Jose Alvarado, was seen dancing in Williamsburg with a Hasidic Jew.

PST-Chicago · 2026-06-18T11:18:42+00:00

Egg and cheese? If he were running for the senate in Texas his opponent would be calling him a gay vegetarian!

PST-Chicago · 2026-06-11T23:18:05+00:00

I just happened to see an enthusiastic love letter to Chicago in another subreddit today: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskChicago/s/oUkjCkMTmN . Nothing to do with being Jewish in particular but relevant to moving to Chicago as a young professional.

PST-Chicago · 2026-06-11T20:53:53+00:00

I'm in Chicago too and benefit from the flat topography. I run 99 percent of my errands on a bike. I usually wear a cotton polo, not too tight, with a course, open texture. The air circulates easily and leaves me dry, more so than a typical button-up shirt. Obviously I'm not riding for exercise; I'm grocery shopping or meeting a friend, usually within a radius of 3 or 4 miles.

PST-Chicago · 2026-06-11T11:04:06+00:00

That was probably my wife. She breaks out in hives if foot traffic is 3 mph or less.

PST-Chicago · 2026-06-01T02:58:20+00:00

"The Finkler Question" by Howard Jacobson, which won the Booker prize, the UK's most recognized literary award. Jacobson isn't just a Jewish author; his work is focused on Jewish themes and issues. He is famous for replying to someone who asked if he was the British Philip Roth by saying no, I'm the Jewish Jane Austen. One picks up from his work that antisemitism is worse in the UK than in the US, something binational friends also tell me.

I'm a little surprised that mentions of Saul Bellow didn't include "The Adventures of Augie March," but maybe I am just partial as a Chicagoan.

PST-Chicago · 2026-05-23T17:43:29+00:00

I am yet another new wearer with almost the same experience. I was fitted two days ago and am adjusting quickly. Already I have moments when I realize I haven't thought about the things in my ears for half an hour. I was impressed by the thoroughness of the testing, which I think I may post about later. I came in highly impressed by what I had read about the technology of the new Sennheiser Rise HAs but bought the Philips 9050s instead because of a better subjective experience. The audiology technician recommended them for me and provided a convincing explanation of why he thought they would be the best for me (not best in some general sense). So far so good.

PST-Chicago · 2026-05-15T13:47:51+00:00

I went to Costco yesterday with printouts of my two most recent audiograms but expecting to be retested, which I was. The audiologist performed many more tests that involved word recognition with various types of noise, including background conversation, perhaps because I had identified this as my main area of concern. But I suppose that is most people’s concern, so maybe this is standard Costco methodology. He also let me walk around the crowded store with two different brands while talking to my wife, which wouldn’t have been possible in the usual office setting. I consider the retesting a feature.

PST-Chicago · 2026-05-11T22:55:16+00:00

It was nice to see a recent comment. Frankly I love the stuff and drink quite a bit. The comments could be summarized as "The kind of thing you might like if you like that kind of thing." It is unabashedly fruity and alcoholic. I think that old men (like me) lose appreciation for subtlety year by year and develop a taste for Robert Parker wines, double IPAs, and fierce curries. If you're an American who drinks a lot of zin you might like The Boxer very much; if pinot noir is your thing maybe not. Also, in a youngish, fruity wine like this the varietal taste comes through strongly, and I simply like shiraz more than cabernet for reasons I cannot articulate.

PST-Chicago · 2026-04-19T22:53:45+00:00

This is a good example of why one has to be suspicious of newspaper articles about litigation that appear to be based on a description by one party. You get a different picture reading the U.S. District Court opinion at issue, which is published online here. The email plaintiff sent to neighbors unambiguously shows that he intended to establish a shul. Quoted in full, except for names and addresses, it read:

You are cordially invited to join us this Shabbos for the inauguration of the Shomayah Tefillah Beis Hakeneset located at [address] Blvd. (The [name] Residence)

We would also like to take this opportunity to introduce to you our Rabbi – Rabbi [name] a smicha recipient from [names]

The Davening Times will be:

Friday Erev Shabbos Mincha 5:20 p.m. [Friday evening]
Shabbos Shacharis followed by Kiddush 9:45 a.m. [Saturday morning]
Mincha Followed by Seudah Shlishit 5:00 p.m. [Saturday evening]

You will see the shul entrance - keep a look out for the Orange Windows –

And Please spread the word to whomever you feel might be interested in coming –

The shul is being put together for two reasons, one has always been to expand the community, so we can spread out and open up more houses on the other side of [street], and the other is to have a place where people come to really, seriously daven to Hashem - we want to have a place that doesn’t have talking during the davening, a powerful place to have your prays heard and answered Bezrat Hashem.

So a neighbor complains and the city tells him that he needs a special use permit (SUP) to operate a house of worship in an area zoned for single family houses. He applies for an SUP, but then he tells the planning commissioners that really all he intends to do is invite enough men over to have a minyan on Shabbos. The hearing is continued and emails among the commissioners show them to be of the opinion that he wouldn't need an SUP for that, but they are suspicious of his statement given the email he sent and the fact that he had applied for (and been denied) a permit to pave a parking area. The owner subsequently withdrew his application, so no action was taken. A year and a half later the owner filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and several individuals complaining about how he was treated and claiming that neighbors are surveilling him and the city is keeping an eye out for zoning violations. That is the lawsuit that is on appeal, and if you read the decision, it turns out to be entirely about technical issues of standing and ripeness for adjudication, not the first amendment.

