Another key to an 83% approval rating? Put all your political opponents in jail.

TheDLC

The comment above was posted on my recent post about Vladimir Putin. Today my blog feed brings an illustration.

Here we see a participant of a legal non-violent picket of the Moscow City Hall being carefully handled by the militia (Russian name for police).

Here we see his partner being picked up as well.

And after a short pampering…

…being loaded in the van.

Single-person pickets do not require permission. According to the article these people were asked to leave and when they refused, were carried out and taken away. To the best of my knowledge protesters are usually let go the same day or the next morning, apparently Russian militia just enjoys the process and resulting news reports.

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A vicious ham-handed attack was recently perpetrated on the troubadour of the knife and fork and minstrel of all things food – Charles Ferruzza by the humorless militant organized fat people.

I hate to break it to the fat people, but sitting around and reading the Pitch in search of things to be offended at is not a healthy activity you should be engaging in to become less fat.
I don’t have any use for organized anything – labor, religion or fat people. No matter how many politically correct titles you invent for yourselves or how much you lobby to be considered normal size, all you have managed to do so far is to take the livelihood away from the people who made a living working for freak shows.

There are two kinds of fat people – the ones who have a sense of humor about their size and the ones who are angry and bitter. The ones who can laugh at “yo mama” joke and the ones who are offended at a drop of a cupcake. I belong to and know plenty of the former but have no desire to associate with any of the latter.

So the next time you are sitting with another chubby young woman “who seems mortified at having to spend another Friday night with (you) instead of being on a real date”, don’t blame Ferruzza for noticing, with this attitude you’ll spend every Friday night there for the rest of your sad life.

Order some broccoli and lighten up.

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The Jewish Federations of North America are conducting a campaign under the title “What’s your #ish”:

Being Jewish means something different to everyone. Whatever it means to you is your #ish.

(For those who are not familiar with Twitter, “#” denotes a tag that they can easily track and display the content on their website)

Cutesy marketing but the question is something I think about often. What does it mean for me to be Jewish, or Russian-Jewish, or even Russian-Jewish-American as the top of my blog announces to the visitors? This post has been stuck in my head for a couple of weeks, I thought how to make it non-offensive and given up; I made some mental notes, then some written ones and I am still not so sure what it will look in the end. All I know at this point that it will contain a lot more “I dont’s” than “I do’s”.

Here we go:

• I don’t believe in God, I don’t do anything religious, I don’t attend a synagogue and when I do on some occasions like weddings, I feel uncomfortable seeing how people are asking and thanking God for things. I don’t feel superior, I just don’t get it. I grew up with the notion that the “Religion is the opium of the people” and so far haven’t seen anything to change my mind.
• I don’t cover my head, I work every Saturday, I go out on Friday nights (if I am lucky); I spend most of the Jewish Holidays at work, and fast on Yom Kippur mostly to see if I can stay away from food for a day. Long time ago when I still lived in Ukraine, I went to a synagogue with a group of friends during a holiday, I think it was Simchat Torah; a group of men was dancing there like it was the best day of their lives. We looked at each other and left. Since then (late 80’s) I only visited a synagogue once (without being invited to a wedding or Bat/Bar Mitzvah)
• I eat whatever I like. My kitchen is the opposite of kosher. At any time I have enough pork in it to make a small pig. My Dad used to pack a slab of salt-pork when I went on trips – it didn’t require refrigeration. I like ham and cheese sandwiches; I mix meat and dairy at will. I have no interest in finding out which foods are kosher and what’s not allowed and why. If it’s tasty I’ll eat it, kosher or not.
• In my whole life I’ve only dated a Jewish woman for two months; I never made a point of looking for one (which cast a lifetime of not-so-well hidden-sadness on my Mom). My short experience was filled with drama, but I am sure both of us being Jewish had nothing to do with it. Sometimes I think it would be neat to try, but so far it didn’t work out this way. Lately, I’ve been thinking that only a Vietnamese woman who knows how to cook Pho can be my true love. Every week I go to the Vietnam Cafe hoping to get noticed.
• I don’t get conversions to Judaism. Things like this (watch the clip) don’t make me tear up with joy. To be fair, I don’t get any religious conversions; sometimes I try to guess the reason, most of the time I just shrug. Maybe we need someone to observe the rules we don’t like, pass around those righteous “I stand with Israel” emails and fight our battles on Facebook and Twitter. Whatever.
• I don’t stand with Israel, I don’t feel that it’s my country even though I have relatives and friends there. Israeli Independence day does not invoke any feelings in me. Let me correct that, I don’t stand with Israel automatically because I am a Jew. I stand with Israel because I am a thinking person who can see through the provocations and lies which are so transparent, you have to be an idiot not to see what’s really going on. I can go back through the last 100 years reciting episodes like this for hours. There are less and less people like me even among the Jews. It’s everybody’s loss, not because I am so smart but because the rest of the world may see it when it’s too late, but what’s new. In the meantime, I do what I can, just little things.
• I still prefer the sound of the Yiddish language to the Israel’s official Hebrew. I remember my Grandma speaking Yiddish with her friends in the little town where she lived and although I don’t speak and hardly understand either, Yiddish with its schlimazels and meshuggeners sounds like music to my ears, while Hebrew sounds foreign and cold.

That should be enough for now. The “I do” part is not nearly as extensive:

• I like Jewish food, more precisely Eastern European Jewish food, and even more precisely my Mom’s cooking. I am sure some of these recipes were passed down through generations, others were made up on the spot to use what little food was on hand, but it’s my comfort food. I don’t think I ever identified it as Jewish, just like I never identified spaghetti with Italian. And most of the time there is a box of Matzos in the house.
• I play the Jewish national sport – guessing who else is Jewish. It was a lot more fun in the USSR since many famous people hid their Jewishness as well as they could and during movies and concerts every Jew in the country was pointing them out.

