Tag Archives: jokes

Yiddish newspapers and talking cows, a case for Jewish education

Jewish education is a mess according to the Times. Most anyone outside it, who’d look in would agree: Ancient books, pre-science outlooks, anti-inclusive, and taught in a garble of languages, Yiddish, English, Aramaic, Hebrew. The New York Times has runs regular editorials claiming that Jewish education robs children of a future, or an entrance to society, producing adults who know nothing of geometry or higher math, or modern history, incapable of voting intelligently in today’s elections (they often vote Republican). The Times’s experts, are often the products of this education, but claim to have risen above it, only because of extra work. As a proof, they often cite the Talmud as a source of useless knowledge of ancient Jewish law, rejected Bible history, and only the most basic views of math. By way of a response, I’d like to quote something I’d heard in synagog a couple of weeks back:

I’m so glad that I learned geometry in school, and not taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.

The speaker was an accountant, and the point of the joke is that there is no parallelogram season. There is a tax season, though, and tax law follows a bizarre logic that is not geometric, but is somewhat talmudic. As for the useless languages, they are all in use, both as spoken languages and written languages, no less useful than Latin, and certainly more alive. There are currently 5 yiddish-language newspapers being published in New York alone, see below. They compete with each other for readers, while competing also with the Times, the Post, and with another ten or more Hebrew and English journals, several of them Jewish, either published on paper or as web-journals. People read them, though the Times prefers to ignore their existence.

There are five newspapers published currently in Yiddish in New York. The Forward (Tony Curtis and duck) and the Vort are left-leaning, the Algeminer, the Blat, and the Zeitung, are more right and center. There is a readership. Why a duck?

And that brings us to the subject matter, Talmud. Much of Jewish learning is Talmud, either distilled or pure, study of a set of books written between 1000 and 2000 years ago in Israel, Babylon, and France mostly, with commentaries from Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Germany, and Poland. Those who learned talmud tend to find it useful. The legal organization and approach resonates to them in the understanding of taxes, contracts, building, damage assessment, marriage, ethics, even in dealing with alcoholism. Talmud is so useful that it’s common for working, orthodox Jews to continue their learning it throughout their lives. A common practice is to learn a page every day in synchrony with other Jews. Today’s page, when I started writing this post, was Nazir 10. It includes a talking cow, just the sort of section that the Times likes to cite to show the uselessness of it all. I’ll forgive their lack of understanding, but not their laziness for not even bothering to try to understand.

Nazir 10 begins by saying: “If a cow says, ‘I will be a Nazir (that is, I will give up wine for a month) if I stand up’. Then, if it gets up, one school of rabbinic thought (Bais Shammai) says he is a nazir. Another school of thought (Bais Hillel) says he is not a nazir.” The page goes on to speak about taking doors, but I’ll stop here after the first 2 sentences and will try to explain what the Times does not care to examine.

Notice that cows are female, and they typically don’t speak, but here you find a “he” who might have to give up wine. This “he”, this male, is understood to be a person looking at the cow, likely a person with an alcohol problem. He sees a cow lying on the ground (in the mud figuratively) and identifies it to himself. That is, he sees himself lying in the mud. He thinks it’s impossible for the cow to get up because he imagines that he himself can not get up. (This is just the Talmud’s way of discussing things). According to Bais Shammai, the person is understood to have said to himself, “if that cow can get up, I will take it as a sign that I can get up, and I will take it on myself to avoid wine and wine products for a month.” Now, according to Bais Shammai, if the cow gets up, the man is obligated to stop drinking for a month.

“I love television, and find it very educational. When someone turns it on, I go read a book.” G. Marx

Bais Hillel says he is not obligated at all. They say that a drunk who wants to change, must do more than be inspired, he must make a real verbal commitment. He must verbally obligate himself to give up drink. We follow this latter opinion, but learn Bais Shammai’s view too, because there are important ideas about self-identity.

Those are just the first two lines of the page. In secular school, you learn stories too, sometimes stories with talking animals, but these are usually modern stories, where the challenges are external, bullying say, but in a sense such stories are sanitized. The internal demons are removed, and these are often the hardest to battle. Even dealing with external problems is often pushed on an external authority, a teacher usually. You are considered to be too weak to deal with a problem. Sometimes that’s true, usually there is at least some part you could deal with. The lack of self-obligation leaves modern school stories flat. Few kids enjoy them, or feel they get anything from them. A result in Detroit is that schools have <50% attendance. Kids leave barely literate with appalling math skills. We blame the teachers and the subject. It’s the book: Sally has 15 tomatoes and wants to give 4 to a friend, how many will she have left? is this relevant? Does this excite?

