Good 'ol Jackie Mason...

Sometimes you just have to accept that you are not in control.

I had a meeting scheduled for Sunday. An important meeting.

Saturday night the guy calls me and says he can't come Sunday, something came up. We rescheduled for Tuesday. The problem with Tuesday is that he could only meet in the afternoon - at 1pm. I knew this would be a long meeting, and I hate doing these in the afternoon, because they always tend to get out of hand and go longer than necessary just because of off the topic discussion.

I am a yekke about my schedule and I hate having to adjust it for a reason that is not absolutely necessary or very important.

I knew when he called that this would get out of hand and mess up my schedule. But he assured me he would meet me at 1 and it would not take too long. Everything would be fine.

1pm comes and goes, and he does not show. Now this guy is very responsible, and very talented. he did not not come just because he was late - something must have happened. I call him up and ask what the story is.

he sends me a message saying he is stuck by a client dealing with a problem. OK, no problem. A short while later he sends me a message that they are coming at 3:30. I groaned knowing that that would definitely mess me up, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was an important meeting and I just had to suck it up and bear it.

Sure enough they get to the meeting and we talk. There is enough wasted time to frustrate me, but that is part of life. I see the clock creeping toward the time I needed to leave to make my regular train. There was still a chance. Grrrr.

Sure enough, we finished the meeting 3 minutes after the time I would have had to leave to make my train on time at the last possible moment.

Everything that could possibly have happened to cause me a delay, happened. Sometimes you just have to accept that you are not in control.

the drugs would be really potent if I hid them in my socks!

Yesterday, while driving in the car, my 5 year old daughter suddenly said, "There is a marathon".

We're like "what are you talking about? what do you see"

It took a few moments, but eventually we understood that she saw somebody running down the street. he was not in running clothes, and was clearly not running for exercise, but more like running for the bus.

She repeated it a couple of times in different variations - he is a marathon. There is a marathon. etc.

I would never have expected her to pick up the association... (she did not go to Tiberias to see my marathon.).

Kids are sponges.

Israel's Channel 10 did an analysis of what happened and how the 3 yeshiva boys got arrested in Japan for smuggling, unwittingly, drugs for someone else. The following video is the Channel 10 show that also uncovers the possibility of mafia connections...


10 from shay cohen on Vimeo.

Not really, but I am all for sensationalist titles...

It seems the security forces are gearing up for the Pope's planned visit to the Holy Land (aka Israel) in May. They are considering shutting the area of the kotel to the general public during the time the Pope plans to make his aliyah la'regel to the Kotel.

Rav Shmuel Rabinovitz, the rav of the Kotel, is opposed to shutting the kotel doors to the public.

“The Kotel must be open during the entire visit for every person who wants to pray,” Rabbi Rabinowitz said. “Jews have been praying at the Kotel for almost 42 years. There is no preference of one person over another.”

Don't let the Temple area fall to the hands of the Romans. Even symbolically. Never Again!

(source: INN)

I have a hard time believing that Sesame Street would really run a skit with Ernie shooting Cookie Monster, so I doubt this clip is authentic Sesame Street, but it's funny anyway...

According to the data, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was the only parliamentarian to spend no funds whatsoever on voter relations.

----Ynet

Perhaps that is why nobody liked Olmert since he became Prime Minister.....

Yesterday was the day it was publicized how the various MKs used the funds allocated for "Connectiion to the Public". There are some very interesting purchases and expenses made under this title, and it is worth your reading the article.....

(source: YNET)

I did not feel like breaking my head and listening to the whole shiur, as I usually do in order to confirm quotes from Rav Ovadia Yosef in the secular press. I find his accent difficult to understand (for me) and it takes a lot of effort to listen and understand. Being that they usualyl quote him reasonably accurately, if not out of context at times, I am just going with the quotes here, and not any firsthand kniowledge of the shiur.

Every year, in the past few years, as Pesach comes around the corner, the debate of eating kitniyot heats up. For some reason, the past few years have seen the issue adressed publicly more and more each year. I have some friends who have begun eating kitniyot on Pesach, based on rulings of their rabbonim.

Rav Ovadiah Yosef, who has normally been in faor of cancelling all Ashkenazy customs (perhaps an exagerration) and making one unified custom of Israel based on the "Maran"'s rulings (Rav Yosef Karo - the Beit Yosef) - the forebearer of Sefardic custom, claiming that the sfardic custom is the prevailing cutom in the Land of Israel, has backtracked a bit. If you call any one specific psak backtracking on a general topic..

