Last week, I wrote about my trials and tribulations in buying tickets for the Washington Opera’s Madame Butterfly. What a First World Problem, you say. Okay, you are right, but what about my experience yesterday?

I know. You can’t answer that if you don’t know what my experience yesterday was. Here goes: I had a Haberman Institute leadership meeting at our Rockville office. Rather than our usual start time of 10:30, we started at noon, to accommodate a West Coast board member on Zoom. To save the staff the agony of ordering food for everyone, I asked those in attendance to bring their own lunch (because our offices are in a synagogue, the food had to be dairy or parve – no meat) if they wanted to eat. I was going to handle this very simply, by stopping at Goldberg’s New York Bagels, and getting some hummus on a bagel and something to drink. I have had this particular meal at or from Goldberg’s many, many times (maybe 3).

I walked up to the counter, placed my order and was met with “Sorry, we are out of hummus.” Say, what? Out of hummus? First, how can a deli be out of hummus? Second, how long does it take to mash up some chickpeas? The website Budgetbytes.com tells me it would take 5 minutes. Third, since they are located next door to a kosher grocery, why couldn’t they just go and buy some pre-made hummus there, if they didn’t have the ingredients at their place?

Digression: reminds me of another old joke. Did you hear that the Titanic hit a goldberg and sank? Hit a goldberg? You mean it hit an iceberg. Okay, goldberg, rosenberg, iceberg – what’s the difference? End of digression.

I finished reading Katharine Farrer’s The Cretan Counterfeit yesterday. I would tell you not to bother reading it, although I know you won’t and I know you haven’t. It was written in the 1950s by a woman who maybe should be best known as the long time next door neighbor of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is what you would perhaps call an intellectual who-done-it. The intellectual part is related to the focus of the book being Minoan archeological digs on the Island of Crete, and whether or not certain artifacts (pottery and rings) are real or fake, and whether if they are fake, they are being sold as real. Farrer says that she consulted with archeologists (which I am sure she did) to write the technical parts of the book, which are somewhat interesting. The who-done-it part of the book involves the murder of the dig foreman’s 16 year old son and of the leader of the expedition, and the stabbing of the leader’s assistant. It turns out (spoiler alert) that the murderer was not any of the suspects whose motives and actions are followed in detail, but the father of the 16 year old, a Cretan who believed that his son was killed by the leader of the dig and engaged in a rather typical, so she says, Cretan blood vengeance. The fact that the murderer himself was only mentioned once or twice in the entire book, and played no role until about three pages from the end of the book meant that everything else in the book was totally meaningless.

But there were a few good lines. I will quote two.

(1) “He had drunk….a glass of neat ouzo, a Greek liqueur rather like absinthe, consisting of almost pure alcohol with a burning flavor like furniture polish.”

(2) “The rabbit, meanwhile, sat still and stared at its owner with that look of timid obstinacy only found in rabbits and minor functionaries.”

I always look for Jewish references in books that have no need of Jewish references, and there always seem to be some. In this book, there were two. The first, to a London policeman who works with the book’s protagonist: “He found a curious scene, Samuelson (his best man), a London Jew of the toughest, clever, decisive and devoured by ambition…..”. The second, “[T]hey were made in Rotterdam by a shady little jeweler called Louis Rosenau…”

Neither Samuelson nor Rosenau played any role in the book beyond what you read in the above paragraph. Why were they placed there by the author? And why does this always happen?

You can see from all of this that I am short of topics this morning. Not sure why. I just got off an interesting Thursday morning discussion of the history of the Yiddish Forward newspaper, which in 1930 had a daily circulation of 250,000, more than the NYT had at that time. One of the interesting facet of the Forward was its advice to the lovelorn column (which later inspired Ann Landers and her sister Abby) and which, says Google’s AI (SI? I guess not), were all real letters:

“Dear Editor: I recently met a good girl, but there is a problem. She has a dimple in her chin, and people say that if someone has this their husbands will die early. At first I did not believe this, but I have seen this to be true. When I meet a woman that has this dimple, her husband dies early. So I don’t know if I should keep seeing this girl. Please help me.

Answer: the problem is not that a girl has a dimple on her chin, but that some people have a screw loose in their head…….”

There you have it. Nothing formal on my schedule today. Just watched Abbas give a speech to the UN General Assembly – he always sounds so reasonable and moderate. The Netanyahu speech comes later today – he never sounds reasonable or moderate.

What a world.