Having now observed seven of the eight days of Passover, or as we Jews affectionately refer to it, “Starch Madness”, I will be happy to once again be eating leavened bread. Apparently the supermarkets in Huntsville do not see fit to carry a stock of matzo, or unleavened bread, so important for this holiday, and we had to procure ours in Toronto. Considering the ingredients, water and flour, I am surprised by how expensive it is (over $6 a box in one store). I should go into the Kosher food business. Of course my mother-in-law found it for less than half that price. I don’t much like matzo. Matzo ball soup is fine, but for me eating plain matzo is like eating cardboard. Besides that, it’s constipating. As I said in last week’s report, Passover celebrates the Jews freedom from Egyptian slavery, but I was a little puzzled about one aspect of the story of their emigration from Egypt. After leaving Egypt, they reportedly spent forty years in the desert before they reached the Promised Land. It doesn’t look like THAT long a walk to me; did Moses forget his GPS? One of my Jewish friends told me that one theory about why it took so long is that the Jews waited to reach the Promised Land until they had produced a generation NOT born into slavery. This makes some sense. I thought they were just perfecting the production of the world’s most expensive unleavened bread.
A belated Happy April Fools Day to all my readers. April first up here in the GWN was marked by unusually warm weather. Tell me, where did it become a tradition to commit mischief on the first day of April? I spent Not-So-Bad Friday helping our neighbor put in his dock. I also launched our folding boat in the lake for my earliest boat ride ever. That Porta-Bote is an amazing boat. We used it to float dock sections out into the lake, and it worked like a charm. It’s very sturdy. There is a great photo available at the Porta-Bote website showing a boat like mine, filled with 600 pounds of concrete, as it lands in the water, having been dropped from a height of 21 feet. The test, done I believe by the Japanese Coast Guard, was conducted to illustrate how durable the polypropylene hull was. I’ve had a lot of fun with that boat, and despite a few design flaws (like the seats for instance), it really is bulletproof.
As of last Tuesday night, the Toronto Maple Leafs are statistically eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs, again. While I knew that day would come, I really thought they had a shot this year. They’ve all but replaced the team in the past six months, and they seemed to be winning for a change. I suppose I must write this one off as another “rebuilding year” … again. Time to start rooting for the Sabres, again. And yes, I am a hockey whore. By the way, the Leafs finally beat the Sabres the other night, after failing to do so in I think the last six consecutive attempts. Of course, they did so when it no longer mattered and when they were out of the running! And speaking of hockey, the other night, I watched about half of a movie about snappy dresser Don Cherry’s life, and I found it quite interesting. I think it was produced by his son. As much of a bonehead as Cherry seems to be as an announcer on Hockey Night in Canada, there is, as the movie points out, a human side to the guy. I guess he’s a little like the Don Rickles of the hockey world.
Just before Easter Sunday, I watched a few “experts” spar on Larry King Live over the latest controversy involving the Catholic Church. The issue was whether or not Pope Benedict XVI was guilty of delaying justice for Michael Teta, an Arizona priest accused of molesting two boys, seven and nine, twelve years ago. The argument goes that the Pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, knowingly ignored Teta’s onerous transgressions and was therefore culpable. This blind eye approach seems to be an ongoing problem with the Church, and if it is not addressed soon, it will eclipse all that is good about Catholicism. I’ve got a novel idea for the Vatican, try abandoning the ridiculous and unnatural practice of enforced celibacy. If a priest elects to remain celibate, good for him, but forcing celibacy on grown men, as we have seen, has horrible and irreversible consequences. Perhaps offenders should, among other things, be forced to eat copious amounts of matzo … maybe even gefilte fish if they are really bad.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No comments:
Post a Comment