The JackB

"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

Holidays

Thanksgiving- A Working Holiday

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Thanksgiving is a working holiday, but the nature of the work varies from person to person. If you are hosting a Thanksgiving dinner you may be working on preparing the house and the meal. Or you might be one of those people who have to work on Thanksgiving at a job that helps to pay the bills.

You might be the chef or hostess at a restaurant. You could be a bus driver, bag boy, cashier or guy behind the counter at 7-11. Many of us enjoy the holiday because it offers a time during which we stop working. It is a vacation from our normal lives. And that is great, as Martha would say it is a good thing.

I have several Thanksgiving traditions. One of them is a football game. It is not a game I watch, but one I play in. Every year my fraternity plays on Thanksgiving day. I started playing in 1987 and with the exception of the Thanksgiving I spent in Georgetown in 1990 haven’t missed one since.

Today I lined up against a boy who told me that he was born the year I graduated from college. So I did what every guy my age would do, I kicked his ass, rubbed his nose in the mud and told him to go home and play with his Lincoln Logs. It is a man’s game and we’re very manly people.

Of course I don’t ever want to see video footage of the game. Allow me to think that I look like a gazelle running and not some awkward, herky-jerky marionette. I glide through the line and sack the quarterback. When necessary I smash a hole in the middle and stomp the ground with all who oppose me. Please allow me to retain this simple fiction.

The game was great fun, but this year was a bit different. It was different because it was a working Thanksgiving for me. I didn’t play the entire game because my partners and I took time to work on our business. It was important. It is important and I am glad that we did it.

Part of the reason that I am writing about this is because we are chronicling our journey.If fortune smiles upon us one day we will look back upon this time and talk about it. It will be a fond recollection that we will share as well as a lesson that we pass along to our children.

Success and opportunity are there for those who know how to acquire them. We happen to believe that part of the process is hard work. And we hope that there is a payoff to this hard work.

Although this is a working Thanksgiving for me I am well aware that it is not the sort of work that others are doing. In a few moments I will stop typing and head off to a much needed shower. For a few moments I’ll sit inside and watch the mud caked on my arms flow towards the drain. And then I’ll dry off, change clothes and head off to dinner.

I am thankful for the opportunity. I am grateful that I have a place to go. And now if you’ll excuse me I really must move as the dark haired beauty has told me that I must give her two hugs and three kisses before I am allowed to eat dinner.

Five years-old and that girl is already barking orders at me like some kind of drill sergeant. It is a good thing that she is so damn cute because I don’t take orders or instructions very well.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Holiday Gift Guide- Some Unusual Gifts

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Here at The Shack we are well aware that Chanukah is less than a month away and as a result we have done absolutely no shopping for those eight crazy nights.

After all, what fun would it be to do all of our shopping in advance. It would remove the sheer joy of fighting crowds for parking and being assaulted mentally, emotionally and verbally during those fabulous trips through the mall.

Besides we like sharing this experience with our Gentile friends who have to help out that joyful fat man with his adventures in chimney cleaning and present deliveries. So we are pleased to present to you the first post on potential gifts for the holidays with a post about unusual yet useful gifts for the holidays.

Today’s featured gift idea is one that I mused about inventing on Twitter.

I thought that it was a great idea. So did @JessicaGottlieb and @AintYoMamasBlog.  In fact following the Tweets we exchanged I contemplated trying to find a way to invent this product. But as it turns out someone already has and since old Jack is a good sport I am happy to give them a free plug here.

The Calmar Consulting Corporation offers AquaNotes which offers you the chance to write in the shower or the tub. And because Jack is a romantic old fool we’ll even share this next section with you:

The development of AquaNotes® made this Shower Thinker’s life more complete. But, in truth, he had only begun to understand the concept of “complete”.  After reuniting with a long-lost love, he married and a new necessity arose…the need to have a special water-proof notepad on which to leave love notes in the shower for his new, wonderful bride. That’s when Aqua LoveNotes® was created.

