Happy Eastover!

Or Passeaster, as with which your preference may lie.

Last evening my family celebrated both, as the lapsed Jews gathered with the lapsed gentiles and the never-were, and faked a quick seder under my direction to tell the story of passover and then eat a meal before digressing into drunken therapy complaining about how awful the people we didn't invite are and always have been.

This is that story:

"Okay, so Moses is a Jew, but he's adopted by the queen. He's basically the pharaoh's little brother. Until one day God's like, "You're Jewish," and he's like, "Damn." So he goes out and sees what it's like to be Jewish, except he's still rich and powerful and not a slave. So God says, "No, you gotta free them now," which he's cool about, figuring his brother will be down ince their dad was about to do that anyway. But it turns out since Moses left to learn about being Jewish his brother became kind of a dick and didn't free the slaves at his dad's death like he was supposed to. It's a free laboring class. Come on.

"So Moses is all "Dude," and his brother is like, "Yeah, I know," but God 'turns his heart' so he'll refuse to let the Jewish slaves go, so effectively nothing from this point out is really his fault and God's a huge dick.

"So Moses performs some miracles, which also happen to be horrible, horrible plagues upon the Egyptian people for something their king did because he was being Jedi Mind Tricked.

"Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader.
"Your sad devotion to this contemporary religion hasn't given you
clairvoyance enough to- wait, yeah, actually no. Go ahead."

"First Moses made his staff into a cobra, which killed and ate the cobra-staff of an Egyptian magician, just to prove out God was stronger than his god. The the real plagues started: the Nile turned to blood, frogs rained from the sky–which is pretty cool, actually–lice, "wild beasts"–so, like Egyptian antelope or whatever were running through the streets, so that was cool–pestilence–which destroyed the entirety of the nation's crops and food stores–boils on the face and all over, giants, painful hail hitting people in their heads, locusts–eating what little of the crops remained–darkness just blotting out the sky–which should have been the end of it, but the Lord still kept Pharaoh from letting the Jews go–and finally the killing of all first-born Egyptian children, essentially committing genocide against an entire people for the fun of it.

"Dude, I am way too high for this right now."
"Shut up, Ezakiah! My mom'll totally hear you!"

"Finally, God let Pharaoh let the Jews go, but they had to get out quickly, so they baked their bread before it had risen, so it was all chewy and gross–basically a Cliff Bar. Then for some reason Pharaoh changed his mind again and some generals chased after them, but the Jews walked through the Red Sea in that really cool animated scene that's all anyone remembers from Disney's The Prince of Egypt. Then all the Egyptians chasing them died, and the Jews wandered in circles for 40 years until Moses died to punish him for breaking some tablets when we got bored and started worshiping a golden cow statue while waiting for God to finish dictating some laws.

"And somewhere in there, God also "passed judgement" on the Egyptian gods, apparently, so they were real but pussies."


Luckily, I'll be spending all day today working, despite it being Sunday and Easter, so I won't have to deal with the Jews telling me I'm a bad Jew (Passover is officially over), or the Christians telling m I'm going to hell (they're all fighting with their own families over plastic eggs).

But God willing we'll all meet again in Exodus II: The Search For More Money.

Merry Easter-Eve

"Mother F-CKER. Whelp, I'm out six pieces of silver."

Ah, the day before Easter. Easter Eve, Holy Saturday, or–as I like to call it–St. Thomas' Day.

This marks the day when Jesus of Nazareth lay in his tomb, dead the day before, but before the day when his followers started seeing apparitions of him, checked his tomb, and said, "Oh crap he's gone."

Now, no one would have said anything the first day, because that's just bad form and comforting was required, but I figure today was the day someone, St. Thomas because why the hell not, first hit on Mary Magdalene.

"Ah, Mary, I know your grief, I too feel it. Surely, I was not his wife, but he was like unto a brother to me. And … it is a brother's duty to care for his widow, so I shall be here for you and your needs. I shall take you into my family and you shall want for noth–

"OH HEY JESUS DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE fuckshitass WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? SHOULDN'T YOU BE DEAD? WHAT'S THE JOKE HERE? Cock-blocking asshole!"

