This coming Sabbath service at our synagogue, I’m doing one of the Torah readings, from the Gospels, the first part of John chapter 11.

You may notice two funny things in that sentence. Firstly, as part of our Torah service, we don’t only read the standard parshah from the Torah (the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) and the corresponding reading from the Haftarah (a selection of readings from the Prophets). We also read a passage from the Besorah, that is, the Gospels, following the Chayei Yeshua reading cycle (“Life of Yeshua” reading cycle).

Hey, Can I Get Facebook on This Thing?

August 1 was the 30’th anniversary of the release of the Commodore 64 home computer. To commemorate the event, Pingdom posted a series of C-64 photos on his blog, and I guess, yeah, we all looked pretty dorky back in the 80’s. (You’re welcome to guess which one is me. And you’d probably be right, since my name is cited right there under my photo.)

Meanwhile, my brother and father and I commemorated the event by digging out my old C-64… which we couldn’t find. Apparently, we had already gotten rid of it. (Unless it’s buried somewhere in my basement, which I guess it may be.) The C-64 was named after its 64KB of RAM (not MB or GB), which was quite a feat for the day. We did, however, find the old Commodore 128, the next-generation system with 128KB RAM, which only half worked. That is, it still works in high-resolution mode (Ha! Good one.), just barely, but the low-resolution video generator seems not to be working anymore.

Regardless, unfortunately, we couldn’t find any floppy disks that still had usable data on them.

Don't Know What It's About

I’m preempting my usual “Friday Fun” column, because this past week was a crappy week, crappy enough to justify a little mourning.

Tuesday afternoon, as you know, a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti, killing tens of thousands—maybe even 100,000. That number represents one out of every 95-or-so people in that small country.

Shortly thereafter, we received news of the passing of my mother-in-law.

Shorty after that, a friend received news of the passing of his grandfather.

(This series of events also explains why I haven’t been blogging this week.)

So instead of my usual humorous, lighthearted Friday sketch, today I’d like to talk about some of the thoughts that have occurred to me this week.

Today, for Wishcasting Wednesday, Jamie Ridler asks, “What do you wish to make room for?” Like most people, I have so much stuff, both physically and figuratively, it’s hard to make room for anything. But what I really want to make room for today is the following blog post, which I’ve wanted to write. But I haven’t had the space for it.

So today, I’m giving up my typical Wishcasting Wednesday post in order to talk about the Mourner’s Kaddish as a prayer for the depressed.