(Note: I better not be getting the night wrong.)My friend told me a children's story about an 80 year old man who came to a doctor's office for a treatment. He requested that they perform the treatment as quickly as possible because he is in a hurry.We love you Grandma, and Happy Birthday!! May you have many more years of smiles! :)
During the treatment the nurse asked: "Where are you hurrying off to? Do you have an important doctor's appointment?"
"No, I am eating with my wife in the hospital?"
"What is wrong with her?"
"She has had Alzheimer's for a few years already."
"And if you are a little late, will she worry?""No, she does not understand what is happening to her. For the last five years she does not recognize anyone, not even me."
"And you visit her every morning even though she does not know who you are?" – the nurse said surprisingly.
"She does not know who I am," the man said smiling, "But I know who she is and who she was."
At malls across the country, shoppers are being besieged by a determined crop of salespeople: young Israelis who man mobile carts and have a no-holds-barred selling style.While I have somewhat mixed feelings about how some of the Israelis tend to do business, most of them tend to be eminently respectful (if a bit pushy) and admittedly great salesmen. Their attitude and self-confidence is amazing (in the article one talks about being able to sell ice to Eskimos), and they certainly get the job done. It's a good piece, check it out. Below is the music video the article mentions by Rami Feinstein, a well known Israeli musician who wrote a song about his annual stint as such a salesman.
Amid the grimmest holiday season in years, these workers are approaching passing mall shoppers or calling out from their stations, pitching body lotions, irons, toys and knickknacks. They demonstrate their wares by flying remote-control helicopters, steaming shirts and applying makeup. Instead of charging American-style fixed prices, they harness the culture of the bazaar and often quote numbers based on what they think a customer will be willing to pay.
Consider, my friends, the monstera fruit. Yeah, I know. With a name like monstera deliciosa, you gotta believe that it’s either some weird result of a genetics lab experiment, or it was discovered by a botanist with a bizarre sense of humor. Let’s start with the tree it grows on. It doesn’t. The monstera plant is a bit creepy. Unlike most sensible plants, it grows toward the dark. Then when it finds the source of the shade (generally a tree), it changes tack and starts climbing it toward the light.
If the monstera vine sounds like something you’d never see outside of darkest Africa, or maybe Brazil, wrong. It happens to be native to Panama, but you can find it much closer to home. Next time you’re dating in a hotel lobby, check out the flora. According to the holy grail of accuracy, Wikipedia, monstera plants are popular in hotels because of their thick, luxurious foliage. But without real sunlight, the monstera won’t put out any of its fruit – which is ok, because that would probably scare the guests away, or at least give the daters something to talk about.
The monstera fruit looks like a banana coated in green pineapple-style scales. Like all monsters, it has its teeth: if you try to eat the monstera before it’s ripe, the oxalic acid it contains will burn your throat and poison you. Which could be uncomfortable.
The monstera is ready to be eaten when it starts to shed it scales. Quite frankly, it’s gross. The dusty green scales just pop off and fall all over, leaving smudges on the exposed banana-colored flesh underneath. Under each hexagonal scale is a hexagonal division of fruit. They’re packed closely together, keeping the banana appearance, but when you bite into it, they come off more like corn-on-the-cob. The consistency is a cross between pineapple and banana. The flavor isn’t bad, at first. It has a pineapple tartness and banana creaminess, but there’s also a spiciness (oxalic acid?) and a heaviness that make you slow down and wonder if it really tasted good at first or if you imagined it.
Fairly decent in small doses; serve the hexagons off the cob, and don't show the guests the monster until after they've swallowed.
A small expedition that included bored bloggers Scraps and Bad4 headed into
It is also unknown (to us) if the Chinese really eat them, or if they just hang them up outside their grocery stores in Chinatown to lure curious Americans so they can tout the fruit’s sweet, delicate taste, and then collapse behind the counter in a hysterical fit of giggles when the tourist walks off with 7 pounds of mornthong at $1.20 a pound. (We pretty much did that.)
