Only one night away from a double whammy - the first night of Hannukah and my 37th birthday.

As a friend of ours on our Queens synagogue's listserv has posted: A friend of Rabbi Kalman Packouz tells him that as he grows older he experiences a personal miracle on Chanukah. He eats one potato latka - and it burns for eight days.

Two points to make here:

• I don't cook latkes in that much oil - at least, I do my best not to.
• I'm not that old...not yet anyway.

Anyhow, if Adrastos can highlight everyone's favorite holiday brick of a treat, I can certainly find some paeans to potato pancakes that'll sit like clay in your gut.



The following is one my husband and I like the least of all of Jewish singer/songwriter Debbie Friedman's songs. It reminds me of how old I'm getting as well - seems like ages ago when she was my music teacher in my Jewish day school deep near the coast of Texas. Now she plays concerts that demand upwards of $50-plus for tickets. She got to Carnegie Hall, even...by practicing and teaching all us kids now-classic original music of hers as well as the occasional inclusion of "Mairzy Doats" and its like. I still wanna scream NO WAY! whenever I hear "A kid'll eat ivy, too, wouldn't you?"

But I hear the following, and I just wanna scream, period.



Sorry, Debbie.

All right. Now Greg's done it. I have to whip out the OGs.

The following ain't safe for work. The kids' ears'll bleed, I know. But the sight of Orrin Hatch whipping out his mezuzah on a chain is truly nauseating.



The GOP senator from Utah may have a recording studio, but the Jewish people will always be more shtetlfabulous in one little finger than he'll ever be with his weak-ass "hip hop".

And if you wanna rest your senses after viewing such a thing, head here...no, wait!...

Just a couple of questions/heads up this Monday morn:

Is this happening all over the country, or just here?:

Basically, the President of the LCTCS (Louisiana Community and Technical College System) Board has dictated that Delgado can not give pay increases with any promotions this year, despite the fact that Delgado has the money to do this and has budgeted the money to do this. His bizarre reasoning for this is that, since the other schools in the LCTCS system are strapped for cash and cannot afford to give promotions or raises, Delgado should somehow show more empathy for their hardships and not fund its promotions. Thus, they are currently asking any faculty up for a promotion to take on the added responsibilities associated with the promotion without any additional pay. Part of his goal is, supposedly, to do away with any position beyond "Instructor", thereby removing all promotions altogether. This would put Delgado (and probably the other community colleges) at a disadvantage in trying to hire better qualified faculty to teach, which would obviously have a negative affect on their ability to provide a decent education.

Address your letters to Dr. Joseph D. May , president of the LCTCS Board. You can google him and read about his vision and plans for the LCTCS. This may give you more ideas to address in the letters. We don't know if the letters will be read, but we hope the effort will produce a positive impact. This is an address I found when I googled the LCTSC Board: 265 South Foster Drive Baton Rouge, LA 70806 PH. 225.922.2800

1. Receiving promotions every four years is the only fixed means for teachers to increase their salaries. We work for 4 years prior to the date of promotion to receive these increases. This isn't work we are going to do, but work that has already been done.

2. These increases also determine teacher retirement income. Example: If someone was planning to retire in 2012,and was depending on their 2009 promotion to be the highest 3 consecutive years salary, their retirement income would be less because the salary increases were not given.

3. Our promotions correspond to promotions given to administrative and staff personnel. When administrators or staff are promoted their salaries increase without question.

4. How was $125,000 found for a newly created position during a time of financial cut backs?

Also, at a time when Second Harvest Food Bank is all over the place in desperate need of funding and food donations, and volunteer programs are setting up hot food lines at the foot of Elysian Fields Avenue by the river each night to feed the homeless at "The Wall", it looks as though the Wall will be taken away as a location to feed these people. I don't know the exact story - most of what I've heard says a neighborhood association is finally getting their wish of turning the Wall area into green space. Please enlighten me in the comments, if you would.