Those love notes would be very useful. It is a great way to leave your special someone a note reminding them that you are tired of finding their hair everywhere or that there are a number of special things that they can do to send you off to work with a smile in the morning.

Or even a simple, “I appreciate the way that you fold my napkin in my lunchbox. Thank you sweetheart.” Of course that assumes that you still carry a lunchbox. Some of us never outgrow those cool units from the ’70s.

Later on we’ll be glad to offer some standard gift selections for you. In the interim here is a list of some unique items that just might be of interest to someone you know.

It is A Bathroom Revolution
How to Make Hard Boiled Eggs
What Not to Do-Snakebites
The Cubicle Celebrates 40 Years
How Velcro Was Invented
My New Desk- I Have To Get One
London Restaurant Tries To Solve Gas Crisis
Who Wants To Buy An Artificial Foreskin
Untapped Sources of Energy
The Mangroomer
Business Cards That Will Get You Business
Medical Technology- The future is now
Inventions You have Got To Have (Includes the ladies urinal, toilet forehead support system and much more.)
The Nose Pouch
How Much Would it Cost To Build The Death Star
Lose Weight With The Greatest Exercise Ever
The Best Clothing You’ll Ever Own
When Disaster Strikes- Blow Up Your House
A free guide to the toilets of the world

Yom HaShoah- Holocaust Memorial Day

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Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day has begun and I find myself searching for the proper way to express my thoughts about the day.

It is of critical importance, this day. It is a time to reflect upon the horrors of the past so that we do not forget that they can happen again. One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we have ample examples from past and present times of the barbarism that man can exhibit towards other men.

There are a number of issues that surround this day that concern me. As more time passes and more survivors die it becomes easier for the world to forget and for the deniers to try to make their case.

I have often wondered how the deniers can claim that six million did not die and that it was a smaller number of only a few hundred thousand. Either number is incredibly hard to digest, to fathom, to understand. Is there any less horror in saying that only 100,000 lives were intentionally snuffed out.

The answer is no. But it would be wrong to allow the horror of those days to be diminished and wrong to those who perished and those who survived. So it is critical that we confront those who make these claims and show that they are false.

While I was trying to determine what I wanted to include in this post I reviewed what I had done in the past and noticed that I had mentioned Ahmadinejad several times. I don’t mean that in the context of having mentioned him several times in a post, but that I did so in more than one year.

Ahmadinejad was/is a constant in these posts, a Holocaust denier and antisemite who has called for the destruction of Israel. History has taught us that when someone in a position of power makes these sorts of outlandish threats you need to pay attention.

You don’t make label it as being flowery political rhetoric or make any sort of excuses for it. It would be dangerous and foolhardy to ignore these remarks or take them as anything less than a declaration of his intentions.

There are too many examples of what happens when people remain silent. Africa burns and the world ignores its screams. Darfur now, Rwanda earlier.

If we are to take the lesson of never again seriously we need to apply it today and tomorrow. The world has a very short memory of just how brutal we can be to each other. Watch and be dismayed. May we never see such things again.

 

Purim 2009

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One of these days I am going to get around to making a t-shirt that offers a solid explanation for the reason why Jews celebrate many of our holidays. Before I offer an explanation for the shirt let me preface it by saying that I am not the first M.O.T. to come up with this line.

In fact, I might not even be the first to come up with a T-shirt, but we’ll deal with that later. I want the shirt to read something like this:

Why Jews Celebrate Jewish Holidays
“They Tried to Kill Us!
They Lost!
Let’s Celebrate!
Let’s Eat!”
 
Obviously it needs to be cleaned up a bit, but you get the general idea. More importantly we’re a few days out from one of my favorite holidays, Purim.
 
Purim is a joyous celebration and a time in which the community really lets loose. If you spend any time tooling around the J-Blogosphere you’ll see a million posts about it. I think that I have four or five of my own that talk about the chag, which is also why I mulled over whether I had anything new or important to add to the discussion.
 
