"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
A question for those bloggers who are Shomer Shabbos, but really for anyone who wishes to answer.
If you had a choice would you close your blog for Shabbos? Does it bother you that people are reading/commenting upon it during Shabbos?
The floor is open.
I thought that this was interesting.
“In 1977, an Israeli cargo ship nearing Japan spotted a leaking boat crammed with 66 Vietnamese men, women and children out of food and water.
They were among the hundreds of thousands of “boat people,” fleeing their war-ravaged country following the end of the Vietnam War. Despite desperate SOS signals, the refugees’ distress had been ignored by passing ships from East Germany, Norway, Japan and Panama.
The Israeli ship picked up the weakened passengers and took them back to Israel. There, Prime Minister Menachem Begin authorized their permanent admission to Israel, comparing their plight to that of Europe’s Jewish refugees seeking a haven in the 1930s.
What happened to the Vietnamese refugees, and the hundreds that followed them, in “the land of the Jews”?
In one of the opening scenes of the Israeli film “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” (screening locally on Sept. 30), Hanmoi Nguyen, one of the original refugees, has been in Israel for 25 years. He works hard in a Tel Aviv restaurant, lives modestly, and with his wife is raising five Israel-born, Hebrew-speaking daughters.
The oldest girl, Vaan, is a writer, has served in the army and feels Israeli — except for her looks. In their classic up-front style, her fellow sabras keep asking her whether her eyes are slanted because she eats so much rice and if she is related to this or that Chinese martial arts star.
In the evenings, the father writes Vietnamese poetry and joins his friends in nostalgic songs about the beautiful land they left behind.
In Vietnam, Hanmoi Nguyen was the son of a wealthy landowner, and he dreams of returning to his village to reclaim the property and settle scores with the communist functionary who kicked him out at gunpoint.
He scrapes together enough money for the trip and returns to a land and a people he hardly recognizes. In a curious parallel to the Holocaust survivors who returned to their homelands to reclaim their old homes, he is met with suspicion and hostility by the new inhabitants and red tape by officials.
Even the hated communist functionary, like the Nazi bully in Germany, is now a nice old man who urges that bygones be bygones.
After a few months, daughter Vaan joins her father to dig for her own roots. She is happy that people on the street look like her, but has trouble negotiating the language and has no patience with the elaborate circumlocutions of social intercourse.
To the natives, Vaan herself has become a foreigner, and she laments, “I am a tourist, I am an Israeli.”
The agony of being suspended between two civilizations, without being fully at home in either one, is sensitively, at times heartbreakingly, portrayed, but the film by Israel’s Duki Dror (a UCLA alumnus) is not without humor.
One hilarious scene shows the newly arrived boat people being welcomed by an effusive Jewish Agency representative in Hebrew, of which the polite audience doesn’t understand a word.
Shortly afterward, an equally enthusiastic integration official tries to teach the refugees a lively Chanukah song.
On the reverse side, the returned father tries to explain Israel to puzzled Vietnamese villagers. He finally comes up with, “They have one lake and eat strange foods.”
For the Full Story Click here.
So as promised I am trying to produce a relatively short state of the blog. It is not easy. There are so very many posts to sift through and I am getting started far too late to do this properly. But I’ll give it a try and we’ll see how it goes.
Last September was filled with posts about Katrina, a post dedicated to Bob Denver, a rundown of my experience in the ladies room, information about firewalking, birth control, the Marx Brothers, where I am from, teenage sex, 31 years of friendship, Havana Gila, and some of my comments about the Southern Baptists.
In October I wrestled about some New Year’s thoughts and the usual animal story. We talked about whether you could have too much sex and interspersed more thoughts about my grandparents.
There was also the post about actors with bad accents and of course I bored folks with more political commentary. There were also musings about the Akedah, Yom Kippur and more ranting about the Southern Baptists.
My post about The ACLU received a lot of attention as did posts about the car accident I was in as did some posts about my children. Halloween was covered as was the value of a college degree. There were assorted conversations about values and more. It was a busy month.
November was a busy month. There were the many experiences with the hate mail from my troll and time with Scooby Doo. Moneyball played a game and who can forget The Germophobe. There were posts about France burning, Haveil Havalim #43 and gems about my kids. See, they are a constant theme.
Things got nasty with a new troll but I found a way to distract myself by discussing peanut butter. I even got a chance to discuss bullies and Winston Churchill. The Flying Spaghetti Monster made an appearance as did Pat Robertson.
Wow, as I look back I can see it was a very busy month. It really got a little nutty when I said that Happy Holidays is An Appropriate Greeting. Religion maintained its place as did science. I wondered if Judaism requires G-d and asked parents to share their children’s most irritating toys.
There is so much more, but I don’t want this post to be exceptionally long so we’ll move on to December.
The month began with a bang with news about the first Western female sucide bomber, picture of the Crab Nebula and a post in which I made fun of curling. As usual I found that the serious topics received fewer comments. My post about actors from the 80s was a hit but it didn’t get as much attention as asking if people had Blog Envy.
I found the blurb about the Titanic to be very interesting. I had a post called Why I blog that was followed by the question of How Many Blogs Do you Read? A little later I Beat Up Santa Claus.
There were all sorts of different posts about things that caught my eye, feelings I had about life and a tribute to my son on the occasion of his fifth birthday.
In January I continued with posts about blogging. They consistently receive the most comments. This theme proved to be true as my posts about the JIBs received quite a bit of attention.
It was the also the month in which I learned that I am just Not That Funny. It was also the month in which my son and I talked about MLK and why people hate others.
WHOA!!!!!!!!
I am far too short on time to continue this so I am going to shift gears and share a few thoughts. I find reviewing my old posts to be hard. All too often I cringe when I read them. It seems to me that I have written this before, so I am not going to belabor the point.
A new year is upon us. I choose to view this as an opportunity to be taken. A time of hope and of joy. It is also a time of sadness and reflection.
It is a time to look inwards and ask the hard questions. I ask the questions that we often don’t want to. Am I the man I want to be.
If you think about it that is a very deep and profound question. I am not going to get into it here, but I take it seriously.
When I daven (pray) there is a point in time in which I always pull my tallis over my head. I do it to try and help me to focus. I want to block out all distractions. It is important to me to have that moment.
I always remind my children that no matter how loved they are, at the end of the day we are alone with ourselves and it is important that we be able to enter slumber time feeling good about ourselves.
And so I wish you all very sweet and plesant year. May this be a year in which we see a more peaceful world. A year in which the sick are healed and life improved for all.
כתיבה וחתימה טובה