Anybody got a neutral ground or a location nearby to offer for the purpose of feeding the hungry, in the meantime?
_______________________

Last night, Edie, Dan, the little guy and I headed for Atlantic Aviation to see what waiting on the Saints to come home from an away game was like and pretty much confirmed it was like waiting on a Mardi Gras parade only with much more fast moving traffic, lots of passing cars honking to support the black & gold-clad masses, lots of people standing on SUVs for a better view, and only a few Kenner police cars there to keep people from getting run over or the players from leaving the parking lot molested in some way. It proved to be too cold for us to stand out there for too long, though, so we retreated to the car, listened to the geriatric bowl on the radio for a bit, and high-tailed an exhausted little guy back home after seeing the chartered flights land.

The euphoria hasn't quite worn off yet.



Update, 12/14: The Gambit now has the Basin Street Records video up in honor of the 13-0! Shortened version of "Saints Christmas", but with more Kermit mojo workin'.

I'll be putting in a word with Hannukah Harry while I'm at it.

Gonna be a hot time in this cold town tonight.

You think I'm kidding.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Who. Dat.

It's a little too easy to dismiss this as Oh my God, it's a white boy discovering police prejudice!

A few months ago I had a run-in with the Jeff. Parish cops. I'll preface this story by saying I'm a white man, college educated, from California, and I generally have all the socioeconomic privileges that keep me from being a target of police profiling. When these JPSO cops stopped me though, I feared for my safety. I was simply riding my bike along the River levee and decided to cruise through Kennar (sic). Big mistake. The two JPSO deputies that followed me for three blocks and then pulled me over first physically threatened me when I asked, "is there a reason why you stopped me?" Then after searching me and running my ID, they informed me to leave the area or else: "this is a crack neighborhood." They said. "White people don't come back here." I was riding not four block off Kennar's main strip.

The message was, 'don't ride through black areas, white boy'; 'don't come into Jeff. Parish at all.' JPSO enforces segregation in order to further criminalize the black poor that live in Kennar and other parts of the mostly white Parish. I was outraged but powerless. Seeing Seagal playing police man to bolster JPSO's image upsets me deeply. That is a terribly troubled and violent police force that need a different kind of exposure.

I experienced Steven Seagal: Lawman vicariously through other folks tweets the other night and caught some of it through posted episodes on A&E's website (A&E, people. How the mighty have fallen there...but that's another post altogether). It's funny mainly because of Seagal's monster ego being fully on display in a Cops-like context, so stopping people for "existing while black", among the other terrible things the West Bank's Finest (ahem) may either create for themselves or have to deal with after the fact, are shot through with the action movie actor's constant emphasis on his martial arts background and punctuated by many, many zaps of multiple Tasers. It's so bad, it's almost badder than bad. Almost.

When one looks deeper into the entity that is the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, however, the comedy does fall away, hard and fast. The same show that will keep Seagal in the public eye will also subject the JPSO to greater scrutiny - you know, the department also cited in a lawsuit filed against the Gretna police department who turned back people trying to escape from a flood-ravaged New Orleans on the Crescent City Connection shortly after 8-29-05** - an action singled out for condemnation by Congress; the law enforcement entity once headed by now-deceased sheriff Harry Lee, who once proclaimed that blacks in white JP neighborhoods ought to be stopped by the police (check Carnival 1987-on in the timeline for that policy in action). It's crazy for a police force to be perpetuating such policies, but to be turning them around and applying them in the service of white supremacist idiocy: this is a crack neighborhood...white people don't come back here...well, who are they to perpetuate segregation?

Although white Americans often think we've had few first-hand experiences with race, because most of us are so isolated from people of color in our day-to-day lives, the reality is that this isolation is our experience with race. We are all experiencing race, because from the beginning of our lives we have been living in a racialized society, where the color of our skin means something socially, even when it remains largely a matter of biological and genetic irrelevance. Race may be a scientific fiction - and given the almost complete genetic overlap between the persons of the various so-called races, it appears to be just that - but it is a social fact that none of us can escape no matter how much or how little we may speak of it. just as there were no actual witches in Salem in 1692, and yet anti-witch persecution was frighteningly real, so too race can be a falsehood even as racism continues to destroy lives, to maim, kill, and, on the flipside, to advantage those who are rarely its targets.*

The JPSO has a terrible track record of perpetuating this thinking and imposing it on everyone...the imposition of its racism on everyone no matter what color they are is ironically the only equal right they afford to us all - the right to harass everybody.

And Seagal has bought into that with every episode of his show.

