BOJAC

BOJAC: The Best of Jewish A Cappella has been released...and we're not on it! boo!

big surprise there...

biking

i really want to get a bike-- I haven't biked much ever and certainly not at all in years, but the distance to school is onl 3.5 miles and I think I could handle it if I worked up to it and worked on safety. Unfortunately, I don't think there is any bike storage in my building....but i really would love to get a bike. looking at craigslist, broadway bike school, my bike and bikes not bombs. any suggestions?

Workers approve a new Stop & Shop contract - Boston.com

the Stop and Shop UFCW workers approved a new contract. It's a good thing we didn't choose their campaign for the labor seder. Although we could still highlight their recent victory...

my recent post, Raise Your Voice for Darfur (part II),cross-posted on Jewschool, was picked up by USA Today's "Blog talk: other voices from the Web" site! but has not yielded many comments. i think it was rather boring and unprovocative. not sure why USA Today would like that.

Raise your Voice Against Darfur (Part II)

In the past few weeks, I heard words and music and saw visual footage from several wonderful folks promoting action on the genocide in Darfur, both sponsored by different segments of the Boston Jewish community. The first was a benefit for AJWS at the Kavod House, advertised in the first "Raise your Voice Against Darfur" post on jewschool ,where the wonderfully talented and inspiring Minna Bromberg sang a collection of her own works and mostly Pete Seeger- folk songs. The concert also included teaching about our responsibility to act on Darfur from Rabbi Or Rose of Hebrew College, and a brief column about supporting targeted divestment from Sudan by Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes.

Then, a week ago Tuesday, Tufts Hillel sponsored a dinner with and lecture by Nicholas Kristof, who has been a lone passionate voice in the public sphere on Darfur.

Although I was at the May 2006 DC rally and have remained [very] marginally informed on the issue, these two events marked a more specific mental engagement with the issue on my part. Nick Kristof presented footage of some individuals he had met in recent trips to Darfur and neighboring Chad, which, coupled with his commentary about their situations, seemed difficult for the audience to take. My initial reaction to the lecture, was that it was overall pretty good but not stunning. Kristof alluded to the regret we would feel, as Americans, in the future, if we looked back and saw that we had done nothing. In the same vein, he seemed to list future reflection as a primary reason for which we should act and encourage action by others on Darfur. To me, this was initially pat at best, and disconcerting at worst-- I couldn't imagine that this was his primary reason for continuing to visit and write about Darfur, in a way to which nobody else has come close.

I remembered some things he had said at the dinner, when he was asked how he has the courage to return to such dangerous situations knowing he has a family and a life back home. He didn't really have an answer except to cite the bravery of the people in Darfur and the fact that they are always in much more danger than he, who goes in for brief visits and can always leave.

While I came away from both events with a sense of sadness that we are doing so little, that so few people care, and that I have expressed such minimal interest in the issue in the past, I didn't necessarily come away with specific plans for action, beyond suggestions Kristof had given, to continue the phone calls to legislators and awareness promotion that has been characteristic of the campaign to this point. This doesn't strike me as entirely enough of a solution for a public campaign, given the lack of government action on the issue.

But I must consider the level of bravery exhibited daily, weekly and monthly by Kristof, and by Awatif Ahmed Isshag, a 24 year old woman in Darfur, the subject of this amazing LATimes story, who has been tacking a monthly "newspaper" to a local tree for 10 years, reporting about the mundane events and atrocities in her community. I cannot imagine the courage and bravery it would take to do what Ms. Isshag does and her continued passion for journalism and hope for her future.

So since, I don't have the time to commit to a full knowledge and analysis of the situation, given other time commitments, I shoud stop sitting around and criticizing what I perceive as a lack of strategy and nuance on the part of Kristof and others, and be brave enough to fit one small action into each week so that maybe, Awatif Ahmed Isshag, and peers like her, will be able to live out her dream of completing a Masters in Economics at the University of Khartoum and leading a development company.

(cross-posted on Jewschool)

Regulating out Butter & the Secret Jewish Coke Stash

this is the problem with government regulation:

"This artificial trans fat is the kind that New York City health officials decided to ban from restaurants, citing health studies that show that even a couple of grams of it a day can significantly increase the chance of a heart attack. Whether natural trans fats have the same health effect is still being explored by scientists, and some researchers believe the natural ones may actually be beneficial.

But to the Food and Drug Administration, which is in charge of most packaged food labeling, there is no difference between the trans fat that occurs in cows and other ruminant animals and the kind that is artificially created and favored in large-scale food manufacturing."

It perverts science and creates irrelevant law while missing half the problem.

The article in today's NYTimes talks about why some bakers are being forced to switch from butter to processed fats in order to avoid the small amounts of natural trans-fat it contains. This totally proves Michael Pollan's "nutritionism sucks" argument.

