It turns out Ha'aretz doesn't do a print edition any more. It would probably cost something like $500 a year if they did. There's the digital edition that's about $120 a year and I don't need it to read at least most of it, but I'm subscribing anyway because I have to atone for my shit-talking about them and agreeing with others who shit-talked it.
The rabbi also told us, again, that Obama was a great president for the Jews, that he supported Israel more than any other president. I have to trust him on this because I know he researches the hell out of things, especially politics. This is the opposite of the popular impression that Obama, a guy whose middle name is Hussein, wasn't very good for Israel.
I don't know where this stuff comes from. It's like it floats in the air. I remember long ago, at a ham radio meeting, one of my friends there going up to the chalkboard to draw some kind of diagram or something and writing out "Israel" and my trying to fuck up his spelling, "I-S-N-T-R-E-A-L..." Or another one of the ham radio guys talking about using drip irrigation that "Our friends in Israel invented" and myself making a sour face. Or my giving shit to a street person in the City who was making little bits of jewelry, some of which were Magen Davids. Just fucking stupid.
Of course it doesn't literally float around in the air like pollen; it's got to be little things in conversations, online, etc. You pick up on the little things and learn that that's what the cool kids think.
Even back in the 80s, I remember moving to a small apartment complex in Costa Mesa, California and the first people who befriended me made sure I was equipped with my own copy of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.
I just drew out my little map to get to this big theater in Campbell for my Next Big Adventure(tm) the erev (night before) Rosh HaShana (literally head, rosh, of the year, ha-shana) service. It's an old 1930s theater and looks huge. To think my mother and her sister, my aunt, performed in places like that, and my mom never told us.
How could she not tell us about something that cool? Was it that her big numbers were in Yiddish? Was it that the music she'd played sounded so different from the pop and rock we listened to? Somehow she knew about tap dancing too, and I believed as a kid that Mom had a pair or two of tap shoes in her closet. I don't know if she actually did, but I had that impression.
My mom was not actually a very nice person, but I think it was because she was intelligent, and sensitive, and hurt. Born in 1937, she'd have been 5 when the war broke out. Who knows what kind of flak, haha, she and her family got in the isolationist years leading up to the war, Father Coughlin, Bund rallies, and the rest. If most of your identity was Jewish or doing Jewish-type things, and you've got to hide that, it can make for an unhappy life.
I see it on Reddit all the time, people finding out they're Jewish and were never told they were by their parents. Or the surprise when they're in their 40s or something. "Hey I never told you but you're Jewish".
And ... wow just wow. It turns out my subscribing to Ha'aretz, which I just did, triggered the fraud detection on my card, and disabled it. So when I went to make my weekly Harris-Walz donation, the card didn't work. I was robo-called by the bank, went though a bunch of choices, and then it concluded by saying my card is active again. I guess any international transaction would do this. My bank is going to have a fit if I'm still using them when I move to Israel.
I finally got going out of here at a bit past 5. The end result being that I started playing at Whole Foods at a bit before 6. I did my thing, and after an hour had made $33. I decided I'd play until 7:30 but by 7:20 I noticed whatever was gong on on the corner, with tons of police cars and flashing lights, we getting people's attention so I packed up. I walked over and asked a couple people what was going on. They said it was a guy inside the building (it turns out the building, an erstwhile collision repair place, simply had a squatter) and we talked a bit and I mentioned I'd had a pretty good day and the lady said "Oh, you do deliveries?" and I said that I'm the trumpet player and they said they were going to go over and see me. The guy wanted me to play some Cuban tune I didn't know, but I thought "El Solo Toro" by Herb Alpert would go over pretty well so I played that and it did. The guy tipped me $12 so my total was $45.
I went in and got some chicken and vegetables and a pack of those little bottles of wine. and went upstairs to watch the incident, the view being good up there. But not much happened. I talked with some different people and we joked around. It was a nice bit of escapism, really.
Eventually I did the rest of my shopping and rode back here. Nothing to do but put 4 boxes of stuff that's been listed into the warehouse, catch a big black widow spider and put it outside, start a load of laundry, and wash hair, brush teeth, those last things best done before bed rather than in the morning.
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