There's a pretty good reason to call him "Doubting Thomas," then. Brother could not believe he could get his game smacked down by a dead man.

Rules of "The Game"

Aaaaand I just lost it.

Until I was 18 I refused to have a "favorite band." It was stupid. You say you like The Beatles and somebody nearby shouts out, "Man … fuck the Beatles!" and you're expected to defend them or conversationally concede that the surviving Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr deserve to be forcibly copulated.

Then I stopped being afraid of what other people thought. Then I found a band so embarrassing to like, but loved so wholeheartedly that it stopped mattering. My favorite band is Long Island alternative quintet and former pop-punk losers Brand New. I don't even really like their last two albums, more the first for sadly ironic lyrics and the second for being AMAZING, and you kind of have to fold in the 2005 demo album that was semi-abandoned after early recordings of it leaked online. But fuck it, I love Brand New. What they did in the beginning, and how it fit into my life, that justifies in my eyes everything they crap out forever.

I'm 26, and I just realized why I loved them, and why I loved the train wreck that was Jersey Shore, and Joss Whedon's final failed TV series Dollhouse, and books about journalists touring with rock bands and wrestlers and emotionally damaged pick-up artists.

I checked a copy of Neil Strauss' "The Game" out of my local library. I walked in and got a library card just to read this. This beautiful piece of trash laid out on a canvas and dyed beautiful colors has clearly been checked out previously by just truly sad, sad people, an average of three times a month since the new year. It's fun to read about horrible people being absolutely brilliant at what at best can be described as psychologically fascinating, at worst as morally … evil, I guess. Vile, maybe.

But it's also fun to see where pages were once dogeared, despite the handy built-in red string bookmark; where an idle pencil mark wasn't completely erased, what on that page must have been a wise pointer meritorious of being jotted down.

And who am I to judge a single one of the losers to read this book before me. I very proudly sauntered up to the librarian in my post-business finest and checked out not a single other book to mitigate the social miasma that follows this tome. She even asked me, "You want to check this out?" as if she were confused. And I avoided a panic attack by a respectably not-so-slim margin as I did so.

Yes, I'm curious as to what's in this book on a blatant level. As confident and not self-depricating as I try to be, I have fear of rejections issues. The best way to overcome this is to fail. A whole lot. Spectacularly, if possible. In public. Have other people see it and walk away without having a damn heart attack over it. This book, I think may actually have some cogent points in between the horrifying mistakes that ultimately lead to the situation introduced on page 1.

I don't discount a priest's wisdom simply because I hate organized religion. Conversely, I don't discount brainless reality programming if I learn something from it unintended by the producers. [Note: I am not sure there is anything to be learned from Honey Boo-Boo except how to be terrible parents and/or give yourselves and your children early-onset diabetes.]

Just someone punch my in the sternum if I start wearing a feather boa and calling myself "Midnight" or something.

Photoshop You Are Making My Life Too Difficult

Maybe I just need to buy a gazillion more petabytes of RAM, but some days all I want is to be able to take a photo, maybe mess with the levels a little bit, and slap some centered text over that bitch.

Yes, sometimes I also want to Photoshop a man's head onto a famous celebrity Olympian for the purpose of impressing his friends and winning a bet, and sometimes I paint a former college President to highlight her uncanny resemblance to the puppet from Saw. And sometimes I'm even asked by my family to crop the girlfriend out of a photo of some guy who looks like my deceased great-uncle-in-law so his surviving fiance can have a picture of him but no one wants to even copy an original.

But some days you just gotta slap text on a bitch and "Innitializing Type tool" is about fifteen seconds of "What the shit was Adobe been doing the five solid minutes this mother was starting up?"

On Facebook Activism

This week the United States Supreme Court has heard–back-to-back–two landmark cases in the gay and non-hetero cis-gendered civil rights movements. The first yesterday regarded California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state by referendum, and today the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act which labels marriage for the purpose of federal benefits as exclusively between one man and one woman, and has already been overturned 6 times on its way to the Supreme Court.

This is the precipice over which we as a nation may fall or off which we may launch great heights. This is so important, it calls for incredibly flowery, corny language, because one day someone is going to write all of this down, and you damn sure want to make sure your argument isn't the one that keeps parents from using your name when they have kids.

However, popular opinion is a queer animal right now.

Voting-wise, conservativism  has had a sizable upswing resultant from economic woes and political fear mongering. This of course only polls those old enough to vote, with the time to do so in the middle of a week day, and angry enough about something to back a party rather over a single political issue.

The Internet is decidedly left-leaning, even if you take out the insane "hacktivists" and techno-anarchists, and advocating for a technological utopia ruled from the highest seats of T1 lines by Linux-based programming gurus who probably failed gym. Kidding aside, the Internet is the domain of the young and the idealistic, and the geniuses too stupid to know they can't just make something work, so who do. Daily.

Which unfortunately is also something true of the truly stupid. "Like this page to support breast cancer." Fuck you, I hate breast cancer. What are you even doing? Liking a Facebook page or sharing a photo, does absolutely nothing. It changes a couple 0s to 1s in a box in a room in a server farm in Kansas. That's what Facebook activism does.

Recently the White House had to up the number of e-signatures required for an official response to any petition created on its special website. Because nerds wanted to know why we haven't built a Death Star yet. Then the Library of Congress, not understanding technology in the slightest, made it a felony to unlock your phone. The Internet wrote a petition, raised the newly required number of e-signatures, and the White House responded in favor of rewriting the stupid immediately.

That is political action taking place on the Internet. Online petitions. That's it. And yes, also Anonymous DDoSing certain websites and WikiLeaks publishing damning data hidden by our government for the set purpose of maintaining political supremacy by keeping the population ignorant of vicious mistakes and terrible crimes. Those count, though they remain illegal maneuvers themselves.

Changing your profile photo to a picture of a cat does not save kittens. It might make Sarah McLachlan a few dollars in some roundabout way with all the YouTube clicks, but it does not save a abused kitten. It does negative good. Effort that could have gone into something useful is wasted on showing off to all your friends that you care about issues.

If every time someone feels the need to "support" anything on Facebook, they instead donated $1 to said cause, we'd probably have developed a functional artificial pancreas by now. We'd have afforded pricier lobbyists years ago. We'd have funded cheap gene therapy. The tax write-offs alone could help rebound the economy. But instead we make in-app purchases to refill out digital Mazerati's tank a little faster.

The only thing I can imagine Facebook sharing and photo trends affecting is if some of the Chief Justices go to check their Inbox at the end of the day, they become as confused and furiously annoyed as I was when I woke up one morning to discover 3,000 new updates of people all changing their profile pictures to the same hot-pink image and linking the same three newswire pieces over and over and over again.

Maybe then they'll just sanction looser definitions of marriage just to shut us the hell up.

On Unleavened Bread

This is probably the last thing I will say about being Jewish until Chanukah.

That's a bold-faced lie. I'll have to make a Jew joke before then. But it would not be a lie to say this is probably the last thing I will say about Jewish Holidays until then. Hell, I can only name three others off the top of my head, so odds are pretty good, I'd imagine.

"Let me tell you what it was like before the Dark Times, before the Empire…."

In any event, it is now officially Passover, and that means Jewish lkids the world over are going to school having to explain their peanut butter and jelly matzo sandwiches to everyone else at the lunch table. I don't have a terrible problem with matzo. It's actually quite delicious under cream cheese or jelly or both, or yes even peanut butter. It's no more terrible than Wheat Thins or an unsalted Ritz cracker.

However it occurs to me that matzo has no relation to the unleavened bread it supposedly symbolizes.

Matzo is made without leavening agents of any kind. Though it probably fails other "Kosher for Passover"/Parve tests, Wonder Bread even qualifies as it is puffed up with blasts of air and not yeast for the sake of expediency. Matzo is a ban on carbs that take time to rise.

"… this bitter Herb-" "Why are you saying it like that?" "Like what?"
"Putting so much emphasis on the H."

Yet in the story of Passover, the Jews in exile baked cakes of unleavened bread because they were in a rush to get out while the getting was good. (Considering an army chased after them because pharaoh changed his mind, not altogether a bad decision.) Consider that: they baked the unleavened bread. It does not say, "They prepared bread without leavening," it says they "baked [the] unleavened bread."

The Jews made their dough as per usual, but then baked it right away instead of waiting for it to rise. If we're being historically accurate about this, we should be eating bread that was prepared as if it were to be set aside to rise, and then baking the hell out of it immediately.

We should be chewing yeasty, gross, chewy-ass bread roughly akin to the pre-buttered breadsticks my mom finds in the back of the freezer aisle at her local Discount Food Plus.

"Let my babies go!"

On Passover | 2013

When we visited my grandmother for her 87th birthday luncheon of foot-long hotdogs, strawberry shortcake, and champagne, I found my old alphabet puzzle.

You will notice that is in Hebrew. The letters are, as the Aleph-Bet song refuses to allow me to forget:

Aleph -Silent, used for words that begin with a vowel sound
Bet - B
[Vet - V (Not considered its own letter for official/numerical/crossword purposes, predominantly used in the middle of a word)]
Gimel - G
Dalet - D
He (hay) - H
Vav - V (official V)
Zayin - Z
Chet - CH (phonographic X or Kh like in German, or the Scottish "loch")
Tet - T
Yod - Y (silent unless at the front of a word)
Kaf - K
[Khaf - (CH again. Second, long-Daled version only used as last letter of a word, no vowel)]
Lamed - L
Mem - M (Square-looking second version used only at end of word, no vowel)
Nūn - N (Long nūn only at end of word, no vowel)
Samekh - S
Ayin - ANOTHER TOTALLY SILENT LETTER
Pey - P (Has the dot in the middle.) Long version only at end of word
[Fey - F (Pey without the dot.) Also has a long version!]
Tsadi - Ts (And a long version…)
Kuf - K
Reish - R
Shin - Sh
[Sin - S (Not a full letter, just a different pronunciation of Shin, denoted by dot on the LEFT branch)]
Tav - T again (May or may not have a dot on the center!)

While I was nostalgia-ing out at work yesterday, trying deserately to remember what Samekh looks like because for some reason it always escapes me, I magically remembered an episode of Sesame Street showed to my class way back in Hebrew School, the first one I went to that was way too conservative and somehow simultaneously lawless and a livid nightmare of child-on-child torment and abuse.

But the show.

My god, it was terrible. So dumb. So dumb it's one of those train wrecks that comes back to haunt you years later so you ca show it to someone else like the Ring tape and say "See? SEE??"

It took me maybe 10 minutes of off-and-on searching at work between customers to find what it really was: "Shalom Sesame" a multi-part series produced between 1986 and 1990, and again recently as an Israeli version of Sesame Street, containing half-translated classic Street bits, and original segments with original cast and puppets.

What I saw was episode 9, "Aleph-Bet Telethon" in which Jerry Stiller runs a telethon to get people to donate Hebrew letters, because somehow I guess they all started vanishing from the Shalom Sesame street sign. Yup.

Anyway, Oscar the Grouch calls in between segmentsfor some reason, and realizes his berating call was answered by his cousin Moishe Oofnik ("oofnik" being Hebrew for "grouch"). He guilts his cousin about being a shitty grouch since he's helping, and concocts a plan to screw up the telethon by introducing a fake letter called "Yuchalechale," in which the hide a Yod they find. Ben Stiller's dad isn't buying it, and discover the hidden Yod, completing their Aleph-Bet.

Then Moishe tries to sell his fake letter on the cheap. Yup.

Now I want you to remember, this was a show produced to be pro-Judaism.

I also learned The Count is Jewish, which is actually a horrible stereotype of Romanian Jews when you see him wearing a yarmulke and little side curls. "One, ha-ha! One pound of flesh for the money lender! Ha-ha-ha!"