Here is an example of why I’m bullish on this projection: TheInfoPro press release. For those who don’t want to click on the link “More than 50% of new servers being installed in 2009 will host virtualization, and future progressive growth indicates 80% by 2012.”
In the process of re-installing this blog, I am using this post, which is real, as a test. In the near future this blog will again be focused on a very narrow range of topics.
Fun, fun, fun, Judaism is cool! What other religion tells you to get drunk, so drunk you can’t tell the difference between Haman (bad guy) and Mordechai (good guy)? In honor of Purim, Nancella, Scott, and I went to American Schmidol at the Bowery Ballroom. This spoof of American Idol was organized by Heeb magazine and the record label JDub and featured karaoke contestants being judged from actors from popular Comedy Central shows.
Nancella was dressed up as Queen Esther. We both got drunk. I flirted with pretty girls, which made me feel confident. Once the show got started I got into it. I felt alive as I screamed encouragement and criticism from the balcony. I got more drinks and went down to the very front of the stage. Eventually, I called my sister and confirmed our plans to meet her at another Purim party. Nancella and I said goodbye to Scott and then Nancella asked me to jump on the stage and give one of the judges a note saying, “You’re cute, let’s hang out, here’s my info.” So, of course I jumped onto the stage in front of several hundred people, handed David Wain the note and supposedly one of the other judges mouthed “sexy” with a nod to the note’s author. Wow, I don’t know if that experience was more exhilarating for me or for Nancella. We continued onward to the Upper West Side where we met my sister Lanna, who looked especially pretty that night. The night ended with Lanna performing a great stunt, but she’s kinda private and won’t let me talk about her exploits that night at a bar called Yogi’s.
I shouldn’t have been so excited to hear Jonathan Lethem speak just because he was recently awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, which is the “genius award” my father used to talk to me about. I had never read any of his books, which include Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, but luckily he didn’t refer to them too much during the conversation.
Do you have childhood memories of a pillow fight? Do you like to engage in public activities others steer away from? If so, then you should have been at the pillow fight in Union Square this Saturday.
Newmindspace organized this event as interactive public art. A Wikidepdia article says this activity fits into the larger social phenomenon of flash mobbing. I heard about this absurd event through the listserv Nonsense NYC. Other bizarre events I participated in include Chengwin’s Homecoming and a reenactment of a Roman Vomitorium. Why do I participate in these types of things? I usually don’t gravitate towards sporting events or organized public activities. I like non-conformity, but this was still a community activity even if most of the participants were weirdos. I took part in the pillow fight not because I had some deeply loved childhood memory, but rather so I could say I did another “only in New York City” thing. The prevalence of people who brought cameras indicated to me that others also attended because of the novelty of it all. That being said, most of us had an amazing time releasing our tension by swinging pillows at each other.
Photos are from brooklynvegan The participants were of all ages, but I bet over 50% were ages 21-28. There were a surprisingly large number of females. At first I felt a bit bad about hitting a girl, but I got over that pretty quickly. I got hit in the head so many times. I smiled a lot even as I repeatedly got hit over the head. After 30 minutes of fun, I was soaked with sweat on the cold winter day. My friends had stood to the side and didn’t participate. I was covered with feathers that I just couldn’t get off my coat, hat, or scarf. At the end I was glad to leave.
Once a month a bunch of intellectual Jews gather in the Lower East Side. Surrounded by Soviet propaganda, the evening could have taken place 50 or 100 years ago, but this is New York City circa 2006. Novel Jews is a series of readings by Jewish authors that is organized by Alyssa Abrahamson of the 14th Street Y and Alana Newhouse of the Forward. KGB Bar provides a kitschy venue with Communist icons adorning the red walls.
When I arrived, I ordered a KGB energy drink that was actually re-labeled Red Bull. Ilana Stanger-Ross read a slightly erotic excerpt from her book Sima’s Undergarments for Women. Narrated from the perspective of an older Jewish saleswoman, she talked about different sizes of breasts and nipples. I heard how women bond by making fun of men for not noticing underwear. Finding a bra that fits is important according to a recent New York Times article I read. I pay attention to lingerie, but it’s not something I’m going to buy for a woman without her being there with me. It was a week before Valentine’s Day and I was seated next to many women in the tightly packed red-themed room. I wonder if my cheeks reflected an image of bashfulness when the Stanger-Ross character admitted to an unwanted glance at a customer’s breasts. I was self-conscious about my own glances and thoughts. The other author that night was Lara Vapnyar, who read from a yet to be published novel, Memoirs of a Muse. She spoke from a Russian immigrant’s perspective. Unfortunately, I got bored trying to listen to the soft-spoken women with a thick accent.
