Tag: newsF

A Holiday Tip for Gentile Schoolteachers with Jewish Students🎅🏿🕎

This is always a fraught time of year for grade-school music teachers: they wanna sing Xmas songs, most of the kids wanna sing Xmas songs. But they know that the constant wintertime Othering grinds away at the Jewish kids. (It’s even worse when teachers try to “include” you be singing the “Dreidel Song”; that song is crap, and we know it. The Xmas songs are way better.)

Back during the pandemic I eavesdropped on the most brilliant piece of classroom third-rail navigation I’ve ever seen in my life, and I wanna share it here again, for any that need help (esp. in what’s become an extremely fraught year for Jewish kids in America).

This was early in the pandemic, when our community was pretty locked down (my kids didn’t have in-person school for 400+ days). My daughter was then a third grader, and I was sitting nearby during her Zoom music class (we’ll leave for another day any discussion of the crime against humanity that was “grade-school Zoom music class”).

A few slides into the lesson, the teacher show a picture of an unremarkable middle-aged White dude, “Mitchell Parish.” 

Who the heck is Mitchell Parish? Well, he was born in Lithuania, and brought here by his parents, who were Jews (my daughter immediately perked up; Jews! Like us!) looking for a better life. Mitchell Parish was a popular songwriter in New York in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s—and he wrote the lyrics to …

*advance to next slide* 

… “Sleigh Ride”!  

*kids sing “Sleigh Ride”* 

*EVERYONE IS A WINNER!*

My daughter felt seen, gentiles got their Christmas carol, and no one had to sing the goddamned “Dreidel Song.” 

So there’s the trick to getting to sing Christmas carols in public school in what has been the worst year for Jews since 1945:

Start out with a brief bio of the Jews who wrote your Xmas song

You could do a whole Winter Concert—featuring “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and “Run, Run Rudolph”—on just a single bio slide: All four of those classics were written by the same Jew (the inimitable Johnny Marks, whose Jewish brother-in-law was the guy who created Rudolph to begin with).

(SPOILER ALERT 🚨: All your favorite Xmas songs were written by Jews; you’re welcome).

A Musical Xmas Gift for the Final Night of Xanukah! ♬♫♪🕎🎄🎅🏿

I’m a mixed Jew (i.e., one raised in an interfaith family, and raising my Jewish kids in one now). I’ve lived in the American Midwest for my entire life (which is kind of a double-Diaspora).

I think these songs—which I wrote and recorded nearly 20 years ago now—possibly capture that experience more purely than anything else I’ve ever written.

  • Another Dark Xmastime (FUN FACT: I wrote this during my first year as a fundamentally unemployable stay-at-home dad; for years my children believed it was an accepted part of the broadly accepted Xmas Music Canon.)
  • Dreidel Bells (FUN FACT: The beat here is an original GameBoy running an early German Nanoloop cartridge. Both voices are obviously me, but the filters for the robot voice badly overburdened my old iBook, causing significant lag–which is why Mr. Roboto struggles so badly to hit his marks.)
  • DreidelDreidelDreidel (FUN FACT: The beat here is a vintage analog Boss DR-55 purportedly once owned by Poe, crammed through a heavy-metal distortion stompbox.)

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such a arrangment, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

Recommended Consideration: Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast

These aren’t always great and I don’t agree with everyone he features (in fact, I super-duper disagree with ever listening to some of these nutbags). But Rubin is a always a wonderful and honest interviewer, so the episodes are often quite revelatory about art and human thinking (at the very least). 

This one with  Rory Sutherland is quite good and worth your time (even at 3 hours!)

I also really like the two-parter with Tyler Cowen. The first half is also on YouTube (embedded below) while the second isn’t (maybe because of copyright? It’s dedicated to Cowen talking about and offering samples of music he finds interesting and is available here):

VERDICT: Extremely interesting, and honestly worth the time, despite extreme length. 

$10 will erase $1000 of Medical Debt in Michigan RIGHT NOW! 💸

We are facing a lot of terrifying problems right now: climate disaster, civil unrest, labor injustice, opioid abuse, the profusion of hate and extremism.

Most problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them. Medical debt is one that can.

I’m collaborating on a project to erase $1 million of medical debt in Michigan.

Fortunately, because of the way this debt is bundled, it’s possible to buy it extremely cheaply on the open market, for just a penny on the dollar (i.e., $1 buys $100 of bundled medical debt). If bill collectors buy that debt, they will hound the debtor for the full value of the debt, even though they only paid 1/100th of that.

But if we buy the debt, we can just forgive it and clear the books for someone who had some bad luck and didn’t have the insurance to cover it.

Incidentally, in Michigan this burden hits Black communities especially hard; buying and erasing debt here is thus a “Good Deed twofer”: one donation relieves a family’s economic woes AND strikes a blow for racial and economic justice.

A bunch of you have already given (we’re over 76% of the way to our goal!), and that’s amaaaaazing! The more you give, the more we can forgive. THANK YOU!

Eliminate Medical Debt in Michigan TODAY!

jargon

I’ve always loved this “jargon” gag (is that Chris Hanson‽) 

… but never knew it was actually a cover! (BONUS: The original has a fun Detroit connect—as does Chris Hanson!!!) Here’s the original:

From the original creator:

I shot this in the late 70’s at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn’t be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. He was using an audio prompter referred to as “the ear”. He was actually the pioneer of the ear. He was to deliver a live speech without a prompter. After struggling in his hotel room trying to commit to memory he went to plan B. He recorded it to a large Wollensak reel to reel recorder and placed it in the bottom of the podium. With a wired earplug he used it for the speech and the “ear” was invented. Today every on-camera spokesperson uses a variation of Bud’s innovation. Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat’s off to Bud a true talent.

Incidentally, I’m not 100% convinced that the infamous EPCM PSP “Turnaround” video is not simply an ornate “jargon” gag. Straight talk: she is waaaaay too amused by scheduled off-stream events in industrial processing plants. Feels like a set-up.

Halloween Treat: An American Werewolf In London🍬🎃

Full and uncut, courtesy of our friends at the Internet Archive!

Incidentally, nothing profound here, but I’d totally forgotten what a Jewish movie this is (I sorta love Jack more than anything else in this movie).

(More on Jews and werewolves.)

An American Werewolf In London : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming