Category: Religion

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Unrequired Reading

I promised some Unrequired Reading for a Friday morning, so here it is:

Jane Galt has a sad post about the economic destruction of Zimbabwae. There are some “interesting” comments after the post.

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Via Bookslut, a collection of covers from old Penguin and Pelican books.

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Ten YEARS of South Park?! Man, I’m getting old.

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It’s Ramadan. Don’t be a jerk.

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What’s organic?

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Mark Cuban talks balls.

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Ron Rosenbaum on William Kennedy, Hunter Thompson and the America’s Cup.

Bonus: Ron on the Dunkin Donuts Coffee Roll.

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Unrequired Reading

No one will pay to see Scarlett Johanson. You know your career’s in trouble when you’re being compared to Ben Affleck:

Years back, it was Eddie Murphy, who went from mega-star to loser when he churned out such bombs as Pluto Nash and I Spy before recovering his stroke. Kevin Costner still seems to be in the penalty box, although his upcoming action film, The Guardian, may change that. And there’s the sad story of Ben Affleck: good-looking, kind-hearted, talented, and death to just about any film he’s in. (Remember 2004’s back-to-back stinkers, Saving Christmas and Jersey Girl?)

Well, welcome to box-office hell, Scarlett. An intelligent woman with some two dozen films to her credit, Johansson, 21, has everything that Hollywood wants in its starlets. She’s charming and she genuinely can act. Better yet, she’s drop-dead gorgeous. But of late, she seems to inject poison into just about every film that has her name in the credits.

I’m very disappointed that he didn’t make a comment about Kevin Costner finding his stroke.

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Pimp my kippah. (thanks, Sirk!)

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ESPN had the very stupid idea that people would buy cell phones for a network operated by ESPN, rather than Cingular or Verizon or somebody. It failed.

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Idiocracy will be the next cult classic.

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In grad school, I subscribed to the economy theory of liver destruction: If you’re going to get drunk, drink malt liquor. You can’t get more messed up for $1.99.

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Dubai’s making great strides in its efforts at becoming a free-trade zone. Of course, I’ll never be allowed to set foot there, since I’m a Jew.

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When I visit someone’s home, the first thing I look for is the host’s bookshelf. So does Jay Parini:

What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.

Thanks to Delicious Library, you can check out mine.

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And I’ve decided to take Little, Big with me to Paris. I’ll letcha know how it goes.

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Unrequired Reading: party like it’s 5767

Happy Jewish New Year, dear readers! In honor of Rosh Hashanah, this week’s Unrequired Reading features a bunch of Jewish-connected links and others that have nothing to do with Judaism.

First, we have Michael Totten’s interview with Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right To Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. He thinks neither of the Lebanon wars is defensible, and provides some good insights into the shifting emotional landscape of Israelis during the most recent war.

If the story about Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the war’s last days proves true, that oughtta get categorized as “really REALLY indefensible.”

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Johnny Knoxville isn’t Jewish , but he gets to celebrate our new year with his new movie’s debut. Here’s an interview with him and Jeff Tremaine, the director of Jackass Number Two.

On Howard Stern this week, Knoxville admitted that he got the idea for getting gored by a bull (watch the trailer) from watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon. We’ll probably see the movie tomorrow, along with a shopping expedition to the new Century 21 store in Paramus, and a White Manna run. Because we’re all about the gracious living.

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For its first season or two, The State was one of the funniest television shows ever (I seem to recall the last season completely melting down in attempts at absurdism that went nowhere, as it its wont). Even though every other series in the world has gone DVD, The State languishes in MTV vaults. Good news: the first season is getting released on iTunes’ video store!

I can legitimately tie this into this week’s Jewy theme because of the great skit in which the cast members were all asked to introduce themselves and make a personal confession, as a way of becoming closer to the audience: “I’m Michael Ian Black. My real name is Schwartz, but I changed it because I’m ashamed of being Jewish.”

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My buddy Ian’s not Jewish, but he IS a chief petty officer! Congrats! Check out the pix from the ceremony!

