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We Remember President Lyndon Johnson

Next week, we would have turned 100 years old.

Whatever else can be said of Lyndon Johnson, he proved to be a true friend of the Jews and Israel.

Music to Play While Wearing a Short Kilt

A visitor arrived to this blog via google search using the following keywords:

"do ya you think i'm sexy bagpipe sheet music"

A World Without America

Two very nice  pro-American videos made by British folks:

A world without American soldiers:

Link

From the much talked about new site, America in the World:

America isn't a perfect nation but it's not had a fair press in recent times.  AmericaInTheWorld.com is an attempt by a few London-based friends of America to make the case that the USA is a fundamentally good nation. We believe that a world without America would be considerably poorer, less healthy and more dangerous and we consequently reject American isolationism as much as we reject anti-Americanism.

Olympic Opening Ceremony

Incredible.  What a spectacle.  The Chinese out did themselves technologically, in imagination and in sheer size.  Like nothing I have ever seen.

My God...

...it's full of stars.

For those who don't recognize the reference/phrase, click.

A Tale of Two Kippahs

The Obamica and the McCippah.

Who do you suppose is leading in the Kippah Poll?

We Are Being Watched

Lost in Space

Beginning in 1957, two brothers living in Italy figured out how to hack into Russia's and NASA's space program radio transmissions.  They managed to get recordings of a lost Soviet cosmonaut's Morse code SOS signal as it faded into space, John Glenn's ride on Friendship 7 in 1962 and more.  Discovered by the KGB, they came close to being killed via "accident." Fortunately for them, they went on an Italian quiz show and became too well known to be eliminated.

Link to their long and very interesting story from the Fortean Times.

Chasing the American Dream With $25

How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true. 

In college, Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, $25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income. This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish an apartment with a coworker, and start saving. 

During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that point, he had saved over $5,000...

...Critics have dismissed Shepard’s claims by pointing to the fact that he enjoyed an array of government services, from food stamps to bus rides to homeless services. But everyone Shepard encountered at the shelter and in the bad neighborhood he later lived in was already using the same services. It wasn’t the public services that lifted Shepard out of destitution—it was his own initiative.

Read the whole thing.

Weather Reporter Dumb as a Rock

Hey!

There's a reason I have a blog.  And I just remembered what it was.

Bizarre Bazaar

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

100 Years Old This Summer

The waltz, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

A Job For Those Who Aspire to Be Mattress Testers

From NASA, no less.

"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip"

Report from the International Association of Time Travelers.

Scottish Jews?

Look at this - Official Jewish tartan!   

"...the only Scottish Jewish Tartan approved and registered by the Scottish Tartans Authority." 

Very cool.

Hat Tip: Interrupting Gelastic Jew

Rick Monday's Greatest Play

On April 25, 1976, during a game at Dodger Stadium, two protesters, a man and his son, ran into the outfield and tried to set fire to an American flag they had brought with them. Monday, then playing with the Cubs, noticed they had placed the flag on the ground and were fumbling with matches and lighter fluid; he then dashed over and grabbed the flag off the ground to thunderous cheers. He handed the flag to Los Angeles pitcher Doug Rau, after which the ballpark police arrested the two intruders. When he came up to bat in the next half-inning, he got a standing ovation from the crowd and the big message board behind the left-field bleachers in the stadium flashed the message, "RICK MONDAY... YOU MADE A GREAT PLAY..." He later said, "If you're going to burn the flag, don't do it around me. I've been to too many veterans' hospitals and seen too many broken bodies of guys who tried to protect it."

Update:  Howdy and welcome, LGF readers!  And many thanks, SoccerDad for linking to this post. 

Hearing about the spontaneous singing of "God Bless America" gave me goosebumps.  It was wonderful to see a public example of American pride - - unfortunately so rarely seen in today's world.

Torah Haiku

People are so creative!  I just came across a site where someone is creating a Haiku verse for each week's Torah portion.  In his words:

Five Books of Moses

Add Japanese Poetry

Stir until ready

This time of year I am always reminded of when my children became B'nai Mitzvah.  We began our own tradition by having all three take place in the month of May, just like their father's was back in 1969. Eldest Son's portion was Emor, Daughter's (the youngest child) was Behar/Bechukotai, and Middle Son's was Bamidbar. 

LBJ: Hero of the Jews

LBJ's Newly Released Oval Office Recordings Disclose His Deep Feelings toward Israel (AP/International Herald Tribune)
    Tapes of Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office conversations, released to the public for the first time on Wednesday, reveal that the American president had a personal and often emotional connection to Israel.
    "I sure as hell want to be careful and not run out on little Israel," Johnson said in a March 1968 conversation with his ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg.
    In a taped conversation from June 25, 1967, about three weeks after Israel defeated three Arab armies, Johnson relates a conversation with Soviet Premier Alexey Kosygin.
    "He couldn't understand why we'd want to support the Jews - 3 million people - when there are 100 million Arabs," the president said.
    "I told him that numbers do not determine what was right. We tried to do what was right regardless of the numbers."