Once a durian mornthong is purchased, good luck getting it home. Durian mornthongs do not cuddle well, being covered in sharp woody spikes. Handling can be difficult for those who aren’t used to sleeping on a bed of nails. Purveyors customarily tip it into a regular shopping bag, after which it is the customer's problem. People who have purchased durian mornthongs are easily discerned from the crowd by their pained expression every time the bag bumps their leg and gouges little holes through their clothes. Which is about every other step.
Like many prickly personalities, the durian mornthong is all softness i
nside. Cut open, it looks rather like a brain in a skull – not a regular brain, but more like the “this is your brain on drugs” kind of brain. The flesh has a scrambled-eggs coloring and a scrambled eggs appearance when disturbed.
The fruit’s odor is not immediately apparent. It kind of sneaks up on you and then won’t leave. Most people stick their nose into the shell, sniff, and say “I don’t smell anything… wait, maybe there’s something?” Then they sniff again and say, “Yes there is, but it’s not so bad… ooh wait - maybe it is!” The scent is pungent and penetrating. Three shopping bags cannot mask its unique and flavorful scent, which fills the room and creeps beyond at a dismaying rate. If you ever wanted to know how the malodorous homeless feel when everyone crowds to the other end of the subway car, take an opened durian mornthong onto the train. In many parts of Southeast Asia, durians are officially banned from public places.
In our professional opinion, the durian monthong has about four really practical uses, none of which involve the human digestive system except the last.
Durian mornthongs are currently selling on
If you’re like most of the world, you probably this is one of coolest fruits you’ve ever seen. If you’re like a weird percent of the world, you think it looks just like those hairy yellow caterpillars that you always found crawling on your bathing suit every morning when you left it out to dry in the bungalow colony. This is a kiwano, and it is proof that looks can be deceiving.
There is no doubt that the kiwano looks pretty awesome. In fact, many people recommend that you keep a bunch in a bowl for decorative purposes, because they retain their good looks for quite a while, or that you hollow out kiwano halves and serve ice cream in them. The people who aren’t “many people” recommend that you leave the psychedelic melon on the store shelf and buy ceramic apples for your decorations and sugar cones for your ice cream. Notably, nobody actually recommends that you eat the thing.
The kiwano is an African horned melon. It grows naturally in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa (a good thing to know if you ever get lost there). They claim it's nutritious. Yeah - so are Brussels sprouts.
There’s no art to eating a kiwano. You can cut it any way you want – the long way, the short way, into rings or into spears, or in half so you can scoop out the center. Whichever way you cut it, you end up with a lot of greenish sacs of pulp, each with a seed in the middle. You know the center part of a big cucumber, where all the seeds are? Well, the entire kiwano is like that, only the seeds and pulp are all bigger.
The official way to eat kiwano is to suck up a pulp sac, hold the seed between the teeth, and suck the pulpy part from around it. Then you spit out the seed. Our panel of judges (thank you Girl Zone specialty staff) found that to be too much effort for too little return, and just slurped down the entire thing, seed and all. Then they decided that even that was too much effort for too little return, and chucked the rest in the garbage.
It’s not that the kiwano tastes bad. It just doesn’t taste much at all. If you sprinkled a bit of citrus juice on the center of a cucumber it would taste kind of how a kiwano tastes. Or maybe a bit stronger. Kiwano may be exciting to look at, but eating it is instant insomnia cure. Give your $4 to a worthy charity instead, and get a check mark next to your name in the heavenly books.
Rosh Chodesh Elul has passed.
The High Holidays approacheth.
The Holy Days are nigh.
Heavenly judgment is being passed.
And you’re busy looking for the ideal shehecheyanu fruit to garnish your Rosh Hashana table.
Is it your imagination, or did this task used to be simpler? Back in the day before antioxidants became all the rage, when you could buy a pomegranate and be sure that none of your guests had tasted it in 354 days. Doubtless those with a house full of boys have often wished the mandate included vegetables – wouldn’t it be so much easier to just serve up a salad as shehecheyanu food?
The real problem is that if something is rare, there’s often a reason for it. Usually, it’s because the taste is just plain lousy. Take quince as a shining example of a fruit that is mostly unemployed because not only did it flunk out of fruit school—it didn’t even manage to get a GED. If you can’t eat a fruit without heavy-duty processing first, what good is it?
