kill em all

MOMMY SWIPED MY GOOD NAME

Rhea Takara, a San Diego student in her 20s, found out she'd been ripped off by her dad — and called the experience "gut-wrenching."

"To hear them ask, 'OK, who did it?' and to have to say my father did it, it was awful," she said

frightening

Honey, I shrunk the dollar

 

When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy, it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their own time. By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

near-death

subway trains are very big

and very fast

and very able to take the front part of my skull right off of the rest of me.

launchie laucnhie

	yaldani's Station Featuring: Queen, Tom Petty, The Grateful Dead, Aretha Franklin, Metallica, John Lennon, Muddy Waters, Sean Paul, Pink Floyd, The Who, Goo Goo Dolls

is it just me, or is that a weird collection?

thoughts

this has always struck me as more of a high school girl's anthem to the cool girls then a twisted love song:

CREEP, Radiohead

When you were here before,
Couldn't look you in your eye
You're just like an angel,
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather,
In a beautiful world

I wish I was special
You're so fucking special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here

I don't care if it hurts,
I wanna have control
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice,
When I'm not around

You're so fucking special,
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here

Oh...Oh...
She's running out again...
She's running
She's, run, run, run
Run....

Whatever makes you happy,
Whatever you want
You're so fucking special,
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here
I don't belong here...

this is what i'm striving for!

when people make me mad or hurt me, i want to balance their shocking "badness" by making some "goodness".

like Ruth Hillebrand, my new hero

cause connery's getting sued

I pose a conundrum to you, a riddle if you will.
Whats the difference between you and a mallard with a cold?
Ones a sick duck...
I cant remember how it ends, but your mother is a whore.

geez

i have yet to talk to anyone in this city who would be interested in having the olympics here.  the commuting, the touristsm the security - it's all a logistical nihgtmare for those of us who would not be priveliged enough to be here with a golden ticket - the one that gets you into olympic village, which will be the least cramped part of the city.

unless of course NY does what it did for the RNC - shut down.  i don't know about you, but we did not have a lot of people in the office when that all went down.

*insert cursing here*

lenny

there's something chilling about reading this as i'm listening to lighting crashes by live.

financial news of the day

Dollar Drops as Bank of Korea Looks to Buy Other Currencies

hello again

i've been pretty quiet on here for the past few days.

i started in the new position on thursday - i am so much happier and more relaxed, it's unreal.

that got me thinking about my past (almost) year at the OU so far and what my accomplishments have been.

i'm pretty damn proud of what i've done in the past year.  i started at the secretarial level, taking over for someone who was leaving to get married.  i fought to be kept out of the secretarial pool, arguing that i'd be far more effective if given room to work (although at the end of the day i'd still be female, and hence easily confused with a secretary in that dept.).

then i got a raise after being here for 3 months.  nice.  of course by then i had taken over the whole system, worked on expanding it, and started on the web site.  lotsa work, lotsa going home really late.  not so happy.  and covering for someone who was an incompetent.  also not fun.

then i asked for an office, and was rebuffed.  because "no woman has ever had an office on this floor".  so i went back and argued it out.  i left with a promise for an eventual office, and it ended there.

so when i found out that someone i was training in to do phones was making more money than me, i got mad.  i asked for a raise.  i was told no because "he has smicha".  cute - he wasn't done with it yet, and at the end of the day, he was the receptionist/phones person.  not cool.

so i gave notice.  i got called back in 2 days later - i was being given an office, etc.

then the responsibilities kept growing and the work kept piling.  and i was staying on top of it all.  when it hit the point that i was designing the Pesach section for the site, i went and requested a raise again.

and i got it.

then things got bad.  someone i worked with suddenly turned on me and i realoized that all along this person had seen me as his personal work secret.  either the fact that i was doing stuff on my own or the fact that higher-ups liked working with me - i'm not sure what set him off, but he blew up.  so i asked for an apology, like a nice person would, and he went off on me again.

which is when i decided to quit.

until this job came along.  better position, better people, better chance of maintaining my sanity.

and my salary has increased by a third.

so.  i think i'm happy with how this all turned out, if still a bit upset that someone i thougth was a friend was really a user.  hey - those like lessons can really smack the hell out of you.

jeff gannon fallout

does anyone else find this to be mind-blowing in today's world?  in the US?!

By my count, "Jeff Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's "marriage" initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting," went the script) pretending to "sort through the details" of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such "reports," some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.

COVERT PROPAGANDA.

A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?

It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned "minders" - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message.

mazal tov!!!!

