Kesher Talk: 11/02/2003

Friday, November 07, 2003

Way cool stuff. Anyone who went to art school will enjoy this taxonomy of art students.

Looks like it's turtles all the way down.

Cool sand sculptures.

The World Beard and Moustache Championship in Carson City, Nevada.

Jews in odd places: New Zealand: The Jewish Week turns an investigational eye on Auckland, New Zealand, which wants all sorts of Jews to come and prosper:

The city’s largest synagogue and the B’nai B’rith chapter in recent years have launched separate campaigns to attract Jewish immigrants from overseas, complementing a national recruitment effort that emphasizes New Zealand’s low unemployment and crime rates.

Both B’nai B’rith and the Auckland Jewish Immigration Organization, affiliated with the Auckland Hebrew Congregation, have directed their activities primarily toward the Jews of South Africa, and secondarily to prospective immigrants from Argentina and Israel.

“These people are coming from distressed areas,” says Stan Rose, chairman of the immigration orginazation (www.aji.org.nz). All three countries are undergoing economic difficulties, while Israel is faced with ongoing Arab terrorism.

They are coming, attracted by New Zealand’s booming economy and laid-back lifestyle, to a distant corner of the globe — three hours flying time from Australia, its closest neighbor; 10 from South Africa; 12 from Los Angeles.

Next on Rose’s agenda: an outreach to Jews in the United States.

Unlike Australia, whose unabashed support for the American war in Iraq has made it a possible target of terrorists, New Zealand, which is aligned with the governments awaiting sanction by the United Nations of any involvement in Iraq, is not considered a target.

Rose says New Zealand is an oasis from anti-Semitism. He points to the portside land donated to the congregation by Auckland 140 years ago, and the national prime minister and seven Auckland Jewish mayors claimed by the Jewish community, as signs of the society’s tolerant attitudes.

Another sign: Jewish sites here don’t require armed guards, a rarity in the West.

...Some 230 years after the first Jews arrived here, mostly whalers and traders, the size of New Zealand Jewry, sustained periodically by small waves of people fleeing persecution, has seen little growth for a century. Today’s community is the typical mix of middle-class businesspeople and professionals, as well as high-tech experts from Israel who have come in the last 18 months.

Many young Jews do their de rigueur O.E. — Overseas Experience, post-college backpacking — and don’t come back. “Because there are so few Jewish people, young Jews go to Australia to marry” and stay, says historian Ann Gluckman, editor of “Identity and Involvement: Auckland Jewry, Past and Present.”

... New Zealand, in an attempt to restrict the number of poorly trained immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, has adopted new immigration requirements that favor people from the West with qualifications in such areas as engineering, medicine and information technology, Lipschitz says. The country’s goal is 4,500 to 5,000 newcomers a year.

... While most members of the Auckland Hebrew Congregation, which bills itself as Orthodox, practice a level of observance closer to American-style Conservative Judaism, the community offers a mikveh and the Kadimah College day school. Kosher food is available, and an eruv and kosher bakery are under consideration.

... Jewish immigrants from South Africa, with a common British experience, feel most at home here, many members of the Jewish community say.

Of the estimated 60,000 South Africans who have come to New Zealand in the last decade, about 2,500 are Jewish.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Did he jump or was he pushed? Keep an eye on this story - might be a scandal in the making. The latest:

Mr Duggan, who was Jewish, died after attending a meeting of the Schiller Institute, a rightwing political group which was described in court by his family as a "dangerous and political cult with strong anti-semitic tendencies, known to have a history of intimidation and terror tactics". The Guardian revealed in July how Mr Duggan travelled to Germany from Paris, where he was studying, because he shared the institute's stance against the war with Iraq.

Yesterday's inquest at Hornsey coroner's court, north London, heard that 45 minutes before he died, Mr Duggan made a 4am telephone call to his mother, terrified and pleading with her to help him. He had no history of mental illness and gave no indication that he might harm himself. Dr Dolman read out a German police document which concluded: "Jeremiah Duggan ran into the road with suicidal intent." Turning to the victim's family, he said: "Having weighed up all the evidence, I clearly reject that opinion."

The Schiller Institute is associated with Lyndon Larouche. Read the whole thing. (via Melanie Phillips)

Watching the candidates debate. If the LGF comment thread sounds like MST3K spoofing a bad sci-fi movie,
Roger Simon's crew sound like George Carlin.

Sharpton might be funny, but he's just the kind of guy who would hog the bong. He's out.

Mosley-Braun would fall asleep after one toke. She always looks like she's ready for a nap as it is. She's out.

Liebermann would take 10 minutes to tell a joke and then forget the punchline. He's out.

Kucinich would be bitching that it wasn't a Thai stick and the bong isn't clean. He's out.

Dean would spend the whole evening saying pot isn't good for us and we shouldn't be doing this. He's out.

Kerry. No difference. He's out.

Clark. He'd spend the night wanting to have a philosophical discussion on time and space travel. Or which Star Trek episode was the best. He's definately out.

Gephardt. He wouldn't smoke it if it wasn't domestic weed. No Mexican. He's out.

Edwards. He'd take two hits and then run off to a party at Sigma Chi. He's out.

Roger, what you don't understand about Republicans is that THEY are the better partiers. Hey, we've got P.J. O'Rourke! George W. would bring snacks, wouldn't hog the weed, have some good jokes and be ready for a few hours of intense games of three-pack canasta (loser takes hits on the bong).

Rumsfeld.

I know he's not a Democrat, but think about it.

I'll bet he has a great stock of absolutely hilarious off-color jokes, which he would tell with a completely straight face.

And he would be the one who could actually keep the cops/landlord/R.A. outside AND convince them that nothing illegal or immoral is going on...and all the while on a serious buzz himself.

That's my kind of guy.

Jews in odd places: Russia: The Jewish Autonomous Region isn’t predominantly Jewish or truly autonomous. And it hasn’t exactly evolved into the “God’s heaven” that Josef Stalin vowed to create in 1928 on this remote chunk of swampland, about the size of Belgium, along Russia’s border with China in the Far East:

“You can smell the Jewry here, and we want to strengthen it because we consider Birobidzhan the center of Jewish life in the Far East,” he says. “We’re only beginning.”

Designated in 1934 as a “Jewish Autonomous Region,” Birobidzhan had 108,000 residents by 1939, but only 18,000 Jews.

They fled the Pale of Settlement, Western Europe and the Americas to build a Jewish socialist homeland — or, as Stalin saw it, to solve the “Jewish question.”

But the place was forbidding: After a 10-day train ride from Moscow to the basin of the Biro and Bidzhan rivers, travelers found swarming mosquitoes, frigid temperatures and impenetrable swamps. Some 20 percent of them quickly returned home.

Those who remained built their own wooden dwellings and cultivated the land while enjoying a short stint of Jewish culture through the 1930s.

However, a swelling population and an anti-Semitic state policy led the regime to launch purges and repressions for decades to come.

The Jews managed to retain islands of Yiddish culture: The Birobidzhan Stern newspaper and Yiddish radio prevailed as state mouthpieces. But when freedom arrived in the 1990s, many fled to Israel.

In sleepy Birobidzhan, where a mere 5 percent of today’s 88,000 residents are Jewish, the superficial trappings of Jewish life are more common than real Jewish spirit — mainly because regional authorities are cognizant of the federal benefits that the republic’s Jewish identity can attract, observers say.

The remodeled train station is crowned with a sign in Yiddish, and a grand menorah dominates the square below.

All government buildings, including the post office, are marked in Russian and Yiddish, the official second language. The capital’s Jewish mayor, Alexander Vinnikov, whose family arrived from Belarus in 1947, says a dozen locals receive official city documents in Yiddish each month.

Religious spirit is glaringly absent, however. Leaders hope Chabad Rabbi Mordechai Scheiner, who arrived in fall 2002, can fill the new synagogue upon its completion, expected this fall.

Moscow allocated $112,000 to finance the synagogue, the first in Russia to receive federal funds.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Avodah. Naomi Chana wrote an excellent and moving essay - inspired by a widespread discomfort and misunderstanding of the Yom Kippur Avodah service by liberal Jews - on the translation from the sacrifice-based Temple service to the rabbinic innovations in liturgy. I have some remarks in the comments. I think this would fit into my Pintele Yid series as another window onto the Jewish worldview, so if you are interested in what makes Jews tick, read the whole thing.

Antisemitism watch. Bookmark four new articles on the "New Antisemitism":

This one lists many incidents of violence against Jews not just in France, but throughout Europe, and explains how this violence is fed by a synergy of media propaganda and old stereotypes. A must read for those who demand specifics.

This overview of the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe and the Muslim world is good for bringing someone up to speed who hasn't been paying attention to the issue. This article is similar, from the point of view of a historian who knows what he is looking at when he sees nasty stereotypes and calls for isolationism (scroll down for some cartoons whose themes should look familiar). (More here.)

The article on how antisemitism is fed by anxieties about globablization is noteworthy in making several points I have not seen raised elsewhere:

It is paradoxical that Jews should find themselves swept up in the backlash against globalization, since Jews were the first truly globalized people. The survival of Jewish civilization—despite 2,000 years without a state and the scattering of its diaspora to nearly every nation on Earth—undermines the claim that globalization creates a homogenized world that destroys local cultures. Jews accommodated, and at times embraced, the foreign cultures they lived in without sacrificing their identity. The golden age of Jewish learning was not in ancient Israel, but in medieval Spain, where Jewish religious study, literature, and poetry flourished under the influence of Muslim scholars.

The last sentence is actually false, as the Mishnah and Talmud - bedrocks of Jewish Oral Law which supercede anything produced in medieval Spain - were first redacted in Israel after the fall of the second Temple, but the larger point is sound. Our particular blend of universality and particularity (anchored by our our concepts of human rights and dignity) is one of the most valuable gifts we have to offer the world. It is ironic that the movement which purports to defend local and indigenous culture against dehumanizing global blandness should then attack the Jews for actually embodying their principles.

This article also sympathizes with Jews who work in the antiglobalization movement:

Last year, there were fears that the Johannesburg-hosted World Summit on Sustainable Development would turn into a replay of the ill-fated 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, where anti-Semitic rhetoric culminated in a draft resolution adopted by the NGO forum singling out Israel as guilty of “genocide.” The [Simon Weisenthal center] urged 180 ecological organizations planning to attend Johannesburg to ensure the conference stayed on message. The responses were largely positive, reflecting the frustration of many Third World NGOs who felt that the controversy at Durban had overshadowed vital issues on their agendas.

And then there are the Jews within the antiglobalization movement itself. Many are drawn to the movement for the same reason that Jews have always been disproportionately represented in campaigns for social justice: the principle of tikkun olam (repairing the world). It imparts a commitment not only to care for the Jewish community, but for all of society. The antiglobalization activists who are Jewish carry a unique burden in that they are made to feel like strangers even though they are passionately devoted to safeguarding the environment, advocating human rights, and promoting economic equality. But rather than abandoning the movement, they seek to wrest the agenda from the extremists who would exclude them. A measure of their success could be seen in the final day of the 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. While street protesters waved their swastikas, a small group of Jewish and Palestinian peace activists organized a series of workshops, funded by local Jewish and Palestinian communities in Brazil. The result was a joint statement, read to 20,000 cheering activists, calling for “peace, justice, and sovereignty for our peoples,” and a Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel.