Talmud teaches some logic, some math, and some geometry, but only for measuring distances and volumes, the application that geometry was named for (geometry = measuring the earth). They learn the rest as needed, and often learn quite a lot.

As Groucho Marx said: “My education is self inflicted.”

The products of Jewish education become successful, often in business, hiring their better-educated brothers. Some become lawyers, accountants, writers, businessmen, or psychologists — more than our share in the population — or mathematicians and scientists. Some even excel in academics or journalism. The Times does not mention this.

Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx

My three children all went to Jewish, religious school and got the education that the Times calls abuse. So far, my son (31) has two masters degrees, both in artificial intelligence/ computer science. My older daughter (28) is getting her PhD in Psychology, and my younger daughter (23) is working on her masters in epidemiology. I suspect they benefited from the education. My suggestion to the Times, is in another Marx quote: “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”

Robert Buxbaum, March 1, 2023. “History may not think with its feet, but it certainly doesn’t walk on its head.”– Karl Marx, the less-funny, Marx brother. Jewish educated, he became a journalist.

Hypochondriacs anonymous: the first step is admitting you don’t have a disease.

I’m writing a book about reverse psychology; please don’t buy it.

This one’s not by Rappaport

The judge said I had to keep 6 feet away from my ex-wife. So I buried her under the patio.

Robert Buxbaum: the above 3 jokes are from Jack Rappaport — He sometimes sells jokes. April 13, 2022. The ones below are from Gahan Wilson, and the one at right, I don’t know.

These last two are from Gahan Wilson

MI hunting: You can arm bears; you just can’t buy bullets.

Large chunks of Michigan shut down for the prime days of hunting season, from the middle of October to early November. About 8% of the state gets a hunting license each year, some 800,000 people, all trying to “Bag a buck.” Michigan is an open carry state for rifles and holstered pistols, something seen recently in the state capitol, I’d say this was an illegal example since there is also a brandishing law, but it gives a sense of things here. About 29% of the state owns at least one gun, and usually more. There are about as many guns as people. Getting bullets, on the other hand, is near impossible, both for handguns and for most rifles, shotguns excluded.

A lot of the attraction of hunting is that you get to eat what you kill. Mot people do this or donate it to a food back. Hunting is also cheaper than golf. Rural farmers also hunt to protect their crops from crows, squirrels, rabbits, rats, snakes, and raccoons. This is legitimate hunting, in my opinion, even though you typically don’t eat crow. Some people do hunt bear, but that’s a different story (I like to be dressed). It’s possible that the bullet shortage is just a hiccup in the supply chain, “supply and demand” but it’s been going on for 12 years now so I suspect it’s here to stay.

Michigan, was once a Republican, pro-gun stronghold. It has swung Democrat and anti-gun for the last few years. Bulletes have been scare for about that long, at least since the Obama election or the Sandy Hook shooting. Behind this is a general trend of urbanization and class-action law suits. At this point, few sporting stores carry guns or bullets, and those that do, tend to hide them in a back room. Amazon carries neither bullets nor guns, and the same holds at e-bay, Craig’s list, and Walmart on line. Dunhams still sells guns but the only bullets, when I visited today were, 17 caliber, 227 and duck-hunting, shotgun shells. Gone were normal handgun calibers: 22, 25, 32, 38, 45, 357, and 9mm. The press seems OK with duck or moose hunting; not so OK with anything else.

The salesman at Dunham’s said that he had moved to bow hunting, something that’s becoming common, but it’s incredibly difficult even with modern bows. I can rarely hit a non-moving target at 50 feet on the first arrow, and I can only imagine the frustration of trying to hit a moving target after sitting in a cold blind for days waiting for one to appear whose distance and placement is unknown, and that might disappear at any moment, or attack me then disappear.

Part of the problem is that arrows travel at only about 250 ft/s, or about 1/6 the speed of a bullet. Thus, an arrow fired from 50 yards takes about 0.6 seconds to hit. In that time it drops about 6 feet and must be aimed 6 feet above the deer if you hope to hit it. A riffle bullet falls only about 2 inches, about 1/36 as much. Whaat’s more, though an arrow is about three times heavier than a hunting bullet, its slow speed means it hits with only about 1/10 the kinetic energy, about the same as hunting with a 22 from a handgun.

There are those who say the bullet shortage will go away on its own because of supply and demand. That’s true until the government steps in in the name of public safety. Though recreational marijuana and moonshine are both legal, government regulation means that prices are high and supply is limited, with a grey market of people buying high and selling higher. I’m seeing the same with ammunition; there is tight supply, a grey market, and a fair number of people trying to reload spent ammunition using match-tips for primers. Talk about white lightning.

R. E. Buxbaum, December 24, 2020.

Locked down so long, it’s looking up: the up-side of COVID-19.

I’m not crazy about the COVID isolation, but there are up-sides that I’ve come to appreciate. You might too. Out of boredom, I was finally got into meditation. It was better than just sitting around and doing nothing.

It’s best not to look at isolation as a problem, but an opportunity. I’ve developed a serious drinking opportunity.

And it’s an opportunity to talk to myself. I told myself I’ should quit drinking. Then I figured, why should I listen to a drunk who talks to himself.

A friend of mine was on drugs, but then quit. Everyone in his house is happy, except for the lamp. The lamp won’t talk to him anymore.

The movies are closed, and the bars, and the gyms. It gives me another reason not to go to the gym.

Did you know that, before the crowbar was invented, crows used to drink at home.

The real reason dogs aren’t allowed in bars: lots of guys can’t handle their licker.

There’s time to spend with my children. And they look like me.

I like that I don’t commute. Family events are over zoom, funerals (lots of funerals), meetings, lectures. They come in via the computer, and I don’t have to dress or attend. No jacket, no pants… no travel …. no job.

My children are spending more time with us at home. We have virtual meals together. I discovered that I have a son named Tok. He seems to like my dad-jokes.

My wife is finding it particularly tough. Most every day I see her standing by the window, staring, wondering. One of these days, I’ll let her in.

I asked wife why she married me. Was it for my looks, or my income, or my smarts. She smiled and said it was my sense of humor. 🙂

My wife is an elementary school teacher. She teaches these days with a smart board. If the board were any smarter, it would go work for someone else. It’s necessary, I guess. If you can’t beat them, you might as well let the smart board teach. I think the smart board stole the election. It began by auto-correcting my spelling. Then it moved to auto correct my voting. The board is smarter and better than me (Hey, who wrote this?)

some mask humor
I’ve learned to love masks, though some of them are hot.

You’d think they’d reduce the number of administrators in the schools, given that it’s all remote. Or reduce the price of college. It would be nice if they’d up the number of folks who can attend. So far no. Today the Princeton alumni of Michigan is sponsoring video-talk by Princeton alumnus, George Will. I wanted to attend, but found there was limited seating, so I’m on the waiting list (true story). By keeping people out, they show they are exclusive. Tuition is $40,000 / year, and they keep telling us that the college is in service of humanity. If they were in the service of humanity, they’d charge less, and stream the talk to whoever wants to listen in. I have to hope this will change sooner or later.

Shopping for toilet paper was a big issue at the beginning of the pandemic, but I’ve now got a dog to do it for me. He goes to the store, brings it back. Brings back toothpaste too. He’s a lavatory retriever. (I got this joke from Steve Feldman; the crowbar joke too.)

I don’t mind that there are few new movies. There are plenty of old movies that I have not seen, and old TV shows too.

This fellow is the new head of Biden’s COVID-19 task force. He’s got a science-based plan for over-population and the disease.

I like that people are leaving New York and LA. It’s healthy, and saves on rent. Folks still travel there, mostly for the rioting, but lockdowns are nicer in Michigan.

More people are hunting, and hiking, and canoeing. These are active activities that you can do on lockdown. The old activities were passive, or going out to eat. Passive activities are almost a contradiction in terms.

We’re cooking more at home, which is healthier. And squirrel doesn’t taste half bad. If I live through this, I’ll be healthy.

I’m reading more, and have joined goodreads.com. I’ve developed a superpower: I find can melt ice cubes, just by looking at them. It takes a while but they melt.

A lot more folks have dogs. And folks have gotten into religion. Wouldn’t it be great, if after death we fond that dyslexic folks were right. There really is a dog.

Let’s love the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse.

There was an election last week. My uncles voted for Biden, which really surprised me. They were staunch Republicans when they were alive. My aunt got the ballot and convinced them. She was a Democrat when she was alive.

I got pneumonia vaccine shot, and a flu shot. That wasn’t a joke. I think it’s a good idea. Here’s why. People mostly die from pneumonia not the virus.

Before COVID, the other big crisis was global warming. Al Gore and Greta Thunberg claimed we had to shutter production and stop driving to save the planet. COVID-19 has done it. The next crisis is over-population. COVID is already curing that problem — not so much in China, but in the US, Europe, and South America.

