HalfSours

Barack Obama was right to be pissed off by the distasteful McCain ads which compared him to the vapid and leggy Paris Hilton. The man known on facebook as ‘‘Brobama’ has much more substance than that. His real crew is so much more A-list than Paris. Actually, Brobama is George Clooney’s new BFF, which is totally awesome for him, because he probably has like a key to Bungalow 8 now, and can get into Nobu without a reservation and everything.

But for serious, there is something unsavory about a serious politician who, back when he was an even younger buck, had a taste for cocaine, hanging out with that rotten Hollywood crowd. Clooney’s even admitted to (boasted about?) being a bad seed, saying he’d ‘slept with too many women, done too many drugs and been to too many parties’. I’d keep an eye out on that guy if I were Obama’s constituency.

What’s even more uncomfortable though, is the idea of George Clooney emerging as Barack Obama’s new foreign affairs advisor:

But now the Hollywood heart-throb has entered the political arena at
the highest level – by becoming an unofficial adviser to US Presidential front-runner Barack Obama.

Oscar-winner Clooney, 47, is said to be helping the Democratic candidate to polish his image at home and abroad.

But he is also sharing with Obama his strong opinions on Iraq and the Middle East.

Sources say the actor has tried to hide the pair’s friendship for fear his Left-wing views and playboy image would hurt the Presidential hopeful’s bid for the White House.

But Democratic Party insiders have revealed that Clooney and Obama regularly send texts and emails to each other and speak by phone at least twice a week.

One said last night: ‘They are extremely close. A number of members of the Hollywood community, including Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, offered to help raise funds for Barack but it was with George that he struck up this amazing affinity.

‘George has been giving him advice on things such as presentation, public speaking and body language and he also emails him constantly about policy, especially the Middle East.

‘George is pushing him to be more “balanced” on issues such as US relations with Israel.

‘George is pro-Palestinian. And he is also urging Barack to withdraw unconditionally from Iraq if he wins.

‘It’s a very risky relationship. His hope of becoming America’s first black President depends heavily on winning over conservative voters and it would be suicidal for him to be perceived as a tool of a Hollywood Leftie, which is how they regard George.

‘But they text and email each other almost every day and speak on the phone at least a couple of times a week, often more.’

Seriously Barack Obama, remove the ipod buds please, and listen for a minute: Syriana was just a movie. George Clooney doesn’t actually speak Farsi, or know anything substantive about the Middle East. He’s another charming Hollywood bandwagon hopper– which I usually don’t even mind.

But he isn’t a foreign policy expert, Barack Obama; he just played one in a movie.

Jim D. Adkisson is such a big Christian, that he to intended upstage Christ, and martyr himself right in Christ’s house of worship. I’m no expert on Christianity, but that scenario seems somewhat askew.

But maybe my instincts are wrong. Blogger and Janeane Garofalo look-alike, Laura Linger, believes that Adkinsson is actually a “JesusFreak” terrorist, instead of just your run-of-the-mill one. Why, counter-intuitively, does she suspect Adkinsson of being a “christo-fascist”? Because! It conveniently supports pre-conceived notions based on, say it with me, liberal bigotry. That’s why. In her own unfact-checked words:

I’ve been deluged with comments from people protesting…LOUDLY…that the shooter was in fact NOT “a Christian.” NOT “a JesusFreak…

Mmmmmm…nope, sorry. I’m not buying it…He wasn’t affiliated with Christianity? I don’t buy it. If it rants like a JesusFreak, and it thinks its beliefs are more important than anyone else’s, like a JesusFreak, and it engages in terroristic violence against those he doesn’t agree with…well, let’s just a say that a religious whackjob isn’t that hard to identify, and I’m betting his religious background isn’t Muslim.


Laura (I’m addressing you directly now), I’d take that bet. Instead of presenting the known facts, you comfortably turn the victimized group into the victimizers.

You even indulge in the wildest archetype of a Christian Conservative, reducing the population’s collective conscience to; “But hey, they’re all a bunch of LIBRULS, right? Even them kids git what’s comin’ to ‘em.” You’re implying that they are somehow less humane and articulate, because they don’t conform to your sensibilities. It’s cute, but it displays a great unexamined bigotry in itself.

