Twinsday was quickly re-established at the new job, made even better, I think, because I now work in Sarah’s neck of the woods. I think it would take me all of twelve minutes to drive to her house. This week we met at Ukrop’s, which has a great salad bar, which is a good thing, because yours truly is on a diet and is eating salads for lunch. Today was sheer torture. I mean, it’s not like it wasn’t hard enough two weeks ago, watching Sarah eat the fried chicken fingers. But this week was worse, because she bought the kids cupcakes for dessert, and herself an eclair. Me? I had a banana for dessert, which I forgot about, probably because I was thinking of how good the Ukrops bakery is. Oh, well. It’s not nearly as bad as it was when I quit smoking and couldn’t be around smokers. At least I know my urges are all mental, and not physical. Unless I’m really addicted to sweets. Hm.

I am down to two Cokes (12 oz. can) per day, one after breakfast, and one with dinner. I’m drinking water the rest of the day. The only non-healthy snack in the house is cinnamon graham crackers, 9g of sugar per serving. Oh, wait. There are Fudgesicles in the freezer, but that’s what I eat for dessert instead of chocolate. Two grams of fat and 60 calories, plus it tastes great.

Four days on the diet, and zero days on the exercise machine. But I’ll get there.

So I had a eureaka moment at work yesterday, and it panned out. I hadn’t realized until I saw it in a letter I sent to Ilyka, but this new job is even harder than I’d realized. I probably shouldn’t explain it to you the way I explained it to her, as I’d like to keep this job, but it’s kind of like the blind men and the elephant, and I’m one of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. Actually, I’d have to be only half-blind, because I do have a programming background, and years of interacting with geeks enough so that I speak fluent programmer and excellent engineer. And I know ALL of their quirks. Okay, not all. But a lot.

So this week, I’m finally making some headway into the uncharted waters (and they are uncharted, trust me). Manomanoman, though, there is a lot of code to documemnt.

Roger Waters, the man who put the Pink in Pink Floyd, has a concert in Tel Aviv scheduled. Of course, palestinians are whining to get him to boycott Israel.

A group of Palestinian artists has asked Roger Waters to cancel is upcoming concert in Tel Aviv, according to a British journalist.

In a letter to Waters, the Union of Palestinian Artists wrote, “How could an artist so closely identified with breaking down walls of injustice would cooperate with this monstrous wall that has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague?”

[...] Now, in reaction to the protest, Waters told the Guardian newspaper, “I have many fans in Israel, many of whom refuse to serve in the military. I won’t cancel my trip to Israel because I don’t agree with the government’s policies, just as I won’t stop performing in Britain simply because I disagree with the policies of Tony Blair.

“People who live in Israel are human beings, just like everyone.”

Good for you, Roger, even though you’re wrong about the seperation fence.

Judith Weiss made the papers for the pro-Danish rally in NYC last week. A certain contributor can be seen at this link, but he may be shy, so I won’t say who he is. You’ll simply have to guess.

Steven Weiss details more anti-Semitism, I mean, anti-Zionism. See, if they boycott Israel, and only Israel, it isn’t anti-Semitism. Get it? This one’s pretty bad.

Lt. Smash has Cindy Sheehan on tape comparing American soldiers in Iraq to — wait for it — Nazi Germany. Yeah, she could get lower, but I’m not quite sure how. My new slogan for the misuse of Nazi and Holocaust imagery: The Holocaust — it’s not just for Jews anymore.

Daled Amos has too many things to single out. Just read and keep scrolling.

AbbaGav is now blogrolled. Keep suggesting new blogs; I’ve got plenty of room for them.

Ilyka is blogging again. ‘Bout time.

A new feature over on Soccer Dad: If … you must. Great links.

Suggest more links in the comments, or trackback your blog post here.

So, you’re in jail for killing your country’s Prime Minister and your wife comes to visit.

What do you get her as a gift?

a) Flowers
b) Chocolates
c) A nice card
d) None of the above.

I cannot stand Donald Trump. I have been unable to stand him for quite some time. But this is going to go a long way towards making him semi-likeable:

A few years from now, the historic Elite candy factory in Ramat Gan will be replaced with a “Trump Plaza Tower,” to be built by real estate tycoon Donald Trump. The building is set to become the tallest in Israel.

The site’s history will be commemorated by a chocolate museum that will be located in the 70-story tower’s lower floors, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

In the past week, Donald Trump signed two huge realty deals in Israel: a partnership in purchasing the Elite building in Ramat Gan for USD 44 million, and a contract to erect a luxury hotel bearing his name on a sea-side cliff in Netanya.