The only reason I say backtracking is because in his shiur last night Rav Ovadiah Yosef said that the sfardim have minhagim and the ashkenazim have minhagim and they go back hundreds of years and should not be revoked. However, a sfardi should not try to be machmir on issues of kitniyot as each person needs to follow according tot he cutoms of his "eidah".

Rav Yosef says that f an ashkenazy person would ask a sfardi rav, the rav should pasken that it is assur to eat kitniyot. It is no longer a "chumrah", but is actual "din".

Again, the only reason I am surprised by what sounds like such a strong opposition is because in the past Rav Ovadiah has been in favor of making the sfardi minhag the prevailing one in Eretz Yisrael. In this shiur, Rav Ovadiah says clearly that each "eidah" has its own customs that need to be followed.

One other point quoted in the article is that Rav Ovadia said regarding sugar. He said that if it does not say the words "Kosher for Passover" on the bag of sugar, you can write them yourself. It is sugar and there is no problem with it. Sugar is kosher l'mehadrin.

(source: Ynet)

I have no problem with the ban on kitniyot continuing. This despite the fact that I understand completely the logic behind cancelling it, and I even think it makes sense. I just am wary of canceling customs that have been in effect for hundreds of years. What does bother me is the way we add to the kitniyot ban nowadays. Items that never before were considered kitniyot, specifically derivatives of kitniyot, are now considered kitniyot.

This might be in poor taste, and I apologize if you think it is, but I feel like posting it anyway, as I got a kick out of it.

The newspaper reported today that the IDF will soon be giving out the P-Mate to female inductees as part of a package distributed by Agudah Lemaan HaChayal.

The P-Mate, aka the She-Pee, for those of you unaware (as I was until this morning) that such a thing even existed, is a device that allows a woman to urinate standing up.

The goal is to get women to stop "holding it in" because they are either in the field, or the available toilets are disgusting and not hygenic. This way they can pee like a man by any available tree and no longer have to hold it in! "Holding it in" for too long can be damaging to the bladder...

I would like to say this is an Israeli invention, but alas it is not. It is a Dutch invention.
Feel free to have a good time with this in the comments. It made me laugh (even though it is really a serious problem of people being forced to hold it in and get sick...)

For a multitude of reasons, since I ran the marathon, my running has been very sporadic. I have run no more than once per week, and have gone a number of weeks in a row without running at all. Even when I did run, most of the runs were in the range of 12km.

It makes sense to me. I never considered myself a real "runner". I ran because I had a goal. I achieved my goal, and then my motivation to continue running tanked. So I let all sorts of schedule conflicts get in the way and stop me from running on my scheduled running days.

The truth is that even though I am not a real runner, and have not really developed a "love" of the sport, it has a lot of benefits that make me want to continue, for now, at least on some level. Playing baseball and basketball for the past 10 years never helped me lose as much weight as I lost running for four months.

So I am trying to make the time to run, when I can.

I went running this past Friday. I ran with a friend, and we ran 12.6km at a reasonable pace - much slower than what my average was during marathon training.

I must say that I was completely wiped by the end of the run (though I still played in my regular Friday basketball game a couple hours later). Not only that, but two days later and I am still sore from the run.

That is pathetic. 2 months ago, 12km runs were my bread and butter. They were the basic staple of my week. They were the short runs. I could run then 18km - 21km without blinking an eye - no soreness, no feeling wiped out, etc. Only if I ran above 24km or so did I start to feel like I was really working (unless the run included a lot of uphill running).

Clearly, the drop off is much quicker than I anticipated.

Thinking about that made me also think about the drop off in other aspects of life - if you don't keep up with something, you lose it.

That is true in every aspect of your life. In your studies - if you do not review what you have learned, you will forget it. If you do not keep up with your relationships, they will move on and your friendship and love will wither and disappear. If you do not keep up with your skills, they will disappear.

The haredi ban on flying El Al is coming back.

In January it was announced that there would be special flights that would be considered mehadrin - no movies, separate seating, etc. for the haredi community. At the time many said it is not a big deal - those flights will simply be chartered flights. On a chartered flight, let them do what they want.

I agree. On a chartered flight, let them do what they want.

But now, the haredim are reintroducing the ban on El Al. Goldknopf and his Committee of Pure Travel are upset that the mehadrin flights have not yet been put into motion. As Pesach approaches, many yeshiva students, and haredim in general, will be flying and they could easily fill such planes.

because El Al has not yet developed the mehadrin airplane, Goldknopf is saying people should avoid flying El Al and pick other airlines that show films of scenery and not debauchary.

