Tikkun Olam

So tonight my D.H. and I went to a movie--first time in a long time--and had Menchies' frozen yogurt at a little outdoor table near the theatre, watching a central fountain spew forth graceful arcs of water, on a beautiful, mild spring day.                                                          I actually 'asked him out.' A little unusual? Not really.  We're married 43+ years and I can do whatever I want, heheh.  As a matter of fact, he had asked me several times over the past few weeks if I wanted to go to a movie, and each time I answered in the negative: feet hurt, knees hurt, too tired, etc.  I'm kind of a homebody; when I get home from work, I just want to vegge out . But today, my D...

(Actually, I already posted today, but this is the post I had intended for NaBloPoMo, so here it is.) Is it Day #4 already? Boy, does time fly. At least, it certainly did in the three-hour film D.H.* and I saw last night. We saw Avatar , and it was everything our son (Mister Arnold Mayergi) said it was (he had just seen it in Tel-Aviv when we spoke to him yesterday). The three hours only felt like one. We saw it in 3-D, which enhanced it even more (is the future...3 dimensional, motion holograms, as in Star Wars?). The special effects / CG technology were superb. It also had a vertiginous feel to it, with mountains suspended in "air" in their non-earth-atmospheric world. The plot by itself was formula, though: a technologically superior people (humans) tries to subdue an 'inferior' race to exploit the latter's world's geological resources for their (the hi-tech people's) own benefit: profit over ethical behavior. In the process there is a love story ...

I know this is an annual event (my husband just tonight alerted me to it's impending appearance)--the Leonid meteor shower --but I am still reeling from the video we saw last night, a 3-hour production made from the TV mini-series, "Impact." It is a science-fiction story about a meteor shower during which a brown dwarf crashes into the moon and jars it out of it's orbit, putting it on a collision course with Earth. The brown dwarf embedded in the moon also has a mass twice the mass of Earth and a strong magnetic and gravitational pull, and wreaks havoc on Earth with intermittent EMP events and gravitational anomalies. I have no idea whether or not this is scientifically possible, but I have to admit, the premise gave me pause. Now, with the Leonid Meteor Shower about to present on or about November 17th, I am thinking, we are so vulnerable here on our little lonely planet, out there by itself in vast space. . . Ok, enough of that. What we'll do is just break o...

One week ago, on Wednesday, I canceled my evening adult Hebrew class to see, along with two of my students and spouses (mine included) a free preview of the Coen brothers' new film, A Serious Man, which hadn't yet opened. It was set in the late 60s, supposedly about Jews in Minnesota. I was interested. I am always interested in movies with Jewish themes, especially those produced by non-Jews purporting to depict Orthodox or Chassidic Jewry, as in the movie "A Stranger Among Us." I usually sit there in the theatre with clenched fists, taut muscles and gritting my teeth, as I watch an embarrassing, often painful rendering of what the producers and/or directors think "Jewish Life" is really like. With all their production assistants and dialect and behavioral and cultural "coaches" and trainers, they rarely get it right. In contrast of course, the Israeli film Ushpizin (in Hebrew, ha-Ushpizin) was outstanding. It was produced, directed and acte...