    See also LBJ Rescued Hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust - Lenny Ben-David (I*Consult)
    Few know about LBJ's actions to rescue hundreds of endangered Jews from Europe.
    In 1938, Congressman Johnson was told of a young Austrian Jewish musician who was about to be deported from the U.S.
    With an element of subterfuge, LBJ sent him to the U.S. Consulate in Havana to obtain a residency permit. Erich Leinsdorf, the world famous musician and conductor, credited LBJ for saving his life.
    That same year, LBJ provided a Jewish friend with a pile of signed immigration papers that were used to get 42 Jews out of Warsaw.
    According to historian James M. Smallwood, Johnson used legal and sometimes illegal methods to smuggle "hundreds of Jews into Texas, using Galveston as the entry port.... Johnson smuggled boatloads and planeloads of Jews into Texas."
    "He hid them in the Texas National Youth Administration.... Johnson saved at least four or five hundred Jews, possibly more."

The World's Most Annoying Song

An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people's least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. Link

It includes "...holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children's chorus and the concept of children in general (really?), Wal-Mart, cowboys, political jingoism, George Stephanopoulos, Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjo ferocity, harp glissandos, oompah-ing tubas and much, much more."

They have several clips of children chirpily singing about holidays, each ending in a pitch for Walmart.  They even did a segment on Yom Kippur. Someone involved in this project evidently has a sense of humor.

The song is 21 minutes long, and I lasted 8.5 minutes.  I had to shut it off because I couldn't concentrate on anything else while it played.

Though the song is annoying, I'd have to say that it is annoying in an interesting and amusing  way.  When all is said and done, it's arguably far less annoying than this:

The Happiest Place on Earth - Guess Where

Not Disneyworld, as it turns out:

Why Israel Is the World's Happiest Country - Spengler (Asia Times-Hong Kong)
    Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the State of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth.
    It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands.
    But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation.
    As a simple index of life-preference, I plotted the fertility rate versus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries - that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone at the top.
    "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders.
    Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 171st on an international quality of life index, below Rwanda.
    The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an elusive goal in the region.

...During 2,000 years of exile, Jews remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism because they liked being Jewish. With utmost sincerity, the Jews prayed thrice daily, "It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the greatness of the One who forms all creation, for God did not make us like the nations of other lands, and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. God did not place us in the same situations as others, and our destiny is not the same as anyone else's."

If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them. I do not know whether they will succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the world will lose a unique gauge of the human capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot conceive of a sadder event.

Suicide Rate (per 100,000)	Fertility Rate
Israel	6.2	2.77
United States	11	2.1
France	18	1.98
Iceland	12	1.91
Ireland	9.7	1.85
Denmark	13.6	1.74
Finland	20.3	1.73
Serbia	19.3	1.69
Sweden	13.2	1.67
Netherlands	9.3	1.66
United Kingdom	7	1.66
Canada	11.6	1.57
Portugal	11	1.49
Switzerland	17.4	1.44
Estonia	20.3	1.42
Croatia	19.6	1.41
Germany	13	1.41
Bulgaria	13	1.4
Russia	34.3	1.4
Austria	16.9	1.38
Greece	3.2	1.36
Hungary	27.7	1.34
Slovakia	13.3	1.34
Italy	7.1	1.3
Spain	8.2	1.3
Poland	15.9	1.27
Slovenia	25.6	1.27
Ukraine	23.8	1.25
Bosnia	11.8	1.24
Belarus	35.1	1.23
Czech Republic	15.5	1.23
Japan	24	1.22
Lithuania	40.2	1.22
Singapore	10.1	1.08
Hong Kong	18.6	1

Yahoo-Bris

Yahoo-Bris is the title of an article which turned out to be about a different subject than I was anticipating.

Question: Why Won't Osama Bin Laden Attack Sweden?

Maybe it's because he and his family used to vacation there.  Lots of big happy smiles, blue jeans and not a burqa in sight. See the photo.

Global Incident Map

From bomb threats, to chemical attacks, to violated airspace, all terrorist threats and actions are reported on this world map, which updates automatically every 310 seconds. Scroll down to see the events categorized by type.  Click on "detail" for news articles relating to the event.

Hat tip: Chaya

David Horvitz...

...may be one of the most creative and enterprising people in the universe.

For you.

We (as an entire class) Used to Synchronize Our Watches and Drop Books on the Floor at precisely 2:07 pm...

...but this is so much better. When I was in high school, an incident like this would have had all the elements to have made my day.  Better than a fire drill for disrupting classes and funny as hell:

A Japanese man was arrested for trespassing this week after turning up at a high school dressed in a girl's uniform and a long wig, local police said.

Thirty-nine-year-old Tetsunori Nanpei told police he had bought the uniform over the Internet and put it on to take a stroll near the school in Saitama, north of Tokyo, on Wednesday, the daily Asahi Shimbun said.