El Al's response - they were open to developing it. They say a travel agent tried to make such arrangements, but he was not able to fill a flight. They will do it if a group fills a plane.

In other words, if you would charter a flight, and fill the plane, they will agree to your request to not show movies and seat men in the seats and women in cargo. It turns out though that they are not trying to charter flights, but to turn regular commecial flights into mehadrin lines. And that is something El Al says that they cannot do.

So it seems like the haredi public, or the majority of it at least, realizes Goldknopf's stupidities are just that. Most people are not interested in his made up chumras.

Whew. There is still some sanity floating around.

Taking DovBear's lead, I have decided to post this question... I heard the same vort DB heard, and responded with the same response (at least one of his responses).

Someone at a Purim seuda told me a vort that "Why does the Megillah first say Bigsan V'Seresh when Mordechai first hears their plot to kill the king, but then later when Achashverosh remembers the good deed, it says Bigsana V'Seresh?"

I assumed it is just a variartion of the spelling, as we find often in the Torah (more often by name sof cities, but it happens by people's names as well).

The answer he gave me was that it was a miracle - Really Mordechai heard, and told over to the king, the plot being planned by Bigsan V'Seresh. They wrote it down as "Bigsan o Seresh". The reason they did so, as per Haman's supposed insistence, is to make it look like Mordechai did not really do all that much. He did not save the king. He did not even know what he heard.

The miracle happened when the king opened the books that night and saw it said "Bigsana V' Seresh". The angel had moved the letters a bit, but fixed it so it said "and" instead of "or".

My response to this was that it works like that in Hebrew, the language the megilla is read in. However they lived their lives in persian, not Hebrew. Ostensibly, it is highly unlikely that the kings scribes and advisers wrote the memo in the kings book in hebrew, and unless he can be sure that the same "miracle" works in the Persian form of the words, it does not make sense.

The response was the perhaps the advisers/scribes were Jewish and wrote it in Hebrew (they were "Yodei Das Va'Din, so he said they were Jewish). Also we find in history that even the non-Jews wrote much of medical texts in Hebrew rather than the more obvious Latin, so perhaps in Persia as well the scribe wrote in hebrew.

So, I turn to you and ask what you think about this vort. Could it be?

funny clip, and the best part (or at least one of) is about 2:40 in...

In Israel, John Demjanjuk from Ohio was acquitted of charges that he was a guard named Ivan Demjanjuk, aka Ivan the Terrible in a Nazi death camp.

Germany has just brought charges against Demjanjuk and is seeking extradition from the US.

"ושם רשעים ירקב"

Very appropriate for this to happen Purim time.

"תמחה את זכר עמלק"

I am from Chicago. That means I grew up with tv that consisted of such greats like Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera (both of whom happen to be Jewish) with all their theatrics such as full blown brawls (including chair throwing on Springer, and I remember once Geraldo got his nose broken on tv) on the set.

I remember Geraldo had this big scoop on Al Capone. They located his safe underground. Rivera was going to open the safe, on live tv, and expose what Capone had hidden. He expected it to contain all the evidence the cops and feds had always been looking for proving the various crimes Capone had been involved in. Either that or bodies or hidden money and gold.

It turned out, after an excruciatingly long program, they eventually got to the safe and opened it. The end is famous, as the safe held nothing but debris and some old cans.

In what could have been a similar fiasco, but on a much smaller scale, the curators of the Smithsonian opened and inspected Abe Lincoln's pocketwatch.

Legend had it that there was an inscription inside the watch, but it had never been opened and nobody had ever seen it except for the watchmaker who spoke about it.
So they opened it up and inspected it, on video but only being watched by meuseum workers.

Some excerpts:

"The moment of truth has come. Is there or is there not an inscription?" Thomas said, teasing the audience, which gasped when he confirmed it was there. He called Stiles up to read his ancestor's words, drawing smiles and a few sighs of relief.

"Like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, this was the reaction he had (to the Civil War,)" Stiles said of the inscription.

Later, Stiles said he felt closer to the 16th president.

"My gosh, that was Lincoln's watch," he said, "and my ancestor put graffiti on it!"

"Jonathan Dillon April 13 - 1861," part of the inscription reads, "Fort Sumpter (sic) was attacked by the rebels on the above date." Another part reads, "Thank God we have a government."

Dillon had a fuzzy recollection of what he had engraved. He told the newspaper he had written: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a president who at least will try."

Fascinating.