We got a hanukah card in the mail from Rebecca’s grandmother today. It was a standard pre-printed hanukah card with cure little graphics and room inside for a handwritten message. The front had a rhyming poem about hanukah. The inside had the following message:

may this be a season unlike any other
with one little miracle after another.

yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh……..

Okay, before someone thinks I’m insinuating something about Rebecca’s grandmother, I just want to state that I’m sure it’s just a coincidence (it is, after all, a preprinted message on a card), but it is a funny one.

I had a meeting with management yesterday about a report I wrote. One of their “corrections” was the fact that I used the word ubiquitous. They felt it was too complex a word, and I should replace it with something simpler. I was reminded that our audience is both congress and our own front office (the higher ups who don’t even know who I am), so I should imagine I’m writing for an eight grader. This is actually the advice I’ve been given on multiple occasions, and I continue to find it pompous. I also believe that since most members of congress have graduated from law school, and the head of the division (the “front office”) is also a lawyer by trade, that this advice is simply a way for our new manager to cover for the fact that she probably didn’t know what the word ubiquitous meant.

Update: Thought of this one a little late. When the boss was telling the word ubiquitous was too tough a word, I should have commented that the word ubiquitous is omnipresent.

Now this is funny.

A 20-year-old German man turned himself and his child-porn collection into authorities after believing a message propagated by the recent Sober virus that law enforcement officers were investigating his activities, Germany’s Federal Criminal Investigation Office said on Monday.

full article.

There’s this old SNL Mary Catherine Gallagher sketch where the school (which is a catholic school for those of you who have never seen it), is having a school dance. One of the nuns goes around separating couples who are dancing too close together saying “leave room for Jesus”.

Here’s my idea: there have been a lot of engagements at shul lately. Next time I see a couple talking I should go up to them and say “What? are you leaving room for Eliyahu?” and nudge them closer together.
(don’t worry, not actually going to do it, just a though.)

When Leno steals this joke, I expect royalties.

Iraqi Ballot after democracy

Okay, seriously, the new ballot looks like this, although everyone’s favorite voting company, Diebold, did have their proposal, which was mercifully rejected.

Alright, I know what I want for Hanukah. I want the Atlanta Braves.

Now let’s see, if I owned the Braves, the first thing I would do was trade all their good players to the Phillies, fire Bobby Cox, and move the team out of Atlanta.

I usually refrain from weighing in on political issues for several reasons, the primary one being that I don’t think anyone cares what I have to say about the graduated income tax. Much like everyone else in the country I believe that “if I were in charge I could fix this place up…”, and like most everybody else I also know that it’s a lot harder than it seems. However, a few issued have really bugged me lately so I’m going to weigh in on them.

1. The “holiday tree”. Somehow (no one seems to know for sure), the capital Christmas tree got renamed a holiday tree. A few republicans worked hard to try and restore the name “Christmas”, and have been using this as an icon of how liberals have been fighting against Jesus/god/Christmas/whatever. As both a Jew and someone who is usually liberal (practically a redundancy), I must say that I’m actually more offended by a “holiday tree” than a “christmas tree”. No other culture or religion has a holiday that they celebrate with a tree covered in lights, and by calling it a holiday tree, congress is actually implying that Kwanza, Hanukah, and New years can also be celebrated with a tree. By calling it a generic term, they’re actually implying that I celebrate the “holidays” with a tree.

   It also occurs to me that whoever renamed this thing must think the American people are a bunch of idiots. Politicians are usually so concerned with image and how things look and are named that they think you can simply rename a tree and people somehow won’t know what it is. As I said, only Christmas uses a tree, so everyone knows it’s a Christmas tree regardless of what a bunch of politicians want to call it, so why not call it what it really is?

2. Murtha and the war Why is it that ideas are not judged by their intrinsic value, but by who says them? I find it remarkable that before Murtha anyone who opposed the war could simply be dismissed as a coward and their opinions safely ignored. Now Murtha’s opinion must be respected simply because he’s an ex-marine. Does anyone with any common sense actually think that opposing a specific war actually makes one a coward? Does being an ex-marine mean one is incapable of cowardice? This situation remind of of a Family guy episode where Peter Griffin has to convince congress to vote for war. He does so by telling congress that “anyone who opposes the war is gay”, and instantly the entire house falls in and voted “yes”. I would expect this sort of behavior from a middle school playground, not the United States House.
3. Delay – This one actually piggybacks well onto the previous issue. Everyone who I’ve heard discuss the Delay issue almost always discusses it from a partisan standpoint – that is to say that Republicans defend him and Democrats want him to stand trial. I find it repugnant that people have allowed doing what’s best for themselves and their party to supercede doing what’s best for the country. Now I’ll be honest, I don’t understand all the nuances of what he did or didn’t do, but I do know that what’s needed is some impartiality, and that’s exactly what will never happen because people don’t care about the truth anymore (just like the Murtha discussion above) people only care about what helps them and their party the most. (This exact same rant could have been written about the Clinton scandal or any of a hundred other scandals involving a politician.) This leads me right into…
4. political parties – They suck. Their goal is not to do what’s best for the country, but to do what’s best for them, and yet you can’t be elected without aligning yourself with one of them. Disgusting.
5. warning labels – Congress needs to pass a law mandating warning labels of boxes of dark brown sugar. It should say:
   

   warning! Do not try to carmelize dark brown sugar. If you do, you are more likely to burn down your apartment leaving only a large blob of foul smelling black sugar vaguely resembling the blob than you are to get carmelized sugar. Go buy a different kind of sugar and next time listen to your recipe more carefully!

Never before have I ever lived in a city which was as afraid of a few snowflakes as Washington DC is.