Jewish New Year's Resolutions

In honor of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I offer up the following New Year's Resolutions. (Note: Any resemblance to real Jewish persons is entirely a coincidence.)

• I will not brag about my son... the doctor... who graduated from Harvard, with honors, and was just listed by some big important magazine as one of the best doctors in [insert name of city here]. (And did I mention he and his lovely wife just bought a lovely new house and are about to give me my first grandson?) 

• I promise to have sex with my husband, that is, if he can tear himself away from that blonde shiksa he hired. (I have no idea what he sees in her. Also, her boobs? Totally fake.) And would it kill him to get his back waxed?

• I will not brag about my new car (a Maybach, only cost me $425,000). 

• I will not nag my children about calling me more often, though would it kill you to pick up a phone once in a while? (Email, shmemail. Feh.) 

• I will keep my mouth closed about my daughter, who insists on living in sin with that no-good deadbeat. Would it kill him to get a real job? And what's with the earring? 

• I will not brag to all my friends about my grandchildren... though, did I mention, my granddaughter was just accepted at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton?  

• I will listen to my wife complain without rolling my eyes.

• I will not post embarrassing pictures of my children/grandchildren on their Facebook pages. (Bar and bat mitzvah photos from the 1970s and 1980s don't count, do they?)

• This year, I will lose 20 pounds. Now would you be a dear and pass me more noodle kugel? 

• I will not pass judgment upon others. (Though did you see [insert name here]'s house? It's like animals live there. Disgusting. And did you see what she wore to the club the other night? What does she think she is, 25? And him! Running around with that woman. Shameful.)

L'shanah tovah!

Everything I know about high school I learned from glee

For those of you who think the popular Fox show glee is purely a work of fiction (like I did, until this afternoon), guess again.

I don't know what I was expecting when I walked into my daughter's high school earlier today, my first day as a volunteer in the high school library. Probably the same thing I experienced when I volunteered at her middle school.* Yes, I am that naive.

Looking around, I felt I was in a frickin' episode of glee, complete with cheerleaders IN UNIFORM in the middle of the day. (My daughter's high school even has similar initials to the one on glee.) There were the jocks in one section, some pimply faced boys in another, a group of token outcasts/rebels, and a smattering of pretty, quiet studious girls and nice-looking studious boys. I seriously kept waiting for everyone to break out into song -- with a pre-choreographed dance routine.


I'm just relieved no one slammed me into a locker or threw a slushy at me.

*I attended a small, private, low-key (at least back in the day) all-girls high school in New York City -- with no football team or cheerleaders, though apparently a handful (or two) of Gossip Girls. 

Do you have Gangnam Style?

And if you are saying to yourself, WTF is Gangnam Style?! Then the answer is no.

So what is Gangnam Style? Gangnam Style is a video by the Korean group PSY -- and the latest YouTube sensation, with nearly 153 million views (on just the original upload) in only two months.



You're welcome.

(If it makes you feel any better, I am also rather late to the Gangnam Style party, having not understood what "Gangnam Style" was until earlier today. And the teenager, who knew about One Direction before any of her friends did, had not heard of PSY or Gangnam Style either. Score one point for Mom!)

More importantly, did we really need another dance craze? (That would be a rhetorical question.)

I am still trying to figure out how to do the Macarena.



Indeed, the last dance craze I probably mastered (though "mastered" is a bit of a stretch) was the Hustle. And I think I was 9 or 10 when the song came out.



So in 10 or even 5 years will we be going to weddings and sweet sixteens and bar and bat mitzvahs and dancing Gangnam Style? I don't think so. Then again, as Judson Laipply so whimsically (painfully?) demonstrates in his Evolution of Dance videos, we've lived through worse.

The best song you've never heard?

I am not a big fan of Heineken beer, but I am a big fan of the songs they play on their commercials (which you probably have not seen unless you watch a lot of baseball and football, which I do). And ever since I saw Heineken's latest ad, titled "The Switch," I've been obsessed with the song played in the background.



