Old Jews Telling Jokes

I'm not sure how I hadn't heard of Old Jews Telling Jokes until today. It just seems like the type of thing I would have heard about. Here's an example:



And the cool part is that the silly concept turns out to be something more than just a way to laugh at my grandparents. So says Sam Hoffman, the director, producer, and editor of this project:

I wrote before that these jokes shed a light on a culture, but they also reveal much about their tellers. Like playing the piano, telling a joke requires craft, artistry and style. Does the teller have the patience for the set-up? Can he or she remember the details that make the characters familiar? Will he or she commit to the voices and the accents and keep them consistent? Is there that innate sense of timing.

I agree.

And this is one more reason why you really should follow Roger Ebert on twitter.

Writerly Pacing

Part of a super-long interview promoting his new book, Joe Posnanski takes a moment to describe pacing:

There is something about pacing in writing that has always fascinated me. You wish you could be there with every reader and say, "OK, this part you're supposed to read really fast. And this part, no, slow down, take your time on this part. And that part, yeah, just skim over that part." I suppose the writers who can get the readers to do that—to speed up and slow down instinctively—are the special ones. I don't have that talent, obviously, but it's something I do think about.

Is it possible that standard-length books of, let's say, 200-400 pages just aren't capable of holding a reader's full attention all the way through? I think it is possible, and probably even likely. 200 pages is a big time commitment. It's a little weird, though, to think that each reader would be interested in the same topics. And it's fascinating that even the author realizes that some parts of a book just aren't as interesting. But, again, I might be enthralled by a part of the book that the author himself just wasn't in love with. Morte D'Author, indeed.

Wanted: A New David/Dave

The past 12 months have been rough at times. I think that's what happens when your first foray into adult life coincides with a bad economy. But more than that, I've been missing my David/Dave. From the age of 12, I've always had a celebrity David/Dave to entertain, enlighten, and edutain me. I started off with Dave Barry, reading books and books along with as many archived columns as the internet could hold. Soon after, I transitioned to David Sedaris. This was nice, because he was actually producing new material at the time I was reading him. There was even a brief time when two of David Cross's stand-up albums were basically played on repeat in my apartment (check out maybe Cross's best known bit at the 7:20 mark of this youtube video with plenty of cussin'.) Soon after, I discovered David Foster Wallace. And just when I had finished reading eulogies of DFW, I started watching The Wire, created by David Simon. But I finished The Wire in the early portion of 2009, and I've been Dave-less ever since, the first time since the late '90s that my favorite artist in the world hasn't been named David.

I'm looking for a new David/Dave.

I've done some light research using the internet. By this I mean, I typed the words "Dave" and "David" into Amazon's search engine, and I let the mildly creepy auto-complete function fill in the rest of my search. Leaving out redundancies (e.g., Dave Matthews Band and Dave Matthews) this is what it came up with:

• Dave Matthews Band
• Dave Ramsey
  
• Dave Eggers
• Dave Chappelle
• Dave Brubeck
• David Gray
• David Guetta
• David Bowie
• David Sedaris
• David Cross
• David Archuleta
• David Foster Wallace
• David Crowder Band
• David Baldacci
• David Cook

Musicians are out because I don't like/understand music quite enough to obsessively follow any of them. Though I do kinda like David Bowie. That eliminates most of this list, and almost all of the Davids/Daves that I hadn't heard of before tonight. Dave Ramsey is some sort of financial writer, who has authored some works as The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan For Financial Fitness. David Baldacci writes crappy mass market novels. I've seen enough of Dave Chappelle's work to be impressed, but I'm happy to leave it at that.

Which leaves us with Dave Eggers. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of the best things I've ever read. But What is the What is the first book I can remember that led me to consciously decide to stop reading. (How We Are Hungry was pretty good.) But can a pantheon David/Dave member be responsible for a What is the What level misstep? I've heard good things about You Shall Know Our Velocity, so maybe that will be Eggers's last chance to achieve official David/Dave status.

