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Wolfish and Musings,
I so agree with both of you.
I think many types of celebrations are getting out-of-hand. I was just to a wedding where they spent more on flowers than we spent on our whole wedding. They have the money, and I know they certainly gave a great deal of tzedekah, certainly proportionally more than we gave. But I was still a bit uncomfortable, I’m not sure why yet.
Dear Tzippi,
I tried to post the name of the book, but it was edited. You may have to do your own research on this one, try googling “literary hoax 1969.”
I purposely did not post the name in the original post because I wished to make a point and I wasn’t sure if the title of the book was appropriate for this forum.
I left it up to the moderator, and the moderator thought it wasn’t, and I’m fine with that.
Also, his assertion that swine flu is the same as the regular flu is also not the case.
H1N1 flu is a novel flu, a sort that hasn’t been seen widely in 30 years, so most younger people don’t have ANY immunity to it. That’s why there are many more cases of H1N1 this year than you would have of a regular seasonal flu, which is similar to previous seasonal flus, and some of us have some immunity to it, so it does not spread as rapidly.
Second, there is the possibility of a deadly mutation of H1N1 – World Health Organization scientists are concerned about one such strain now in the Netherlands and five other countries, that seems to attack the lungs much worse than standard H1N1 flu.
Third, there is always the very real possibility of a flu strain in future years (swine or bird) that will be novel and a big killer, such as the 1918 flu, which killed over 3% of the world population. It killed mostly young, healthy people, whereas the seasonal flu tends to kill the very young and the very old.
Discover Magazine had a quote from a public health worker that sums up the situation:
To paraphrase:
The killer flu is like the boy who cried wolf. Except the wolf is still there.
We have been lulled into complacency because the killer swine flu did not materialize in 1976, and it appears that this year’s variety may not be a huge killer flu.
This can be likened to the words of the man who jumped off the Empire State Building, as he passed the second floor, “So far, so good.”
SmartJew –
There was no such letter from the CDC – you or the doctor may verify this on the CDC website, http://www.cdc.gov , if you wish.
The situation is confusing enough for some people without patently false information being spread to muddy up the water.
with the Internet:
A lie is half-way around the world before truth has a chance to put on its pants in the morning.
EDITED
>>”An engagement is not a pot of soup.”<<
of course not. Everyone knows it is a bowl of cherries.
yes, dear truthsharer, but that was also a different age. In the last several decades, we have changed the way women are recognized, treated and regarded in society.
There were many things we could not count on in Europe.
Dear Tzippi,
EDITED
Sometime I may have the chance to discuss my favorite literary hoax, “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” by George Plympton. The hoax, the article and the book were about baseball, which only seems to be controversial here around World Series time.
H1N1 vaccine update:
according to the World Health Organization (WHO): 65 million people have been vaccinated to date. There have been 10 known cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, an auto-immune based paralyzing condition often seen following viral infection.
The WHO said that number is in keeping with background rates, but each case is being investigated for vaccine association. None of the cases caused deaths.
The agency said the side-effects have been typical of flu vaccines:
Dear Mybat,
all those stories are taken from “REAL LIFE.”
I wonder if you could convince the publisher that there would be a market for the Faye Kellerman books if they were bowdlerized (had the obscenities removed). To the best of my recall, there isn’t that much of it, and very little of it is relevant to the storyline. It would scarcely change the stories, which are great.
Mybat, I believe that wise people always exercised discernment over whom to trust.
“Trust, but verify.” – Ronald Reagan
“Trust everyone, but cut the cards.” – Finley Peter Dunne
“In G-d we trust, all others pay cash.” – Jean Shepherd
Why is this specific to Bnot Mitzvah celebration? If it had been a bar-mitzvah celebration, would you have been any less offended?
Sometimes a car is just a car. If the man thinks it is more valuable due to the infamy of his provenance, isn’t that his problem. Why destroy the car? It is not the car’s problem, it is a problem of some people’s belief system and values.
Reminds me of a famous literary hoax and experiment done by a writer for Newsday and a number of prominent authoers in 1969. He wanted to illustrate that American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. His theory was that any novel, even a literarily vacant one, even one with no social value whatsoever, could succeed if enough explicit prurience were thrown in.
He recruited 24 fellow writers, mostly from Newsday, and had them each write a chapter. He asked them each to write a deliberately inconsistent and mediocre chapter. Those that were too well written had to be edited down.
The book was a smashing success, of course, even making it to the New York Times bestseller list, and his point was proven.
or: Tales of the Over-Caffeinated
working title: The Coffee Room Chronicles
I have an idea for a novel: It was a dark and stormy night. Two girls, who were worried about the impending shidduch crisis, were driving to a Chanukah party, and their tire was punctured and ran flat. A boy, on his way to do some Black Friday shopping, and wearing a colored shirt and jeans comes to the aid of the two. He fixes their tire, makes small talk, coyly trying to make sure that they are close to his age, or perhaps even older, in order to make a shidduch, yet not exacerbate the age gap. The boy was well-reared by his parents, and did not wish that any girl be frozen or excluded from marrying on his account.
While fixing the tire, he got a grease stain on his velvet kippah. He tried to blot the stain with a recent, thick copy of Hamodia, preferring not to use the more effective blotter of the New York Post, due to its inappropriate content.
He had been previously engaged, to a girl five years younger, but there had not been a tenoyim, and they had parted amicably. Their aunts, who had redt the original shidduch, were still friendly.
One of the girls had an uncle who was entering the hospital shortly, in a distant town. She wanted to ask the boy if he knew of a bichur holim in that area, since the boy seemed to have a lot of such knowledge.
Suddenly, his cell phone rings. He had forgotten to turn it off since, of course, this was not a date. It is his best friend, who IS on a date, and was discussing Shalos Seudot recipes with the girl, and wanted help remembering a cheesecake recipe for some delicious parve cheesecake they had eaten the week before. . . . .
Note to publishers: This is just an outline, I am still working on it.
“Tales of the Yeshivish.”
these days you can economically publish yourself, even if only on the internet.
wearing a hat and beard does not make him good, I think we all know that already. We know that Jews are capable of the highest good AND the lowest evil, so why accept packages on that basis?
Yes, I do love Faye Kellerman’s series with Peter and Rina Decker, starting with “The Ritual Bath.” Very good detective stories based around Jewish themes, with much of the detective work done by Rina, who is an observant Jewish woman.
That’s good to know, Haifagirl.
We looked at apartments in Jerusalem, and they were out-of-this-world, pricewise, at least, particularly in the english-speaking areas of Jerusalem.
Mrs. ronrsr can work her job in any country of the world where her company has a presence, and would like to
Dear Haifagirl, what is the cost of living, particularly housing, like in Haifa, compared to other sectors in Israel?
Enlightened, I have to agree with you on the Economist. Compared to the American newsmagazines, such as Time and Newsweek, it is very global, covering most of the world, instead of just most of America. The reporting is top-notch, and there is somewhat less bias than you find in other similar publications.
Their Science and Obituary section is peerless, and each week there is a full page obituary of someone who changed the world in some way, not always a huge way. I turn to the Obit first, because it is so well done, and almost always fascinating.
I thought it was the entire society’s duty to help intended couples find each other.
sounds a bit like Eliezer’s test for a wife of Isaac.
Let’s find a boy with the sensitivity and kindness to help two stranded people fix a tire. He will be a worthy match!
how did we get to this point where meeting and matching has become such a complicated and convoluted process, with so many extra rules added in this generation?
<<<recall that I met my husband through a shul fundraising raffle>>>
Thank you for that story, telegrok, but was he the first prize, second prize, or consolation prize?
Hi Oomis, that is the opposite of the way most people fear disease.
We tend to fear the disease that is new and novel and in the news, and not fear the more common and potent threats to our health.
There’s a truism in the information biz that a lie is halfway around the world before truth has a chance to put its pants on.
That is the case here. We see the one girl who has some side-effects, psychogenic or otherwise, and that is strange and new enough to convince some people that the vaccine will be bad for them. Perhaps there should be a video, in the interest of fairness, showing the deaths of the thousands of people who died of the flu, and some of the suffering and regrets of their families.
Is there even enough time to watch that?
This year’s death toll has been higher in high risk groups.
High-risk groups include those with asthma, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, children with neurodevelopmental conditions, or women who are pregnant or have a weakened immune system. There are small subsets of patients, even among young persons previously healthy, who rapidly develop severe pneumonia, typically 3 to 5 days after initial onset of symptoms. Deterioration can be very rapid, with many patients progressing to respiratory failure within 24 hours, requiring intensive care and ventilation support.
Hi Jothar,
I am not clear about the link between mixed eating out and mixed frequent visiting leads to divorce. Can you please expand on that a bit?
don’t believe everything you read and see on the internet. I don’t know what the motivation is for scaring people with videos like the one of the girl with dystonia. Does anyone have a video of a child who just died of H1N1 flu. There’ve been over 7,000 confirmed deaths from H1N1 so far.
Temporary paralysis from Guillaume-Barre syndrome occurs in about 1 in a MILLION vaccinations. Death from the flu is consistently about 1.5 deaths per THOUSAND cases, but can be higher with novel flu strains, such as H1N1. Worldwide, for swine flus, it has been as high as 3%, as in 1918.
So, here are the irrefutable odds: 1 in a 1000 chance or higher of dying of the flu under normal circumstances. Could be much higher this year VS. 1 in 1,000,000 chance of temporary paralysis due to vaccine, and 1 in 10,000,000 or so of dying from the vaccine. There’s really no argument.
Also, what does a child learn when he or she has to ask the parents for the money for every little purpose? To beg? to badger? to butter up mommy and daddy? to look sad and cute when supplicating for money?
I’m not sure to what extent any of those are life skills you want to teach.
Give the child his own money, and let him learn the easy way what the world will someday teach him the harder way.
My father started my allowance at age six – it was a nickel, at a time when you could buy a daily newspaper or a candy bar for 2-3 cents. It went pretty quickly to a quarter, since a nickel didn’t go as far as everyone seems to remember it did. This taught me the value of inflation.
I always had an allowance, not a big one, until I was old enough to work. I liked having money, so I always worked. I always budgeted, I always saved, I always had some for tzedekah.
The current boy’s own father did not believe in allowances. This boy was not good with money from the start, and his father feared that giving him an allowance would lead him to just another failure in his life, since he would always be running out of money, and blaming himself.
I take the opposite view, that the running out of money will teach him to stretch it a bit, and it is better to learn this skill now, at 16, with smaller amounts of money, than to learn it as an adult, with larger amounts of money. The allowance of a child is a salary, but in a sandbox. If he misspends it, he may feel bad, he may learn, but he will not starve or rack up large debts.
it could be worse. He/she could have chosen Yamsburg as a screen name.
I had a thought this weekend about why people are having trouble giving their children the flu vaccine.
I talked to a number of my older female relatives at a simcha this weekend, women who had children in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I asked them if they had any reticence to vaccinate their children back then, when vaccines weren’t nearly as good and harm-free as they are now.
All said they didn’t hesitate at all, because they knew what a scourge polio was, and the vaccine was regarded as nothing short of a miracle.
I think this is for several reasons. There was more trust in the government back then, and a much less cynical worship of medical practitioners.
So, I thought further. Maybe we don’t take flu so seriously because it is so commonplace. We say “I had the flu,” which usually doesn’t mean the flu, just a bad cold. We don’t think of it as a killer.
But the flu really is a reliable killer. Maybe not in huge numbers, and maybe not so dramatically, though in total it kills about 60,000 Americans per year. It does so undramatically and reliably when it rolls around every winter.
Does the ubiquity of flu make us complacent?
When a West Nile Virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis occur, people run in panic to their doctors for vaccines? Why? because they’re rare and new, so rare that when someone does succumb, we hear about it on the news.
The flu is neither new or rare, but it dwarfs the death toll from West Nile or EEE. But we don’t hear about each flu death on the news, we just hear the numbers on the radio, and occassionally we lose someone close to us.
<<<raying for the end to the epidemic without getting vaccinated — and getting your children and family members vaccinated — is like praying for a shidduch while<<<
Yes,charliehall, are we not Hashem’s partners in creation? He makes the fruit trees flower and fruit, but leaves it to us and our good sense to plant and tend the orchard.
In today’s news:
The CDC is out with updated swine flu figures for the six-month period from April 1 to the October 17. So far, 22 Million Americans have been sickened by H1N1. Over 150,000 people in the USA have been hospitalized for that flu and its complications, with as many as 6100 deaths, including 540 children.
>>
“We do think we are having a substantial number of deaths,” CDC immunization and respiratory disease chief Anne Schuchat, MD, said at a news conference. “The numbers are only through Oct. 17, and we have seen a lot of deaths since then. Unfortunately, we will see more. … I do believe the pediatric death toll will be extensive and much more than we have seen with seasonal flu.”
It is still very early in the flu season. What makes this season so unusual is that it has started VERY early, and that most of the severe cases are among the young.
The CDC has conservatively estimated at least 1,000 more deaths.
paint over the colored paint with white paint?
is this the most distressing thing about this 17-year old? If so, don’t worry about it too much.
As Damon Runyon wrote, paraphrasing a line from Ecclesiastes (Kohelet): “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”
Flu vaccines and vaccines in general are not brand new. This one is made pretty much the same way as vaccines have been made for a long time. Some of the adjuvants (agents that will stimulate the immune system are newer, but none are brand new.
Experience over the last 40 years has shown that it’s about ONE MILLION TIMES as dangerous to get the flu as to get the flu vaccine.
No one is arguing that there is no danger, there is a slight danger, and one infinitesimally slighter than actually getting the flu.
So, your choice really is: one in a million chance of getting a bad reaction to the vaccine, or a mortality rate of one in a thousand (for normal flu) through one in 33 (for the most virulent of the H1N1 that has been recorded to date).
One is about 1000 times more likely to die of the flu, then to get seriously ill or die from the flu vaccines.
How would you bet with those odds?
DESERVE is not the right word – deserve implies that one has earned it. Unless it is a pre-negotiated reward for excellent schoolwork or such.
Should you give an allowance, for young boys, yes. I think it’s important to learn money management. You should guide them, but let them make their own mistakes. Let them run out, if they mismanage.
I see a lot of adults who never learned that.
Our family policy has always been that once a boy turns 17, the allowance goes away, with a few exceptions. If he is devoting himself to his learning, or to a sporting team or after school activity, or to some other equally worthy endeavor, we are willing to help support him. If not, he should have some sort of a part-time job. I am also willing to pay him a fair market wage for his help around the house and yard, above and beyond his normal chores. We are always renovating the house, so there is as much paid work as a boy could want to do. Unfortunately, the current boy at home, likes his leisure and hates work, and does not mind being penniless most of the time. Not sure what to do about him, he’s a tough case, and not like most boys I have known.
But different children do have different needs. When I was in college, I worked part-time jobs, even delivering newspapers in the dormitory the first year. My mother, was wise enough to send me some money every now and then, because she knew I was not the sort of boy who would ask her for it, and she didn’t want me to work to the point where it interfered with my studies. She gauged me and acted accordingly. I pray that some day I will figure out what the current boy needs, too. I keep trying different methods, without much success.
I guess the conclusion I’m trying to get to is to gauge each boy, and act accordingly. Take into account whether he has free time to work, and bear in mind that you don’t want him to feel inferior to the other boys because he doesn’t have money for necessities, a bit of leisure activity, and an occassional reward for hard work.
many millions of doses have been given out worldwide already.
It’s a perfectly normal impulse to ask a neighbor, friend, relative, correspondent,etc., what they think about a topic.
If you did it face-to-face, it would be called normal conversation.
Jerusalem Post, Forward and MAD Magazine.
I was reading an antisemitic screed the other day, and it said that Jews own all the newspapers, so wouldn’t all newspapers be Jewish newspapers?
Does anyone have contingency plans for frum communities, should the H1N1 flu prove to be a virulent one?
Many private employers now have campaigns that discourage “presenteeism,” that is, coming to work when you are sick, and potentially sharing your viruses with your fellow employees. Can we change Jewish mores to accomodate the greater good and the preservation of life?
As Starwolf notes:
<<<so many of the activities in the Jewish community require public assembly. Men feel that it a requirement to go to minyan and the bet medrash, and will not forego this in the early stages of the flu, when symptoms are mild (just a little cold) and the risk of contagion is high.>>>
How quickly can we break old habits and convince members of the community that it is a greater service to stay home when you are infectious, then to go pray with your community?
Perhaps we should start some additional threads, “Bad Jokes,” “Potentially Offensive Jokes,” “Retread Jokes,” “Arcane Jokes.” This should keep everyone happy.
Ok. it’s installed, and I played with it for 1/2 hour or so.
Windows 7 was touted as having a much faster booting and shutting down than previous versions of Windows. It’s slightly faster, but nothing you really notice.
I wasn’t particularly wowed by what I saw. The search functions are much faster, but it doesn’t seem to run any faster or better than Windows Vista or XP.
I think that in the USA, where there have been extensive anti-smoking campaigns and pressure of other sorts for almost 50 years now, the only older people who are left smoking are those who have severe physical addictions. In light of all the medical evidence and social stigma, all those who could give up smoking have already done so.
Those who still smoke are perhaps more deserving of support and compassion than of more stigma.
Whenever I see one of these poor souls, I am grateful that 1) I never started smoking and 2) I don’t have the physiology that would cause me to have such unbearable urges.
actually, I did start when I was about 19, but didn’t even make it 1/4 way through one cigarette before discovering that I was not cut out to be a smoker.