Look! It’s me and the Divine Ms. Esther Kustanowitz, a.k.a. My Urban Kvetch. She breezed through San Francisco on her way to the Jewlicious at the Beach conference in L.A., and though I would have loved to host an afternoon hike in my neighborhood, I had to settle for one short hour over Thai food.

Continuing the conversation we started at Zabar’s, we covered Jewish singlehood, Jewish marriage, my in-laws, her dating prospects, what “looking Jewish” means, how much we hope Ruth Andrew Elleson will publish (us in) a second volume of “The Modern Jewish Girls Guide To Guilt” and how darn cute her nephew is.

As always, I was deeply impressed by Esther’s intellect and sense of humor in person — her blog “persona” is genuine, just in case any of single, smart, funny observant Jewish men care to know. I don’t know if I dare call myself a contemporary of Esther’s, but she certainly is good company.

Beats blogging through my lunch hour with a Luna bar and a yogurt any day.

Dontcha know? The bird flu virus is an “ethnic bomb” developed by Israel to kill Arabs. According to Syria, anyway.

It’d be funny if it didn’t make me feel so sick…

There’s a new “Jewish pencillicin” in town, and it isn’t a steaming bowl of shmaltzy soup:

Israeli virologist Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu has developed a product that combines elderberry with modern medicine to produce a flu remedy that actually works. (No, it’s not Elton John’s Elderberry Wine.)

The clinical research on Sambucol, marketed by Mumcuoglu’s Jersualem-based company Razeibar, shows the remedy to significantly cut the time one suffers from flu symptoms and is “at least 99% effective against the avian flu virus, H5N1, and in cell cultures significantly neutralized the infectivity of the virus.” Full story.

This is excellent news, because Esther’s questioning was giving me a massive brain burp: If you have avian flu, and you eat chicken soup made from a chicken with avian flu, will the flus cancel each other out?

Hat tip to Jewtastic!

This is a very special day for the Yenta: It is six years ago today that I became a Jewish mother.

I’ll spare you the gory details of the 36-hour labor and delivery, though I will say our beloved, now-deceased dog labored with me for most of it, which may be the reason I had the animal strength to go au naturel for the whole shebang.

The result of all that pain was a gorgeous boy baby with old man eyes who has morphed way too quickly into a man-child with an astonishing vocabulary, a penchant for Torah-learning and a fabulous sense of style.

When babies are first born, you’re so afraid that you’re going to break them that you’re just a total mess, but eventually you get the hang of it. Or, you get Child Protective Services called on you for forgetting your lap is not a safe place for your baby while in a moving car, á la Britney Spears. (Not there was any question about it, but she’ll never be a Jewish mother.)

Obviously, I relish motherhood. My life’s changed a lot in six years and sometimes I envy the childless for their freedom to go to the movies whenever they want, for peace and quiet, for boobs that don’t look like balloons three days after the party. But I look at this kid — in some ways already smarter and more mature than both his parents put together — and I understand that raising this mensch is the blessing of my lifetime.

Yeah, he’s only 6, but every day is one closer the day he won’t need me anymore, and you know what? That completely freaks me out. I can only hope that when he finally goes off into a world that I’ll be too generationally-challenged to understand, he’ll come back and go to the movies with me sometime.

Happy Birthday, son.

Not because of the whole Holocaust cartoon contest idiocy, which is doubly ridiculous because if you deny the Holocaust, where will the content come from?

No, retarded in the same way America was retarded when efforts were made to rename french fries “freedom fries” when France got all uppity.

That’s right: To complete Iran’s eschewal of all things Danish, the evilly sweet breakfast food, sometimes topped with cherries or cheese, will heretofore be known as “Mohammed pastries”.

Poor little liberal Denmark! Me, I’m planning a reverse Danish boycott by ordering massive amounts of Gouda grinzola cheese in bulk.

Maybe somewhere in Brooklyn there’s a guy at the corner store who gives away pieces of halvah when the neighborhood kids memorize parts of the Gemara in Hebrew, but if anybody’s giving out free sodas in exchange for Bible verses anywhere else in this country, it probably ain’t kosher:

SNEAD, Ala. — Dale Lanier has found a way to get people to read and memorize Bible verses.

Lanier said he’s been doing this for the last six years, and gives away between two and 12 drinks a day. He said entire families sometimes walk in and recite the Bible passage he has picked.

Now, if the guy’s sticking to the psalms and the Old Testament, it’d be a mitzvah for the whole neighborhood.