Monday, February 6, 2023
Partly cloudy. High 50 degrees

Notices
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Observations
By Carol Tannenhauser

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” an eminent psychoanalyst told me. “Nice nuts and nasty nuts.”

I don’t know any categorically nasty nuts personally, but I see evidence of them all around and read about them in the press.

I was set on this course by a story in Saturday’s New York Times — not ostensibly about the Upper West Side, but very relevant to it — about people who are scamming older people they meet on internet dating sites. They prey on older people because they are more likely to be lonely and have money.

One 87-year-old Manhattan man — a Holocaust survivor — was swindled out of $2.8 million, causing him to lose his apartment, by a 36-year-old Florida woman named Peaches Stergo, who has since been indicted for mail fraud. Over a period of four years, the man allegedly wrote 62 checks to Stergo, which she used “to pay for a condominium in Florida, rooms at the Ritz Carlton, gold bars, a Corvette and luxury watches and clothing,” said the Times. “The defendant callously preyed on a senior citizen simply seeking companionship,” said FBI Assistant Director Michael J. Driscoll, in the U.S. District Court filing.

Peaches Stergo? Nasty nut, no doubt. But there are other, less extreme examples of nasty behavior, if not character. For example, I deem it nasty when people don’t pick up after their dogs, allowing for unavoidable circumstances. It’s a matter of empathy, walking in another’s shoes. I know how it feels to step in it — to dig it out of the grooves of one’s sneaker with a twig — well enough to want to spare others that misfortune. Not picking up is nasty, in many senses of the word.

Another nasty nut was the peabrain or brains who dyed a pigeon pink this past week, presumably for a “gender reveal.” Curbed told the story:

“A pink pigeon was found in Madison Square Park on Monday, and no one knows where it came from. We do know, however, that it is not supposed to be pink: The pigeon with the dye job is now being cared for by the Wild Bird Fund [on the UWS], which says the domestic king-pigeon fledgling, who they’re calling Flamingo, remains ‘weak’ and is having a hard time keeping food down. “We’re concerned — we don’t know at this point whether he’s going to be okay,” said Catherine Quayle, the Wild Bird Fund’s social-media director. The story traveled quickly, as these things tend to, but the attention has yielded little in the way of an answer to the most obvious question: Who does this kind of thing to a bird?”

A nasty nut.

Or maybe there’s another explanation, another category the analyst overlooked, revealed in the adage known as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Have a nice week!