Atomic Tom Live on NYC Subway

This is pretty cool (despite my overall meh attitude toward Apple).

Camp Simcha for Children with Cancer - "Waving Flags" Official Music Video

Wavin' Flag

This was a great editorial by Estie Neff from the YU Observer which I felt like sharing.

Lipa sang a number of popular songs and reached "Abi Meleibt" (It will be okay), one of his signature tunes. He sang the chorus, and the yeshiva boys simultaneously added their own noise as expected, breaking out in Camp Simcha's "Wavin' Flag." Some people in the audience chuckled, some people groaned, but Lipa - surrounded by loud instruments and intense percussion - did not hear them.

As Lipa neared the chorus of "Abi Meleibt" the second time, he turned the microphone to the crowd. The band quieted down in anticipation of our cooperation. Instead, a resounding recital of "Wavin' Flag" filled the cavernous room from the yeshiva boys in the back, who overpowered us.
Lipa did not miss a beat. "Oh! That's nice! Sing it again!" he said, encouraging the yeshiva boys. They sang again, exuberantly, and this time Lipa sang with them. Next, the band chimed in with their thunderous instruments. Finally, the entire audience was singing the chorus of "Wavin' Flag" together with the yeshiva boys, the band and Lipa.

Sitting in the concert hall, it struck me that two concepts were harmonizing together, in the form of music, at this spontaneous moment. Camp Simcha's song about the lives and struggles of youth with cancer, and Lipa's song about relinquishing control to life's twists and turns, became one.

The haphazard melding of these musical messages was surprisingly appropriate. As mere human beings, we cannot control many things in life, like a person's health - or a person's livelihood, or when a person finds their bashert. But given a situation, we can react in the proper way by realizing that "it will be okay" - everything is God's will and what He decrees is ultimately for the best.

[..]

Like a "wavin' flag," whose every move is determined by the one who brandishes it, the minutia of daily life is determined by the will of our Creator; therefore, we can say "abi meleibt!"

And here's the video

Radio Flyer

This is awesome...! Hat tip: Aunt Anne

 

Fresh

Starting over is often taking one step back to take two forward.

Or, perhaps more accurately, it's pulling off to the side of the road to get your bearings, and even though you might discover just how far off the path you've ended up thanks to some roadblocks that were placed in your way, at least you can figure out how to get where you want to go.

Either way, it's a great feeling.

Gentiles & Mezuzahs

Interesting piece in the New York Times about mezuzos and the Gentiles who keep them up.

PSA: RSA $25,000 Raffle Tonight!

TONIGHT
Someone Will Win $25,000!!!

It could be you!

Heh

From here.

Echoes of a Shofar

Update: R' Gil already posted about this with a nice Palestine Post (JPost's predecessor) from way back when...

(Hat tip: Mom) Via Cleveland Local Jewish News:

Under a British law in Palestine passed in 1930, Jews were forbidden to blow the shofar at the Kotel, pray loudly there, or bring Torah scrolls, so as not to offend the Arab population. Despite this restriction, for the next seventeen years, the shofar was sounded at the Kotel every Yom Kippur. Shofars were smuggled in to the Kotel where brave teenagers defiantly blew them at the conclusion of the fast. Some managed to get away – others were captured and sent to jail for up to six months.

Two weeks ago, these six men returned to the scene of their “crime”. Armed with shofars, they recounted their individual stories and blew shofar again at the Kotel. This is their powerful and inspiring story.

Giants Stadium Transformed

Kinda cool...

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/09/13/sports/football/1248069023670/home-field-advantage-overnight.html

Passwords

This xkcd comic is so true, except I'm sure that Google does have a plan. (Not that I mind, of course, O Google Masters...)

8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live

Hat tip: A lot of people who e-mailed with various versions of "this made me think of you" and "I thought you'd appreciate this". Thanks, everyone - I'm flattered that people understand me so well!