Just something to remember in the midst of all the Zen Taser madness.

*White Like Me, Tim Wise

** changed to correct factual errors; my bad.

Allright, enough mushy stuff. Here's a hostilidays vid that'll burn you up:



...if it were an actual monkey that were harmed in that video, PETA would sue and you'd be out a whole lotta gelt. But there's a whole lotta people short of gelt these days, anyhow. And somebody found a solution to their financial woes:



Jury's out on whether or not I'll be doing the same after my latest round of car repairs. When I paid the bill and was walking out the door of the garage, the mechanic said he always felt like a Scrooge when he had to charge people as much as he charged me for the work on my car at this most wonderful time of the year. If he weren't such a nice guy at heart, I'd liken him to that Christmas character Krampus, but he really doesn't deserve to be sent back to hell if he does something wrong by Santa.

In a couple of days, my son turns seven.

Seven years and a little less than nine months will have passed since the day I turned green from smelling the gas I was putting in my car at the Magazine Spur station and decided to get a pregnancy test.

More years than that have passed since the day I was having lunch at Juan's with my not-yet-fiance-or-husband and telling him I was never going to have kids. Never say never.

This child of mine has grown like a weed. He's still a big sweetie, but he's also quite confident in himself, almost to the point where I fear for his willingness to open his mouth and share his opinions and facts about the world at any time and any place - and almost to what seems like an arrogant fault. His French teacher told me yesterday of how he was demonstrating his knowledge of the TGV, France's high-speed train, to her and how he punctuated it with, "Know how I know that? From my Big Book of Transportation!" (She laughed at the thought of such a book, and laughed even harder when I told her, "No, it's true, he does have that book!") A visit from Mrs Jindal to his school to demonstrate the new Promethean Board they acquired as a teaching tool showed that his outspokenness can pay off though, as he gave her the correct answer to one of her questions in a demo of what the board can do (Dan and my fellow coffee shop patron had the same question: "Did she know the answer?" Uh, yeah, guys.).

He loves the cars, trucks and airplanes, he was adamant that his birthday party invitations have an Airbus A380 on them and that he have a few games for his partygoers, and he's now getting into the Legos big time. The kid knows what he likes and dislikes and has no problems telling you. Turns out he gets easily freaked by some scary stuff in kids' movies (case in point: I had to take him out of Ice Age 3 after the carnivorous plant moment, which I thought was hilarious, a true homage to Die Hard With A Vengeance), but he loves Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. What'cha think, people, should I get him an Indiana Jones set or what?

He's also still got some love for the ladies: he tried writing a nice note on what his prospects were to a little girl in his after care (he wants to be a pilot for Delta when he grows up, according to the note). Watch out for the charmer, girls. I mean...really...watch out.

But overall, he's still a young 'un with all the accompanying growing pains that tend to be wearing on me a bit more than they are wearing on him. Or so I think, until he asks me why there are wars, or why there are kids who aren't as outgoing and friendly as he is that he tries to welcome into his orbit, or when he's going to be a big enough guy to do the things he wants to do - the stuff that sends his heart afire like being a semi-driving airline pilot, or getting married and having a job (yes, it's true, he thinks about that a lot), or seeing the animals he reads about regularly in the wild, or even owning a rat, a mouse, a ferret, or a turtle as a pet of his own.

He'll worry about things like, this morning, when I was going to get the brake tag renewed on our now-fixed car. He reminds me each religious school Sunday to pass him the money for his class' tzedakah (charity) collection in the morning. His capacity to worry about all kinds of things can worry me sometimes....but then he voices something that's more self-centered, like oh, what will happen to him in a certain situation?, or when can he watch a certain movie?, or can't I please pull out the birthday present his grandma and grandpa bought for him a little early?, and I am secretly relieved that I haven't been raising a complete saint, until the selfish goes too far and I have to rein him in. Basic kid behavior.

My son is an ongoing work in progress, as am I as his mother. We are proof positive that certain tasks are ongoing, that shaping one's life is never ending and having a hand in that process is an art in when to be a good parent and intervene and when to be a good parent and let it go. We are all still learning. But we're doing it together, planning for what we can but taking all the rest as it comes. No instruction books. Hell, we don't even have a TV with a converter box, forget cable or satellite.