Another bright spot in the miasma of global anti-Jewish prejudice is the Czech Republic. Why? Because the Czechs can relate:

Exactly two thirds of a century ago the British and French governments forced Czechoslovakia to give up territory that Germany considered to be "occupied." A few months later, Germany wiped Czechoslovakia entirely off the map. British and French leaders thought appeasement would protect them from Germany's wrath, saving them from having to fight a terrorist state. Once he got this Czech territory, German leader Adolf Hitler explained, he would have no more demands and would get along just fine with the British and French. They believed him. They were wrong. But they also justified their behavior in terms of human rights and charity to the weaker side. After all, the land Czechoslovakia was forced to yield was inhabited by ethnic Germans. Berlin's demand to rule those citizens could be portrayed as reasonable. Also, Germany had been humiliated a few years before, in World War I, so it was only trying to regain national pride and reacting against its mistreatment by the victors.

. . . After a half-century experience of Nazi and communist rule, Czechs don't evince romanticism toward radical ideologies, respect dictators, tolerate propaganda, or suffer from illusions about rationalizing terrorism. They can tell the difference between a fence to stop terrorists and the Iron Curtain wall that not long ago crossed their own country where those trying to flee were shot down. . . . . If you talk to a Czech about ignorant, craven leaders trading off the rights of a far-off land of which they know little, he recognizes this as a paraphrase of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain's remark about their country when he was selling it out.

IN SHORT, there is not much patience with nonsense.

Jews in Sports: Gabe Kapler, outfielder for the Colorado Rockies: Gabe Kapler has grown accustomed to extra attention from other Jews since he got to Majhor League Baseball for the first time in 1998. Now with his third team, the 27-year-old Kapler is still trying to establish himself as a regular. In four-plus seasons, Kapler has a .272 career batting average, with his best year coming in 2000 with the Texas Rangers (.302, 14 homers, 66 RBIs). He knew the eyes of Jewish sports fans would be on him as he began his first full season in Colorado.

"Only because I think there's so few of us," Kapler said. "I don't think that they are hard-core baseball fans, but they feel elated there are some players that are Jews that are having some success."

He is not necessarily enamored with all the attention.

"I think there are some misconceptions. I don't want people to necessarily think that I'm going to synagogue every week and that I'm keeping kosher. I don't mind if they do, but it's just not me.

Instead, Kapler focuses on the cultural and national aspects of being Jewish.

"That's where I identify the most: heritage, blood, history," Kapler said. "I'm so proud to be who I am. I'm so proud of where I come from. I feel very strongly about being a strong Jew, not necessarily from a religious aspect."

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Congress stands up for Israel: Joe Wilson of South Carolina and Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado have both led letters to President Bush on Israeli issues recently.

Mugrave's letter urged Bush to support the removal of Yasir Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian Authority and Wilson's urged the President to insist that the next prime minister of the Palestinian Authority act forcefully against terrorism and cease inciting Israel and its allies.

November 4th, 1995. Israelis Allison and Imshin reflect on the 8th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin.

Lynn posts a reality check.

UPDATE: Allison was there as a reporter and filed some stories.

Not Ladino, but Latino: Temple Sinai, in southern Florida, is one of a growing number of synagogues responding to the recent influx of Spanish-speaking — mostly South American — members by incorporating Spanish readings into the regular services.

Monday, November 03, 2003

Intellectual masturbation on the Upper West Side, cont. I went to a shiur by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller on Saturday afternoon. It was free, unlike the Shabbat dinner the evening before. I politely but firmly challenged Rabbi Seidler-Feller a few times, and after reading this news item today I'm glad I didn't sit in the front row. Although he got a bit defensive and didn't really respond to what I said, he kept his cool. On the other hand I didn't call him a kapo, which is a pretty low blow. I wasn't the only one who challenged him, but the pervasive tone was respectful and subdued, perhaps in reaction to the heated arguments of the dinner the night before, or reports of the scuffle in LA.

Rabbi Seidler-Feller seems to be one of those folks who speaks the truth as they see it without pandering to any particular party line. He has confronted Edward Said and pro-Palestinian Muslims in public (scroll down and onto the next page). He has led Arab-Jewish dialogue groups. He has spoken out against the divestment petition. He has called for an international force to enforce a 2-state solution. He was a founder of Americans for Peace Now. He has written critically and perceptively about conflicted secular Jewish academics (such as Tony Judt), and in fact at the talk on Saturday he praised Leon Weiseltier's response to Judt.