But back to our bet. Though you cited the same source as I have, you neglected to include that the FBI is investigating the shooting as a hate crime. Also, according to a neighbor, Karen Massey, Adkisson had a certain hostility to adherents of the Bible. She recounted to the Associated Press a conversation they once had about religious study, saying; “He almost turned angry,’ she told the newspaper. ‘He seemed to get angry [over the topic]. He said that everything in the Bible contradicts itself if you read it.”‘

The same source claims that he was latently angry that his parents forced him to attend church for years.

Now this isn’t conclusive proof that the man isn’t a Christian, but it certainly is evidence to the contrary of your ( Laura) wild guess affirmation that he is. I could buy that you were led to believe that this act of violence was similar to the sectarian violence in say, Iraq, and actually most of the underdeveloped world. But this theory was not mentioned in your post, and I, despite my principles, do not administer the benefit of the doubt freely. I find that it is generally difficult for Liberals to see conflict outside of their own paradigms; it’s a mental handicap.

So how much do you owe me Laura? The stakes should have been high, seeing as the odds were stacked against me; or can we quit pretending that people with plastic rimmed glasses are the final authority on anything that’s struck their passing interest?

A commenter wrote on Kvetcher.net that;

If the Hareidim would sink into the earth and vanish from human sight, and if the Christian fundies would get raptured already and float off to meet Jesus in the sky, and if the Islamic fundies would go to Paradise to be with their I forget how many virgins, the rest of us might be able to get on with the business of creating a civilization that was actually tolerable to live in.

Yes! It’s my dream as well that the earth should be purged of all who think differently than me. You might call it a personal crusade of mine. Or jihad. That works too.

Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.

“Glum” is the perfect descriptive for when one, perhaps an addled woman in her early 20s, has depressive yearnings to watch Marilyn Manson perform a routine on “Dancing with the Stars”. Fareed Zakaria thinks so. Fareed Zakaria got his Ph.D. from Harvard. Fareed Zakaria is quite the subcontinental sexpot. Fareed Zakaria would look great in a blue spandex jumspsuit. Stop lackadaisically swishing the contents of that cocktail shaker, dear reader. I call your attention to this: The Rise of the Rest

The women of my extended Persian family, even the ones well into their sixties, could double for the Kardashians should some righteous members of their crew stage a violent coup, and de-throne TV’s Armenian royalty. They are almost uniformly tanned, expertly groomed, and by all tastes, gorgeous. Yet nearing Passover they become so unrecognizably domestic looking that I would, were I so bold, warn them against spending time in the parking lot of Home Depot, lest La Migra think that they are illegal hired help. This is in small part due to their complexions, but also due to the fact that bebe hasn’t yet come out with a line of aprons (I don’t think).

I have heard it said in Israel, where knowledge of the Ashkenazi/Mizrachi rift is bounds ahead of us in The States, that Sephardi/Mizrachi women are fanatic about Pesach cleaning. I have heard it also said that Hashem judges a woman’s righteousness by the fervor with which she cleans for Pesach. If the Israeli school of thought on this matter is correct, then ipso facto, Hashem loves Mizrachi/Sephardi women more than Ashkenziot.

There is no empirical evidence to prove this. I have mere anecdotes that I hope my readers, of which I believe there to be a good 6, will come through with in kind. I anticipate a good turnout in the comments page; there is always interest in discussing who Hashem loves more, albeit usually between Jewish denomination rather than ethnicity.

In my mother’s hay-day as a balabusta, she used to shriek at us kids like Judge Judy on the rag if we were caught outside the kitchen with chametz. Dad did not have immunity. This wouldn’t start the week before. Oh no, this would begin and only intensify starting from three months before Pesach. I have a faint memory of such a happening on New Year’s day once, though I don’t remember of which year.

Every year she would use rolls of aluminum foil to quarantine off chametz sections of the kitchen. Were it World War II my mother could have halted the entire war effort with the amount of tin foil she used. There were usually just dishes in those sections in any case; no actual chametz ever survived the great purge. Her rationale for this was that she did not want us to confuse chametz dishes with Pesach dishes. The Pesach dishes, of which there are three sets (dairy, meat, and fancy meat), are more impressive than the dishes we use the whole rest of the year.