It's also reminiscent of some of the seemingly bizarre and arcane aspects of Halachah, Jewish law, especially involving Kashrut. We have some written or oral code, whether it is the Torah, Talmud or Federal Register, and since someone once wrote it, even if some detail now (or even at the time as is the case with the FDA rule) makes no scientific or common sense, based on the spirit of the law, the status quo is to follow it to the letter, sometimes even erring on the side of stressing those details over others that are actually useful.

Of course with Pesach coming up, I'm thinking of the restrictions on kitniyot, which have all sorts of serious impacts on the way people who don't eat meat observe the holiday. I would say spending 8 days worrying about finding protein sources pretty much zaps most of the brainpower that could be spent on, you know, thinking about what it was like to be a slave in Egypt and how we can work towards liberation in our own lives and world. Some might argue that that's the point, but that doesn't seem to be the intention, correct me if I'm wrong.

In other Pesach-related minutiae of food ingredients, I found this thorough blog post about why non-Jews should be excited Passover is coming up. At least if they are looking for soda without corn syrup and don't feel like heading down to Mexico. I had a similar epiphany myself recently, while learning about the make-up and uses of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in a nutrition class. Suddenly the annoying task of looking for Ou-P soda each spring became somewhat ironic, when I realized that there might be a whole segment of the population unaware of this secret source of sugar-sweetened Coke that they could have access to, if only they lived in an area of high-density Jews and happened to know about the intricacies of Jewish dietary tradition for Passover. I doubt it actually affects that many people, but it brings up so many interesting questions about production--

How much non-HFCS soda is produced for the Kasher L'pesach crowd?
Is it actually profitable to Coca-Cola/PepsiCo/Cadbury Schweppes/etc. to do so?
Why do they do it?
Do they need separate production facilities?
Would other consumer segments be interested in purchasing a similar product for [clearly] different reasons?

cross-posted on the Jew and the Carrot

traveling the internet

Bill Bowles is traveling the world, and the internet. After receiving an email from a mutual friend about Bill's impending adventures around the world, I checked out his site, and found a very cute intro video using the NYC Subway system as a visual (and auditory) metaphor for his planned travels of the internet, or rather, his world travels which will be posted daily on the internet. Bill sails this week for London aboard a freighter.

Inspiration

It's amazing how much sun and warmth affect my ability to be inspired and interested in the outside. Or to see the glass as half full, how much the cold and winter make me dwell on my own problems and necessities. In the past 72 hours of temperatures above 40 F, I have cooked my 2nd pot of lentils ever, gone to the gym twice, and started most of my homework for next week. Oddly enough the latter two are the astounding feats to anyone who knows me. Hopetfully this kick will continue.

Other moments of inspiration include when I pass by Ben Shahn's work quoting Maimonides (pictured at left) each time I walk to the Tufts Hirsch Health Sciences Library.

And finally, I have sung Psalm 118 Verse 22:
אֶבֶן, מָאֲסוּ הַבּוֹנִים-- הָיְתָה, לְראשׁ פִּנָּה , a thousand times during Hallel but somehow never knew that it was the meaning behind the Bob Marley lyric, literally translated "The stone which the builders rejected is become the chief corner-stone." Special Blog Points to the first person who can name the Bob Marley song. cuz, you know, so many people read this blog.

Gastronomic Gatherings

Several food-related items I intended to post in the past few months:

• A 12.27.06 NY Times article, You Are What You Eat: 2006 and the Politics of Food - New York Times, capitalized on the meeting of the minds: Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser spoke in various forms around the NY metropolitan area last fall. The article catalogued some of the ways that food policy became mainstream news, including the e. coli outbreak, talk about obesity, Omnivore's Dilemma, The Nation food issue, Wal-Mart going organic and the trans-fat ban, that made 2006 as "the year everyone discovered that food is about politics and people can do something about it,” according to Nestle.

If there was a need for validation of career choice, I think it arrived.

Also, a shameless plug on the theme of 2006 food news: I don't think I ever mentioned my piece on the e. coli epidemic in Balance, the Tufts Daily's Nutrition and Health Supplement.

• Another 2006 morsel: Interview of Eric Schlosser in the Guardian. I still haven't seen Fast Food Nation, but also haven't met anyone who has.
  

shooting on st marks

So about an hour after my post yesterday, nicole informed me that there was a shooting of a cop (by another cop's husband) on our corner in Brooklyn.

This Daily News report of the shooting is particularly ironic because one of the reporter is Veronika Belenkaya, who wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun with me, and was the reporter who did the inside investigation of the bouncer at that club in the E. Village where the college student was killed last year.

p.s. this blog needs a f---ing facelift. specifically the sidebar on the right. oh well, one of these years...

I miss New York.