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Cory Maye’s not Jewish either, but there are probably Jews at the law firm that helped get him off death row, pending a new sentencing hearing. Here’s hoping it’s the first step to springing Maye from prison!

Oh, and the “informant” whose tip led to the botched raid that landed Maye on death row probably doesn’t like Jews. He sure doesn’t like black people.

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Rich people don’t always stay rich. Larry Ellison is Jewish, and he spent a ton of money, but he managed to stay rich:

A raft of e-mail messages and financial documents introduced in a lawsuit that disgruntled shareholders filed against Mr. Ellison and other Oracle executives in 2001, give witness to some of Mr. Ellison’s budgeting practices. (The suit was settled last November and the judge in the matter subsequently unsealed financial documents submitted as exhibits in the case). The documents, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, also show how far Philip E. Simon, an adviser who described himself as Mr. Ellison’s “financial servant,” went in trying to persuade his boss to pay off about $1.2 billion in loans. (Neither Mr. Ellison nor Mr. Simon responded to interview requests for this article).

Mr. Ellison’s ledger around the end of 2000 included annual “lifestyle” spending of about $20 million, the purchase of a Japanese villa for $25 million, a proposed underwater archeology project earmarked for $12 million and his new yacht, budgeted at $194 million (news reports later said that the yacht’s final cost approached $300 million).

“I know you view me as a pessimist,” Mr. Simon wrote Mr. Ellison in an e-mail message in 2002, several months after banks began sounding alarms about Mr. Ellison’s debt. “Maybe you’re right, though I would disagree. Nonetheless, I think it’s imperative that we start to budget and plan. New purchases should be kept to a minimum. We need to establish and execute on a diversification plan to eliminate (yes, eliminate) all debt and build up a significant, conservatively structured, liquid investment portfolio.

“I know you don’t like to discuss this,” Mr. Simon added. “I know this e-mail may/will depress you. View this as a call to arms.”

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During my previous visit to Paris in 2002, I visited some of the monuments and shrines that commemorated the Jews that France shipped out for the camps. There’s plenty of other stuff for us to do this time around, as this BW slideshow sez.

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Sven Nykvist wasn’t Jewish, but he was the cinematographer on several Woody Allen flicks, including one of my favorite movies: Another Woman. (Also, he had an affair with Mia Farrow pre-Woody, which makes their subsequent collaborations just plain weird. On the other hand, Amy & I had exes perform the readings at our wedding, so hey.) He died last week after a long illness.

A few weeks ago, Amy was looking through our Netflix queue, and asked, “What is Light Keeps Me Company and why is it in our queue?”

Yes, she married someone who’s interested in seeing a documentary about a cinematographer. All I can say is, like Rembrandt, Nykvist’s work taught me new ways of seeing light. Rest in peace.

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Tiki culture: something that could bring all the world’s faiths together. Except the ones that prohibit drinking, I guess.

Yo-ho-ho and l’shana tova!

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Unrequired Reading

Stuff I meant to post about in the past week:

Writing about restaurants in New Orleans (with a go-to mention of Finis Shelnutt):

“When people are still mucking out their houses, chefs are living in FEMA trailers, and others are finding out they are going to get screwed by their insurance company, I don’t want to be the guy who is writing about how the foie gras is not quite up to snuff,” he said.

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Why bashing Wal-Mart is not a good strategy for the Dems:

By restraining inflation, intense competition of the sort that Wal-Mart provides eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to do the job with higher interest rates. Note the paradox: At one level, intense competition destroys jobs, as some companies can’t compete, but the larger effect is to increase total job creation by fostering favorable economic conditions.

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Get your picture taken with Jesus.

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NO,LA: It’s the civil engineering, stupid!

Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging — or worse — by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated -— to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.

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The Chinese village of Dafen is like the opposite of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions:

In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen’s four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container. [. . .]

Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it’s not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen — graduates of China’s most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).

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A guy used the graphics engine of the computer game Half Life to make a video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house.