What's awesome about this Onion piece on the entire NYC deserting it for greener pastures is how true everything in it really is:  (warning: really bad language; after all, it does quote lots of New Yorkers)

NEW YORK—At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

With audible murmurs of "This is no way to live," "What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here," and "F*** this place. F*** this horrible place," all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

According to residents, the mass exodus was triggered by a number of normal, everyday New York City events. For Erin Caldwell of Manhattan, an endlessly honking car horn sent her over the edge, causing her to go into a blind rage and scream "shut up!" at the vehicle as loud as she could until her voice went hoarse; for Danny Tremba of Queens it was being cursed at for walking too slow; and for Paul Ogden, also of Queens, it was his overreaction to somebody walking too slow.

Other incidents that prompted citizens to pick up and leave included the sight of garbage bags stacked 5 feet high on the sidewalk; the realization that being alone among millions of anonymous people is actually quite horrifying; a blaring siren that droned on and f***ing on; muddy, refuse-filled puddles that have inexplicably not dried in three years; the thought of growing into a person whose meanness and cynicism is cloaked in a kind of holier-than-thou brand of sarcasm that the rest of the world finds nauseating; and all the goddamn people.

Read the whole thing, it's brilliant. What scared me is that I agree with every single logical reasoning in the piece, and yet... I'm still stuck here. {shudder} It's a bit unbelievable... so much so, that this is a great way to announce the following: Moshe, you won.

For those unaware, about five years ago Moshe and I made a bet; the loser of the bet would take the winner to the restaurant of his choice in New York City for a nice, expensive dinner out (with Mike's Bistro being the likely choice). The bet: Would I still be in New York City in September 2010? I was *sure* there was no chance we would still be living here; Moshe was convinced that I was "just talk". This is the saddest bet I've ever lost in my life, but also possibly the funniest (and certainly the longest).

Moshe, congratulations! We'll go out when things are a bit better, be'H soon! :)

Honesty & Common Sense

This Sunday was my grandmother Hilda Goldish's a'h stone setting in Cleveland. I wasn't able to attend, but I did enjoy the two brief speeches from R' Naphtali Burnstein (YI of Greater Cleveland) and my father, particularly when my father discussed what my grandmother was all about - and when listening to it, it's striking how it's so simple in so many ways. 'If only!' people would just use (/would have just used) their common sense, then most everything would work out - remembering, of course, that "timing is everything".

Most of all, it's hard not to notice that so much in life comes down to what each of them stood for and what is said so beautifully on each of their headstones: Honesty and Common Sense.

Dad Life (Father's Day Opening 2010)

Absurd Tweet

Take a look at this tweet, and, for a second, marvel at the absurdity of it.

To all my christian brothers and sisters, especially catholics - before u condemn muslims for violence, remember the crusades....study them

This is on par with the stupid comment Tavis Smiley made regarding the Columbine Murderers being Christians. Doesn't this just typify the left? Is it something reflexive to the left to defend Islam or is it more to condemn those that dare to condemn Islam?

Yellow Card for Yarmulke

Interesting story via Deadspin:



During a game against Austrian club FC Red Bull Salzburg, Hapoel Tel Aviv's Itay Shechter scored after a very nice run, proceeded to pull a yarmulke out of his sock, (apparently) said a prayer—and was immediately given a yellow card.
Update: Per commenter OutKukoced:

According to this article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv (in Hebrew), people were chanting "Go to the gas chambers" in the first half (as heard by one of the team owners). [www.nrg.co.il]
According to this interview (sorry, it's in Hebrew) with Schechter [www.haaretz.co.il] the celebration was, however, not a reaction to anti-Semitic chants, as he did not hear any by that point in the game. He says, however, that afterward (unclear if he means after the game or celebration), he was made aware of the anti-Semitic insults from the stands. According to him, he was given the kipa by a fan for good luck at the airport, and decided right before the game started to keep it in his sock and take it out if he scored.
So, yes, there were anti-Semitic chants going on (par for the course at European soccer games), but no, the celebration was not a reaction to the fans.
And thus ends Kipa-gate.

