Ms. Zeno and her romantic partner, Rashad Ruhani, used more than $300,000 of the organization’s funds on indulgences like a vacation to Bali, teeth-whitening procedures and repairs to a Mercedes-Benz, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. On Tuesday, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Ms. Zeno, 65, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. Before being arrested, Ms. Zeno said, she had sought treatment for mental health issues and alcoholism. Mr. Ruhani has maintained his innocence, while a third defendant in the case, Kimberly Osorio, was charged in October with lying to federal investigators. “It’s a very sad moment,” said Steven Legon, a lawyer for Ms. Zeno, whom he called a “very accomplished attorney,” after the proceeding. Ms. Zeno is set to be sentenced on April 20. Russell Noble, an assistant U.S. attorney, said the government would seek a prison term of four to five years for Ms. Zeno. The case unearthed a disturbing level of graft, particularly for the leader of an organization that represents the city’s most vulnerable residents. The Queens Defenders, which Ms. Zeno helped found in 1996, is one of a number of nonprofits that are paid through city, state and federal contracts to represent defendants who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement that Ms. Zeno “brazenly betrayed and abused her position of trust as the director of a nonprofit.” Ms. Zeno became the organization’s executive director in 2018, earning about $400,000 a year to lead the organization. She was fired in January 2025 after the organization said it discovered “several irregularities” from an independent forensic audit. After Ms. Zeno was fired, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice announced it would reassign the services behind the organization’s annual contract, worth $32 million, to the Brooklyn Defenders, another public defender organization in New York City. “Queens Defenders is under new leadership and focused on our work to serve the people of the borough,” Mike Scala, the president of the Queens Defenders board of directors, said in a statement. Some people who worked with Ms. Zeno at the Queens Defenders have described her as a tyrant who bullied racial minorities and women. In a separate federal lawsuit filed in 2024, Ms. Zeno and the organization were accused of racial discrimination and retaliation by three former employees. Ms. Zeno, according to the lawsuit and former employees, routinely berated and belittled staff at the organization’s office in Far Rockaway, Queens, imposing a culture of fear. She once told her staff that she would “eviscerate” and sue a lawyer who went on maternity leave and did not return to the organization, according to court papers. Beginning in 2024, prosecutors said, Ms. Zeno and Mr. Ruhani began a romantic relationship and drew on the organization’s funds to embark on a wild spending spree. They spent thousands on luxury items from Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus and Ralph Lauren. More than $39,000 was spent on rent for the penthouse, prosecutors said, along with DoorDash deliveries and an 85-inch television. “They were not, in fact, business expenses,” Ms. Zeno said in court on Tuesday. In addition to the theft of funds, prosecutors said, Ms. Zeno hired relatives and friends of Mr. Ruhani for jobs in which they did no work. One of the people Ms. Zeno hired was Mr. Ruhani’s wife, who despite living in Saudi Arabia, was paid $60,000 to lead a nonexistent health and wellness program at Queens Defenders. Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.

You can read the other books in the series to find out what happens to Shane and Ilya.

Google: The documentary Melania, released on January 30, 2026, is underperforming significantly, with opening weekend projections of only $1–5 million against a reported $40 million acquisition cost and $35 million marketing budget by Amazon. The film is facing very low attendance, with many theaters seeing nearly empty screenings. Weak Sales: Reports indicate, for example, that the Boston Common Theater sold under 20 tickets for its opening day. In the UK, chain Vue reported "soft" sales, and in South Africa, the distributor canceled the release. Failed Projections: Despite claims of high demand, early ticket data suggested a "massive bomb," with only two U.S. screenings reported as sold out in a survey of over 1,000. High Costs: Amazon MGM Studios spent heavily on the project ($75 million total). Regional Variance: While sales are very low, some stronger demand was noted in conservative areas, such as Houston, Texas, and parts of Florida. The film, directed by Brett Ratner, covers the 20 days leading up to the inauguration and is available in theaters and on Amazon Prime. I think I will rewatch Heated Rivalry instead!

It would be nice if someone could come up with the correct name.

If a person who has HIV and it is controlled by medicine,(undetectable) the likelihood he could transmit it zero.

Luigi is looking even better with his new facial hair. That surprises me as it means I have started liking some facial hair.

I'd see him again.

Back in the old days, we didn't review a book until we had finished it. But you see this all the time now, where people review a book they haven't started and/or finished. I don't get it, but I am old. Now take what I say here with a grain of salt. The thread title after all is what are you reading, not what you have read.

@Gar1eth...will you be posting pictures of the finished pantry?

In a long and unofficial study on men's sexual activity, it was noticed that having a big dick penetrate a tight hole was far preferable to fucking a pussy. The randomized study did rely on anecdotal information, and was conducted over several years in my own bedroom. So far, the study results have not been published in any scientific journals.

If you were dressed like your avatar, they would have been afraid not to let you in! Did you get free communion too?

Check out the review section here on Pantry Arrangement. You'll find a lot of good ideas.

I can't imagine anyone here posting an exaggerated review of a good hire. After all, aren't we all dedicated to the integrity of the site?

Vanity project for which she was paid some 20 million dollars.

Wow! 696 replies to this thread! I have probably already posted here that I like pink. But would I turn down something else? Ha!

See DM.