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Go see Little Miss Sunshine when you get the chance. We caught it yesterday. So did a couple of children sitting in the row behind us. They were less than 10 years old, and I’m sorta wondering if their mom noticed the “R” rating on the movie, or just thought it would be a fun flick about children’s beauty pageants, with that guy from The Daily Show. She may’ve been a little surprised when Alan Arkin was snorting heroin in one of the opening scenes. Anyway, it was a really wonderful flick, with a punchline that almost had us crying with laughter.

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And have a good holiday.

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Rainy Saturday

It’s some godawful weather here in the northeast. We’re expecting a pair of Amy’s friends this afternoon for an early dinner. She’s been cooking and cleaning all day while I’ve been cleaning and trying to stay out of her way. It seems to have worked out okay, provided her friends are on the right bus out here from NYC.

We spent yesterday at this giant-ass outlet mall in New York state. I’ve written about this place a few times before, including one of the first posts I ever wrote. No Hugo Boss clothing this time around, but I found a couple of pairs of decent pants for the fall/winter.

Our routine for visiting this mall is that we

a) go on Saturday

b) leave a half-hour before the place opens

The latter enables us to get together before buses from NYC start showing up and the parking lot becomes jammed with rental cars carrying The Axis: German and Japanese tourists who have come to buy luxury goods on the cheap.

We got a late start yesterday, since Amy had to handle a work-emergency in the morning. When we reached the place, it was around noon, and it was a Friday.

That’s when Amy discovered the importance of going only on Saturdays: Hasidic Jews won’t be there.

As it is, there were enough Hasidim present yesterday to populate Samaria. The place was overrun with head-covered moms pushing multiple baby carriages, two or three more children in tow, while sections of the parking lot looked like a reunion for Country Squire station wagons.

This led Amy to ask, “What exactly are they all here to buy?”

I replied that we should open a headscarf and wig store up there: “And the best thing is, we could take Saturdays off!”

Anyway, we spent a bunch of hours up there, with Amy searching pretty much in vain for fall clothes. On the plus side, we swung by my office on the way home and picked up my new Amazon delivery: a couple of 1gb SD cards for our digital cameras, a gravy separator, and a pair of books, My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler (whose show on E! is a hoot), and Lost Girls, Alan Moore’s pornographic comic book about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy (of Neverland) meeting in a hotel in Austria shortly before WWI.

I read the first few installments of the comic years ago, and, um, enjoyed it a lot. I’ll let you know how the collected edition (three books in a slipcase) works out.

Once we finally got home, we busted out the gin and our most recent Netflix choice: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It’s one of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched in a while. Robert Downey, Jr. is typically fantastic, but Val Kilmer’s also pretty fun to watch as Gay Perry, the private eye. Run, don’t walk.

Anyway, our guests swear they’re on the right bus, and oughtta be here in half an hour. Amy’s made a cassoulet; I’ll let you know how it goes (she also picked up some neat cheeses for hors d’oeuvres, and made a chocolate cake for dessert). If it weren’t typhooning out, we’d take her friends on a nice tour of the gardens out here.

That’s the skinny. I hope everyone else is having a drier holiday weekend.

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Outta touch

Sorry it’s been a quiet week, dear readers. I’ve been busy at work, but I’ve also found myself falling into one of my wheels-within-wheels paranoiac phases. It’s centered on trying to get at an understanding of the power-relations at play in the current Gulf War.

Anyway, I gotta write an article on the benefits of RFID in the pharma supply chain, so I’m gonna get to that.

I leave you with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon / sushi axis.

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On the DL

Dennis Leary goofs on Mel Gibson while he sings the praises of Jewish ballplayers during a Red Sox broadcast.

(Some of you may wonder why, as a Yankees fan, I keep a link to a Red Sox blog in my blogroll. It’s because Mnookin’s an awfully good writer, isn’t prone to flying off the handle, and needs all the pity he can get, since he cheers for a team whose fans I witnessed perform The Wave five times during the June 19 game against the Nationals)