It comes in waves, but when I'm in the middle of a wave, I miss it a lot. I don't know if it's the actual city of New York that I miss [and the city thus includes the sprawl around it, including Long Island, but as such: sprawl, and not for its own sake, in and of itself], or just the fact that that's the metropolitan area I'm familiar with. That is to say, [that's my new favorite turn of phrase, which I don't use nearly enough] if I was from some other city but had spent some time in New York, would I sill miss New York or would I miss the other city. Clearly impossible to tease those out.

My neighborhood in Cambridge is not entirely quiet, and the quiet/semi-quaintness of it is somethign I very much enjoy, but at times a wave will wash over me and I'll have a visceral image of some random smog and traffic-choke street in an outer borough, with non-english music blasting from a silver minivan, and I feel pangs of loneliness. I definitely more and more think about living in Northern California (maybe Marin county if I can afford it. or Oakland) or western Massachusetts, or maybe even somewhere more adventurous, but it seems like I may end up back in New York just out of sheer practicality.

Things that I take for granted, like the fact that I'm able to switch from my normal speech/dialect in the context of stories or quotations to a New York accent- this amuses people from other parts of the country to no end, and I don't quite understand why. Isn't it just like a bilingual non-accented English speaker being able to insert accented words from the other language into non-accented English speech patterns?

--Speaking of which-- I've received numerous comments of late, upon meeting new folks, about how I don't "sound" like I'm from Long Island. Life goal number 1: Check! --

But yeah, the way I explained it to someone recently, is that, you can easily find lots of diversity--cultural, economic, gastronomic, etc.--here, but you have to seek it out a bit harder than you would in New York, (at least the parts of New York, I'd be able to afford and want to live in) where it's just in your face, all the time. Which can get overwhelming, especially when combined with all of the development, gentrification and clear efforts ot marginalize that diversity and push it farther away from the "civilized" parts of New York that attracts the
throngs of tourists.

But any other place seems like sort of a joke, in comparison.At least any place that claims to be diverse and doesn't immerse you wholeheartedly in one particular culture, which as a different option would be fine, but this half-way, half-assed situation is just always a little depressing when you know what it's like to go all the way.

Lehman raked in the big $$

According to the Boston Globe, former Cornell prez Jeffrey Lehman had the highest salary of any Ivy League president in 2004-2005: $1,004,034

As Harvard is on the eve of selecting its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, maybe we should revive the investigation into Lehman's axing. Or at least until we find out the salary numbers on his replacement, David Skorton.

I'm currently watching The View on week 3 of my winter vacation from school: They've been having quite a bit of heated debate, now that Rosie has returned from her week-long vacation, and I've been enjoying it for the most part.

However, there is a bit of hypocrisy- Rosie and Joy, and even sometimes Barbara, have been spouting off about the Iraq war, explaining clearly, many of the simple arguments used by the Left, but mentioned scarcely by the Democratic bigwigs: they go off about how Americans aren't seeing all of the gruesome details that were banned from the media by the Bush administration, etc.; they talked about how people don't care enough about it, perhaps, due in part to the restricting of bodies on TV, but then they spend the majority of the show focusing on the celebrities, winter make-up, and other things that Americans are obsessed with instead of caring about the trajectory their globe is taking to hell in a handbasket. and then they wonder why nobody cares enough about the war...

The other odd thing is that following each of the first two hot topic/discussion segments, there were strange pseudo-PSAs that counteracted the main point just made on the show. First, Rosie etc. were responding to the latest Donald Trump nonsense, with Rosie highlighting how ridiculous is that he actually uses "fat" as an insult--as if it's news to her that she's fat. After talking about whether and how the word fat is used in the Carpenter O'Donnell household, they talked about whether you should express concern to the child if your child is fat...They talked more about if you should tell your child to lose weight or not do anythign or try to make them more active, etc...Joy talked about how they can tell whether you value thinness even if you don't say it to them directly, by observing your own behavior about your own weight.

Then, as soon as they went to commercial break, there was a ridiculous ad from the Dairy Council, about how to get your child to lose weight via exercise and other things and of course, by drinking milk "instead of" sugary drinks. I have other comments about this commercial, of course- I couldn't believe it was from the Dairy Council, but then the milk part made perfect sense. But the fact that it came after this segment was pretty funny.

On the next segment, they were bashing Bush, in quite a good, drawn-out, consistent manner, with Joy referring to Sen. Jim Webb's experience standing up to Bush about his sons coming home from Iraq. Elizabeth jumped in with the oft-used semantic argument about how parents can't "send" their children to Iraq- the children must enlist themselves, which is totally not the actual point. Rosie made a good comeback, explaining to Elizabeth and the audience the relationship between wealth and likelihood of joining the army in order to get a college education- a clear, and concise point. As soon as they went to commercial break, not only was there an ad for the Army, but it was directed at parents- to convinve their children to join the armed forces!!!