The only David that I know of who may fit the bill is David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. I think I'm going to give him a shot, but if you know of any good Davids/Daves that are out there, please let me know. It's not easy being Dave-less.

Chabad Throws The Best Telethons

Chabad sure knows how to party. And fundraise. And publicize itself.

The organization managed to involve--and I'm not sure you could come up with an odder pairing--both Ron Artest and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in its most recent telethon.

First, Artest. A philanthropist agreed to donate $1000 for every free throw completed in the span of one minute. So Ron Artest agreed to show up to a TV studio at 6:50 AM. He made 29 free throws and behaved himself.

"[Artest] grew up in Queens, so seeing a yarmulke or a Rabbi with a black hat wasn't National Geographic for him," Marcus told me. In all, and in contrast to his fierce on-court rep and off-court rap sheet, Artest was, Marcus says, "absolutely super menschy."

And here's Triumph:



The whole thing reminds me of this picture of Wilson Chandler and a Rabbi Grossman, which originally appeared here on this blog.

I am endlessly fascinated by interactions between NBA players and rabbis.

Google Throughout The Ages

For such a simplistic site, the Google main search page has gone through a fair number of changes since its launch in November 1998. Did anyone reading this remember that the wordmark above the search-box originally had an exclamation point appended to the end? I certainly didn't. To be fair, the extraneous bit of punctuation was there for less than a year.

Also of note is the page highlighting PC Magazine’s decision to award Google with its Technical Excellence Award way back in 1999. Good call, PC Magazine.

The internet is old.

The Highly Literate Simpsons

The HeiDeas blog has done all of us a tremendous service by cataloging all the linguistic jokes used on The Simpsons during the past four seasons. It's certainly worth perusing. Here's a good example to get you warmed up:

Episode: Funeral for a Fiend (2007)

Category:Idiom chunks, degree phrase

Sideshow Bob's psychiatic expert witness is giving evidence that SB was insane during his most recent attempt on the Simpsons' lives:

Psychiatrist: Robert was a peaceful boy, sickly and weak from a congenital heart defect. [He shows a picture of SB going to his prom in bed. The jury goes "Awwww!"] But then that Simpson boy started tormenting him, and he crossed over into dementia!
Sideshow Bob (defending himself): To what degree was this dementia blown?
Psychiatrist: Full! [Jury gasps.]

Why I Like Rock Band

I like Rock Band because it's fun. Most video games are. And they may even be good for you. But Rock Band is more than just fun and possibly a good teacher of problem-solving skills: it makes me appreciate music more. I've thought this for a while, but I had a hard time coming up with an appropriate food metaphor about it until I read Seth Schiesel's review of The Beatles: Rock Band in The NY Times:

It is an imperfect analogy, but listening to a finished song is perhaps like being served a finished recipe: you know it tastes great even if you have no sense of how it was created. By contrast, playing a music game like Rock Band is a bit closer to following a recipe yourself or watching a cooking show on television. Sure, the result won’t be of professional caliber (after all, you didn’t go to cooking school, the equivalent of music lessons), but you may have a greater appreciation for the genius who created the dish than the restaurantgoer, because you have attempted it yourself.

More than just introducing me to new artists and songs, Rock Band has taught me how to listen to music. I really never listened to music growing up--even in the car it was always sports or sports talk radio. Music was often a soundtrack to other things, but I rarely listened to it as activity in its own right. So I had a lot to learn. I'm not saying that I appreciate music as much as someone who actually plays an instrument or has devoted countless hours to intent listening, but I think I'm getting a hang for the basics. I can certainly hear more than I could when I started playing Rock Band, which isn't necessarily saying much because until I started playing this game I listened to music almost exclusively for the lyrics. Which is the point. Slowly but surely, a video game is helping me understand why everyone in the world seems to like this music thing so gosh darn much.