I went to Berlin. I saw lots of monuments , the wall, lot of grafitti, parts of the remains of the wall, and a concenration camp, as well as batya :-). Perhaps more later.

In other news, on the plane overI read, among other things, this sentence that I liked:
"Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."

I arrived in Berlin only 6 hours later than scheduled. My luggage, which I had checked in order to take with me a kitchen knife, joined me about 2 days after that. On the way back I decided to avoid such problems and have so far sucessfully brought my 4 inch knife through two security checkpoints/scanners. Not that this is at all surprising...

an actual advertisement:

"You don't have to be brain surgeon to get a scholarship to Brooklyn College."

(to be fair, it finishes, "but you could become one. still...)

Over shabbat I was reading the Edah journal (recently made available in non-online form...).

This article really infuriated me. Perhaps more on that another time. In fact, I happened to be staying with the journal's editor and he told me to write a response, so I might just do that, though I feel underqualified, and also the article is in some ways so ridiculous that I feel bad doing anything but completely dismissing it...

On the other hand, I was very very happy to see Rabbi Brill (Dr. Brill, since his maimo-chumash-teaching-days, i suppose...) say some things I think need to be said much more often. Just to see someone else point out that all the talk about Modern Orthodoxy, aside from being stuck in the nineteenth century, has little if anything to do with most experiences of Judaism in the contemporary world... More to say there,too,some time, maybe, though I might not care enough about politics...

It's fun to read jewish scholarship again. (The what-am-i-doing-with-my-life wheels start to turn...)

advice

i am in the market for a digital camera. please advise me.

why i should move

last shabbos, all my roomates stayed in. (i only knew about one of them before friday afternoon.) everyone made their own food. it was so strange. four girls, four individualized combinations of reheated leftovers and weird kosher-pallate-esque things. and me and my milchigs. we don't live together, we just happen to inhabit the same space sometimes.