Quicksand and Sinkholes

Of the blogging sort, that is. Some people let their blogs linger on and on and others perform a radical blogectomy, deleting all their posts or even their entire blog. Several friends have lately decided to put a torch to what was their home on the Web. One of them routinely does so, along with almost all her other online accounts. It shouldn’t surprise me by now, but it still does. I sorely miss connecting with those online friends, many of whom I’ve known for close to a decade or more. On the other hand, other real life friends have taken up blogging with a passion and it amazes me they waited so long to do it. (Yes, SJ, you’re one of them. )

One of my favorite reads is The Pioneer Woman and her post on Ten Important Things I’ve Learned About Blogging speaks to me loudly, with the obvious exception of her second point, which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stick to and maintain my sanity. (Have I mentioned that I have a brown thumb?) In spite of having a blog, I am not a writer by nature (I tend to express myself visually) and after 8 solid years of daily business writing, my personal  writing “style” has taken a serious hit. Worse still, at times it’s hard for me to find things that I think would resonate with my readers.  Heaven knows there’s enough WordPress.com memes around (Plinky and Post a Day for example), but I find I’m not much of a joiner and tend to go off in my own direction and certainly at my own pace.

There’s a crazy number of blogs online these days, somewhere around 30 million on WordPress.com alone, and finding the blogs that speak to you is an enormous challenge. So if I haven’t said it lately, I’m thankful for each of you that takes a few minutes to stop by my little salon. Coffee?

BlogDay2008: The Tribe Edition

This year’s BlogDay2008 post has a bit of a Jewish bend to sharing 5 new-to-me blogs. Happily you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy them.

Stuff Jewish People Like: A spoof of the now famous “Stuff White People Like” and after the mega book deal clinched by SWPL, the SJPL people are probably slapping their foreheads saying, “Nu! Why didn’t we think of this first!?” As with many of the things I find on the Internet, the kasha with bowtie noodles has gone cold. If you like what you find there, please call their mothers to nudge them into coming back.

The Torah in Haiku*: Although they share a joint Wikipedia page, this site isn’t even remotely related to “Haikus for Jews” (unless you’re playing Jewish Geography). “Five Books of Moses, Add Japanese Poetry, Stir until ready” Brilliant.

Hebrew School: According to David, his music “…is an innovative use of the genres of Indie rock and experimental music to mitigate, through recording and performance, the disaffection of Jewish life in a large urban center.” A fascinating mashup reflecting David’s diverse enthusiasms and where you’ll also find a Bollywood version of “Hava Nagila” (Let’s all be merry!), except it sounds like they’re saying “Haba HaNabila”. Looking forward to hearing more of David’s own music on his site.

These last two are a bit of a cheat, because they aren’t new to me, but definitely worth sharing with you:

Jerusalemite: One of my very favorite plugged-into-the-Israeli-scene bloggers, Harry, has pretty much abandoned his personal blog (sob!) in favor of blogging on company time. Luckily for him, he’s the boss. “From a run-down corner office on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall comes Jerusalemite, the definitive English-language culture guide to the center of the world. Through our blog, event listings, maps and city guides, Jerusalemite gives readers the world over an up-to-date and specialized perspective on the various cultural doings in the Israeli capitol.”

HaKerem: The Israeli Wine Blog: Not to be confused with your Grandparent’s Sabbath dinner Manischewitz, Israeli wines have been winning major wine awards worldwide for a number of years. Avi’s blog “is here to bring the latest and also the greatest on the Israeli wine world — from the latest releases, to an exploration of the over 150 different wineries in Israel, to a discussion — and please join in — on how to help the world discover this hidden gem.” L’Chaim!

That’s this year’s BlogDay2008 roundup from me, but I’m going to leave you with a true bonus blog.

If laughter is the best medicine (next to chicken soup, of course), Benji Lovitt’s What War Zone??? should be on your daily menu. Benji made aliyah, that’s immigrated to Israel, a couple of years ago already. As any great comic would, he’s turned his culture shock into fodder for his humor.  But be warned! Ever since appearing on Israel Television’s Channel 1 a couple of weeks ago, he’s been possibly even funnier than before. Nu? What are you standing around here for?

Voices from the Past

My grandparents, Russian immigrants who escaped the pogroms at the beginning of the last century, made their way to America, met, married and raised a family there, were already elderly by the time I arrived and never really talked about what life was like in Russia. First of all because they didn’t want to talk about their previous life in Russia (they were both teenagers when they arrived in the US) and second I was too young to know enough to ask them.

Fast forward to high school and my closest friend. Her parents were both Holocaust survivors and I remember sitting on their living room couch, listening to my friend’s father recall how he and many others with him had jumped from a transit train bringing them to Sobibor and despite having been shot and left for dead, he survived. Although my friend’s father passed away a couple of years ago (z”l), his and his wife’s testimonies can still be heard online at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Scroll down the page to “Mastbaum”. In spite of the poor sound quality (it was recorded in 1983), their interviews are interesting not only because of their holocaust experiences, but also their recalling of what life was like in Poland before WWII. My 81 year-old Polish born mother-in-law still can’t talk about her experiences.

At 10:00 a.m. this morning, as a siren wails, we as a country will stand for a minute’s silence remembering those that died in the Holocaust. May their memories be blessed.

(Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on flickr.)

Code Red

Anyone who has been reading, watching or listening to the news from Israel knows that towards the middle of last week there was a huge upsurge in the number of rocket attacks from Gaza on the Israeli towns of Sderot in the Negev and Ashkelon along the sea coast, both having a close proximity to Hamasitan. At the end of last week, the Israeli government belatedly showed a moment of backbone and launched a ground and air offensive in an effort to quell these attacks.

Why Israel has to endure rocket attacks at all is a question that non-Israelis seemingly prefer to ignore, if they wonder at all. These attacks have been a daily event for months against Sderot and they are just as lethal and terrifying as the SCUD attacks on Israel from Iraq during the First Gulf War in 1990 and the Hizbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel during the Second Lebanese War in 2006. During the Gulf War we had close to 2 minutes to get into a safe room once the warning siren sounded. The residents of Sderot have 15 seconds.

(hat tip to Avi aka “British Academic” via David at Treppenwitz)

I am not happy for the suffering on either side, but sometimes …well, Expategghead says it so much more eloquently than I.

Knitting and Death

Competitive Knitters Battle to the Death in “Sock Wars” (hat tip: Liron) Honestly, I wouldn’t even bother entering this because I knit so slowly it would just be suicide.

From xkcd:

(Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?)

Craftzine Blog linked to this brilliant animation that I first saw last year and it still makes me laugh!

And speaking of death, Leo went quietly in the small hours of the morning earlier this week. The 5% that I’d managed to do was frogged down to the last stitch. RIP