Monkey see, monkey do - MeMe

Since everyone's doing it and now that all of you jumped off a cliff and there's a nice pile of bodies to break my fall, banzai!

Book Meme:
The Rules: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. Tag five other people to do the same.

"However, it can also offer some performance improvement in cases when you know a SELECT statement will return only a single record (for example, if you include a WHERE clause specifying a value from a unique column). In this case, you can use CommandBehavior.SingleRow to inform the provider."

This is from O'Reilly ADO.NET in a Nutshell, a book I haven't looked at in at least 5 years. The thing is, my programming books, haven't really used any of them since I can just "google it", are in the printer stand which is closer to me than my bookshelf.

Seven Facts About Me:
The Rules:
1. Link to your blogger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people (if possible) at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs.

1. I can read a 500 page book in Russian but my brain shuts down when I try read half a page of news.
2. I have several terabytes of anime spread across DVDs, 3 computers and 2 external drives. After we finish watching a series, I can't bring myself to erase it.
3. I almost always have 5 2lb sticks of salami hanging from the ceiling in my kitchen.
4. Even though I liked the subject, due to my bad memory, I managed to fail every Biology test, quiz, midterm, final and regent.
5. I wear a kimono for suedat shlishi and also if I don't go to shul because I'm sick or my wife is sick. I wear it even if guests are coming.
6. Like a good muslim, I had my bris at 13. This may or may not have contributed to my name on my cell message being Mussa ibn Ibrahim. ;-)
7. I hate gefirte fish. I'll eat it when there's nothing else. My neighbor mixes it with vegies and sauce. I bake A & B salmon gefirte fish in tomato sauce for Yom Tov. Other than those situations, never, no way, no how.

I'm not gonna tag anyone because I'm lazy and because everyone's doing this anyway.

Sholom Zohor

Tomorrow, in my shul, 1749 Ocean Avenue, between L and M.

It's a boy!

Born December 23rd at 3:59PM.  Weight, 7lb 15oz.  Ironically, Shlomik was also 5 days late and was 6lb 15oz.

Baby Registry

Amazon baby registry.
Also need Enfamil Gentlease and regular.

Chanukah

Hanukkah is the festival of clementines.

For eight days we celebrate these wonderful fruits. Stores and homes are filled with boxes and bags of clementines. People are eating them for breakfest, lunch, dinner and as a snack. Shuls are serving them for suedat shlishi, Chanuka parties and any other functions. Garbage bins are overflowing with orange peels.

Due to inability to say mezonos on clementines, we eat doughnuts which are similar in shape and whose sweet taste compliments the tangy taste of clementines. Though saying chamotzi on challah rolls would be an even greater elevation of this great fruit, it was decided that people would be too lazy to say the very long benching. We also light eight candles which is the minimum number of segments that a clementine has.

It's believed that this holiday was started because rabbis saw people getting sick due to the onset of cold and lack of enough vitamin C. While both the orange and the tangerine were considered, both of those were much harder to peel and more prone to contain seeds.

Flash Games - Charger Escape

Do you like horsies, unicorns and point and click room escape games? Well, even if you don't like horsies and unicorns, this game is very well done and is even logical.

Play Charger Escape

No ma'am, I don't support banditry

This week there was something very interesting at Daf Yomi.  Too bad all those rabbis who are telling their students that all of them must go to kollel and working is evil never learned this.

This is from Kiddushin, page lamed (30) side beis (2).

The father is obligated to teach his son a craft.  From where do we know this?  Chizkiya said: "For the verse states: See life with the woman whom you love."  Life connotes craft (for a livelihood) and is here next to woman.  If "woman" is to be understood literally, then just as the father is obligated to find his son a wife, he is obligated to teach him a craft.  If, on the other hand, "woman" is to be understood allegorically to mean Torah, then just as the father is obligated to teach his son Torah, he's obligated to teach him a craft.

Rabbi Yehuda says that anyone who does not teach his son a craft, teaches him banditry.

Gemara asks if this is what he really meant and answers that what he meant was that it's as if he teaches him banditry.  Since his son doesn't know how to do anything, his only means for supporting himself is by stealing.

Gemara places Torah, wife and a job on the same level and obligates the father in all three equally.  No one comes to defend the father and say that he should get his son a rich father in law or that the son should steal money from the government or go collecting charity or sitting and praying onto G-d to fedex him money every month.  Just as you're supposed to teach your son Torah and to get him a wife, you're supposed to teach how to go out and earn an honest living.  The response of today's yeshiva rabbis is a two prong attack on this "fallacy".  One, condemn secular education, the one needed for getting a job, as evil and not part of Torah leaving.  Two, condemn working people as criminals who are wasting their time working instead of learning Torah.

My cousin works as prison guard in Colorado.  I was talking to him on the phone and he asked me "Did you know how many Jew are in prison?!", "Yeah, wanna know why?"