I'm starting to wonder if they strucutre the ads to relate to the content in this specific way, something which I'd never thought about before. Isn't The View live, though?

new frontiers in eco-kashrut

relaxation

aah. I stil have one final left, but am taking the time for some nice TV time and relaxation.

Dork that I am, I was very excited when I got home and turned on the TV and found a wonderful episode of Scientific American Frontiers about Obesity...I think it was a repeat, but was really quite informative, even for someone who is studying these things at the graduate level. The best parts were a food lab studying children at Penn State and a segment about the traditional diet of two tribes in the SW United States, one of which was the Pima, (I forgot the name of the other one), and how the traditional diet of plants gathered from the desert prevented diabetes in this population supposedly genetically predisposed to diabetes through the "Thrifty Gene." I enjoyed Alan Alda asking one of the elders "What are the ways in which this food connects you with your culture?" It was like a little food anthropology experiment gone PBS. Heaven.

Anyway, yeah, I said... I'm a dork. It's really nice to have some downtime to one's self. As this semester is coming to a close- I only have a statistics take home final remaining and then I'll be heading down to New York on Sunday or Monday.

I just saw a commercial for Freedom Writers, a new movie opening in January, and even the trailer made me tear up a bit. Looks great--- It supposedly takes a place in Long Beach, where my roomate is from- she has told me tales of great diversity in the district, I think this movie, which is supposedly based on a true story, portrays a different version of that story, although I'm sure it wasn't actually filmed there.

Which brings me to mention that there's an insane number of movies out right now, or that have been out in the past month- Usually, I'm reluctant to see anything in the movie theater more than 2 or 3 times a year, but there seems to be a turn towards actually making good movies.

I really wanted to see the Last King of Scotland, as well as Fast Food Nation, although I'm not sure those are playing anymore. Then there's Borat, Babel, Volver, 3 Needles, Blood Diamond, and now this new film...oh, and Bobby looked pretty good too.

Any suggestions on how to choose, now that I will be finding myself with a bit of free time? Recommendations for light reading would be great as well, although I definitely have a list in my head and lots of NY Times to catch up on....hmmm...oh, to not be a student again....

Update 05|05|07: I just discovered this wonderful report on the study of traditional Tohono O'odham foods, the featured subject on the Scientific American Frontiers show above. Read for more information...

what's next? BDSM on the bimah?

check this out.
(post title not intended as commentary on the actual Committee on Law and Standards decision, but on the comic.) :)

fair trade

I'm currently in the middle of crazy crunch time, writing 2 papers, 2 presentations and 3 finals (plus more stuff) in the next two weeks.

I found these interesting blogs while researching for my Fair Trade paper:
http://fairtradecoffeeinperu.blogspot.com/
http://www.poorfarmer.blogspot.com/
http://greenlagirl.com/
http://www.fairtradecoffeenews.com/

your fire, your soul

in honor of the upcoming thanksgiving, the lyrics to your fire, your soul by dar williams:

Button up that shirt you're supposed to wear.
Don't forget your airline ticket or to brush your hair,
Show that family that you care.
But could you wear something that celebrates
Everything you love, and maybe what your family hates.
'Cause that might be what it takes.

It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.

First thing they'll say's take off your shoes,
And they'll say they want your story, but they get confused,
By all those words you use.
A year ago your car went off a cliff,
And you saw an angel in midair who said you'd live.
Well, that's a story you can give.

It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
Your fire, your soul, you shouldn't have to go.

And they'll say, "You're family, you belong to us.
You can stay at home and have our love and trust,
But any day now one of us could die,
and if we make you suffer don't you want to find out why,
'Cause we love to watch you try,
With your fire, your soul, your soul.
It's your fire, it's your fire, it's your fire.

Then you'll fly home and get the flu,
And you'll keep staring at the ground, you always do,
When they get their time with you.
You are not a punching bag, my dear,
I think your darkest day should have some light this year,
I think you should stay right here.

It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.

also.....we won! yay! I've had just a wee bit of spring in my step since Tuesday night, and especially since Thursday when George Allen miraculously conceded defeat. I though this day would come, but not so soon. Just when I turn away from politics and marginally stop caring, hope is restored.

And this was my election voting non-absentee for a non-school board vote. Which was rather less exciting in this great Commonwealth, because we have paper ballots here, unlike the lever-style voting machines of my youth in New York.

My sister and I had a discussion, agreeing that more people would vote if the levers were used everywhere, because well... it's just cooler. Or at least it feels cooler and more part of something.

I didn't even get to play around with hanging chads here, only black markers to fill in scantron-like bubbles at the polling place which was, excitingly, a mere 2 blocks from my apt.Yay for the People's Republic of Cambridge and our 87% of the vote that went to our Rep. Michael Capuano. And Yay for the taking back of America. I think Howard Dean was just a few years before his time...