Emerging Adulthood

The NY Times Magazine last week had a very interesting article about 20-somethings and why they take so long to grow up. The basis is that there is a newly recognized stage in life called 'emerging adults', where they make some of their own decisions but defer others to parents or society. It is long but worth the 30 minutes it may take you to read it (that's how long it took me).
Here are some points I liked:

If society decides to protect these young people or treat them differently from fully grown adults, how can we do this without becoming all the things that grown children resist — controlling, moralizing, paternalistic? Young people spend their lives lumped into age-related clusters — that’s the basis of K-12 schooling — but as they move through their 20s, they diverge. Some 25-year-olds are married homeowners with good jobs and a couple of kids; others are still living with their parents and working at transient jobs, or not working at all. Does that mean we extend some of the protections and special status of adolescence to all people in their 20s? To some of them? Which ones? Decisions like this matter, because failing to protect and support vulnerable young people can lead them down the wrong path at a critical moment, the one that can determine all subsequent paths. But overprotecting and oversupporting them can sometimes make matters worse, turning the “changing timetable of adulthood” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 [A 25 year old commenting] “to think about all the things I’m supposed to be doing in order to ‘get somewhere’ successful: ‘Follow your passions, live your dreams, take risks, network with the right people, find mentors, be financially responsible, volunteer, work, think about or go to grad school, fall in love and maintain personal well-being, mental health and nutrition.’ When is there time to just be and enjoy?” 

And in case you thought Kollel support only exists by frum Jews:

[..] asked parents of grown children whether they provided significant assistance to their sons or daughters. Assistance included giving their children money or help with everyday tasks (practical assistance) as well as advice, companionship and an attentive ear. Eighty-six percent said they had provided advice in the previous month; less than half had done so in 1988. Two out of three parents had given a son or daughter practical assistance in the previous month; in 1988, only one in three had. 

For a comforting conclusion:

Arnett would like to see us choose a middle course. “To be a young American today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.” If it really works that way, if this longer road to adulthood really leads to more insight and better choices, then Arnett’s vision of an insightful, sensitive, thoughtful, content, well-honed, self-actualizing crop of grown-ups would indeed be something worth waiting for.

I could only theorize about this impact on our community, but you are free to make your own conclusions; recognizing that singles may actually want to be that way a little longer, that they want to develop themselves and careers before a family. Of course that we as a community would have to recognize a developmental stage between adolescence and ready to get married, would really wreak havoc with our  understanding of Jewish life as it is. It would mean accepting a single and not treating them as second class citizens, something that people like Bad4 only theorize about.

 

L'Shana HaBa (1992 HAC Version)

Hat tip: Buda. There are a few videos from this performance - this one is apropos, after seeing my sister, brother-in-law, three nieces and a nephew off to make aliyah today. This is from the 1992 Hebrew Academy of Cleveland boys choir (I don't see myself, and I can't remember if I was in it or not, but a large number of my classmates and people from the grades just above mine are). I believe Yudi S. is the videographer and the one who posted them to YouTube - thanks!

For everyone else - enjoy, and admit it - those glasses were Awesome.

So, My Sister is Making Aliyah Today...

...that's pretty crazy. Vervel and BIL and their four kids are on today's Nefesh B'Nefesh flight as they make their way to their new home in Rechovot from Baltimore (they took a bus with 4 other families this morning from Baltimore to JFK. My parents are in from Cleveland, and we're all headed to the airport now to see them off.

They'll be reading this later, so feel free to send your good wishes/advice/welcome them to Israel in the comments!

How Language Affects Thought

(Hat tip: Mom and the "most e-mailed" feature on the WSJ.com site)

There is an absolutely fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal about how language affects our lives - from cultures to how we act to how we think about things. Some choice excerpts that were really cool:

So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

Meanwhile, the way events are re-told in various cultures affects how people remember them:

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well. 

 Meanwhile, I couldn't help but somewhat cringe at a note that I've often discussed with friends, co-workers, and the like about how the way they put things affects the way people think about those things/people. I recall one co-worker consistently making jokes about others - completely joking, but I noted to him that by doing so, he is slowly creating perceptions about people, much as media does when and how they discuss various subjects or people as well. People shrug off media bias by suggesting the word differences are innocuous, but what and how we say things does matter:

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read "ripped the costume" blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

Read the whole piece, it's really just fascinating.

Side note: In Judaism, a basic concept is that what sets us apart from animals is language; in addition, particular note and honor is given to the use of lashon HaKodesh, which is Biblical Hebrew, over other languages, establishing that there is something special about language and that language in particular.