(Is it just me or is that singer a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse?)

So finally, last night, after seeing "The Switch" a half dozen times (we watched a lot of sports yesterday: football -- GO JETS!* -- baseball (Mets still suck, sigh), and the U.S. Open women's tennis final, which was awesome, though could someone please put a mute button on Victoria Azarenka already?)  I went Googling to see who sang the song played in the background.

Turns out, the song is called "Love Letter," and it's by a group called Clairy Browne & the Bangin' Rackettes. And it's even more awesome than I thought. (Also, I am clearly not the only one who saw and heard a resemblance between Clairy Browne and Amy Winehouse.)



"Love Letter" is totally going on my iPod, and if you like smokey, jazzy, R&B songs (or Amy Winehouse), I recommend you put it on yours.

So if any of you know of an awesome song most people probably never heard of, please leave a Comment with the name of the song and the YouTube link.

*So are the Jets this good or were the Bills that bad?

How harsh a parent are you?

The spouse and I were amused reading New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor's recent article about the Obama girls, Malia and Sasha. Specifically, we were amused by Michelle (and Barack) Obama's rules for the girls, which included (and I quote):

• Technology is for weekends. Malia may use her cellphone only then, and she and her sister cannot watch television or use a computer for anything but homework during the week. 
• Malia and Sasha had to take up two sports: one they chose and one selected by their mother. “I want them to understand what it feels like to do something you don’t like and to improve,” the first lady has said. 
• Malia must learn to do laundry before she leaves for college. 
• The girls have to eat their vegetables, and if they say that they are not hungry, they cannot ask for cookies or chips later.

While some children (and their parents) might find these rules on the harsh side, the spouse and I did not. Indeed, while we allow our daughter to use technology and watch TV during the week, she only does so after doing her homework. And she had to start doing her own laundry when she turned 13. We also put her on a clothing budget when she became a teenager, which has taught her to look for coupons and watch for sales, and I have taught her how to comparison shop. And we told her she can only cook (or bake), an activity she loves and has gotten quite good at, if she cleans up after herself.

Are we being too harsh, or strict? We don't think so. (Hey, compared to Prince Charles -- and Queen Elizabeth II -- who just sent Prince Harry to Afghanistan for four months as punishment for misbehaving*, we are softies.)

But what do you think of the Obamas "rules" for their girls? And what rules do you have for your children? I'd love to know, via the Comments.

*No, the Queen didn't really send Harry to Afghanistan as punishment. At least I don't think so.

Lies, lies, lies, yeah (they're gonna get you)

I am so sick of all the lies that the Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney and his sidekick, vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, have been spouting -- and repeating even after nonpartisan fact-checking organizations have called them on their lies -- I want to scream. The only time I want to hear lies is in the lyrics of a song, preferably one with a beat that I can dance to.

So, as I have been told that wiring the presidential and vice-presidential candidates to a lie detector (and an independent fact checker) during the debates and having the moderator administer an electric shock every time one of them lies, the bigger the lie, the bigger the shock, would probably kill them, I propose playing a snippet from one of the following songs each time a candidate lies.

So which song should it be? The Thompson Twins' "Lies"?



The Eurythmics' "Would I lie to you?"



Or Depeche Mode's "Policy of Truth"?



Or do you have another suggestion?

Mighty erections

Alternate title: Another visit to the Storm King Art Center.

I love a good outdoor sculpture park. And what better way to enjoy a lovely late summer day than to stroll the grounds of Storm King at dusk?

Here are a few of my favorite photos from yesterday's visit. (You can see photos from our previous visit to Storm King, back in 2010, here.)

Click on the photo to see a larger view (as well as the name of the sculpture and artist).

[FWIW, the spouse took a most unflattering photograph of me taking the second-to-last picture, which, if you are interested, you can see on both of our Facebook pages.]