This is the kind of person I most admire (sans the poor impulse control, a characteristic he shares with fellow iconoclast Christopher Hitchens), whether I agree with any of his specific positions. However, if one didn't know any of that - and I didn't; I vaguely knew who he was, but I only googled these articles while writing this post - one could easily assume from his presentation Saturday that his primary approach to the existence of Israel is one of guilt and apology. We worked from texts ranging from the usual gemara and Rambam to some early Zionist Hebrew poetry to newspaper reports. I felt that Seidler-Feller cherry-picked his sources to drive a particular thesis, and - claiming time limitations - was going to avoid engaging with any arguments that would take him off-message. This is a legitimate way to handle having too much text, not enough time, a very controversial topic, and an urgency about bringing the audience to a particular realization (which wasn't going to happen anyway). But Seidler-Feller is an experienced teacher and lecturer, so why did he create that dilemma for himself in the first place?

His thesis wasn't novel: Jews now have political power but we still want to cling to victim status because we haven't yet internalized the idea that we are powerful. This is a venerable Leftist pop-psych variation on "you Jews are just paranoid." But our sense of our own power and vulnerability is mixed, as is the factual evidence of both. He wove the Jewish sense of specialness into this; I don't remember exactly how but I do remember my response: 1) one way in which Jews (and privileged Westerners in general) act like we are special is that we don't hold others to the same moral standards with which we castigate ourselves. And the world willingly obliges: If Jews will agonize over our lack of moral perfection, the UN will happily spend 25% of its time on Israel and ignore the truly oppressive and terrorist states which don't wear a "kick me" sign around their necks. The solution is not to lower our expectations of ourselves but to have the guts to hold others accountable.

My other comment was that these discussions always take place in a bubble where nothing exists except our texts and our consciences. As Joanne put it: "There is of course a sense in which this is all masturbatory anyway -- it's not as if what's said in a shul basement can affect someone determined to strap on a Semtex belt." In this shul basement there are no real Palestinian extremists (and international enablers of same), and we can fantasize that everyone who disagrees with our right to exist can be reached if we are only contrite enough. Or we (in a different shul basement) engage with a few selected Palestinians who constantly go on the offensive, let the Jews do all the soul-searching, and who have no influence on Arafat's thugocracy anyway. (Seidler-Feller responded to my comments with an anecdote about Sari Nusseibeh, which proves my point. Yawn. For the past 20 years, whenever the Israeli Left wants to produce moderate Palestinians who will "dialogue" with Jews, they trot out philosophy professor Sari Nusseibeh. Like I've said before, my money is on banker Omar Karsou.)

So I was disappointed in Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller's presentation. If we had started with the same Jewish texts (plus a few), and actually tackled a thorny case study - perhaps how to render ineffective a terrorist leader surrounded by civilians (yes, I know what the Geneva Convention says, but what do our tradition and law say?) - and argued it through, it would have been a worthwhile Shabbat afternoon of study.

UPDATE: Israel is finally taking the UN seriously enough to hold it accountable.

Quagmire watch. What a hatchet job. From the people who brought you Jayson Blair. I am not going to fisk this point by point (although I expect this to be a fun project for many bloggers in the days to come), because Rieff's criticisms of the bureaucratic infighting and decision-making leading up to the war may very well be accurate, but so what? This is the conclusion he draws:

Had the military been as meticulous in planning its strategy and tactics for the postwar as it was in planning its actions on the battlefield, the looting of Baghdad, with all its disastrous material and institutional and psychological consequences, might have been stopped before it got out of control. Had the collective knowledge embedded in the Future of Iraq Project been seized upon, rather than repudiated by, the Pentagon after it gained effective control of the war and postwar planning a few months before the war began, a genuine collaboration between the American authorities and Iraqis, both within the country and from the exiles, might have evolved. And had the lessons of nation-building -- its practice but also its inevitability in the wars of the 21st century -- been embraced by the Bush administration, rather than dismissed out of hand, then the opportunities that did exist in postwar Iraq would not have been squandered as, in fact, they were.