I once had a guy follow me from the steam room at the Y in SF. He was naked, hard, and jerking as he followed me, and then stood at the end of my locker row continuing to jack off. Did he come? I don't know as I was not about to get sexual in the locker room so I ignored him. But I think it was safe to assume that he was into me. Years ago, of course.

@marylander1940 You are quoting the Times article, not me!

I am on Mounjaro after a long time on Ozempic. Yesterday I was hungry all day long and couldn't stop eating.

Eleven dollars! You'd pay that to go to a movie if people still went to them.

Glad you edited that!

I was able to get these two books immediately through Hoopla, which my library connected me to. I was pretty surprised as I had heard they were hard...to get.

NY Times allows me, as a subscriber, to gift articles: Opinion Guest Essay Americans Are Turning Against Gay People Jan. 19, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET Credit...Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times By Tessa E.S. Charlesworth and Eli J. Finkel Dr. Charlesworth and Dr. Finkel are research psychologists who study bias and political partisanship. The remarkable success of “Heated Rivalry,” the steamy new television series about closeted gay hockey players, has been widely taken as yet another sign of social progress — evidence that acceptance of queer love continues to grow. We wish we could share that optimism. Unfortunately, new research that one of us, Professor Charlesworth, helped conduct reveals a darker truth: The decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then. The popularity of “Heated Rivalry,” it seems, is a welcome burst of enthusiasm for gay life in a new era of anti-gay prejudice. This reversal stunned us. In the two decades before 2020, visibility, recognition and legal inclusion of gays and lesbians progressed in lock step — larger and more prominent Pride parades, rainbow-lit landmarks, federal legalization of same-sex marriage. That progress translated into something remarkable: Americans’ bias against gay people declined faster than any other bias ever tracked in social surveys. Research led by Professor Charlesworth and published in 2022 detailed this decline. Drawing on 7.1 million responses from Americans collected from 2007 to 2020, the researchers tracked both explicit bias (how people answer questions like “To what extent do you prefer straight people over gay people?”) and implicit bias (more automatic responses inferred from how rapidly people associate words, such as “straight” with “good” and “gay” with “bad”). Across every U.S. state and demographic group, anti-gay bias plummeted — by roughly 75 percent on explicit measures and 65 percent on implicit ones, on average. Forecasting models suggested that, at that pace, anti-gay bias could hit zero as early as 2022. One of us, Professor Finkel, is a host of a podcast called “Love Factually,” which analyzes romantic movies in light of scientific research about relationships. Last June, in an episode about the 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain,” which depicts a love affair between two cowboys, Professor Finkel cited Professor Charlesworth’s 2022 research to make a hopeful point: “There is still a slight preference for straightness over gayness, but it is getting very close to zero.” But at that time, the Charlesworth research team was analyzing new data showing that anti-gay bias had begun to rise. The analysis of an additional 2.5 million responses from Americans collected from the beginning of 2021 through 2024 revealed that progress had not only stalled; it had reversed. In just four years, anti-gay bias rose by around 10 percent. Increases also appeared in bias toward Black, darker-skinned, older, disabled and overweight people, but not as starkly. Just as bias against gay people fell especially steeply before 2020, it has surged particularly sharply since. Perhaps most surprising is that these trends were distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25. This group increased its animus against marginalized groups in general and gay people in particular at a faster rate than older Americans did. Also surprising is that although anti-gay bias has risen faster among conservatives, it has also risen among liberals. What explains this decline in tolerance? At the moment, we don’t know. But the evidence suggests that we can rule out two common hypotheses. The first is that the anti-gay backlash is a side effect, or spillover, of the backlash against the movement for transgender rights. If that were so, you would expect increases in anti-trans bias to be meaningfully correlated with subsequent increases in anti-gay bias — which the research does not show. The second hypothesis is that the anti-gay backlash reflects the rise in moral panic language about sexual grooming, the notion that gay adults are recruiting or influencing children to become gay. But the research shows no evidence of spikes in grooming discourse (measured through Google searches) that are meaningfully correlated with subsequent spikes in anti-gay bias. If asked to speculate on the cause of the rise of anti-gay prejudice, we would point to two related factors. The first is social instability. Starting around 2020, the United States experienced a sustained disruption consisting of the Covid pandemic, economic strain and intensifying political conflict — each of which has been linked to heightened intergroup hostility and scapegoating. This would explain the overall rise in bias against marginalized groups. The second factor, which would explain the rise specifically in anti-gay bias, is anti-establishment sentiment. The sustained social disruption since 2020 has fueled resentment and a loss of confidence in institutions perceived to have failed — governments, corporations, the broader establishment. By 2020, support for gay and lesbian equality had become an establishment position. Corporate America, for example, demonstrated a concrete commitment to gay rights, with companies donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for Pride celebrations and other efforts at gay and lesbian inclusion. Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken, especially among younger generations grappling most intensely with uncertainty about their future. Which brings us back to the exuberance surrounding “Heated Rivalry.” The recent rise of anti-gay bias suggests that public attitudes and media representation are no longer moving in lock step. At a time when social advances can coexist with backlash, watching queer stories on television can feel comforting. But comfort on the couch is not the same thing as progress.

Sigh. No one else seems to find him attractive here. Granted, there is a lot of competition.