Oh, there are rare fruits that taste good. Starfruit, if you can find it, or prickly pear (sabra), if you haven’t seen it on sale in the past year and been unable to resist snapping it up. Lychee nuts pass with a small number, but there are always those who object to eating a fruit that tastes like something you keep in a jar in the bathroom to improve the scent. No doubt about it. Buying a new fruit is a really tough job.
The very worst part of new fruit purchasing is buying something that just looks sooo good and being terribly disappointed. And then telling someone about it and hearing that they tried it last year and already knew that it was a flop. So here's a proposition: if you've done the legwork and tasted a fruit, please render a review for the edification of the public. I'll be puting up a few of my own in the coming weeks. Share yours as well.
- R' Yonasan Goldson at Beyond BT on the sacrifices the signers made, and how that should translate to us.
- SuperRaizy has a few great videos that I really enjoyed.
"We live each day with Emunah and Bitachon. Each one of us knows quite well the concepts of G’zar Din and S’char v’Onesh. It is certainly difficult to accept Hashem’s decrees.No one claims to have the answers of the specifics and the severity. But one thing we do know - the Ribbono Shel Olam did it for a reason only He knows - and we accept His judgement.The comments on this letter are split. Some comments disagree with the author and discuss how these days are the same as observing a Yarzheit, etc. and some comments agree with the author's view.
Sadly, the Chilonim don’t walk around with such an attitude, and therefore have questions.They need to take a minute each year to think.We as Chareidim think about Hashem’s ways every day of the year.The mechanic’s friends won’t celebrate with him - it lowers their standards. The Chareidim don’t stand during the siren - it minimizes their Emunah and Bitachon. "
After the Mashgiach left, everyone sat down – men on one side of the Mechitza, and women on the other, and music began to play; with Yom Tov Negunim sung by R’ Mechuel Schnitzler. The crowd then broke into a “rekida”, Likovid Yom Tov!Just to note, I think that what was done was very cool and quite amazing; I just am presuming that this would not have been assured like previous concerts that in reality are no different.
Is anyone out there surviving financially? I, for one, am not. Pesach itself set me back so seriously. In addition to the cost of making Yom Tov with the sky-high prices of Pesach food - and food in general, there were Afikoman presents to buy and Chol Hamoed trips to go on. This all made my already dire financial situation that much more disastrous.I'm betting that most of the readers here can already guess what Wolf & SL responded, but it's worth it to see what they each added as well. Oy.
Take eight kids to an amusement part on Chol Hamoed and you'll walk out having spent close to $200. For what? And if, chas veshalom we don't take our kids on a Chol Hamoed trip every single day, somehow we are lacking as parents. That's the feeling we get. So the day after the amusement park, we went to the Liberty Science Center. That, too, cost a veritable fortune. On the third day of Chol Hamoed, I said that instead of going on a trip, we would go buy Afikoman presents. Frankly, the Chol Hamoed trip would probably have been a bargain compared to the prices we paid at the toy store. On Erev Shabbos, the last day of Chol Hamoed, we took the kids bowling. Who would imagine that you would have to pay well over $100 for a family to play two games of knocking down some bowling pins?
I’ve lost track of the times in the eleven years since Project Y.E.S. was founded that I was approached by single mothers who requested that I help make arrangements for someone to take their son(s) to shul. Countless others have asked me for an eitzah regarding the appropriate response to their son who categorically refuses to go to shul alone.When I was in Israel, I would go last days of Yom Tov to my cousin in Neve Yaakov. She was trying to work, take care of her seven kids ages 2 to 16, and in the process of getting divorced (and the second year I was around, received her get). There was a huge difference in the sons' demeanors when they would daven with someone next to them (a neighbor, me) and when they'd be on their own. The difference in happiness when they'd go on someone's shoulders for Simchas Torah instead of just standing on the side was immeasurable; the, for lack of a better word, blah look when they would sit there alone was deadening. It doesn't take much to go over to a kid and invite them to sit with you; while for me it was easy, since it was family, there were a couple of other men in the shul who walked over and had my cousins join them and/or their kids.
Thoughts on the Shloshim of the 8 Mercaz Harav Kedoshim
