sitra achara

i found myself in boro park for shabbos, at the home of members of the self-described "sheeris hapletoh" of mizrachi people in the area. lovely people. more on that later, maybe. anyway, they suggested i go to shomrei emunah (big shul) for the annual boro park yom haatzmaut celebration. i was promised that i would get to hear the chazan of that shul, himself a bobov chassid, sing hatikvah (substituting "am kodesh"[sic] for "am chofshi").
now, this is exactly the sort of thing in which i take perverse pleasure, so i decided it was worth sitting through yet another impassioned plea for gush kattif jsut to be able to say that i celebrated yom haatsmaut the boro park way. (as for thursday's nidcheh version of the holiday, for the first time in my life, since i've known what yom haatsmaut was, i didn't know when it was until it was basically over...)
well, i sat through the apocalyptical gush-katif-ish fire and brimstone of an aging, not quite as cogent as he used to be, rabbi, as expected. what i did not expect was
1- they would start on time, and if the chazzan sang (i am guessing he did b/c i saw him there), it was at the beginning and i missed it
2- same aging rabbi would predict, in no uncertain terms, the downfall of the french government to muslims within twenty years. (then he threw in england and belgium too.)
3- another rabbi would rail against the world gay march in jerusalem.

so yeah, a sad story for me, but whatever, its a story...