What I’m drinking: Plymouth, Q Tonic and lime. And a whole bunch of kosher wine.
What Rufus is up to: Wagging his tail in his sleep last week, which I take to mean he was having the happiest dream ever. And another Sunday greyhound hike up in Wawayanda State Park! Enjoy the pix!
Where I’m going: Las Vegas next Sunday for a biz trip. None of my usual suspects of biz pals will be there, Tom Jones is out of town, and I refuse to bet on baseball, so this may turn out to be a very boring trip for me.
What I’m happy about: Our seder went off without a hitch and Mom made it safely back to St. Louis this weekend after her 10-day stay. Oh, and we got to see my cousins Lewis & Denise on Saturday (at one of my favorite Thai restaurants, hence the decor in the photo).
What I’m sad about: A friend of mine blindsided me with news that his wife blindsided him with divorce papers.
What I’m worried about: There’s no Q Tonic at the liquor store where I’ve been buying the stuff. Now I’ve gotta start searching some other haunts and begin hoarding it before it goes the way of the New York Sun and every other goddamn thing I really like in this world.
What I’m pondering: What it is about Audrey Hepburn’s in-her-prime beauty that literally makes my eyes well up when I see her in a movie.
While I’m celebrating the fact that my super-tonic doesn’t include high fructose corn syrup, and thus is All Good for Passover, official pal-of-a-VM-pal Andy Newman just published an article in the NYTimes on Passover-kosher food . . . for pets.
We’re not too concerned in our household. Despite appearances —
Late last year, I donated some money to the Chabad house that had taken care of me & my dad the last two Yom Kippurs (here and here). I’d been meaning to do that for a while, but it slipped my mind. After the Mumbai terrorists targeted the local Chabad house for special treatment, I didn’t have any excuse.
My donation led my being added to the distribution list for their weekly e-newsletter, which usually goes out Friday mornings. I skim through most of the contents, but I try to check out the parshah section, which details that week’s reading from the Torah. (For those of you who are unacquainted with Judaism, here’s the skinny: each Saturday morning during sabbath services, the Torah is brought out and a portion of it is read in seven segments. Over the course of the Jewish year, the congregation works through all 5 books that comprise the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. At least, I think that’s how it works. I’m sure my brother or my mom will correct me on that.)
I’m not a practicing Jew, and if I were, I doubt I’d be part of the Lubavitcher movement, the Hasidic sect that runs Chabad. That said, my experiences with them have been rancor-free; they welcomed me and Dad with open arms and demonstrated zero pushiness or guilt-tripping about our religious slackness.
Early this week, they sent an e-mail about a ceremony I had never heard of: Birkat Hachamah, the 28-year-blessing.
See, because the solar cycle is 365 days and 6 hours, it takes 28 years for the sun to be in the same position on the same day of the week. Today is supposed to mark the anniversary of the creation of the sun, so Jews go out within the first 2 hours of sunrise and thank God for creating the sun. (Read the FAQs; they explain it better than I do. And there’s always Wikipedia.)
I didn’t have time to meet up with the Chabad group this morning to pray. Actually, I didn’t have the inclination to do it. I know the spirit of prayer for Jews is that of community, not solitude, but there are a lot of ways I fail to live up to my heritage, so there you are.
Instead, I printed out the prayer & the psalms, put on my yarmulke, and walked around the block to the area with the best view of the rising sun (which happens to be the yard of a house owned by observant Muslims). And in the chilly morning I read:
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who re-enacts the work of Creation.
What a beautiful, evocative and mysterious phrase that is: “Who re-enacts the work of Creationâ€! How better to characterize the sunrise?
(The psalms that followed had a few, um, problematic sections, mainly the ones about ruling the nations of the world. But hey: I didn’t write ’em.)
Once I finished reading, I walked home, trying my best not to look over my shoulder to glimpse the sun again. Yeah, I failed at that, too.
* * *
In keeping with my half-assed Judaism, I should note that tonight is the first night of Passover. My mom’s visiting for the occasion, but we’re going to have our seder on the second night, because it’ll be easier on us and the dozen or so gentiles who’ll be in attendance. To all my Jewish readers, observant or not, chag sameach!
Here are a couple of neat Passover-related links, a little Unrequired Pesach Reading for you:
I was too darn busy this weekend to write about that final Montaigne essay, and this week’s going to be pretty rough at the office, but I don’t want to leave you guys in the literary lurch. So here’s the closing passage from Philip Roth’s 1980 interview with Milan Kundera.
It’s not that I’ve been poring over Kundera lately, or contemplating this interview. Rather, an acquaintance sent out a request for someone to dig this interview up and provide him with the passage for something he’s writing. It initially ran at the end of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Roth included it in his Shop Talk collection of interviews & essays. I typed it up for him, then decided to share it with you:
Roth: Is this [novel], then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?
Kundera: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian novel, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
I know it’s gotta burn my mom’s ass that there’s a big “Fly Emirates” logo on the jersey of her favorite FC, but she’s gotta be happy that the UAE has caved and will now allow Andy Ram, an Israeli doubles-tennis player, to participate in an ATP tournament in Dubai.
Weirdly, the ESPN article (derived from Reuters & AP) treats the ban on Israelis as though it’s a UAE response to the fighting in Gaza, and not, y’know, long-standing official policy. (Allegedly, they’ve been loosening up a little, partly in response to Dubai’s growth in the diamond trade).
But keeping the surreal quotient high:
On Wednesday, Swedish authorities said that Sweden and Israel will play their first-round Davis Cup tennis match in an empty arena next month because of security concerns.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear bomb expert who sold secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is a free man!
Khan said he was finished with his nuclear work and wanted to devote his time to education. He said he had no plan to travel abroad apart from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, for a Muslim pilgrimage.
It’s against the law here in NJ to sell alcohol in supermarkets, so this installment is technically a cheat. Still, the liquor store happens to be right next to the supermarket, and hey, it’s my blog.
I saw this out of the corner of my eye —
— and was impressed that someone would target an Irish stout toward people headed into Rumspringa.
Then I realized that it read “BEAMISH” and not “BE AMISH”.
For this week’s installment of Lost in the Supermarket, I thought I’d hearken back to my doubleplusunkosher post by offering up . . . imitation crabmeat!
Of course, it begs the question as to whether something this artificial is actually traife. As opposed to just a Bad Idea.
This week, you get a bonus pic! It doesn’t come from a supermarket, so it doesn’t warrant its own post. However, I couldn’t resist snapping a pic of . . . a kosher hot sandwich vending machine?
I found this one up at an outlet mall in New York state. My wife & I will only go there on a Saturday morning, before the busloads of New Yorkers arrive and when the hasidic contingent has to stay home for shabbat. Otherwise, it’s like a cross of Spanish Harlem, the Axis powers, and Samaria up there.