Most families have the minhag of hiding a bit of chametz the day before Pesach, and ritually hunting and burning it. My mother could not risk contamination for this tomfoolery, even through the protective sheath of a ziplock bag.

The other women on her side are similarly fervent.

When I moved to Israel, and spent my first Pesach without my family, I was adopted by a couple in their early thirties. He was Persian, and she, I’ll call her Nancy, half Ashkenazi, half Moroccan. Nancy, like me, is technically Ashkenazi from her paternal line. She considers marriage to a Persian, which makes her now Sephardi by minhag, a fine fit. These factors, I think, make her an anthropological wonder. She was my on-call person for Halakhic advice throughout the cleaning season. I was invited to her home for the Shabbat of Pesach chol, when she, a charedi woman, outright refused to allow her husband to learn from his sfarim; she was as frightened as a sheep on shear day that there might be crumbs stuck between the pages. And you know what? That actually made great sense to me.

In wrapping up, I am compelled to quote one of my favorite bloggers, and writers in general, Michael, of KosherEucharist.com:

The Cleaning: There are two major schools of thought when it comes to Passover cleaning: there’s the school that gives the floors a good sweep, locks up the plates, pots and pans, buys some paper plates and plastic forks, and goes and does something meaningful with its life; then there’s the school that throws out any food item or utensil ever suspected of having come into contact with leaven or legume, including ovens, sinks and children, and attacks with Lysol and Q-tips the devious chametz hiding, ready for unwitting consumption, in the cracks between the ceilings and floors. As with most things, I belong to a third school: the school that motivates itself to perform a thorough house cleaning through the use of amphetamines. By the end of thirty-some straight hours of awake, jittery and obsessively thorough housecleaning, your fingertips bleeding from the combined action of the rough side of the sponge and the bleach, you will rest content in the knowledge that you have performed a mitzvah - because you have actually heard the voice of God in your head commending you for it. Obviously, this school is not for everyone; I recommend that the faint-hearted among you use a sponge without a rough side.

So where do I live in this mad territory? I’m an interesting case study too. As I’ve hinted at, I take after my mother. When it came time to clean my own apartment for Passover I more closely resembled a dumpster woman than a Long Island Jewess. My four roommates had all scattered on home and left me with an entire apartment to clean. I called Michael, and may or may not have hinted that if he came over I would help him find Adderoll for his snorting pleasure. Michael, by bus or foot, was over within half an hour, and at my service.

Nancy had told me that an alternative to boiling water to purify kitchen surfaces was using bleach. We went through two bottles, and I insisted on going to the neighbor’s to borrow some more. Michael was inspired to write the above piece, thanks in no small part I’m sure, to that unending night he had in my apartment. By five A.M. the place looked like a space station, and the bleach had permanently scrambled our fingerprints. It was, in all earnestness, great seasonal fun.

I was in Penn Station two days ago on, as far as I’m concerned, the worst day of the year to be in Manhattan. I shan’t mention the name of the culpable Catholic holiday on this page, as that would preclude my blog from being introduced into the canon in years to come. The city, especially the train station, was teeming with pasty New Jerseyans with cheap green plastic beads hanging down their chests. The streets of Midtown later, like I’ve trudged over in Dublin, were an expansive swamp of vomit.

As I see it the Irish paid their dues to the city when they built all those bridges and whatnot. Where I’m concerned, they can have their one day to run amuck of the city. Heck, when I was a senior in high school and working as an intern in the publishing racket I got to watch the parade in person. My office was right off of Fifth Avenue, and every third Irish boy had cut school that day to run around, red heads blazing, asking girls to kiss them in the merit of them being born of the clan. Fortunately, my usual penchant for red heads was curbed by the smell of the fresh morning puke.

This year I experienced a different unpleasantry: rollicking anti-Semitism. An older frum man with full beard and fur hat (not a striemel, but a fitted, Russian style hat) was walking on his way somewhere. A group of about 10 of the aforementioned pasty New Jerseyans passed him in the terminal. The tallest of the group, flanked by women, pointed his long arms out at the frummy and said; “Yeah, there’s my man right there.” The frum man then said; “what is wrong with you?”, and continued walking in the opposing direction. Another guy at the front of the group then said loudly; “this is America, ya know?” Not one member of their group chided either of them. Some laughed along with them, some paid no mind.