Yet here we are, a couple of sillies.

I love that little character of mine. Happy birthday, little guy.

Well, crud, people. Seems the demand is outstripping the supply. Imagine that.

A report from Education Sector raises questions about the ability of charter schools and charter-management organizations to scale up as dramatically as their supporters might hope.

“The extraordinary demands of educating disadvantaged students to higher standards, the challenges of attracting the talent required to do that work, the burden of finding and financing facilities, and often aggressive opposition from the traditional public education system have made the trifecta of scale, quality, and financial sustainability hard to hit,” concludes the report, “Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools.”

As hard-hitting as the findings seem to be, the report is at the center of a controversy over whether the final text—released by the Washington think tank on Nov. 24—was watered down.

The main author, Education Sector co-founder Thomas Toch, asked to have his name removed from the final product. It “didn’t fully reflect my sense of the current conditions or future prospects for CMOs,” he said in an interview. “Charter schools are an important addition to the public education landscape and the best CMOs have produced great results. ... But the CMO movement has created only a few hundred schools in a decade, and even with more funding it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much faster without compromising the quality of their schools.”

Forget all the controversy surrounding the main author's claims that the report was actually toned down by supporters of school choice....just step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

In a perfect world, the charters wouldn't be relied upon as the only means by which public education could be reformed. They were never meant to be the cure for all that ails education.

In fact, many of the problems cited in the EdWeek article are problems that traditional public schools share - all of elementary and secondary education shares those problems, to some extent....but the added burden of a larger chunk of a charter's funding coming from private sources that are drying up in the current economic climate is making for some belt-tightening: ...the report as released last month omits some candid quotes from industry executives about the fragile economics undergirding some charter school networks and about how the credit crisis has affected the ability of charter school networks to raise money, as well as statistics showing the difficulty some CMOs have had in reducing central-office costs.

So the overall neglect of public education has brought us to this.

Even with the stimulus promised to the charters, the real problems are not being addressed. Why did we keep diverting finances for the education of our children to other things? Why did we keep supporting people in government at all levels who did this? Even if the money was going to the schools, but still ending up in the wrong places, why didn't we jump on that kind of thing much sooner and put a stop to it? (yeah, okay, here's one answer to that, locally speaking) Why the hell are too many of us so damned afraid to send our kids to truly integrated schools? Why can't we pay teachers more, no matter where they work, so that they don't have to take a second job? Benefits are not enough. They just aren't when you have to eat and get dressed and have a roof over your head, too.

We keep stumbling. Our children keep paying for it. And I keep beating this long-dead horse to a bloody pulp, as does Ms G.

Why we can't bury the thing and have a rollicking jazz funeral for it is beyond me.

Oy ve-E-eh-E-ey. More Hostilidays entries have reared their ugly heads:



Steven Wright once had a bit about sitting next to a beautiful blonde Chinese girl on a bus...

Well, here's the reality of Bucky Goldstein:



Those cowboys need to get schooled in dreidel spinning...hell, they need schooling in Judaism. Here's a primer:



My personal favorite part of the video? The Hillel/Shammai kung fu fighting. Nice to see the Talmudic battles of old represented.

The one moment in the whole Monday Night Football broadcast that made me giggle uncontrollably:



I mean - Brees to Obama??? Come on, people! How unreal is that?

Then again....

11 and 0.

Lemme say it one more time...

11 and 0.

Uh, Drew, you think you can pull some strings and get us some more flood protection in these parts?

Finally, we're off the road.

We passed the time at places both swank and mundane, freaked my son out by touring a coal mine and a salt mine (too many dark places, though he did grow to like the salt mine when he found out about all the movie props stored there that are on display - and Dan and I got a kick out of hearing about the Boy Scout troops that have sleepovers in the museum part of the mine only to be awakened at midnight by the blasting that is still going on in working parts of the mine), spent the night at some hotels, one of which provided clarifying shampoo for my apparently misunderstood hair, and capped it off with a visit with my parents before driving on back home.

It was there that I took advantage of access to their cable teevee and their periodicals.