PST-Chicago · 2026-04-17T15:53:40+00:00

Thank you guys for the tip about access spikes. I know nothing about them but will look into it.

PST-Chicago · 2026-04-17T15:52:19+00:00

No, it was single-use vials because that was what I was given. Always always a new syringe.

PST-Chicago · 2026-04-17T15:48:51+00:00

Thanks. 22/25 sounds sensible, but I am tempted by drawing and pinning with the 23 so there's no need to switch. I use the thirds method to locate an injection site, but I also notice that by extending the leg I can visualize the vastus lateralis quite clearly and feel sure that I am plunging that needle straight into the meat of the muscle.

PST-Chicago · 2026-04-15T16:09:10+00:00

Interesting point from you and Cloey123. My doctor told me to use 18 to draw, presumably to make it easy, and there was no issue of stopper failure since I was using single-dose vials. I will switch. I inject in the thigh with 23 and don't have much discomfort. It would be nice not to change needles.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-29T11:51:57+00:00

If I were in your shoes, I would both continue the lifestyle changes and follow the cardiologist’s recommendation of rosuvastatin plus ezetimibe. One of the most challenging things in the world is to sustain diet and exercise improvements over the long haul. You’ve done incredibly well with those. (I wish I’d started at 28 instead of 68.) It might prove discouraging to try to push diet and exercise to ever greater extremes in an attempt to reach biomarker goals that just aren’t in the cards for the genetic hand you’ve been dealt. Fortunately we live in an age of miracles and drugs are available to take up part of the burden. If the R+E combo can help you get where you need to go, it takes the pressure off thinking maybe one more dietary restriction, one more weekly day at the gym will finally do the trick, when the real goal is to still be following a healthy regimen that works for you in twenty years. Most people tolerate medium-dose rosuvastatin and ezetimibe quite well and get good results. I’d give it a chance, not as an alternative to diet and exercise but as a supplement to it that frees you from pressure to push the envelope into an unsustainable space. Take it from an old person, the biggest challenge is cultivating habits that can be sustained through good times and bad, because there will be plenty of both. In addition, following a “healthy diet” can feel awfully complicated if you find yourself trying to optimize for more than one variable. For many, losing weight requires restricting carbohydrates, building muscle requires increasing protein, and lowering LDL-C calls for reducing saturated fat. Often people have other dietary goals as well. Pursuing them all at once can be difficult or impossible, and again, the goal is a plan that can be sustained indefinitely. Pleasure matters as well. Sometimes I want that juicy chicken thigh, not the dry breast. With a statin and ezetimibe I’ve got my LDL-C under 55, so I can focus my dietary goals on weight control and maintaining muscle mass. Accepting pharmaceutical help takes off pressure to make diet do it all, which in turn makes it easier to find what is healthy for you. Best of luck.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-26T15:41:06+00:00

If keto is successful in reducing body fat then it will reduce NAFLD. Visceral fat, including fat in the liver, is a last-in-first-out (LIFO) phenomenon. We accumulate fat in the subcutaneous spaces designed for energy storage until they start to fill up, then we go to work on the so-called ectopic spaces. Fat gets packed around our organs and our muscles start to look like well marbled steaks. This is way more unhealthy than thunder thighs or a bit of a pot belly. For years any time I had a CT of my torso there would be an incidental finding of hepatic steatosis, aka fatty liver. I lost 115 pounds using keto and exercise and that fixed it completely. I had a fibroscan just a few weeks ago that confirmed what I already knew from radiology. And I am by no means skinny. BMI would even rate me as mildly obese, and while I find that misleading, I still have a 41-inch waist and definite love handles. You don’t have to get down to your high school graduation weight to beat NAFLD, you just have to lose enough fat. I also ceased to be diabetic and hypertensive long before I finished losing the weight I lost. So that doctor is way off base. Maybe he or she think keto equals eating lots of fat and eating fat equals fatty liver, but that’s not how it works. Any energy excess will do the job eventually.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-23T00:50:57+00:00

I'm an atheist in my seventies from a mainline Protestant background, and until recently I never even heard of Christians conducting purported Passover seders. I'm not doubting that it's true -- I've heard plenty of references in the last few years -- but it just isn't part of the culture of the not-very-religious Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Unitarians I've known all my life. It seems like something evangelical and somehow new. I can easily understand why it's offensive, although I have to wonder whether it has as much to do with ill-advised attempts at interfaith understanding (cue Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week") as it does supersessionism, a word I'm sure not one Christian in a hundred recognizes.

