...but for those of my loyal readers who follow me mostly here and not there, and I love you all, here are some recent posts from Facebook. For the comments, some of which are quite good, see there. (I leave out one post about Facebook itself.):
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I'm
used to people coming up to me in shul and telling me my tefillin are
too low. I usually try to wave them off, but some of them are insistent.
They say R' Kook used to adjust people's tefillin,
but at least he was the rav- and he knew what he was doing. With me,
it's usually some ignoramus. To make matters worse, they usually have
full heads of hair (lucky dogs) and simply can't grasp what the phrase "my hairline isn't where it once was" even means. (I suppose the language barrier doesn't help.)
None of that prepared me for today. Today, it was someone who- I kid
you not- runs an entire organization (in Brooklyn, naturally) devoted
to this topic. He had a spiral-bound book and glossy fliers all about
his cause. And he kept going on about how I'm violating a d'orayta, need
to take care of this today, and how- I'm quoting here- "I'm doing you
a big favor." (The Karaite myth didn't come up, alas.) All this in the
middle of hagba. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think talking during
davening ranks a bit higher on the no-nos.
When faced with that
sort of lunacy, you just nod, smile, and try to slowly back away. While
saying your "V'Zot HaTorah," "Acheinu," and Amens, which, as I said, I
think God is a bit more interested in.
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(This is from last week, and so a bit dated, but not much:)
So here's a timeline of headlines:
Sunday: Bibi announces that he won't remove any Israelis from their
homes. Subtext, not picked up on by me then: Settlers are free to live
under the PA if they want.
Monday: Bennett blasts Bibi, saying
this is a stupid idea. (It is, on a number of levels.) On the same day,
in a different paper, the headline informs us that the PA rejects the
idea out of hand. Their future state will be Judenrein, thank you very much.
So, Monday night, Efrat and I decide that Bibi may well be being
devious- offer the PA a deal which they'll inevitably reject (because
they're evil and, thankfully, stupid), and thus expose them as a bunch
of anti-Semites, not that it will convince anyone who doesn't like
Israel or Jews anyway.
Sure enough, Tuesday's headline: Bibi
blasts Bennett for ruining his perfect opportunity to expose the
Palestinians as a bunch of "racists and anti-Semites" (which seems to
have worked anyway, but maybe he wanted to make it "official").
Bennett's people respond by complaining that Bibi never told them it
was part of a big plan.
You just have to laugh sometimes. (As
Tom Wolfe once wrote, "It's a great life, if you don't weaken.") But it
leaves the following questions: Are Efrat and I officially smarter than
Bennett? (One of us voted for him, a decision still not regretted
overall.) If so, why is he so much richer and more powerful than us? Was
Bennett just playing to his base? Or, frighteningly, does Bennett
perhaps know that Bibi really is the squish we think him to be? Or is
all this really part of some huge plan? (On the last, at least: Nah.)
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Finally
saw The Hobbit Part Two (yeah, I know that's not its name) yesterday.
Probably one of the last showings in theaters, so I had to go with the
3-D, which doesn't work for me, but I enjoyed it. So long as you don't
expect Jackson to stick to the book- and he deviates wildly, oddly
enough not only (obviously, for long trilogy) adding whole plots either
from other Tolkien writings or from his own
imagination, but ironically making some very clear omissions (I can
only assume they'll be in the extended versions, but whatever)- it can
be fun. Sometimes inadvertently funny, as in some of the over-the-top
fight scenes, but what's wrong with a laugh? I guess I'm not a purist,
especially if the result isn't bad.
Another year till the next...I'm having flashbacks to LOTR in 2001 and 2002.
I may have mentioned this last year, but it's certainly odd having to
follow along constructed languages such as Quenya (Elvish), Khuzdul
(Dwarf language), Black Speech, and Orkish in Hebrew subtitles. Same for
Klingon last year.
One more thing: I know they tailor trailers
to the main feature, but three of the four trailers were for Marvel
movies. Wow. (The fourth was the Robocop remake, Hashem Yerachem.)
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My English teacher in the seventh and eighth grades (twenty-five years ago!) was Mr. Harvey Brodsky. He was amazing. (Note added for blog: Most of my classmates, unlike me, had younger and not older brothers in the school. Mr. Brodsky would assign all sorts of "risky" books- like "To Kill a Mockingbird"- there would be howls of outrage from parents, and the books would not be assigned the next year. Fortunately, I got to read them before the hissy fits.)
My parents send regular "care packages" of articles and the like I
might find interesting. What a delight to discover, in the latest one,
an article showing that Mr. Brodsky is still going strong. May his tribe
increase.
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