The only reality show that has any business being on TV these days? Say Yes to the Dress. Not even house flipping shows are that much fun anymore - who can sell anything in this market? People are still getting married, so check out all the blowout sales, watch for those brides trying to stuff an entire dress into their purses without paying, and take some bets on which styles the women are gonna choose - there might be apple martinis riding on your pick.

In Newsweek, a reporter who was in captivity at Tehran's infamous Evin Prison details how paranoid the Islamic Republic's clerics are. (Clay has also found evidence that Iran's Revolutionary Guard has even less regard for the rest of the world's opinion. Shirin Ebadi is one of the people working very hard to heal her country, and her country is spitting in her face again and again and again. So not good.) The latest Time magazine, however, has declared the 2000's to be "the Decade from Hell" - and guess what event is the centerpiece?

And what about the Hurricane Katrina debacle? An act of God, right? Not really. When the storm raced toward New Orleans in late August 2005, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration feared the worst. For years they had been warning the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the city's 350 miles of levees, that its system was inadequate. The scientists wanted the Corps to revise the Standard Project Hurricane, a model that determines how extensive the levees should be. For instance, the Corps did not consider the tendency of soil to sink over time, and it excluded the possibility of a highly powerful storm hitting the city because that was unlikely, which violates sophisticated principles of statistics and just plain common sense. On Nov. 18, a federal judge ruled that the Corps was directly responsible for flooding in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward. "The Corps' lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions," the judge said. The government is expected to appeal.

Besides the Army Corps, mismanagement by the local levee boards contributed to substandard levees. Katrina wasn't even as bad a storm as had been feared, but the levees weren't as good as had been hoped. Some fact-based decision-making could have saved hundreds of lives and billions of dollars. Here, too, years of complacency were the rule, not the exception. The price was paid this decade.

Deteriorating infrastructure extends far beyond the Crescent City. At 6:05 p.m. on Aug. 1, 2007, the Minneapolis I-35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River collapsed, killing 13 and injuring 145. The National Transportation Safety Board later cited a design flaw as the cause, but the bridge had been classified as "structurally deficient" since 1991, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation Highway Accident Report. The bridge, which opened in 1967, was scheduled to be replaced in 2020. How many other bridges, roads and dams are death traps–in–waiting? No one knows, but you can't help wondering if squeezed maintenance budgets are making our country less safe. A 2005 report card on American infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (which gave mostly C's and D's) estimated that the U.S. needed to spend $1.6 trillion to bring our roads, highways, bridges and dams into good shape. Sure, the engineers are looking for work but know that the U.S. spends only 2.4% of its GDP on infrastructure, as opposed to 5% in Europe and 9% in China. Here again, why should a politician spend money today to fix something that won't collapse until tomorrow? Especially if he or she could get re-elected by cutting taxes instead.

Update, 12/1: BuggyQ has more on Time's verdict on the decade over at First Draft.

Another neat thing about visiting my family is checking out all the reading material they have in the form of catalogs. Loads and loads of catalogs. The catalogs are attractive and repellent all at the same time. So much stuff, so few bucks. Capitalist fantasies dance from their stapled spines, beckoning us to dispose of any disposable income we might still possess in these trying times. One of my personal favorites is one that is held together without any staples whatsoever: Neiman Marcus' Christmas Book.

The fun this year really begins on page 48.

Right? Fun?

Cupcake-shaped cars? Kinda sick-sweet.
A chandelier made of recycled plastic bottoms of soda bottles? I could make that.
A Neiman's edition Jaguar? Feh. Bring back the mauve Neiman's Hummer.

Oooh, a modern-day Algonquin round table! Roz Chast! Anna Deavere Smith! The Ephrons, Nora and Delia! Adam Gopnik! Henry Louis Gates! George Stephanopoulos! ???? Ummm, John Lithgow? And fine print on this one? *Final guest list will include at least eight authors committed to donating their time for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, pending scheduling arrangements. Final guest list is at our discretion. Substitutions could occur if unplanned absences become necessary.

Hell, I'll just donate to First Book instead.

I mean, you ever had the chicken at the Algonquin? Dry as a biblical bone.

I've opened this up on Humid City as well, where I gotta cut the Cthulu somehow...

....but I couldn't pass this one up, as it features a certain Rising Tide keynote speaker:



Remember where you came from, folks!

And don't worry 'bout me. Really.