Yeah, it usually means Jewish American Princess, but that term didn’t define the three black clad women on a Makor panel about “Debunking the Myth of the JAP”. According to Rhonda Lieberman, Isabel Rose, and Alana Newhouse, a JAP is stereotypically spoiled, loves shopping, shallow, high-maintenance, pushy, has disposable income, expressive, opinionated, whiney, narcissistic, and much more. Of course Urban Dictionary has its own list of definitions. When I told someone at work about this lecture, he referred to Gilda Radner’s “Jewess Jeans” Saturday Night Live skit.
Alana Newhouse is the arts and culture editor at the Forward. In a March 2005 Boston Globe article she wrote, “First identified in postwar America, the JAP was a girl lavished with the best in life-from the top of her professionally straightened mane of hair, to the nose job she got for her 16th birthday, to a wardrobe of designer clothes and the most expensive shoes money could buy.” Ms. Newhouse grew up in an Orthodox family and went to Barnard.
Isabel Rose is the author of The JAP Chronicles. She said she had problems getting booked on her book tour because of the word’s stigma. Many people consider it to be Anti-Semitic and an ethnic slur like “nigger”. She’s now making the novel into a musical that will include the ditty, “Don’t Worry, Be JAP-py”. Ms. Rose grew up on the Upper East Side and went to Yale.
As a self-described Jewologist, Rhonda Lieberman said a JAP was like pornography, you know it when you see it. She associates the archetypal JAP with the evils of consumer culture. Ms.Lieberman is an artist who Newhouse said produced an iconoclastic group of pieces that included a “geltbelt”. She teaches at Yale and has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago.
All three women are Jewish American Powerhouses. Confident and success professionals, these women don’t fit many of the stereotypes mentioned above. During Q&A, a guy in his mid-50′s rambled on about his anxieties about living up to the expectations of strong Jewish women. I understood where he was coming from.
Listening to Alana Newhouse, I got the impression that emasculated Jewish men started to use the word JAP pejoratively approximately the same time feminism was empowering women in the 70s and 80s. In other words, coming from a Jewish guy, the term reflected hostility because his social/professional status was being threatened.
That leads me to JDate. During Q&A, I noted that in many profiles I read, a woman tries to distance herself from other “JAPs” by saying she’s not “your typical Jewish girl”. A young lady in the audience noted with disgust that she’s read guys’ profile in which they think using the words “Gucci” and “Prada” will get them a Jewish girl. The panelists noted with pride that non-Jewish guys are going on JDate in looking for a Jewish girl. They didn’t say anything about gentile women on the site or Jewish guys going for shiksas because they are supposedly less demanding and better in bed. I personally doubt the latter comment.
I don’t think the myth of the JAP was totally de-bunked. Many of the stereotypes of a JAP describe Jewish women in general. There are so many working Jewish women in my generation that it is hard to think they’re truly spoiled. I don’t think there is anything JAP-py about appreciating nice things or expecting to be treated like a lady. The panel ended with a well-dressed woman in her late 60s or early 70s getting up and giving an impassioned defense of being a JAP if that means embracing your good-fortune and loving family.
Starting off the fall lecture season, tonight’s public forum was definitely an example of “deliberative democracy”, as the host Brian Lehrer put it. At least four people were removed from the audience for exercising their First Amendment right to scream, mostly about the trampling of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches.
The forum’s topic was subway security and the underlying theme was the level of civil liberties we are willing to forgo in order to be safe. The forum had two panels, one on random searches, and another on surveillance cameras. The advent of random searches on the subway looking for terrorist bombs was the impetus for the discussion, but hasn’t the subway always been dangerous?
Almost everyone on the first panel agreed with David Harris, author of Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing and Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work , that the best way to catch a terrorist was to look for suspicious behavior rather than ethnicity. Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute played her role as the panel’s conservative to the hilt. She defended racial profiling by saying that the terrorist threat was coming from Islamic terrorists so the police should target South Asian and Arab men. She provocatively asked if it would make sense to search black men if the police were looking for a Klu Klux Klan member. After listening to the other panel members, immigration lawyer Sohail Mohammed and law professor Stephen J Ellmann, I concluded that random searches are so ineffective that they are not worth relinquishing any of our civil liberties.
While random searches might not work, the increased police presence in the subways that comes with the searches probably will decrease crime and terrorism. As everyone panics about terrorism, a side benefit is that anti-terrorism efforts can also reduce random crime. This is what I think might happen as new surveillance cameras are added to subways.