She's a mommy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and yes, that now mean PP is a daddy too.

so much happiness, i can't compute

wiped

just
totally
wiped

nyt link of the day

True to Her Orthodox Beliefs, if Not to Her Roots

"If you break down the words of the title, it represents where I've come in my life, in terms of my self-image," she explained in a telephone interview recently. "The meaning of the words are very beautiful. I'm Japanese. And Jewish. And American, just as American as anyone else who was born here. I don't consider myself a princess, but I consider myself worthy for the first time in my life."

In the show, Ms. Factor, who was born Christine Horii in Hawaii, relates her journey from a high-kicking Rockette at Radio City Music Hall to Israel, where she now lives with her husband and two children. She is currently on a 41-city American tour, performing to sold-out auditoriums at synagogues, community centers and Jewish high schools, all the audiences filled exclusively with women, as her strict faith demands.

Karla Gardner

Can you say "class action suit"?

oy

Today’s fun email:

It has come to my attention that a product known as milkys(a chocolate yogurt/pudding with whipped cream on top) has recently been OU certified and has appeared in the US(the product is from Israel). In Israel, the milkys that are under rabanut hashkacha contain geletin to my knowledge. The milkys that I have seen in the US also list geletin as an ingredient. I had called my local vaad about this and they said they would remove the product from the local stores that they give hashkacha to. However, I have seen this product with the same ingredient list elsewhere as well. I was wondering if this was brought to anyone's attention or if the geletin is merely kosher fish geletin(the ingredients do not indicate this).

well... first question to me is why didn't the Vaad contact the OU to ask? to remove product from shelves means the shopkeepers have to recall it, customers have to return it, and the importers are going to get a bunch of angry phone calls, not to mention the OU for certifying this "non-Kosher" product.

second question is why in the world he thinks we would say what kind of Kosher gelatin is used in our products!? any product that says "kosher gelatin" on it actually is not up to the standards of the OU, such as the Dannon yogurts bearing the K.

i hate that people don't know this.  that a VAAD doesn't know this.

i also hate that people write long rambling emails without using puncuation or the space bar.

happy

A Filipino-American Effort to Harbor Jews Is Honored

In Manila, though, a vigorous expatriate cigar manufacturer from Cincinnati had been playing poker and bridge with the likes of Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower; Paul V. McNutt, the American high commissioner; and Manuel L. Quezon, the first Philippines president. When the manufacturer, Alex Frieder, saw refugees straggling to the port pleading for entry, he cajoled his poker cronies to let the Philippines become a haven for thousands more.

Through his efforts and those of three of his brothers, about 1,200 German and Austrian Jews eventually found sanctuary in the Philippines in the late 1930's, then an American protectorate, even as the liner St. Louis was turned away from Miami with a boatload of 900 Jews in a more typical example of American policy.

blowing out of their a$$es

cheech and chong deny smoking weed during the filming of all of their weed-based movies

giving lawyers a bad (worse?) name

"She thought she could blow off the rules that apply to everyone else because she's a lawyer," said Anthony Barkow, the assistant United States attorney who made the government's final argument to the jury.

she broke the law and then defended herself by talking about civil liberties...

There was little dispute about the central facts in the case. After Mr. Abdel Rahman was sentenced in 1996 to life in prison, his followers issued a series of threats against the United States demanding his release. Prosecutors imposed rules, known as special administrative measures, that barred the sheik, already held in solitary confinement, from communicating with anyone outside prison but his lawyers and his wife.

Ms. Stewart repeatedly signed documents in which she agreed to uphold the rules.

She brought a letter containing messages from Islamic Group members to a meeting with the sheik in the prison in Rochester, Minn., in May 2000. She received a statement from the sheik and on June 14 called a reporter in Cairo and read him the statement. The sheik said he was withdrawing support for a cease-fire the Islamic Group had observed for three years in Egypt. The group never canceled the cease-fire.

Testifying on her own behalf, Ms. Stewart said the press release was part of a legal strategy that involved provoking the government if necessary in order to keep the sheik in the public eye. Ms. Stewart said she was acting within an unwritten lawyer's "bubble" in the prison rules that allowed her to defend her client as she thought best.

there is no rule that i'm aware of that says that you can break the law because you don't agree with it. David - care to comment?

article just posted

Arthur Miller

i don't like it, but it's the first thing i've seen on the net.

arthur miller is dead at 89

when i was in stern he came to speak at B&N on 18th.  I went, forcing some friends to come with me.  i remember telling them that one day our children would say to us "You were alive when Arthur Miller was alive?  And you could have heard him speak, and you didn't go?!?"

well, i went, and i heard, and i can sincerely say that we have just lost one of the more brilliant and non-comformist thinkers out there.  although he would probably make the argument that without non-comformity, there is no brilliance.

clarification

avraham points out that people might have read that post and thought the product was Kosher.  the product is not kosher.  my annoyance is with people taking fresh produce, which has never been problem, and making it non-Kosher in a deceptive manner.

dani out.

kash alert

yet again, people are taking products that shouldn't be problematic and making them problematic:

Grapple, the new grape-flavored apple, is not kosher.  this flavored fruit is produced by soaking an apple in non-kosher concord grape juice and then refrigerating it for five days.  Grapple has been found in frum (Kosher) stores.

