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BS”D
A harmless dummy hung in the spirit of Purim in Chicago
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They should have hanged a harmful dummy in Teheran instead!
BS”D
I received the following from a drinks distributor who is very concerned about underage drinking on Peerim:
“I can provide you with kosher lemehadrin Iranian alcohol free turpentine from the same barrel that Homon drank from before he went up on the 50 amois swing set. $300 a gallon is 20% off the usual price of $200 a gallon and it is under the hashgocho protis of Erev Rav Yishmoel Dovid Weiss and Haham baLeylot Ahmadinejad of Teheran. Please fax as many credit card numbers and bank transfer details to my associate Mgobongo Akadele Prince in Nigeria and I’ll ship 3 gallons out to you in time for you to serve the turpentine at your Purim event. (Yes, turpentine burns and you can use whatever is left to set an insurance fire to cover the cost of the turpentine!)”
BSD (Thanks Smartcookie but I’ll be gone Shushan Purim :))
Kind of an oldie, a rehash of one of the first Creedmoor posts anywhere:
Give your matnois le’evyoinim money to the Federal Koilel Relief Fund:
We provide essential aid such as free 2000 dollar sheitlach, Prada tichlach, Lexus repair and lease payments, new chandeliers, and lavish simchas including simcha outfits to Federal Koilel almonos, meaning women whose husbands are learning in FK and did not leave them with access to the offshore bank accounts, so that they can support themselves and their “yesoimim” with the bare essentials of the pre-Federal Koilel haimish lifestyle.
How often do we hear the cry of a “Federal Koilel yosoim”: “Mommy, Tatty’s partner is out and his son is having a huge Bar Mitzvah because he was smart enough to moiser Tatty!” “All the other girls wear a new Shabbos dress every week and I’ve been wearing the same Prada for 2 months now ever since Abba went away!”
And what of the eishes chayil who is embarrassed to tell her neighbor whose husband is now on trial himself: “Byla, I ripped my Prada tichel last night and Gimpel is in Otisville again! Can’t you lend me one?”
The cries of those who are suffering are heard in the boutiques and department stores, in the car dealerships and at the shaitelmacher’s, where their huge and frequent orders often brought parnosso, cash, no questions asked, to our local merchants which enabled them to keep overcharging the rest of us poor schnooks who pay on credit.
Help these poor children and women whose fathers and husbands have done so much to get their names on the buildings where you daven and learn by sending your matnois le’evyoinim gelt to us.
BS”D
Tomchei Shabbos, Masbia – food and daily needs for poor including newly poor due to economic situation. Both operate in Queens; collect for TS of Queens if you want it to go locally as each TS may be independent.
Your local bikur choilim is often the go-to address for all types of help because of the stress a medical emergency puts on a family LA and they need money to do this. I don’t know what it is called in your area; ask your rov or a local “macher”.
EY tzedokos: Meir Panim (food and clothing), Ezer miTzion (medical especially yenne machle), Yad Eliezer (food, clothing, hachnossos kallah).
BS”D
Here in Ukraine, we just go back to the pharmacy the next morning and get MORE 96’er!
BS”D (back only until Shushan Purim and ONLY for Purim spirit)
Little Horeshtigoleh* Ahmadinejad, the seven year old illiterate daughter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (aka Homon) and his wife Azam Farahi (Zeresh ishtoi) is being hailed as a hero for turning Iran into a nuclear state and thereby enabling her depraved father to impotently threaten the world once again.
“All I did was to figure out how to use the microwave that Mommy brought home from the city dump last year,” the young girl said. “Mommy is too busy walking the streets and checking everyone’s veils to make dinner for me when I come home from madrassa, so I had to figure out how to make hot goat rinds myself. The microwave Mommy bought doesn’t have a door because Mommy said microwave doors are un-Islamic so I asked my brother Agag to teach me how to microwave with the door open, and he said he would in exchange for my 10 copies of “Farida and the Revolutionary Guards” comics that I can’t read anyway.
So he stuck a pencil where the door was supposed to close and he taught me what the word “ON” looks like. I am so happy I was born a girl because I don’t have to learn to read the way Agag does. He is 13 years old and he can even read four letter words – he is SO smart! Then I pressed the button the way Daddy wants to do to the Zionists and boom, the whole microwave blew up and when Mommy came home she said Daddy would be so proud of me because Agag and I were glowing in the dark and that means our glorious Pistachio Republic is now a nuclear state!”
* I promise, this is NOT an obscene word in Farsi because a few Persians might hang out here, but if you go to a Persian restaurant and order this you might get a few odd stares.
BS”D
I just ordered the mehadrin version of Windows 7. It removes all pictures of women and has a choice between Yiddish and Hungarian interfaces. Instead of anti-virus, it has a built in dybbuk remover.
BS”D
If there is no label, how am I to know how many hechsherim my tuna bagel has and whether it is hamoitzi or mezoinois?
BS”D
LOL her husband is (apparently) the tuna bagel.
EDITED
BS”D
And of course fruitcakes are half baked by definition, but be careful of tuna bagels which are half baked as they are the types who run around with flashing lights when there is no emergency etc etc.
Incidentally, is a half baked fruitcake considered maachal ben Drusoy?
BS”D
Just make sure your tuna bagel or fruitcake is pas yisroel, kemach yoshon, with a reliable hashgocho.
The best place to find mehadrin fruitcakes in the US would have to be in Monsey, at Beck and Weiss’s Halb-Bakerei (half-bakery) on Saddle River Road.
BS”D
Otisville, a pleasant retreat in upstate New York, has a minyan but security concerns make it hard for those who are not in the koilel there to daven in the beis medrash.
-see you Purim!
BS”D See everyone somewhere around Purim time when I flood the jokes and humorous items again with escapades of the brave yingerleit of Federal Koilel d’Otisville. My 10 odd days of forced vacation, which I resent because of the connection with notzri holidays, is over BH, so no more time to play here. I’ll pass by occasionally when something outrageous happens, but really I won’t be online much for non-business reasons until Chol Hamoed Purim.
BS”D
How do we know that Gan Eden is in Gruziya (Georgia)? Is it not written: “biSHVILI nivra haoilam”?
BS”D
No, I was personally involved in one such case, one of gross negligence where a lot of money was involved because one party was very special but lacked money and the other was ill but had a very wealthy and powerful uncle who would pay whatever was necessary to shadchan and zivug alike to hide that illness and get him as good a shidduch as possible. The crook of a shadchan took the money, made the shidduch, and coached the ill one on how to behave.
There are many, many more out there where the negligence was not as gross but sholom bayis problems cropped up immediately and divorce took place within the first year LA.
BS”D
I have personally assisted a victim of shadchan malpractice, where the shadchan knew very well that one party to the shidduch was mentally ill and being manipulated by relatives who needed to hide the illness. Yet, this shadrechan went along with it and an agunah situation with blackmail resulted. (The shadchan involved got a nice comeuppance from shamayim too, but that is besides the point).
Paying for successful shidduchim without waiting to see if the marriage works out is bad enough but tolerable. I can just envision what kind of dregs of society will nill themselves as shadchonim if parents were to pay for “attempted” shidduchim.
BS”D
Come to think of it, I am all for this proposal. It will mean that everyone gets fed up with the whole shadchan business, and more and more people will rely on friends and family to do it leshem shamayim.
BS”D
If real estate brokers were as unprofessional as some shadchonim, there would have been a complete change to the system. In fact people tried all kinds of ideas online to cut out the broker and none worked. That is because brokers are regulated and licenced. Shadchonim are not. They should be, by rabbonim and batei din.
When a divorce takes place so fast, you can bet that there are hidden issues that the shadchan purposely glossed over to get the job done just as two bit home improvement contractors gloss over many details, paint everything nicely, get paid and that’s it. (Again, the CONtractor can be sued or prosecuted. A shadchan can’t.)
some by the completed job.
BS”D
Except that a shadchan’s job should not be considered complete until the couple is married in more than halachic status and name. Yes, some sort of warranty needs to be enforced so that if the couple divorces within X time, or if a hidden issue such as mental illness is found, all fees are refunded. Alternately, fees should be paid into a community escrow and held for a specified amount of time agreed upon by the parties to the shidduch.
BS”D
And I see that the whole thread was started by a shadchan who calls himself Lo Yitzloch. How fitting.
Maybe it is time to end the whole shidduch system once and for all. Maybe this online video meeting is a better idea, at least until the community starts regulating shadchonim.
With all the sholom bayis issues I hear about, especially in places where ‘professional’ shadchonim are often used, I think there are far more skirt pants scamateur shidduch plumbers out there than real ones. And I am sure most of the best ones are those who do it leshem shamayim.
But if you want to discuss proposals, here is a far better one. No shadchan should get one penny until three years of successful and happy marriage. That would clean up the so called industry overnight.
BS”D
Sorry, the truth hurts. You are suggesting giving scamateurs even more opportunities to take scarce funds from young people and the parents of large families.
What you are suggesting will bring about the end of the shidduch system as money just won’t be available for self appointed, unmonitored amateurs posing as professionals.
Sheker Diber Kesef Notel = ShaDChaN.
And your attempt to silence me will get nowhere, AZ = Avoda Zoro!
BS”D
BS”D
Last night, my hosting company suspended my account and informed me one of my sites was “too hot to handle” and had to be moved to a separate server with more resources that the company did not have available. No big deal; I was planning to separate that one from the rest which are just development sites.
So, I called my friend who has a large PayPal balance and asked if he wanted to trade cash for part of it so I could use PP to pay for the new hosting. I had to call him because his E-mails were bouncing. Sure enough I found out he had also been thrown off his hosting because a hacker had abused his account and the poorly run local hosting firm would not assist him in getting rid of it but instead got rid of him. He is the director of a chessed and chinuch moisad for whom every penny counts in this lousy economy and he was looking for the lowest possible price for good service.
I told him I would let him know which option I was about to choose was best for him. I had planned to direct him to my original host as I still use them for my other sites and they are reliable and reasonable, but not great.
Then, I signed up for a special deal on a major host – which accepted me and then suspended me soon after, mysteriously returning my money. I was not thrilled with the speed of my site on the new host, and I hardly cared. I then checked out a smaller, specialized company I had dealt with before and had been pleased with – and found out they had an AMAZING deal which I took immediately as it was about an 80%! beginning of 2010 discount.
What’s more, once I had the deal, I was eligible for an EVEN BETTER deal, HALF the price I paid, which I could also pass on to a friend, and pass it on I did.
I later saw that the first company had sent me a request for ID after I had set up my new account. The request had landed in my junk box and I did not notice. Since I did not respond, they threw me off and refunded my money as my account had come from Ukraine where there is a lot of fraud. Had I noticed it and responded as I would have normally (I am always asked to verify new hosting and related accounts), I would have stayed with the first company and ended up paying 8 times as much as I do now for service that is nowhere near as good. My friend would not have gotten his offer which is almost 90% off regular price! What’s more, had I waited ten more minutes, I would not have gotten my deal either as it was about to expire.
“Where is he taking her on a date that is could cost $250 for gas and tolls?????”
BS”D
Federal Kollel. $100 for gas and $150 to bribe the guard.
BS”D
OK I concede. Mouse IS from lahak via the Latin mus – from the word MAOZ, meaning fortress!
Roman soldiers found it so easy to penetrate the shlimazeldige fortresses built by the baryonim, sicarii etc that they likened them to mice. Others say that mouse comes from maoz because getting rid of mice is as difficult as penetrating a fortress.
Anyone who believes that can pay me $19.95 a month for the rest of their lives so I can have someone recite kapitel 256 at the kever of Charles Ponzi for a segulah against mice.
Speak to some ppl who are involved and THEN comment.
BS”D
I have. As a very dissatisfied customer.
I now use only friends and rabbonim because the “professionals” are just shooting arrows at dart boards. If I would have been forced to pay one in particular, I would have looked for a heter to moiser her to the tax authorities after I paid her, so as to put her out of business once and for all. Another one tried to cheat me in an unrelated transaction after wasting my time; she is a participant in all kinds of MLM and alternative healing scams and wanted my services to help her market her scams. I sent her a very sharply worded message telling her to quit making a chilul Hashem with both her shadchanus and MLM scams.
The only honest one I dealt with was a brother of 2 friends of mine, who realized right off that the 2 of us were better off becoming personal friends than his trying to find me a shidduch because he isn’t a full timer and really handles only younger people from families similar to his own.
If anything, the only shadchonis I would have paid was a very well meaning personal contact who tried, made a real effort, and was rebuffed by the girl’s parents probably because of yichus issues. If it would have gone through, I would have sent her a gift from an online or other delivery merchant, because she told me right off that she would refuse payment as she’s not a pro and was doing it leshem mitzvah. More people like that, and fewer shidduch plumbers, and the crisis would be abated quite substantially.
BS”D
Who are these three stooges LOL????
BS”D
AZ, are you a shadchan? I smell a rat here.
This would only make shadchonus an even worse business than it is today.
BS”D
No one pays for a plumber who does not fix the sink because he brings the wrong parts and wrong tools. And if he charges for hours he wasted that way, you go to the BBB or Consumer Affairs.
BS”D
LOL I should have realized that Shprintza sounded like the word for a mechanical spring, which would come directly from shpring, meaning jump. Vesne is pure Russian.
Anyway, a rather off center BT I know named his twin son Sdom and his sister Amorah.
BS”D
Typo. In any case, a Hebrew origin for mouse is not correct. The official name for a mouse is Mus (Latin, I believe). And no, the Roman soldiers in EY did not coin that name based on maus.
I am sure you are wrong about mess as well. This type of pseudo-scholarship does nothing for Torah or Yidden.
BS”D
That is beyond absurd. If he went out of his way, you can give him a voluntary gift, but until it works out there should be no payment.
BS”D
TraitorTours (TM) shows you occupied Balastin like no one else can. Experience a Ku Klutz Kartel tisch in the heart of Gaza, help leftists plant olive trees near Chevron so terrorists can hide out, go on an ambulance run with a suicide bomber in the back seat, and now, you can even tour the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt and help the true Balestinian occupants of the land smuggle weapons, drugs and cash for their legitimate struggle against the Zionist oppressor.
Contact: Yishmoel D. Weiss, Monsey Masjid, 102 Saddle River Road (845) 371-0490
BS”D
Abba was given as a segula for a long life. Most people I know who are named that have it as a second name (Dov Abba, Moshe Abba etc).
BS”D
Anyone can add what they want to Wiki. It has gotten so big that hardly any checking is done except when it comes to hate speech or obscenities – or articles in support of the Jewish right to live in EY.
BS”D
I think Yisroel Werdyger is releasing a second CD in the very near future. Ditto for (finally) Shloime Gertner.
BS”D
I don’t want to spend more time here either except to finish by saying that Ben Levi is being very charitable toward the leftists. The leftist, big government ideal is more along the lines of “what is yours is mine and what is mine is mine”. And we all know what that is called!
The left wants to tax the industrious to pay for the indolent (not out of a sense of chessed but in order to ensure generations of welfare dependent leftist voters) and especially to increase the size of the bureaucracy (again makework job dependent voters are created).
BS”D
Wikipedia? Very accurate. For instance check out Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and Moshe Aryeh Friedman….
BS”D
And if you find eighty boys named tzaddik, are they pay tzaddikim? Sure hope not…
Seriously, Tzaddik is a first name used among Greek Jews (Romaniotes or Sefardim, not sure which).
BS”D
Also, the Medicaid and Medicare are political hot potatoes. Start denying coverage even when it should be denied, and the recipients get their Congressional representatives involved through all sorts of “aid” organizations that also feed at the public trough. Now the system is (barely) at a size that this politically influenced tolerance for abuse can still go on – but extend coverage to all via the government and the system will be overstretched, with waits for care and denials reaching UK and Canadian proportions.
Same with Yehudis, the popular Jewish-sounding name, originally of the wife of Eisav!
BS”D
I think that it is used now because of Yehudis who did away with Holofernes YMS and possibly was originally used for girls named in memory of a Yehuda.
I once read that Nimrod became popular due to the “Canaanite” movement of the early secular Zionists. Anat is also the name of a Canaanite Avodah Zarah.
BS”D
Yes, Nimrod and names like it came from the extreme left. More obscure names such as Anat became accepted because no one bothered to check the source.
BS”D
Just proves my point.
Medicaid, which spends other people’s money, will pay for anything so long as the papers are filed right. That is why we read constantly about Medicaid fraud rings; the entitlement insurance programs are an easy target.
The private insurance, which spends money paid in by its customers, does due diligence. No one dies from a doctor having to prove his diagnosis and treatment; it only makes everyone do his job better. Besides, this in turn goes back to my experience here in the FSU. I can read. I understand when the lab tech tells me my cholesterol is 250 without the statin and 170 with or whatever my numbers might be. Therefore, I buy the statin, read the patient insert (online because I don’t read Ukrainian but that is besides the point) and I know what to look out for in terms of side effects. Now, that means that my insurance company does not have to worry about the clinic marking up $40 worth of Lipitor to $200 every month and charging $120 to them per visit for 4 visits a year and who knows what they would charge to the company for my annual ten buck blood test. Restore power to the consumer and get rid of the nanny state, and the private insurers will no longer be covering conditions that residents of other countries treat at the pharmacy and laboratory. With my insurance in Moscow I could have gone to the clinic every time I cut myself in the kitchen or bruised myself falling on the ice, and walked out with an OTC preparation billed as an RX, billed to CIGNA at 4x the highest street price along with the magic $120 per visit.
People with any insurance are prone to go to the doctor for sniffles, especially when they have time on their hands which a lot of people do now thanks to the leisure ethic of the US and the present situation. People who value time and work for a living, and don’t want nanny state interference, take care of things themselves. At one time, most Americans were the self reliant types. Now, it is the other way around and those who are entrusted with spending our hard earned money have to watch every dime because of abusers, including doctors who get so little now that they look for ways to pad.
This all started with the nanny state and with defensive medicine. Increasing the nanny state will only make Americans worse off in every way.
BS”D
Maybe because I live in the part of the world where Salita and Foreman are from, I see it as (not for us but still) sport that comes from their early upbringing in what was then an Olympic sports obsessed culture, and not as violence. Then again that might also be because I lived in NY during the Dinkins years, and more recently in hardly placid Crown Heights before returning here, and I know all too well what real violence is about :).
Regardless, it is not for us to watch and they should not be our personal heroes, but they can serve as examples to those who for whatever reason must continue in a “borderline” or “non-traditional” secular career.
BS”D
While looking for Hebrew roots to all words in all languages may be going too far, keep in mind that:
1) Jews lived all over the world.
2) Jews were traders and professionals – and usually very literate, which was one means of rising to the top until the next tzoirer came along.
3) At one time the Torah was studied in the original, by non-Jewish scholars and those studying to be galochim (lehavdil). Laha”k (not the jargon of Ben-Yehuda OLBM) was considered a classical language along with Latin and Greek even in US Colonial times, hence the laha”k on the shields of Yale and Columbia universities.
So, what does exist is Hebrew slang in other languages, such as this “copacetic” that seems to be confirmed, as well as “haver” for friend in Hungarian, which is even heard in commercials today, some slang words in Dutch etc. Mouse from mius seems a bit far-fetched.
BS”D
And then there was the Creedmoorer who registered seven names for his boy so he could get seven WIC cheques. The names were:
Eliezer
Eliyahu
Elimelech
Elishama
Elifelet
Elitzur
Elisha
And what did they call him at home? Elisheva!
BS”D
Jothar, you are right, but I know an Elyokum and as he is a BT I questioned whether he had his name right. He insisted it was his grandfather’s name, spelled with a vov. However, I think it still is erroneous and that his family may not have been too learned, or, more likely, his ggf might already have left Yiddishkeit and hardly knew or cared whether his son’s shem beYisroel was correctly spelled.
BS”D
Yes, these pastimes were common among oisvorfen going back to Esav. There were always oisvorfen and there always will be oisvorfen. At different periods of time, the neviim and the rabbonim spoke out about these types. We don’t follow in the ways of oisvorfen.
Wrestling is called Graeco-Roman wrestling. That was the culture that glorified the body. In those days, honest men worked in the fields, or as smiths, and having worked a bit with my hands (stonemasonry, not to be confused with Jackie Masonry which is what I do on YWN sometimes :)))) as a student, I know that after a hard day’s work you cannot find time or energy to do sports because you already had your workout. The only ones who could wrestle were indeed lazy bums and the only ones who had time to watch it (and bet on it) were even bigger oisvorfen.
In this generation, a Dovid Salita or Yuri Foreman is making a kiddush Hashem because they both come from another culture which glorifies the body, yet they also uplift their neshomos. On the other hand, any yeshiva bochur who goes to watch them or chas vesholom bets on them is going down many, many madreigois.
Working out for fun has nothing to do with professional sports.
PS: HUNTING as a pastime for Jews?????? I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. VeEsov ish tzayid….
BS”D
In any case I think friling is more common for spring in Yiddish. I can double check with a native Yiddish speaker at shacharis tomorrow; I am trying to remember songs by YTEhrlich that mention spring and friling comes to mind.
Sorry KBear, but any Yiddish speaker will tell you that Shprintza is the Yiddish word for the season Spring.
BS”D
Do you mean shprinzin for spring? It is not the source of Shprintza though, like the similarity of Frimet (forgot the source) to the word frum, it could account for the popularity of that name in Eastern Europe, where winters are long, cold and dark.
BS”D
Almost every birth of a bechor in my community, both my old subcommunity (my very close knit shtibl-like shul) in Crown Heights and my present community in the FSU which is KAH BH experiencing an amazing baby boom, has resulted in a pidyon haben. I had one as well; I am a “run of the mill” bechor born under regular circumstances.