The real lesson of the postwar mess is that while occupying and reconstructing Iraq was bound to be difficult, the fact that it may be turning into a quagmire is not a result of fate, but rather (as quagmires usually are) a result of poor planning and wishful thinking.

Well, is Iraq a quagmire? Have opportunities in postwar Iraq been "squandered"?

You decide:
The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly - ongoing Iraq news roundup.
The Command Post - ongoing Iraq news roundup.
Forty positive news stories from Iraq.
Another roundup of positive news stories.
Chart tracking various improvements in Iraq reconstruction.
Links to bloggers in Iraq.
Salam Pax with pix and talking to the Brits.
Another Iraqi.
Another Iraqi.
An exiled Iraqi journalist returns home.
A poll.
Another poll.
More polls.
The marsh Arabs: a humanitarian and environmental success story.
Recent Congressional delegation to Iraq - transcript of report.
Congresscritter's Iraq weblog.
Another Congresscritter's report.
American judge's report.
American municipal CFO's report.
An American artist reports.
Skeptical American reporter's encounters with Iraqis.
American reporter's blog.
Another American reporter in Iraq.
The 101st Airborne success stories.
More 101st Airborne success stories.
And the Marines too.
Another Marine story.
More offense please.
Blogs of soldiers in Iraq.
Yes, even British Leftists.
Yes, even the Guardian.
Yes, even the Arab News.
War crimes museum opens.
Iraqis get married.
An Iraqi expat returns.
Iraqis and Americans work it out.
Iraqis condemn their insurgents and suicide bombers.
Construction contracts for Iraq and related news.

No, it doesn't look like Bush went into the reconstruction of Iraq with a "meticulous" plan. Good. Because it would be stupid to create a detailed plan if you don't know what you're going to find. Instead, they have been feeling their way into the situation, being responsive, learning from mistakes, pushing responsibility down to the lowest level, encouraging different approaches. In short being as entrepreneurial as possible rather than bureaucratic. And that is working just fine. For example, Rieff claims the Pentagon aggressively promoted Ahmed Chalabi, but has the US annointed Chalabi as an interim Iraqi leader? No. Rieff criticizes mismanagement that took place under Jay Garner's watch. Is Garner the current Iraq administrator? No.

I shed a crocodile tear for the State Dept.

Rieff claims Bush did not take to heart lessons learned in other nation-building efforts, although he doesn't specify what those lessons are, other than to expect widespread looting. But others have, for example:
David Plotz
Donald Rumsfeld
Hernando de Soto.
Are these the lessons Rieff wants to see applied in Iraq? if so, are they being applied? Read the links and decide.

Jews in odd places: Iraq: Rachel Zelon is on a one-woman mission to rescue the 34 Jews who remained in Iraq after the recent war, the last remnants of a Jewish community that numbered 150,000 in the 1940s. Zelon, the 44-year-old vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, aimed to find every one of the Iraqi Jews, many of them elderly and housebound, and offer them a way out: a plane ride to Israel.

From Iraq, Zelon made occasional phone calls to her agency's American offices. Leonard Glickman, president of HIAS, said that the sound of shooting in the distance came through the fuzzy signal during those calls. "This was a pretty stark example of Rachel putting her life in harm's way in order to rescue Jews in need in some far corner of the planet," Glickman said. "She put herself last, and her job and these people first."

Sunday, November 02, 2003

So exactly how contentious is the Jewish community. Sooooo contentious....

We had Shabbat dinner at our shul this Friday night. The food was interesting -- first rice, perhaps crunchier than is conventional, then nothing for a very long time. Then some more rice, even crunchier, but we were very hungry by then. Then, about the time we were licking our plates and picking the rice from our teeth, salmon, long dead and cooked for approximately a year and a half, apparently the whole meal. Then, surprisingly, chicken, wrapped around something that once had been green. Spinach, maybe? Then, astonishingly, hard little pellets of ground lamb, chewy, not bad. Given the progression, I was half expecting something like lightly grilled elephant chunks, but it ended there.