I am reflexively against surveillance cameras but am close to being convinced that they can are a good thing. The NYC Police Department is installing over a thousand cameras into the subways. Almost everyone agrees that cameras don’t prevent crimes or terrorism, so why use them? Because they help solve crimes after the fact. For example, cameras in the London Underground helped capture the terrorists in this summer’s subway and bus bombings. As many convenience store owners can attest, cameras won’t deter most criminals. That said, I have noticed the drop in the number of drug dealers in Washington Square Park since Giuliani installed cameras. Interestingly, no one in the audience represented a high crime area where residents have been asking for subway cameras to protect them from criminals long before terrorists became a concern.
There are many reasons why surveillance cameras are bad. Unfortunately, the second panel’s main opponent of cameras, Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union, came across as a hysterical liberal. She and some audience members overstated the technological ability to be able to monitor, record, and save the data recorded by surveillance cameras. Heck, most tapes are re-recorded over after 24 hours or a week, and most video footage is never viewed by an actual person. Remember, the federal government is already able to monitor our phone conversations and emails, but there are not enough law enforcement officials to actual review the massive amount of data. The Center for Democracy and Technology has an excellent resource for those of you who want to learn about what the federal government is doing to monitor our every electronic move.
The panel was co-sponsored by The Smith Family Foundation and will be broadcast on WNYC.
The Fahmy family is so much fun! Their hospitality is top notch! Tarek Fahmy is one of my best friends. He invited me to his brother Ziad’s wedding to Kaila. Tarek’s father and mother, Adel and Ferial, reveled in the wedding week’s festivities.
Tarek’s aunt and uncle, Kamal and Zahia, were the de facto wedding planners because they were the proprietors of Kamari Village, which is a series of concrete villas on top of a hill. I spent a lot of time in Kamal and Zahia’s kitchen, living room and porch.
Zahia is Adel’s sister. Adel’s two other brothers are Taher and Salama. Huguette is married to Taher and lives in Montreal, as does their daughter Rania. Taher doesn’t speak English and looks like Adel. Huguette is cute, but not as much as her daughter. I think I had a short crush on Rania. Salama and Kathy are Kareem’s parents. Kareem is the cousin from Tarek’s stories. Kareem was just like Tarek had described. Kareem bartends and manages restaurants in Ottawa, Canada.
Kathy is Irish and lives in Cairo, where Salama does “development work” and helps small and medium sized businesses. He created a one-stop shop to help businesses deal with bureaucracy and red tape.
The reason for my entire trip was the wedding between Ziad and Kaila. I had gone to the same high school and college with Ziad. I became friends with Ziad while visiting Tarek’s house. Ziad and I could talk about books and argue about politics for hours on end. Ziad’s bride is a M.L.S. (Masters of Library Sciences). She grew up in Arizona and her family lives in Iowa and Minnesota. I am not sure where this posting’s photos came from, but here is a photo of Kaila and Ziad:
I met Kaila my first night on Naxos at a big dinner. She is cool. Her friend Jodi works for the State Department, but may become a university professor. Ziad is on a Fulbright Scholarship writing his dissertation and Kaila works at the American University in Cairo. In Cairo, Kaila and Ziad are friends with Eduardo and Angela. Angela actually spent several years teaching in Bologna.
Although I had already eaten lunch in the town with Kareem and Tarek, I ate a lot at dinner. I got drunk on cheap table wine. I danced with the belly dancer and talked to everyone. I decided to walk up the hill to the complex when I broke a glass. Here is a picture of Kamal with the belly dancer:
The next day, after hanging out at Kamal and Zahia’s, Tarek and I drove around the island. It was classic Tarek and Larry fun. We drove north through many mountains. The landscape was beautiful. It was like parts of Northern California, but better. After driving for over 45 minutes, Tarek wanted to head back the way we came. I said NO. I didn’t want to see the same things on the way back. I convinced Tarek to go around the island’s coast. I figured we are on an island, how hard could be to get lost? Well, we did get lost for a bit. I said “let’s go this way”, and the next thing we knew, we ended up on a dirt/concreted road that dead-ended at the sea. Overall, it took 80 minutes to get back, but it seemed like forever because of all the turns and hills.
That night we went to the rehearsal dinner at an Italian restaurant in the small city of Naxos. The food was good, especially the mushrooms, but I didn’t have rip-roaring good time. I was tired and didn’t talk a lot. I talked to Kaila’s father. He is an electrical engineer, like my father.
I never got to rent a motor bike and didn’t go in the water (the bay and a jacuzzi) after my first day on Naxos.
The wedding ceremony was held on a sea cliff. It was picturesque. Violinists played some of my favorite songs. Eduardo played a song on his guitar with vocal accompaniment by his wife Angela. Uncle Kamal was the “minister”. There were about 45 guests and members of the wedding party. We were given white flowers, but I didn’t know their names. The guests made themselves into aisles that closed behind the wedding procession. The photos taken afterward took 2-3 times as long as the ceremony itself. Here is one of them:
The bride was beautiful. She wore a simple white dress. The three bridesmaids each wore a light blue dress, each its different hue.