I can’t think of much else. In my childhood it was easy, my Jewish nationality was stamped right there in the “fifth line” on my passport. Tens of thousands of people strove to have this line changed to something else, so their kids would not be subjected to the antisemitism and discrimination. Then the same people paid big money to change it back so they can emigrate to Israel or the USA.

I think about it a lot. Do my multiple “dont’s” betray the memories and dreams of my ancestors, who carried their Jewish identities through a lot tougher times than I could imagine? Would they be proud of me? I don’t know. When I think about my connection with my people, there is no place where I feel it more than at the Jewish cemetery. I wrote about it before, but the Kansas City cemetery I was writing about is faceless and sad. The Jewish cemetery in Odessa, Ukraine where some of my relatives are buried is full of life; it has faces, it tells the stories. Life stories, love stories, tragedies, achievements, accidents, births, deaths, emigration, relationships, memories. My Dad took me there once or twice and we walked around visiting our relatives, his college professors, famous restaurant singers, doctors, teachers, criminals; he knew many people there, too many. Now during my rare visits I walk around as well; I don’t know anyone, but it doesn’t matter: I come to feel my roots, or as some marketing schmuck would put it “my #ish”

Maybe it’s better that my parents let me figure this out on my own. It’s taking me a long time but some day I’ll get there. My daughter is a lot more decisive with these things, I never push her one way or another but she seems to have a pretty good idea who she is.
Maybe this #ish thing is just skipping a generation.
*I knew this would turn out long, and I didn’t even get to include the video of dancing Jews.

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Previously….

I’ll start by busting another myth: the streets of Buenos Aires are crowded with hot Latin-American women with model looks and explosive tempers, who would make a certain lonely foreigner lose his mind, ship his child back to the USA and make his home in Argentina, earning a meager living by playing guitar on a busy intersection and singing off-key. Let’s just say that I am writing this from home and the country of Argentina will never hear me sing. While it’s true that most Argentinians are in good physical shape, the looks of men and women you see on the street are pretty average, far from what my wild imagination led me to believe.

La Recoleta Cemetery is a world-famous Buenos Aires landmark and we visited it on our very first day in town. While being buried in a crypt (or mausoleum) is not a preferred way of getting rid of my body, the cemetery is fascinating to see for many reasons like architecture, sculpture, artwork, sheer amount of marble and granite, amount of religious imagery per square foot, record number of tourists looking for the Evita’s grave and a visual history of the Argentinian facial hair fashions. Over the period of almost 200 years the Argentinian upper crust invested untold amounts of money into placing their likenesses in a variety of Biblical, Roman, Egyptian and whatever else-inspired imagery. There is a mind-boggling number of mourning virgins, sad Jesus’s, Roman Emperors and weeping angels, portrayed in sculpture, portraits, engravings and stained glass. We took our time taking these pictures, but I will try to limit the number to a few that I like.

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When Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev came back from his trip to the United States he had the answer to all of the USSR’s agricultural and other problems – corn. A directive was issued and pretty soon corn was being planted everywhere with joyous reports pouring in from all corners of the country  even from places where corn had no chance of maturing due to the short growing season. Just like in the Special Olympics it wasn’t the results that counted, people got points (and awards) for participation.
I thought about overachieving and stupidity when I came home the other day to see my neighborhood lined with blue trash carts.

With these trash carts the City of Olathe is about to start its recycling program. I am skeptical about the benefits of recycling and until now did not participate in the program since it was not mandatory and cost an additional charge. My household doesn’t produce enough recyclable materials as outlined by the City to even bother. As a matter of fact we just don’t have that much trash in general. When the City supplied everyone with 95 gallon trash carts few years ago I immediately traded down to a smaller 65 gallon size and even that is almost always half-empty. I hardly ever have any items that fit the description other than an occasional phone book, a rare plastic bottle, or a piece of cardboard, so the 65 gallon cart represents about 65 times more volume of recyclables my family can produce in a year. The City did a test-run and feels that I will have enough stuff to fill it every two weeks. Obviously this is not going to happen.

In addition to the fact that I never volunteered to participate and wasn’t consulted with before the cart was dropped off in my driveway I literally don’t have any room in my garage to keep two 65 gallon containers. Hardly anyone in this neighborhood has more than one-car garage and most of the people already keep their regular trash carts out on the street (against the regulations), so now it will be adorned by two giant trash bins per household. However, the main non-benefit of the recycling program is a mandatory increase in the cost of the trash pick-up. While no one has to participate, everyone has to pay supposedly to attain a “long‐term stabilizing benefit to recycling because landfill costs are increasing”. Now I am torn between wanting to get something for the money I suddenly have to contribute and the realization that I will probably never have enough recyclables to even bother rolling the cart out on the pick-up day. Most likely I will just return the cart and curse the City every time I pay the bill.

I realize that many people believe in recycling, Jesus Christ, hope and change, world peace and  global warming/cooling or both. Nothing wrong with that. What I find idiotic is the city investing in enough of the $65 trash-carts for every house, special trucks and equipment, with many people like me who will opt out of the program for various reasons. I have no idea how many people will return the carts or just leave them outside as decorations. The time will tell. I wouldn’t have any problem with just a price increase without the recycling gimmick, I realize that the costs are rising, but what may be a good idea for some, was imposed on all by the same type of thoughtless overachievers who long ago were planting corn inside the Arctic circle.

In the meantime you are welcome to drop off your recycling at my house – it’s already paid for.
If you have thirty minutes of spare time, watch this episode of Penn and Teller Bullshit, maybe you’ll recognize yourself.

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