The audience was not exactly usual for the setting; slightly older, slightly more formally dressed, slightly less familiar looking.

Then the talk, about Israel, about looking within ourselves and the Jewish community for some of the reasons for the problems there. That is the orthodoxy we expect. Then, as surprisingly as the chicken, came shouted rebutals, loud arguments, passionate denials.

The shift among some liberals has been subtle but is starting to be noticable; what's being lost, it seems, is the feeling that things can get better, even as the rhetoric generally stresses how we could still live in the best of all possible worlds if only we could just all get along. (Internal turmoil seems to predispose people to cliches.) It's hard to give that up -- I know, I struggled against it myself -- and so it's fascinating to hear those strains battle themselves in one person's talk.

There is of course a sense in which this is all masturbatory anyway -- it's not as if what's said in a shul basement can affect someone determined to strap on a Semtex belt -- but the shift, and the fact that at last orthodoxies are open for debate, is a very good thing.

Today, for something entirely different -- the marathon. We watched from the 23rd mile as runners pounded toward us. My indefatigable brother-in-law shouted encouragement to them, using their names whenever they showed up on their shirts: Lookin good, Linda. Lookin good, Ray. Almost there, Sally. Lookin good, Wolfang. He was almost always lying. They almost never looked good. They were drenched with sweat, many were limping, most looked ready to keel over. I just stood there. Much as I'd love to I can't yell at strangers, even encouragingly, and there is no way I can possibly drop a final g. It wouldn't come out of my mouth.

Then my sister waltzed up. She did look good. Perky, in fact. Intensely blue-eyed, thin, energetic, happy, happily sweaty, she said hello, then ran on to complete her seventh New York City marathon. Just for that fraction of a second, I almost got it. Go, Lynn!

A few links from LGF. It is no secret to KT readers that I find a lot of great links in the LGF comment threads, like this. This entire thread could be titled: MST3K watches the Democratic candidate debate; park LGFers (virtually, of course) around a live TV feed and they are quite entertaining. Or watch the wolves gather around an unwitting young leftist who wandered too far from his campfire one night. (Props to mobius1 for hanging in there - did you learn anything?) And why does all this remind me of that old Mad Magazine strip Spy vs. Spy?

UPDATE: MST3K (LGF version) watches another Democratic debate.

Oddities. Life imitates The Onion. On the other hand, this is from The Sun, so a few grains of salt might be in order.

Kim Jong-Il - manga hero.

My my, aren't we busy.

More than you ever wanted to know about jumping off the Golden Gate bridge.

Turning my midlife crisis into a second career Dept. Well looky here. Someone else is less than impressed with Doug Rushkoff.

Rushkoff used to be a kind of countercultural figure and a leading "cyberculture" expert, back when that title made any sense. . . . He hasn't had much interesting to say since he published the dizzyingly weird, hyperbolic book of cyberculture ethnography Cyberia in 1994. Then he went on to become a media pundit, writing Media Virus!, where he not only defended Beavis and Butthead as an implicit, countercultural project that taught viewers how to criticize the television from their seats, but he used the term "meme" in the incredibly broad, vague and useless sense that has currently become chic with livejournal users and adbusters enthusiasts alike. His web log keeps it pretty simple, and its a good resource to find out what the main arguments going on are.

Now I understand why Rushkoff attempted to open up a new market (modern American Judaism) for his punditry - he had squeezed whatever celebrity he could out of the old one. Unfortunately, he condescended to his customers and didn't do sufficient market research - now isn't that exactly the stuffy mindset dot.com hipsters used to lecture "brick and mortar" businesses about?

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Kesher Talk

Friday, November 07, 2003

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Monday, November 03, 2003

Sunday, November 02, 2003

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