Just As a final thought, let’s look at the bright side of the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse. Take Monty Python’s advice and Always look at the bright side of life.

Robert Buxbaum, November 20, 2020.

math jokes and cartoons

uo3wgcxeParallel lines have so much in common.

It’s a shame they never get to meet.

he-who-is-without-mathematics

bad-vector-math-jokemath-for-dummies

sometimes education is the removal of false notions.

sometimes education is the removal of false notions.

pi therapy

pi therapy

Robert E. Buxbaum, January 4, 2017. Aside from the beauty of math itself, I’ve previously noted that, if your child is interested in science, the best route for development is math. I’ve also noted that Einstein did not fail at math, and that calculus is taught wrong, and probably is.

Thinking the unthinkable

Do you know how you go about thinking the unthinkable?

 

With an ithberg, of course.

 

Robert Buxbaum. April 12, 2016. I thought it was time for another “dad joke.” Besides, the Titanic sank on April 14th. I spend a fair about of time thinking the unthinkable. On a vaguely similar note:

After Boris died, everyone gathered at his funeral.

The minister started to speak: “He was a model husband, a decent man, a terrific father..”

The widow then makes a motion for her son to come to her.

“What is it mother?” he whispers.

“Dear, go check the casket, I think we’re at the wrong funeral…”

Stories of Jewish charity

Before Passover this year, an individual went to the rabbi of our town for a private meeting to tell him about the problems facing various people. He said, there was one particularly pathetic case where a family could lose their house. They had borrowed $5000 from a particularly nasty lender who would throw them out in the cold if they didn’t pay up soon.

Our rabbi was touched, and said he would do what he could to raise the sum. He would even contribute $100 of his own. As the fellow left, he had just one question, ‘How do you come to know this is going on? Are you a relative, or particularly close friend?” “No,” said the guest, “I’m the lender.”

 

Another story of Jewish charity: a neighbor of ours takes incredible care of her husband, She spends quite a lot, regularly to get his nails done professionally. She says it’s worth it to know that his coffin is secure.

Finally, I must admit that I’d wanted to marry my ex-wife, who I had divorced previously — sort of an act of kindness. But she would have none of it. My ex said I was only marrying her for my money.

Robert E. Buxbaum. October 23, 2015

Chinese jokes

At college, my chinese room-mate wanted to make a surprise birthday dinner for his girlfriend.

….. But someone let the cat out of the bag.

 

Then there was the fellow who broke into the Fortune Cookie Factory with a hammer and broke virtually all the fortune cookies — as many as he could find — in an act of wonton destruction.

 

And finally,

 

I don’t believe racial jokes are evil, but suppose it all comes down on your idea of good humor. Comedy always involves odd people, or people doing things differently. The difference doesn’t have to be insulting, just different, and all good jokes provide some new insight.

Robert E. Buxbaum, October 29, 2015. Every now and again I post jokes– and then I analyze them to death (it’s funny because ….). Recent ones include an Italian Funeral joke, a fetish lawyer joke, and things on, engineers, dentists, piratessurrealism. Just click the “jokes” tab at right for the whole, unsightly assortment.

Einstein’s fuzzy slippers — and a fetish lawyer joke

First, the joke about the fetishistic lawyer: He got off on a technicality.

It’s funny because  ….  it’s a double entendre, a multi-word, sexual homophone (no insult  to the homophone community). It also relates to a fact as true and significant as any in life. What a person considers enjoyable, fun (or not) depends mostly on what’s in his mind. Whether judging sexy or scary; pleasant or disagreeable, it has relatively little to do with a physical reality, and is mostly in the imagination of the person. As a result, the happiest people seem to be those who embrace their inner weirdness. They try to find jobs that they are good at, that allow them to take perverse pleasure in their own weird way within the bounds of a civil society.

Take pleasure in your own weirdness.

Einstein in fuzzy slippers outside of his Princeton home; take pleasure in your own weirdness.

Einstein, at left, seems to have enjoyed doing physics, playing the violin, and wearing odd clothes: sweaters, and these (pink) fuzzy slippers. the odd clothes didn’t detract from his physics, and may have even helped him think. Boris Spassky (the Russian chess champion) was asked which he preferred: sex or chess, he said: “it very much depends on the position.” Do what you like, and like what you do. As the old joke goes, “I don’t suffer from insanity: I enjoy every moment.”

Robert Buxbaum. April 1, 2014; I mostly blog about science and hydrogen, but sometimes, like here, about personal relations, or last week economics (dismal). Here’s a thermodynamic look at life. And a picture of an odd sculpture I made. I take my own advice, by the way: this blog doesn’t get me any money but it’s fun, and maybe I’ll help some day — e.g. maybe it’ll spark my creativity. Here’s a bit about Einstein’s mustache, and the universe being curved in.

Climate change, and the metaphysical basis of humor

It’s funny because ….. it’s metaphysical, it deals with what’s real and relevant, and what’s secondary and transient– an aspect as fundamental as it is funny. We claim we understand the real, but realize (down deep) that we don’t. A classic of old-time comedy is the clever slave, the sympathetic stooges, of the brave coward, or the most common version– the stupid person who does clever things at the right moment. A typical comic structure is to establish, early on, that this person is stupid (as well as being low, and crooked); he may say some stupid, low things, so we accept it as so, or perhaps someone in authority tells us, as in “Puddin’head Wilson”. But as the story progresses, we see the person do something clever, or show loyalty and bravery. The viewer begins to laugh because he knows that reality is sort-of this way, though our minds must keep people pigeonholed. The reader already knows, perhaps from other comedies, that the slave will turn out to be the hero, the stupid one will one-up the smart and the chicken will save the day– somehow.

Ward Sullivan in the New Yorker

Ward Sullivan in the New Yorker. It’s unsettling when you don’t know if this is a new reality or a passing phase.

In life, we grab on to the patters we see because the alternative, chaos, is worse. All winters are cold, but will this winter be longer or shorter than normal; perhaps the groundhog knows, or perhaps the president of the US knows? We’ve learned to ignore the groundhog, but trust the president. Once we accept, from authority, that winters are getting warmer, we resist any effort to think we may be wrong, or that the pattern of the past may have changed; uncertainty seems worse. But we laugh at comedy, and occasionally get mad. How much evidence before one accepts that the temporary is permanent, or that ones original assessment was flawed? In comedy there’s always a stuffed-shirt character who tries to show off and gets hurt, perhaps by a pie in the face. Then it happens again, and again. The injuries and slow acceptance of the new reality create the humor. A common ending is to discover that the clever slave is a half-nobleman, perhaps the son of the stuffed-shirt, and the crowd goes home happy, with someone new we can trust.

With global warming and climate change, I see the same comedy being played out, and I expect it to reach the same, happy ending. For 20-30 years, till about 1998, there were a string warming winters; as a result we come to believe things will keep getting warmer. Then the president says we have to stop it, and laws are passed but not implemented; Al Gore gets a nobel prize for his efforts to stop global warming; the computer experts predict global disaster if we don’t change by 2005. The studies predict 4-6°C warming per century warming with massive flooding; we make new laws and point to shrinking of Himalayan glaciers, shrinking polar ice, and the lack of snow on Kilimanjaro — all justifications for the need to act fast and sacrifice for the future, and the warming stops. So far it’s been 16 years and no warming, the snow’s comes back to Kilimanjaro, and the seas have not risen. A few scientists start saying there may be a problem with the models, and the president gets mad about the headless chicken skeptics.

The US is then/now hit with the coldest temperatures since the early 1900s, with as much snow as 1904, but it’s never clear if this is a fluke or the new normal reality. Has the real pattern of warming changed, or maybe it never was. Kilimanjaro’s still snow-capped, the glaciers have returned to the Himalayas, and the antarctic ice swells to record size. The US sees a year with no major hurricanes.  We can laugh, but there’s no laughter from the President of The US, or the Prince of England or any who solemnly predicted disaster. Like the stuffed shirts in a comedy, they double down, and roar at the deniers; “They’re pawns of the lobbyists.” And I suspect the resolution will be that some climate denier will be crowned as the new expert, and we’ll go on to worry about a new disaster.

For what it’s worth, the weather seems to be chaotic (Chaos is funny); we appear to have been seeing part of a cycle that has an up-period and a down period. Something like that is shown by the 100 year plot of temperature data from Charlotte Carolina shown below.

Charlotte SC average temperatures over the last century.

Charlotte SC average temperatures over the last century. Perhaps the recent warming is part of a cycle. Is it clear there has been a change in climate. If so, where does the change start?

Robert E. Buxbaum, March 9, 2014. Surrealism is funny because it taps into the ridiculousness of life. Metaphysics humor is behind a statistics joke, an architecture cartoon, and my zen joke.  Physics is funny too.