Whole Foods, at least “our” Whole Foods, has a “show me your ID, no exceptions” policy when you buy beer or wine. They take your card and scan it unto their system along with your invoice. Silly, of course, but if you want beer or wine,….
Today, I decided to buy a Sam Adams six pack when I was at Moti’s Kosher Market. The clerk, a regular, said, “I guess I can assume you are 21”. She smiled, and I thought about it and told her, “I am 21 times 4”. First time I thought about it and it makes me seem very old. On the other hand, I have only been old enough to buy liquor for 75% of my life. That sounds like maybe I am still a spring chicken.
Speaking of chicken, here is the worst joke I have heard in a long time:
where do you find a chicken without legs?
right where you left it.
What’s interesting about that joke is that you can tell it with all sorts of animals – chickens, cows, muskrats, dogs, cats. Yes, the list goes on and on. Try it.
We attended a small breakfast yesterday with Sarab Abu-Rabia Queder, a truly remarkable woman who teaches in the Education Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is the university’s Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion. She was the first (not the last, by any means) Bedouin woman to receive a PhD in Israel, about 25 years ago, from BGU.
She was born in Beersheva and has lived there most of her life, except when she did post-graduate work at The Hebrew University and at Oxford. Her field, perhaps not surprisingly is the study of Bedouin women and she is perhaps the most respected scholar in that field. Her father is a physician and (this sort of thing must run in her family) and the first Bedouin physician in Israel. She attended a number of different schools before entering BGU as an undergraduate, including Bedouin schools and Jewish schools (in one, she was the only Arab out of a school of 400).
Her father married out of his tribe (which is the largest Bedouin tribe in the country), when he married a woman of Nazareth, a primarily Muslim and almost exclusively Arab city in the north of Israel, and I am sure that created a stink in Bedouin circles at the time. Sarab’s husband is Bedouin (I believe he is an accountant) but from a different (and it the Bedouin hierarchy, a lower) tribe, and the marriage created a tremendous amount of opposition at the time. They have three children, and I did not get a chance to ask what their children were doing (they are probably in their late teens or twenties). She is very personable, and very well spoken (she speaks at least Arab, Hebrew and English), and uses her own story and struggles to show how Bedouin women can succeed in Israel.
As Vice-President of Ben Gurion University for Diversity and Inclusion, her job, as I understand it, is to ensure that the university finds places for, and treats well, Arab students, women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and so forth. That is the kind of job that in this country, today, Donald Trump would probably insist that the university eliminate if it wanted any federal funding. Good to know it still exists in Israel.
She has written her memoirs, but they have not (yet?) been translated into English. I would like to have her speak for the Haberman Institute, and am trying to see if that is possible.
We did watch the Capitals 5-3 victory over the Penguins last night. The Caps are going to be hard to beat, in my opinion, in this, 41-year old Alex Ovechkin’s last year playing. So if you are looking for a team to follow….
And I did hear a part of Trump’s San Antonio speech, where he said that if Republicans don’t get elected, we would fall into a great recession, and discover that Iran would obliterate San Diego. And of course, if they do get elected, everyone (national debt be damned, and who cares about inflation?) will be $5000 richer.
Go, Trump (as both sides say).