Anyway one of the aspects of Purim that is fun are the costumes. It is not uncommon for some people to start thinking well in advance about what/who they want to dress up as, but I am not one of them.
 
Don’t ask me why, but I tend not to dress up in costume. Blame it on too many years of dressing up like Goofy. But I do have fun helping the kids find an outfit. They love it and I get a lot of pleasure from watching them.
 
One of their favorite parts of the holiday is the traditional Purim carnival. They love playing all the games, especially the one that offers goldfish as a prize. Every year I try to avoid the damn thing and every year I end up coming home with new fish. It is not that I am against having fish as pets, rather it is that the Purim carnival goldfish generally has a lifespan of three days.
 
As a point of interest there is no uniform agreement on when to hold the Purim carnival. This means that some shuls will have it the week before the holiday and some will hold it the week after. In theory this shouldn’t be a big deal, but the past couple of years that kid I call “Little Jack” has always heard about a couple of them.
 
So the end result is that he starts grinding me to take the family to many carnivals. Now I have never been afraid to say no to the kids, but it still doesn’t stop the multiple requests to “see what is different” at each carnival.
 
And now if you’ll excuse me I am off to change the clocks and get some much needed shut-eye because the whole leap forward bit is similar to enforced jet lag.
 
If you are interested in past posts about Purim check out the links below.

Chanukah 2008 Continued

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You know that line about those who forget history are doomed to repeat it? Well tonight kind of made me think of that. Let me set the scene as best I can.

The year is somewhere around 1976 or ’77. Your hero (that is me) is a young schoolboy. Happy, well adjusted and glad to recite all of the Welcome Back Kotter lines with his friends, “up your nose with a rubber hose” was a personal favorite.

My family is at home. My sisters and I are involved in different activities around the house. At some point in time my middle sister and I have a disagreement about something. I can’t remember what I did, but like a good big brother I really aggravated her. She hauls off and belts me in the mouth. It doesn’t hurt, but it does knock out a loose tooth.

I am infuriated by this. Looking back I think that I was more upset by the idea that my little sister got one over on me than anything else.

Flash forward to the present. The family is at my folk’s house. It is filled with aunts, uncles and cousins. I hear my son scream and he comes marching up stairs holding his mouth. I see blood and ask what happened. He hands me a tooth and tells me that his younger cousin kicked him in the mouth and knocked out his tooth.

That younger cousin just happens to be the youngest child of the sister that knocked out my tooth. He is truly sorry and tells me repeatedly that it was an accident and it probably was.

A little bit later all if forgiven and forgotten and we go to light candles. I bask in the glow of the lights and the smiles on the faces of the kids. We finish the blessings and the kids run and sit in the living room. I look at my father and say that he should get ready to play grandpa.

We walk over and my son tells me that they are all ready to get their gifts. I look at him and say that we’re not doing gifts tonight. My niece looks at me and says, “don’t tease us Uncle Jack.” I smile and tell her that I am not.

Jaws drop and confused looks from the children are pointed towards us. My son takes the lead again and says that it is not funny, the joke is over. I assure him that tonight there are no gifts and then the heavens unleash a torrent of young voices upon us.

I quiet them down and remind them that the holiday is not only about gifts. I give them two minutes of patented parent P.R. and add a dose of guilt. And then I remind them that another reason we are not exchanging gifts is because not all of their cousins are there. Not to mention that the good news is that they will get gifts the next night.

Kids shrug their shoulders at me and grumble for a moment. I offer a free kick in the pants or punch in the nose. No one takes me up on it. They run off to play and I look at my father.

“What are you looking at,” he asks. I tell him that I want his opinion on how I did. He smiles, pats me on the shoulder and says “you’re learning.” I smile back and tell him that it is still ok for him to give me a gift that night.

He smiles and sticks out his hand. I place my hand in his, knowing what is coming.

“Congratulations.”

And the lesson here is that old family tricks never die, even those that still aren’t funny. Ok, I laughed, but that is a long story in itself. We’ll save it for a different day.