I like that Trump is willing to invest in Israel. Countdown to protesters in front of Trump Tower: Begin.

According to much of the Muslim/Arab world, these stories never happened. But here are two stories of Holocaust survivors bound to make you reach for the tissues.

In the first, a Holocaust survivor celebrates his Bar Mitzvah — at the age of 76. But he has a wonderful story to tell.

Rosenblat celebrated with about a dozen friends and local congregants, eating cookies and dancing the Hora. But his journey from near death in a German concentration camp to celebrating his life in a Mineola temple is just one of Rosenblat’s amazing tales.

Perhaps his most astonishing is the story of how he met his wife, Roma. While in the concentration camp, the teenage Rosenblat met a girl on the outside who would throw him apples and bread over the barbed wire fence that separated them. The little girl gave him hope, he said, in a world that was filled with death. Seventeen years later, after being freed by the Russians and immigrating to New York, Rosenblat reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date. After a few minutes of talking, the girl, Roma, asked him where he was during the war. When he told her, she got quiet and then told the story of how she used to feed apples and bread to a teenage boy in a concentration camp. The two realized they had been reunited and Rosenblat proposed on the spot. Six months later they married.

In another story of atrocities that did not happen, a Holocaust survivor is reunited with one of his rescuers.

“The fact that Lou is here today, alive and well, celebrating his 80th birthday, is nothing short of a miracle,” Ehrenfreund said.

But the miracles didn’t stop there.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ehrenfreund said, “meet Bob Persinger, Lou’s liberator.”

A gasp rose from the crowd as the silver-haired Persinger, now 82, walked to the stage and fell into Dunst’s arms. “Thank you for saving our lives,” Dunst said between sobs. “God bless you!”

They had never met before yesterday, but their lives have been intertwined for more than 60 years. On May 6, 1945, lifelong bonds were forged between a Holocaust survivor and a tank commander – without either man’s knowledge.

“I never saw him,” Persinger said.

“I was delirious,” Dunst said. “I didn’t know what was happening.” That morning, in fact, Dunst was literally at death’s door. A 19-year-old Ukrainian Jew in a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, he had crawled onto a pile of corpses outside the crematorium to perish. But that afternoon, Staff Sgt. Persinger drove his tank “Lucky Lady” through the camp’s gates, liberating Dunst and the rest of Ebensee’s 18,000 prisoners.

The most important part of the story, though, is this:

There were tears again yesterday, and again mixed emotions. Joy, yes, but also the sense that this lifelong bond involves a lifelong responsibility.

“Be healthy,” Irving Dunst told Persinger, “and be able to tell this to other people. Because, from you, they are more able to believe it.”

Sad, but true: The world is more willing to believe the rescuers than the Holocaust survivors. In all things Jewish, anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.

Via Omri and Judith Apter Klinghoffer.

Via Glenn Reynolds, we get this gem from Don Surber:

A 25-year-old computer programmer is ready to file suit to block a child support order to pay for a daughter he does not want. The National Center for Men plans to use the suit to establish that men, too, can choose whether they want to become parents.

Here’s a thought: Keep it in your pants, or use contraception. Once those boys are in that egg — which is in the woman’s body, not the man’s — you have lost your say in the matter.

Abortion rights for men? Use a condom. There’s your abortion right.

I’ve read more than one Hollywood-bashing piece, and frankly, don’t need to even bother with the NRO article to know what it’s saying. Blahblahblah, lefties, blahblahblah, out of touch with America, blahblahblah, liberal bias.

Here’s the thing about Hollywood that most conservative commenters seem to have forgotten: Hollywood’s business is business. Their number one aim, when distributing a film, is not to make a message — regardless of whether that message is in synch or out of synch with mainstream America. Hollywood’s number one motive is for a film to make money.

Do you seriously think that that the studio that produced Brokeback Mountain didn’t expect to make money on it? Do you think they made the movie saying, “Well, hell, America may not be ready for a gay cowboy film, so we’ll probably lose money on it, but let’s put it out there anyway because dammit, we’re pathmakers and this is what we think America should think!”

Do you think that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal took the roles thinking, “Well, we won’t make any money on this, but damn, we’re going to get a message out!”

Perhaps — just perhaps — the high number of gays in Hollywood, as well as the success of shows like Ellen and Will and Grace, led the studio to believe that America was ready for a gay love story. Ya think?