When students standing outside the gates started to scream at the sight of him, he dashed inside the school grounds, hoping to blend in with the crowds of teenagers, the paper said.

They also screamed, forcing the man to flee, losing his wig in the process. A school clerk pursued him and stopped him at a nearby riverbank, the paper said.

Snow Day!!

Everyone's been talking about the possibility/probability of snow tomorrow. This is the south, where any kind of winter weather is always an "event."

Alert: Winter Storm Warning Issued

Clear commute; deteriorating conditions overnight

*Winter Storm Warning from 11 p.m. tonight to 10 p.m. Friday night*

A STORM MOVING IN FROM THE SOUTHWEST WILL BRING PRECIPITATION INTO THE COLD AIR ALREADY IN PLACE OVER THE REGION. THE RESULT WILL BE LIGHT SNOW OVERNIGHT...FOLLOWED BY FREEZING RAIN FRIDAY INTO FRIDAY NIGHT. -National Weather Service

CommuteCast: Temperatures today have risen to around freezing north and west of the District and into the mid 30s for the city as well as locations south and east. Earlier sunny skies are now giving way to increasing clouds and this will continue through the evening commute.

A first guess at accumulation potential for tonight through early Saturday. Black stripe indicates where we estimate surface temperatures will be at or below freezing (above the line) and at or above freezing (below the line) at about 6 p.m. tomorrow.

Tonight: Light snow is likely to move into the region around or before midnight and temperatures below freezing area wide will allow whatever falls to accumulate. By sunrise, 1-3 inches of snow may be on the ground across much of the area, with possibly a little more north of the city and a little less to the south and east. Lows will reach the mid 20s for most locations.

Tomorrow: Friday promises to be a wintry mess across the region as snow transitions to a mix of sleet and freezing rain from south to north during the morning. By late in the day, temperatures may nudge above freezing in DC and points south and east, but how far north the freezing line makes it is still uncertain at this time. Daytime highs are expected to be near or below freezing from DC north and west, while locations south and east may top out in the mid 30s. Precipitation is likely to continue into the night and early Saturday.

Bakers Riot....

...over Danish cartoons.

Nicolas Sarcozy

What a breath of fresh air after Chirac.  When his plan to twin French students each with a Holocaust victim whose life they were to study came under fire for being too traumatizing, he responded:

"If you do not talk to them of this tragedy, then you should not be surprised if it repeats itself. It is ignorance that prompts the repetition of abominable situations, not knowledge. Make our children into children with open eyes," Sarkozy said.

Backyard Critter

Here's something we don't see very often, though my son says he sometimes hears their loud mating calls at night.  Says they sound like babies crying.

Some shots of a fox in our backyard - taken early this afternoon. 

 

I was taking pictures through the window, knowing that he moment I opened the door, he'd run.  Sure enough, eldest son opened the door and...

...he was gone.

To Be Filed Under: Border Management Techniques

Egypt Threatens to Break the Legs of Gaza Infiltrators
Egypt said on Thursday it would no longer tolerate Palestinians infiltrating the country from Gaza, and threatened to break the legs of anyone crossing the Rafah border illegally. "Anyone who breaches the border will have their legs broken," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit told the official MENA news agency. Abul Gheit also reproached Hamas for firing rockets into Israel, and said some rockets misfire and hit the Gaza Strip itself, wounding Palestinians. (AFP)

But Israel's the bad guy.

The Foreign Policy of Jerry Garcia

He might have been a Middle East hawk. Who would have thought?

The Man Cold

Via The Corner

I'm still wiping away the tears.  This is so true in my experience. 

How'd They Do That?

Count the people and wait.  After the switch, count them again.  It will keep replaying.

One of My All-time Favorite Movies...

...and an enjoyable, well-written, and thought provoking review of it.

But Then Again....

....it could prove to be extremely amusing.

(Like an ice hockey brawl, where you know the officials will stop it before anyone really gets hurt.)

Hey, You There From Tempe, Arizona

What's so interesting?  Are you looking for something specific?  Can I help you?

(They've been stopping by here every few hours or so for the past couple of days.)

Saying hello is on the approved list of behaviors for this blog.  Feel free - - I won't bite.

It likes to follow mice.

35%

Look Around You: Maths

You will start watching this and think it's something it isn't. Suddenly you will realize that it is seriously...wacked.

People in Order

From one to one hundred:

I thought many looked older than their actual ages.

The Aussies Always Do it First

There's always something very cool to me about the fact that Australians celebrate the New Year so far ahead of us - and this is emphasized by the fact that pictures are now so readily available on the internet. Here they are, ushering in 2008, just like we will be many hours from now:

Link

Yes, oh Yessssss!!!

Pron for girls. (SFW)

A Discovery

A new blog, Interrupting Gelastic Jew, where I read an intriguing quote:

If you reward cruelty with kindness, with what do you reward kindness? Hillel