News of the morning

I'll bet you the wedding won't compare to Diana's

one of those things

i noticed today that i only saw 12 people with ash on their foreheads.

i always loved that in scranotn everyone was religious - and it'snot like there are no catholics in the city.  there are plenty.

is it just a PC thing?  did they go and wipe it off for work?  did they (*gasp*) not go?

it's also funny

to see who says "congratulations/good luck" versus who really means it.

i haven't really told anyone yet - apparently someone's blabbing it through the office.

lol - nice to know i'm not the only one who talks about me all day.

have you ever fliven?

first it was the meals, now it's the pillows!?

i'm gonna start traveling by cruiser...  luxury cruiser

hm

as jim just pointed out, today is Rosh Chodesh, Ash Wednesday, and the Chinese New Year.

must read

funny article of the week

it's now official

in two weeks time i'll be joining the OU Communications office in the administrative offices.

i'll be working on the web, publishing, PR, and marketing.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

well

in the world of weird coincidences, i have good news...

that i can't share yet.

damn!

reality

avs and i play this game where we pretend that we're actually going to sign up to be on a reality TV show.  you know - avs on queer eye, or me on the apprentice.

i got to thinking today about why it is that you don't see more religious Jews on Fear Factor, or the Apprentice, or just about anything else we reality TV junkies watch.

a few thoughts.
one - it would be really annoying for the fear Factor producers to maintain a list of disgusting foods that could be Kosher.  between getting a kosher animal, killing it in a kosher way, and providing proof of its Kashruth = not worth the time.

two - the apprentice.  auditions in New York were this past Friday, any other day I actually would have gone just for kicks.  They eat non-Kosher food, share a kitchen, work on Saturdays, and live in a very non-yichud happy apartment.  plus there's that whole separating from your spouse thing.

three - american idol - whether you're male or female, you're going to run into kol isha problems.  forget the schedule and food issues even...

and then it occurred to me that the Halachic system is really doing an excellent job in this case of keeping observant Jews from being associated with what may go down in history as the most embarrassing and degrading era in Amercan TV history.  reality stars may now be cool(-ish?), but in a year or two they'll only be good for punchlines (much like britney spears).

ok, must run, time to go space out on the train again.

so stuff

and things

i hope when i get through he's too drugged up to yell at me for calling

i feel old and tired and helpless

all day

not the most comprehensive, but still...  it's free!

salaryexpert.com

lol

This is so going to be my life in 5 or 6 years

yay ccny!

Subject:

First Minyan Tomorrow!

Members of CCNY Hillel-
If you wish to learn more about observance, plan out future events, or
participate in the minyan. Let's meet tomorrow at my USG office NAC
1/111 at exactly 12:30PM.
-Sergey Kadinsky,
Club Prez.

whine

so tired, so sick, so not interested in being here. it sucks that i love the job, but hate a lot of what comes with it. am ready to go home and not come back.

from polsky

Drunk -- on three glasses of Listerine

polsky says:  it sort of makes sense, considering that I've had liquers that taste like mouthwash, so you might as well buy what's cheaper

from the OU weekly email

This week, as a small part of our new initiative called “Safe Homes, Safe Shuls, Safe Schools,” we announced our attempt to eliminate the phenomenon known as Kiddush Clubs, at which individuals leave services, usually during the Haftorah, and partake in hard liquor. Our Board voted at the first Board meeting of the new administration in Los Angeles, to overwhelmingly support the statement against these clubs.  We have two objectives in this initiative.  On the one hand, we are attempting to restore Kedushat Beit HaKnesset and Kavod Beit HaKnesset, sanctity and dignity to the prayer services in all of our synagogues.  Secondly, we are concerned with the message sent by adults participating beyond moderation in alcohol on synagogue premises.  Obviously this is only a small part of a larger effort in the area of educating our community regarding the dangers of alcohol which often lead to serious substance abuse.  Another part of our attempt to change the culture of the services in the synagogue, is a live webcast shiur which I will begin on Thursday noon, February 24^th and hope to continue every Thursday at noon. This shiur will be entitled “Tefillah v’Siddur haTefillah” or “Prayer and the Prayer Book.”  This shiur will be open to all individuals from our offices as well as to anyone in the community who wishes to attend.  It will be held in the large meeting room on the 14^th floor every Thursday at noon. It will be devoted to the philosophy of prayer, halachot of prayer, and texts of the prayer book.

 

i'm all for it.

vodka anyone?

yes, yes, party at our house, and no - just because you read the blog does not mean you're invited.