Celebrate cheese weasel day!

Learn the story of the cheese weasel at http://dglenn.livejournal.com/86811.html

Sing the song of the cheese weasel found at http://www.cheeseweasel.com/

But above all, have some cheese!

Tags: silly

Here in Bursteinville, gnomi and I are anticipating a busy weekend, starting tomorrow.

Folks may recall that last month, my half-brother Danny got married to Barbara Heller in Michigan. This Sunday is when they're having a second celebration, and so Nomi and I are heading down to New York City for the weekend. We decided to get to the city in time for lunch tomorrow so we could meet up with one of my high school friends, a gentleman we don't see as often as we'd like.

I know there's a lot going on in the area this weekend, and I know there's always a lot of people to see, so if we miss you this time, maybe we'll catch you next time. For this trip, we're taking advantage of the gracious hospitality of sdelmonte and batyatoon for shabbat, so we're pretty much spending the weekend with them in Queens. Shabbat afternoon, we'll also be getting together with chaos_wrangler and G.

Early Sunday afternoon, Nomi and I will take a cab to the Heller-Burstein celebration, which is at a deli in the northernmost parts of Riverdale. Here's where things get personal in a way I had not expected.

I had decided to call for a cab from Boulevard Taxi, a company that Mom used to use for her daily commute to work. All the folks at Boulevard, the drivers and dispatchers alike, got to know my mom as that nice lady judge in Forest Hills.

Since we needed to know how much the cab would cost, Nomi suggested I call Boulevard last night to find out the price of a ride from the middle of Queens to Riverdale in the Bronx. So when I called last night, and explained I was calling from Boston and why, I made sure to mention my mom. I told the dispatcher that my mom was the judge who they used to pick up in Forest Hills.

"You mean Judge Burstein?" the dispatcher asked.

I was flabbergasted. "Yes."

It turns out they still remember her very fondly, and the dispatcher was delighted to hear me tell him how much Mom had always praised their company's service. On Sunday, he said he's going to take personal charge of making sure I get the cab I need.

Tags: mom, nyc, personal

One of my co-workers pointed me to the article Cracking the Code in the current issue of Reform Judaism magazine. It's a long article, but worth reading if you're fascinated by either genetics or Jewish history.

I've known for a while about one of the things the article mentions, which is the apparent genetic evidence about the kohanic line. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this concept, in Judaism there is a group called the kohanim, who by tradition are accepted to have all been descended from the priestly class of ancient Israel. (The name "Cohen" tends to indicate someone who is considered part of this group.) Traditionally, kohanic status was determined by the male line, so even though my mother was a daughter of a kohein, I myself am not a kohein.

If you know anything about human genetics, you can see where this is going. The Y chromosome is the only one guaranteed to be passed from father to son, so anyone who claimed to be a kohein ought to have inherited a Y chromosome that went back for generations. (I'm simplifying here.) It turned out that almost 100% of Jewish kohanic males tested in an experiment in 1995 shared a genetic marker for a common ancestor, implying that the tradition was valid.

The article in Reform Judaism magazine discusses more recent experiments that show that the vast majority of Jews all over the world seem to share a common ancestry going back 4,000 years to the middle east. Unfortunately, the article doesn't include references, so I can't verify all the claims within. And there is one place where the writers seem to equate Orthodox Judaism with Lubavitch Chasidism. I suppose from the Reform Jewish perspective, it might be hard to distinguish, but this is the first time I've ever run across the claim that Orthodox Judaism strictly prohibits abortion.

Anyway, it's still a fascinating article.

Tags: jewish, science