After the wedding, we went for drinks at Kaila’s mother’s place. We all drank and laughed. I drank Dewars whiskey.
Next, we went to another restaurant for the reception. It was the consensus that this place was the best restaurant so far. Kareem asked be to get on my chair and dances, so I did. I also danced with Tarek’s mother and Kaila’s relatives. I boogied down with Jodi to Aretha Franklin’s “R.E.S.P.E.C.T”.
I missed Adel’s feast on Sunday afternoon. Before I left they had put a full sheep on a rod and were going to roast it for 4-6 hours.
It was Greek Orthodox Easter and of course the airplane from Naxos to Athens was late. I was a bit stressed. I was the last passenger to arrive for my flight to Schipol (Amsterdam). I have started reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is about a Greek immigrant family in Detroit. It is narrated by a hermaphrodite.
Overall, I give my vacation a rating of “excellent”. Tarek and I might visit Kareem in Ottawa in the near future.
I know the origin of the saying, “it’s all Greek to me.” Or is the saying, “it looks “it sounds like Greek? The Greek alphabet is indecipherable at first glance. I took a 3-hour bus ride from the port of Patras to Athens. We drove in to Athens through the port of Piraeus. We passed lots of strip clubs. The Lonely Planet book from 1999/2000 wasn’t wrong about this part of town.
My worst fears were realized when the bus driver (who, btw, didn’t like me and didn’t speak English) left us off without directions about where to go. It was approximately 11:30 pm at this time.
Luckily, there was a subway station nearby and a map indicated that I was near the city centre. I easily found the Acropolis. I walked up a dark path and was a little spooked. I relaxed on my back on a stone bench and was incredibly comfortable. I should have stayed there longer. It turns out it was an upscale, gay neighborhood. I walked up closer to the Parthenon and got as close as I could.
I walked around a bend and found several paths going down through various types of trees, brush and rocks, all the way to the Plaka neighborhood. It was a very large hill. I had an amazing view of the city. It reminded me of the view from a cemetery near my old house in Glover Park, Washington D.C. I could hear local kids riding around on motor bikes. I spent some time looking for a spot to take a nap, but after a bit I got cold. I descended down the paths then a maze of narrow roads.
I found a major business area and church. I slept on a bench and got cold again. I spent the rest of the night freezing, laying down for a few minutes, freezing, cursing the fact that I didn’t get a hotel room, thinking I should have known better. I ended up in a huge plaza below the building that houses the national parliament.
I got to the airport early and had had time to buy a wedding present and a two more books. Sitting down, I struck up a conversation with a bunch of Americans. It turns out they were Keila’s aunts and cousins.
As expected, I took a ferry from Venice to Greece, but that is about the only part of my ferry ride that went as planned.
I got to Venice well enough. I got to Venice and it was pouring. I decided that I had to purchase the ferry tickets because I was becoming anxious. I walked around and asked and walked and finally found Minoan Lines. I decided to just buy a ticket and get on board because I was tired and the boat was leaving soon.
On the way to sea, we passed by Venice and I was filled with regret. It was so beautiful. Why hadn’t I stayed? I thought I had made a horrible decision. Would I ever get back to Venice? Or would I just see it in movies. Venice looked so much more majestic than Bologna.
I see why the travel guides recommend against taking the ferry. Everything was overpriced on the boat. I slept on a lounge chair for a few hours. Then I walked around. Then I slept on the floor. I kept waking up, expecting to get to our destination around midnight. It was so cold outside that I couldn’t stay out for more than 10 minutes. It was pitch black. Peering from the arm rails, all I could see was the white crests rising from the boat. Then I woke up and saw that morning had arrived.
My luck wasn’t that bad after all. It turns out that if I had gotten on the ferry as planned – after staying a night in Venice – then I would have missed my plane from Athens to Naxos. Since I had been under the impression that I would get to Athens a day early, I had been planning on getting an early ferry to Naxos or site seeing in Athens. Now, I though maybe I would get a hotel room and go shopping for a wedding present.
All this being said, my vacation planning sucked! I should have taken a plane. Or, should have not gone to Bologna or Italy? Who knows. I am constantly second-guessing myself, but luckily it hasn’t been debilitating. I just didn’t expect to be on a boat for 28+ hours.
Here’s a profile of the passengers on the ferry: Lots of Greeks. They smoke a lot. I think a majority of the Greeks were truck drivers. There were a lot of old folks, including in that group some German, Scandinavian, and British. There were some backpackers.
I finished reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. I liked it but couldn’t help wondering if his other books were better. Halfway through reading Citizen Girl by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, I was worried I wouldn’t finish it. Happily, it finally engrossed me.