I was a bit taken aback by this. The Irish and the Jews by all accounts should have a strong kinship forged by a similar history of subjugation. Ireland’s history is one of the least tarnished by violent anti-Semitic crimes. There was one incident known as the Limerick Pogrom which, as pogroms go, was actually pretty pathetic; thank G-d no one was actually even killed. The rest of their record is relatively clean.

Irish-Americans have a more extensive history of anti-Semitism, which culminated in 1902 during the funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph; Irish workers from the R. Hoe company attacked mourners, throwing iron and other projectiles at them. The police called to the scene, mostly Irish, then came and indiscriminately clubbed the Jews in the crowd. Prior to and after that incident it was not uncommon for Jewish peddlers in New York to have their beards pulled by dock workers.

The jerks in the train station were not pulling on the frummy’s beard, but in my mind there was still an injustice done; the guy was just walking through the hall, looking a bit different and minding his business.

I wish I had the wherewithal to say something to them. I was in the midst of a long trip back home from Vermont, was balancing several irregularly shaped objects in my arms, and looked too disheveled to want to draw attention to myself. My usual biting tongue did not feel that it have the go-ahead to lash out at that moment. Quite honestly I’m not sure that protesting that kind of behavior really helps in any case. Ethnic tension is as old as ethnicity. We’re all guilty of ethnic bias; until Messianic days it is here to stay. I like the approach of Eileen Scully, an Irish-American history professor, who once taught me that you can’t use logic or persuasive argument to sway people out of their set opinions. Your actions and behavior are your best modus operandi to sway minds.

So Harvard chose to allot separate time for women to work out at one of their gyms. Then all the little co-eds with no other cares in the world started going ape-shit. It turns out that the Ivy-class is only tolerant of the religious and cultural sensibilities of others when they aren’t inconveniencing them. So one of the campus gyms is closing its doors to men, and allowing modest (mostly Muslim) women to work out sans their presence. People are trying to make this out to be another Plessy vs. Ferguson. Big woop. I have faith that the spry Harvard Renaissance man can hoof it to another campus gym during the six hours per week that particular one is closed to them. And don’t ever let me hear a peep out of Harvard when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. Those people can’t even share a gym facility with Muslims. We share a country.

Read this if you can stand to:
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I have no opinions to opine on future prevention or retribution. I just thought that it should be acknowledged that at least eight people were senselessly murdered today at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav today in Jerusalem.

‘Terrorist fired 500-600 bullets before he was killed’

I virulently disapprove of the eroticizing of butt-cleavage. It is, aside from the wrathful jellyfish, the least appealing part of any Tel Aviv beach. Every time I see a sexy lady drawing attention to herself in that way I wonder if she also thinks toilet plungers make cute accessories.

As an expert aesthetician (10 college credits in photography), I can certify that a person’s body, in the public realm, is most alluring when it is left mostly unrevealed.

Too much exposure to a good thing can lead to its ultimate under-appreciation (think Seinfeld in syndication). I find that this is a general truism for nearly every good thing in life. In fact, at the moment I’m typing this I can’t think of a single exception.

Women in the Western world have dressed progressively more revealingly since the middle of the last century. The fashion industry, not to be degraded to anything less than a community of true artists, has always sought to push the envelope. Artists, I find, have this drive to be so in your face, that you’re often left in need of a handkerchief to remove the smear marks left behind.

If we are constantly stimulated by revealing, sexy persons around us, do our senses not become frayed and numbed? If, what is meant to be erotic is so ubiquitous that has becomes commonplace, how can it possibly hold the same power?

Time was that a woman dressed just so could stop traffic. Today, undaunted by that diminished possibility, we have billboards with nearly naked women on practically every major roadway.

And so sexuality has become less sexual.

Do we really want to live in a world where nothing, not even the G-d given blessing of sexuality, is sacred?

Even for some of the biggest packers and pushers of sexuality, like Victoria’s Secret CEO Sharen Jester Turney, the over-exposure has become ad nauseam.

Apparently, You Can Be Too Sexy