On Sunday evening, after most of the events of Nakba Day had occurred, the Cap’n and I drove to Beit Shemesh for a little R&R. While prowling through old grocery store (stocking up on things we can’t find in Efrat or Jerusalem), we met up with an acquaintance from our old neighborhood. After a brief discussion of the day’s news, she told us she’d once been to a talk given by someone who was an expert in positive thinking. Among the things he said he did to pursue a glass-half-full attitude was the following: “I haven’t read a newspaper in 10 years. You don’t have to go looking for the news; it will come find you.”
That’s certainly true enough. And if it doesn’t come find you, maybe it wasn’t worth hearing about after all. Reading Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz’s interview with President Shimon Peres in last Friday’s paper did little for me but confirm my astonishment at the willful self-delusion of the Israeli Left. (Horovitz: So you still see Abbas as a peace partner? Peres: Absolutely.) I’d actually rather I hadn’t read that.
One of my favorite blogs is Jen Yates’s Cake Wrecks. Jen shares photos of purportedly professionally baked and decorated cakes that shock, amuse, and appall the viewer, accompanied by Jen’s barbed, hilariously witty commentary. But after a whole week of wrecks, Jen reserves Sunday for the really professional, eye-poppingly masterful cakes, called Sunday Sweets. These are the weekly reminders that skill, creativity, and good taste still flourish (somewhere) in the professional cake-making world.
I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea to take a day each week and have some such thing on my blog to cleanse the psychological palate from some of the stuff that goes on in the world. I’ll work out the details later, but to post something amusing, allow me to share the following video of one of Judaism’s premiere comedians (and fellow convert), Yisrael Campbell. This is the second installment of a series called the Jews Report. (You can check ’em all out on YouTube.)
Shimshonit 
[…] mentioned in a recent post that I was thinking of instituting a feature on the blog that would be a departure from the […]
I got sort of hung up on the “radish strike” — proof that when we tell our bunchkins not to talk with their mouths full, we have a point. Thank you for sharing funny fellow-convert Yisrael Campbell. My psychic palate is duly cleansed. Thanks to our friend WBM for introducing me to another interesting blogista and “sistuh,” if you know what I mean. Love to swap stories some time. Keep up the excellent blogging!