does this still exist?

Hey guys!! I think i accidentally posted to this blog instead of my Spain blog, so you now have a full update on my anticipation of spring in Caceres... riveting stuff. Who knew this blog still existed, haha. Is this a sign that we should revive "Newcomers and Working Women?" Hope you all are well!

Stay true to your school

The high school I attended, Mountain View High, is apparently ranked 224th best in the country. This seems about right: There's no way I graduated from a top 200 institution, but I couldn't fathom coming below 300th. I mean, right? Where would I have to have been educated? A fucking barn?

Worth noting: Gunn and Paly -- the oh we're so cool we went to school in Palo Alto -- high schools didn't even make the cut this year for the first time since 2003. I'll grant you that doesn't exactly pass the smell test, but neither does ol' MVHS being the 8th best high school in Northern California. I wonder if we got any points for having a student newspaper with its flag run down the left leg of the front page?

[pause]

Go Spartans!!! Go Spartans!!!

Thoughts on the Festival of Lights, or: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned to Love the Baum

I hate to interrupt this steady stream of everyone posting for something so self-indulgent, but I'd like to doff a cap for Hanukkah, if I may. The holiday, which started last night, is essentially known in three different ways: Most Christians know it as the Jewish Christmas, a few Christians and most Jews are aware of it as when some oil lasted eight days after a battle of some kind, and Jews who graduated from Hebrew High School in Palo Alto, Calif. can describe it as something more. (First link that came up for "true story of Hanukkah" + "assimilation" and I'm lazy.) Anyway! The Festival of Lights has one more special significance that I don't think gets enough play. This is what I'm talking about:


Shocked? Don't be. Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song" -- while unbelievably, unbelievably cliched at this point -- is, I would argue, a true keystone for American Jewry. Sandler first sang it on Saturday Night Live in 1995 and I believe that day turned the tide on more than just his career. Despite the tune's seeming novelty status and limited appeal, it actually did crazy well on the Billboard charts, even becoming a Top 20 "mainstream rock track" (whatever that is) when he released it on CD a few years later. (I mean, I still can't believe how into it that crowd seems for the friggin' Hannukah Song.)


The first ever public version of the song, on Weekend Update.

Before 1995, well, I was eleven. But in any analysis of Jews in pop culture to that point would suggest that being Jewish, frankly, wasn't very cool. It's not so much that Jews felt they had to hide they were Jewish, even recently (looking at you Winona Horowitz, I mean Ryder) it's that the public perception was that every one was Woody Allen (f.k.a. Allen Konigsberg): a nebbishy inept schlump in therapy. But that isn't exactly the case anymore. While some Jews still play the classic effeminate whiner (see: Braff, Zach) more and more often being Jewish is almost something oddly hip. Look at this Gap ad with Jeremy Piven, who has also done ads for JDate. Or so I'm told.


Somewhat unbelievably, he's wearing a Jewish star necklace in full view! That ran in, like, national magazines! This is the new Jew? Muscular and suave? Fair enough! The bottom line is that at some point, mainstream American culture decided it was kinda cool to be a little Jewish. Some will argue it was Jerry Seinfeld, whose show was famously turned down initially because it was "too Jewish." But as it became the most popular comedy of the 1990s, "Jewish humor" became more accepted until the point where countless awful sitcom writers today try to force gentiles to tell jokes like a Heeb.

But I point to Sandler, who gave young Jews their first piece of pop culture that was ours, the first cool thing that maybe our non-Jewish friends actually wanted to be a part of. Sandler pulled off one of the great social transitions of our lifetime in three minutes: he took the isolationism of being a young Jew at the end of the millenium in America and turned it into a cool kids club, full of gin-and-tonicahs and -- wink, wink -- absolutely no marijuanaka. It was around this time you started to hear people talking about others as "belonging to the tribe." And, boom, just like that, you were proud to have a Bar Mitzvah, to be going to Hebrew School (and even, oy vey, Hebrew High School, when all the actually cool kids were still smoking pot behind the In-N-Out Burger). See, so what if we were different? Listen to the radio!-- That song is about us!

So do you guys think I'm cool yet? Guys?

All in the game, yo, all in the game

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Today is Dec. 4. Not a big date in terms of holidays (unless you live in India, in which you're probably drunk already celebrating Navy Day) -- that is, until this year. That's because today is the day HBO is releasing Season 4 of their acclaimed show The Wire on DVD, only less than a month before the fifth and final season -- completed before the writers strike -- debuts in January.

Season 4 is still my favorite season of The Wire, and I didn't even see every episode when it aired last year. But now it's available for purchase and you can be damn sure it's on my Christmas list. Why am I so excited? I'll let America's TV critics answer that, from these reviews of Season 4.

"The breadth and ambition of "The Wire" are unrivaled and that taken cumulatively over the course of a season -- any season -- it's an astonishing display of writing, acting and storytelling that must be considered alongside the best literature and filmmaking in the modern era."
Tim Goodman, San Francisco Chronicle

"To me, what allows 'The Wire' to surpass 'The Sopranos' in the pantheon of greatest American TV shows is its ambition and its anger."
Aaron Barnhart, Kansas City Star

"This is TV as great modern literature, a shattering and heartbreaking urban epic about a city (Baltimore) rotting from within."
Matt Roush, TV Guide

"Brilliant, scathing, sprawling, The Wire has turned our indifference to urban decay into a TV achievement of the highest order."
Robert Bianco, USA Today

"When television history is written, little else will rival "The Wire," a series of such extraordinary depth and ambition that it is, perhaps inevitably, savored only by an appreciative few."
Brian Lowry, Variety

"They have done what many well-intentioned socially minded writers have tried and failed at: written a story that is about social systems, in all their complexity, yet made it human, funny and most important of all, rivetingly
entertaining."
James Poniewozik, Time magazine

"The Wire is one of the few times you'll watch TV and not feel like the people making TV think you're a fucking idiot."
Patton Oswalt, actor and comedian

At the end of the day, the best quote I can offer you is this, from Ms. Vickinson, being reminded of the significance of Dec. 4.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

USA! USA! USA!

Terrifying, yet hilarious. Kinda like democracy!



Vegas set the over/under on the number of statements and/or implications in this answer I would disagree with at a dozen. (And, yes, the over wins.)

Labor pains

1886: The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes (Local One) is founded.

Time passes.

Nov. 2, 2007: Jewman Capote buys his first-ever Broadway tickets.

Nov. 10, 2007: The IATSE Local One strikes, for the first time in the union's 121-year history.

Nov. 24, 2007: The night of Capote's tickets. He is in New York nevertheless.

Nov. 28, 2007: Stagehands and producers come to an agreement. Strike concludes.

Clap your hands say meh