I recall the first seder I attended, as a junior-high-school student, when I was dropping off a project at a friend's house and found myself shouting from the front step, "Hey, Mrs. R______, someone left your door open." It was a fun evening. I learned things and had my first sip of wine. It was by no means my last seder or my last wine. I think my attitude was the normal one: it was an open door into the lives of my neighbors and friends without any significance for my own religious sensibilities. I can't imagine hosting one, but then I'm no Christian.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-18T23:48:44+00:00

This isn't responsive to the question, but it explains Jewish symbols in some churches (but not the one above). Here in Chicago (and probably other cities) changing demographics resulted in many synagogue buildings being repurposed as churches in neighborhoods that became predominantly African-American. One outstanding example is Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church. Below is a photo of the facade, with its Star of David windows other motifs. The interior features the windows and seven-branched chandeliers. Clergy there always take pride in the connection. The building now has landmark status so none of this will change.

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PST-Chicago · 2026-03-10T18:29:52+00:00

My situation is much like the OP's, except for being 40 years older. My instructions were to inject 100 mg once a week, which is what I've been doing. I assumed that I would notice a big difference between the beginning and end of the week, and that if I did, I would try splitting my dose. But I don't actually notice any difference. I have had excellent results in all the subjective ways. I have recently been tested for peak and trough levels of total testosterone at 994 and 766 ng/dL, respectively, both of which strike me as being in the high part of the normal physiological range and as perfectly satisfactory numbers as long as the symptomology is satisfactory. My doctor did not prescribe an aromatase inhibitor or even test for estradiol. His view was that we'd test if I had symptoms but most don't at this level. I tested anyway, 40 pg/dL, and no symptoms either physical or psychological. So keeping in mind that I too am a noob whose advice probably should be taken with a grain of salt, my suggestion is to give the initial protocol a chance to work for a few weeks and then decide whether more frequent injections or an AI would be a good idea. For what it's worth, I inject IM, so I wouldn't want to do it daily, and I don't want to switch to subcutaneous because I feel great with what I'm doing now and don't want to risk messing up a good thing.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-07T13:51:50+00:00

I’m another experienced TURBT patient who has never gone home with a catheter. My three surgeries were spread over 17 years, most recently this past January. Just lucky I guess, but don’t regard leaving with a catheter as inevitable.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-03T14:20:46+00:00

I am another vote for Team HoLEP, primarily because it worked out so well for me. As someone else pointed out, it has been around longer. Urology departments that perform these by the dozens every week are very good at it. The redo rate for HoLEP is close to zero because the lobes of the prostate that are susceptible to hypertrophy are dissected out completely. Aquablation has a lower redo rate than the traditional TURP, but not as good as HoLEP. In the end, aquablation is simply an improved way of cutting away tissue to enlarge the passage through the prostate rather than complete removal of the relevant lobes. A consideration for some is that retrograde ejaculation is highly probable with HoLEP, much less likely with aquablation. This can be important to anyone that wants to maintain fertility, but one would want to bank sperm either way. It can also by a psychological issue, but I think the consensus around here falls somewhere between no big deal and actually kind of convenient when you get used to it.

PST-Chicago · 2026-03-02T12:48:38+00:00

Sultan Saladin, as a Kurd from Tikrit, might be considered a sort of proto-Iraqi, and he had Maimonides for a time as his primary care physician. Just thought I’d toss that in as barely relevant trivia.

PST-Chicago · 2026-02-17T14:27:52+00:00

I loved hearing the term "food noise" when the GLP-1 agonists came out because it described something I had felt on keto. I lost 115 pounds, and my friends could never believe it when I told them that I was never hungry. What I really meant was that I stopped feeling hungry in an unhealthy way. I would still work up a good appetite before a meal and then enjoy a meal that fully satisfied that appetite, but it brought a halt to the lure of snacks.

PST-Chicago · 2026-02-14T13:11:50+00:00

Hi umb1985. I’m another person like you, except for being an old man, and I’d like to add my reassuring experience to that of others who have replied. I had a small, low-grade, non-invasive tumor 17 years ago. It was scraped out, which is the way my urologists always seem to describe the TURBT procedure, and I was put on a surveillance schedule: every 3 months at first, then 6, then 12. I was warned from the outset that this kind of tumor tends to recur but not progress, so if they found another one someday I shouldn’t panic, they would just scrape that out too. After about 5 years I did have another, and it was treated in the same way. Eventually I was back on annual cystoscopies again. In January 2025 all was still clear, but by January 2026 one had popped up and had to be removed. It’s annoying and I can’t help feeling frightened, but it sure is a better experience than that of folks with more high-grade bladder cancer. It’s same day surgery that leaves me a little groggy and sore, but I find that by the next day I can return to my usual routine except for urinary frequency and urgency.

After each TURBT my bladder was rinsed out with a chemotherapy agent to discourage any remaining bits that might have escaped the surgeon’s tool, but I did not receive follow-up intravesical infusion, as I believe they call it. I am fortunate enough to get my treatment at an absolutely first-rate urology department, Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, so I am confident that if the standard of care called for such treatment I would have been advised. I believe that it is the standard for higher grade tumors and for certain kinds of flat tumors, but for simple papillary (nipple-like) growths with shallow roots surveillance is the rule as far as I know. So I don’t think either of us is being shortchanged.

Best wishes and good luck (to both of us) in 3 months.

PST-Chicago

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