Evolution vs. creationism

How about squirrels?



(Torah-related post coming soon.)

Also, HTC are awesome phones. This one saved a man’s life by stopping a bullet:

Liking fish

Fish, as one Russian commercial said, is a girl’s best friend.

In any event, a small excerpt from Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman:

I had decided that I was going to live Japanese as much as I could. That meant eating fish. I never liked fish when I was growing up, but I found out in Japan that it was a childish thing: I ate a lot of fish, and enjoyed it. (When I went back to the United States the first thing I did was go to a fish place. It was horrible — just like it was before. I couldn’t stand it. I later discovered the answer: The fish has to be very, very fresh — if it isn’t, it gets a certain taste that bothers me.)

One time when I was eating at the Japanese-style hotel I was served a round, hard thing, about the size of an egg yolk, in a cup of some yellow liquid. So far I had eaten everything in Japan, but this thing frightened me: it was all convoluted, like a brain looks. When I asked the girl what it was, and she replied “kuri”. That didn’t help much. I figured it was probably an octopus egg, or something. I ate it, with some trepidation, because I wanted to be as much in Japan as possible. (I also remembered the word “kuri” as if my life depended on it — I haven't forgotten it in thirty years.)

The next day I asked a Japanese guy at the conference what this convoluted thing was. I told him I had found it very difficult to eat. What the hell was “kuri”?

“It means ‘chestnut’,” he replied.

The wolf-dog and the beavers

A selection from a novel by James Oliver Curwood:

Some crazy *beep*

— Ma’am, what are the circumstances of your husband’s death? Was he ill, was he sick?..

— Was he swallowed?

So, speaking of craziness. What is an average crazy thing  that you expect a crazy French person to do? I’d say: wear pointy shoes and eat a sandwich of chopped pigeon liver. A Russian? Stay in a drunk state for so long he has no idea the state regimes have changed (true story from early 90s). A Crownheightster? To write an angry letter demanding that a local clothes store was closed because it sells elbow-less shirts (ok, maybe I am underestimating here a bit).

What about an American? How about feeding your cows live to an alligator that lives in a lake — excuse me, a bayou — nearby? I mean, I am looking at this scene and thinking: “Yes, it is totally believable that there is a lady living in Florida or Louisiana who does this.” (The scene itself is not halachically problematic, except the said alligator-feeding part, but it has some obscenity in it.)



— Officer, we have a problem with Hector.
— What problem?
— He went swimming.

The Great Cat Massacre

From a book I read while waiting at the airport (when I wasn’t doing a comparative anthropology study):

THE FUNNIEST THING that ever happened in the printing shop of Jacques Vincent, according to a worker who witnessed it, was a riotous massacre of cats. The worker, Nicolas Contat, told the story in an account of his apprenticeship in the shop, rue Saint- Séverin, Paris, during the late 1730s. Life as an apprentice was hard, he explained. There were two of them: Jerome, the somewhat fictionalized version of Contat himself, and Léveillé. They slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeymen and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat. They found the food especially galling. Instead of dining at the master's table, they had to eat scraps from his plate in the kitchen. Worse still, the cook secretly sold the leftovers and gave the boys cat food: old, rotten bits of meat that they could not stomach and so passed on to the cats, who refused it.

This last injustice brought Contat to the theme of cats. They occupied a special place in his narrative and in the household of the rue Saint-Séverin. The master's wife adored them, especially la grise (the gray), her favorite. A passion for cats seemed to have swept through the printing trade, at least at the level of the masters, or bourgeois as the workers called them. One bourgeois kept teenier cats. He had their portraits painted and fed them on roast fowl. Meanwhile, the apprentices were trying to cope with a profusion of alley cats who also thrived in the printing district and made the boys' lives miserable. The cats howled all night on the roof over the apprentices' dingy bedroom, making it impossible to get a full night's sleep. As Jerome and Léveillé had to stagger out of bed at four or five in the morning to open the gate for the earliest arrivals among the journeymen, they began the day in a state of exhaustion while the bourgeois slept late. The master did not even work with the men, just as he did not eat with them. He let the foreman run the shop and rarely appeared in it, except to vent his violent temper, usually at the expense of the apprentices.

Read on (I assume just from the name itself you can guess what happened next). From this book.

By the way, I know it comes as no surprise to anyone that the French have always been amongst the top five weirdest nations in the world (read on to see what I mean).

Surrounding children with holiness vs. accepting the truth wherever it comes from

I’ve been meaning to post this (and other things) for a while, but could not really find the time to do it. Something my rabbi said two Shabbosim ago.

We learn in Pirkei Avos: “Yehudah ben Tema said: Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion, to carry out the will of your Father in Heaven” (5:23). This is also quoted in Shulchan Aruch (both the regular one and Alter Rebbe’s) and explained and expounded upon in detail in many places. That’s not what I am going to write about.

At the same time, we know that the Rebbe started a “campaign” against little Jewish children having non-kosher animals in the images around them (on their cribs, their clothes, in their books) or as their toys. I am also not going to discuss this, where it is coming from, halachic and spiritual aspects of, etc., etc. There are those much more knowledgeable than me who have done this, and there are better places online and offline where this was discussed.

What I am interested in considering is something my rabbi said. One the one hand, the Rebbe was against spiritually unclean animals surrounding a young child. On the other, Shulchan Aruch and Pirkei Avos tell us to learn from non-kosher animals. What’s going on?

The answer is: “everything that Hashem created, He created for His glory.” And “just because fools worship, sun, moon and the stars, should Hashem destroy His Universe?” We can learn from anyone and from anything and utilize anything for the purpose of holiness. The Rebbe himself was incredibly emphatic on this point, and in my opinion no stream of thought inside or outside of Judaism emphasizes this idea better and clearer (very strongly but without shtus — unlike some other streams of thought) than Chabad. But — there is time and place for everything. Just because we need to be able to learn from unkosher animals and in general impure phenomena in the Universe does not mean they should surround little children.

Little children need to be surrounded by purity, holiness and Torah in its cleanest and most direct form. When they are older, and Torah has penetrated to (or rather revealed) their essence, they can learn from other things.

So, this is what my rabbi said. My question is: should the same philosophy, perhaps, be applied to chochmas chitzoinius (secular studies)? Specifically regarding children.

Metamorphoses

Buy it.

More of the same.

Yes, Russians are nuts. Sometimes it pays off.

Corpse in the living room; a girl’s best friend

Norvezhskiy-Lesnoy says: “Did you ever receive a call from a girl asking you for help with getting rid of a corpse in the living room? I did.”



The text message says: Sweetie, I killed the little fish. I am so sorry :(

This is a second post from the series called “Girl’s Best Friend”. The first one featured this photo:



The sign says: “A girl’s best friend is a fish!” It proceeds to list in a smaller font all the important nutrients found in fish. Just an FYI from Moscow Department of Health (as it says at the top of the sign). Taxpayers’ money put to good use.

Penguins seen in Florida!

(Global warming has reached Washington, D.C.)

Well, not quite, but close.