Hollywood has always dabbled in message films. Do you remember how shocking Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was considered? Did you sleep through Gandhi? Do you remember Spielberg’s other message film, Schindler’s List? Well, here’s a quick trip down memory lane. In 1993, the same year Schindler’s List was released, we also saw:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3
Indecent Proposal
This Boy’s Life
Benny & Joon
Dave
Jurassic Park
So I Married an Axe Murderer
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
RoboCop3
Ernest Rides Again
Philadelphia
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

And, the dog of the year: Ed and his Dead Mother.

All of these films — even the last — were released in the hopes that they would earn the studio money. The fact that Hollywood box office keeps dropping is possibly attributable to the fact that more people are buying large-screen TVs and renting or owning DVDs instead of going to the movies. A family of four is going to pay a lot of money to see one film in the theater: About $30-40 for the tickets, another $20-30 for refreshments — compare that to renting a DVD for five bucks, and I think we can see why box office keeps dropping.

Which is not to say that themes don’t have an effect on box office. I would venture to say that Hollywood wasn’t looking for the teenage audience with Brokeback, or indeed, with any of the Best Picture nominees. But the Best Picture nominees don’t represent the year in movies. They only represent the films that the studios lobbied to get nominated, then lobbied again for votes, as well as the pictures that SAG members — mostly actors, not a class of people known for their stunning intellect — vote for.

Give it up, conservatives. Your attacks on Hollywood are invoking nothing but yawns outside your own circle.

These days everyone is either praising or bashing Hollywood. This article from NRO (the distillery of the rightwing voice) is on the side of the bashers and raises some legitimate questions about one-sidedness of this establishment. To remind you - Hollywood is Joo-owned, as it is widely recognized by the left wing media. As such, it could be looked upon as a department of the Elders’ outfit gone temporary out of control.

By and large, the NRO article hits the nail on the head. There is nothing to answer to the questions raised. Hollywood is playing a dangerous game, and the name of it is: half truths.

I don’t have any special problem with a bit of bashing applied to the corrupt and greedy oil company executives, nor with some creative expose of the late Senator Joe McCarthy (it is really cool of the producer and staff to dare raising this subject!). You know, I didn’t even mind that Turkish thriller where the Jewish doctor plays around with Iraqi pre-owned organs. After all, freedom of speech must be guarded, and the tastes of the public are all-important in the free market.

However, the consistent disregard of the issues from the other side of the coin, so succintly presented in NRO, is making the Hollywood crowd nothing more than purveyors of half truths. And it should be noted that half-truth is the more dangerous sibling of outright lie. It plays with brains of the left- and right-wingers and pushes them into the twilight areas of the mind that simple liars don’t even dream about.

So, Hollywood - sit up and take heed. The Elders put you on notice. Either straighten out or plan to move to an area more suitable for the half truths you are peddling.

Want a hint re geography of such areas?

Hat tip - our Elder colleague.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

Forward reports on a very peculiar phenomenon: participation of some Jews in a white supremacism movement that calls itself “American Renaissance”. It appears that there are some mental cases of Jewish persuasion that attempt to find their place in this hateful racist group. In spite of this:

After congratulating Faye for stirring remarks that “touched my genes,” Duke asked if there weren’t an even more insidious threat to the West than Islam.

“There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit,” Duke said.

“Tell us, tell us,” came a call from the back of the room.

“I’m not going to say it,” Duke said to rising laughter.

Jews sitting in the same room with Guillaume Faye, David Duke, Jared Taylor? Impossible to imagine, but here you are. Follows an example of a Jewish participant.

Son of a card-carrying Communist, Berman marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. But, he wrote, that was before two of his sisters were raped by black men and before he served eight years as the dean of boys at Brooklyn’s George W. Wingate High School, where “we averaged five arrests a day.” These days he attends American Renaissance conferences, and this year he brought a likeminded former teaching colleague to serve as his shabbos goy.

And here is the due repayment for Mr. Berman:

Not everyone at last weekend’s meeting could stay cool on the Jewish question. Before Faye spoke, Michael Matthews, an attendee from New Jersey, passed Michael Berman in the hotel foyer.

“Are you a Jew?” Matthews demanded. “I don’t think you should be here.”

Berman was hurt.

“You see, there’s no home for me,” he sighed after Matthews had left. “I’m like a black sheep here and everywhere I go.”

Actually there is a home for Berman and his new Neo-Nazi friends: a garbage dump. Somewhere in an isolated area - to prevent contamination.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews