My father was over 50 and very overweight. His father was overweight and had diabetes for the latter half of his life. The doctors told him that he’s going down the same road, so he lost over a hundred pounds in a few months. He simply stopped eating junk food altogether, limited his carb intake to two slices of bread a day, stuck to only diet drinks and stopped eating sugar and oily foods altogether, including salad dressings. He also started walking five miles every day and ten on weekends.

If a fiftysomething year old man very busy and very set in his ways can do it, so can a twentysomething year old girl.

That being said, the shadchan has some serious issues. You should demand that she ask you mechila. It’s simply assur to insult someone by calling them fat.

Going back to my original statement, you still have to work on yourself. If your weight is causing you to have trouble in shidduchim you simply have to ask yourself what’s more important, comfort food or getting married? My Mother in Law always says that there’s no excuse for a young single girl to be overweight.

In Europe many years ago, the Kaiser Franz Joseph wanted to know how come the Jews are always so up to date on the news and know everything almost as soon as it happens. He calls in a small town Rav who tells him that the Yidden get their special knowledge from going to the Mikveh in the morning. The next day, he disguises himself and heads to the Mikveh. He toivels and dries off, but no knowledge seems to come to him. As he’s getting dresses on the bench, the guy next to him says “Nu, du hut geherdt? Der Kaiser kimpt!”

Agreed. Coraline was super creepy. His comics are even creepier, but they are very “adult” so not exactly appropriate.

My other favorite Gaiman work, though, is probably his first short story collection (called Candles and Shadows or something like that) that has quite a few non-horror non-fantasy stories which were hilarious and touching.

I started reading Gaiman after reading Good Omens. Interesting author, my favorite book so far is American Gods.

Let’s give a better hypothetical: Let’s suppose that there is a bill in the Knesset that would allow a person after five years in Yeshiva to enter into a Chareidi version of National Service for a year and then be patur. Will the Chareidim support the bill or will this be an uproar with people claiming that the Evil Zionists are ripping Talmidei Chachamim from Yeshivas?

WIY: And get the band name wrong.

According to the other parts of the Gemara which you apparently have not yet gotten up to marriage is a very big deal, enough that the mere simcha is a D’Oraysoh and can be docheh a mitzvas loh sa’aseh in several circumstances.

If it’s treated like a business contract, then the marriage itself is treated like a business partnership.

Brooklyn and Manhattan are ridiculously expensive, but I’ve heard that there’s a significant sized frum single community in Queens and Five Towns.

Agree on (1) and (2). I see no reason that the Knesset should be geographical based, I think the current system is fine.

Real peace with the Palestinians. Let them have Gaza and declare it a Palestinian State. It’s not like Israel wants it anyways. Come up with some sort of plan to give them the West Bank and Natzeret but keep Gush Etzion and Beitar. (We don’t need the rest. Set everyone up with cheap housing in the Negev.) Get the US to agree to send troops over to keep the peace for the at least next decade until all terrorists are dead or in jail and there has been no violence for three years. Put the Old City and surrounding area under UN control.

I have a weird degree of confidence in a Chareidi Knesset. Once there is no longer the need to have a “Jewish State” due to the unpopularity of religious and secular Zionism in the Knesset there should be less of a problem giving up settlements.

Eragon was a fun series of books but I wouldn’t compare it to HP. It used too many cliches and followed the standard “Hero’s Quest” of fantasy books a little too closely. Also, a big chunk of books 2 and 3 were dead boring.

Find me an app that can explain what the machlokes the Shach and the Taz had and why it relates to a sugya in Nezikim.

Small Gods, Men at Arms, Reaper Man, Interesting Times or Masquerade. I’m old fashioned like that with my favorites being one of every series that I’ve read in high school. I’ve also read The Long Earth more out of loyalty than anything else. Let’s do a favorite quotes thread!

• Why the platypus?
• “It’s a rhetorical question, like what’s the sound of one hand clapping!” “CL. THE OTHER HAND MAKES THE AP.” “Yeah, er, wot?”
• Wait, was that store that was always there for as long as you can remember, always there for as long as you can remember yesterday?

Because what’s to discuss? A terrible tragedy happened. If someone wants to start a Mishnayos initiative for the Niftarim, then gezunteh heit!

Kanoi: Of course more Yidden died in Israel since 1948 than the 100 years before. There were more Yidden in Eretz Yisroel!

What everyone is trying to say is that the myth that Jews and Arabs got along hunky dorey before the evil Zionists came along is just that, a myth. It’s generally perpetuated by sonei Yisroel to “prove” how the Jews are the cause of their own suffering. Needless to say, have you ever noticed how the original neighborhoods of Meah Shearim and Geula look like forts? There’s a reason for that. Arab marauders were fairly common when they were built and nobody had any fantasies about them leaving the Yidden alone.

Mobe613: If you think that whatever problems people are having with Facebook involves people from other walks of life, you are severely naive.

haifagirl: I feel like I’ve started a fight on something that I don’t really understand.

Health: Thanks a lot. I guess I didn’t realize how prevalent the issue is. Still, I believe that if a person wanted to do an aveira 15 years ago, he didn’t need the Internet. It’s possible that it’s common to use Facebook as a heichi timtza, but I doubt that the divorce rates are any higher because of it.

Health: So people on Facebook do what exactly that leads them to divorce?

Can someone explain to me, as if I were a 80 year old Luddite, why Facebook causes divorce?

I consider myself rather tech and Internet savvy. I work in computers, and spend an unhealthy amount of time on the Internet. I can fully understand how looking at and reading inappropriate material can lead a person to very unrealistic expectations in a spouse. (This is not limited to men and pornography. It has been shown that women have similar sorts of expectations that come from certain kinds of “romantic” fiction.) But I just cannot figure out what the deal is with Facebook. I am near-completely ignorant of “Facebook culture” and “Facebook social circles”.

I have a Facebook account, which I check maybe once day. Most of my friends are pretty boring, so I’m not exactly one to talk. But I just cannot understand what people see in Facebook that makes them so unhappy with their lives. You see pictures of your friends going to Israel, new babies, Channukah pictures, you’re chatting with old classmates. I’m not trying to criticize the idea, I’m just trying to understand it.

WorldWideJew: That’s the same shayloh of how can you turn on a faucet to begin with, as the water pumps are running on Shabbos.

NOT VLASTIC!

I personally like Batampte and Gus’s. The Batampte pickled tomatoes and garlic pickles are especially yummy.

I have friends in every spectrum of law school (including Harvard) who got in on a BTL and LSAT alone.

Funny unrelated story: In Camp Kol Torah which is located on Telshe Cleveland grounds, one year a boy surprised Rav Gifter by jumping in front of him and taking a picture. The next day the kid dropped his camera, exposing all of the film. The following year, several friends and I lined up outside his apartment when he comes home from Mincha to shake his hand and take his picture. We nervously looked at him and the Rebbetzin who smiled and told us that she wanted to see the pictures later. He looked up, smiled and said “Well, it looks like a lot of people want their cameras to break!” We all took pictures and spoke with him for a few seconds. He asked me why I came to him now, two weeks into camp. I stammered out that I didn’t see him before (accidentally saying “you” instead of the honorific “the Rosh HaYeshiva”) which wasn’t quite true. To which he replied in his usual jovial manner that it’s impossible I haven’t seen him before. Big zechus.

I don’t dislike grammar due to it’s difficulty. I dislike grammar because in school it was the most boring subject out there. Math made sense. Spelling was important. Grammar was simply arbitrary and had tons of nonsensical rules and exceptions with complicated names for everything. My favorite game to play when someone was asking grammar questions was to ask them to use a participial as a dangling modifier in a sentence. Maybe one out of twenty even knew what that meant. Not to mention the fact that my grammar teachers were just plain awful. I remember Mr. G. from eighth grade who used to make us sit down with our grammar books for an hour straight every week and just “do the work”. Never learned a thing from that class (except for the fact that Mr. G. has high blood pressure and is prone to outbursts when he finds out that everyone who wasn’t Yitzi L. basically just shmoozed the entire hour every week for months in a row and that Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz of Project YES is actually a very kind and understanding person and will actually be able to convince the class to apologize to the teacher even when it’s obvious how wrong he was)

I hate Mishloach Manos. It becomes a time when you are forced to decide who your “real” friends are based on who gives you a box drink and wafer.

There is no 19th floor, there is no Mrs. Zarves.