I’ve become rather obsessed with the new MacBook Air. It just looks so slim and lovely compared to my four year-old Powerbook G4, which takes 20 minutes to load iTunes and now reminds me of the chubby little girl dressed like a bee in that Blind Melon video. But then I think how similar its dimensions are to a J. Crew catalog or similar piece of junk mail and I figure if I had one, I’d end up throwing it out in a PMS fit of violent tidiness. And I’m not being neurotic (about this, anyway), ’cause it actually happened.

Poor Stephen Levy’s wife – how long will it take before she’s no longer the neatnik who got fed up with her husband’s piles of newspapers and tossed his computer?

Anyhoo, maybe my adoration of the MacBook Air has more to do with the lovely ditty attached to its TV commericial, sung by Israeli-French sprite Yael Naim.

Isn’t she just lovely?

Jack Black, such a shanda! You’ve probably made your mother cry on many occasions (especially for the cinematic turd Nacho Libre) but how do you think she felt when she saw the following quote from in the New York Post?

Part of the bar mitzvah is that you become a man supposedly at 13 years old. And as I was a man, I decided never to go to synagogue again.

So I guess we should assume you let your buddy Steve-O perform the bris on your son instead of a mohel.

Ok, Purim party people, it’s time to get shikkered up and get you some megillah!

Catchy tune, nu? Loved Mamoud’s cameo at the end.

Here’s a nod to teen pregnancy and the Oscar’s from the Shushan Channel:

And no spring chag would be complete without posting the Yenta’s all-time favorite Purim virus (it’s contagious, but it won’t cause body aches or upper respiratory irritation):

Oh, and a little sumpin’ for the kiddies. Will you consider this virtual Mishloach Manot from your favorite heretic?

If classical scholars fell out out of their ivory towers when the “Jewishy” rendering of William Shakespeare was chosen as his official portrait, will their heads actually explode at the theory that the Bard was actually a … Jewish woman?

Jewess has posted a fascinating interview with John Hudson, a scientist-turned-literary sleuth who posits that all those plays and sonnets were written by Italian Jewess and poet Amelia Bassano Lanier.

For hundreds of years, people have questioned whether William Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. The mystery is fueled by the fact that his biography simply doesn’t match the areas of knowledge and skill demonstrated in the plays. Nearly a hundred candidates have been suggested, but none of them fit much better.

Read his entire Jewcy article here. You may see the method in his madness…

…would be on a Disney cruise, right? The entire Yenta family (including the my in-laws) took a quick 3-day trip last weekend to the Bahamas on board the Disney Wonder, a 10-deck marvel of Mickey Mouse-shaped pools, Cinderella buffets and Goofy entertainment. I’m not one for the conspicuous consumption that Disney defines, but I’m tellin’ y’all, they know how to do “fun” right.

Anyhoo, one of the hallways was covered in famous art – all for sale – and while we were walking towards yet another restaurant (so…much…food on these cruises!) Little Yenta Girl shouts out “Look Mommy, a torah!” It was a beautiful Marc Chagall etching with Hebrew letters, right there on the wall overlooking the crowds of gentiles (in four days, I counted at least four t-shirts depicting Jesus and his thorny crown.)

It was incongruous, yet really cool.

I couldn’t find the exact print to show you, but here’s “Moise II”. Get to tons more Chagall from here.

I got an email yesterday from Savannah photographer and fellow outlaw Shalom School instructor Hannah Gaber Saletan that last week the University of Kentucky had “removed the Holocaust from its curriculum because it offended the Muslim population, who claims it never happened.” It quoted Winston Churchill and urged readers to forward the email to everyone in their inboxes so that the ignorance and hatred of the world could be met with … chain letters?

Now, I love my friend Hannah (who, apart from this small mistake, is very smart and responsible) and I’m as paranoid as the next Jew that the world might forget that Hitler murdered a third of Europe’s Jewish population a mere 60 years ago. But really, the Muslim population of Kentucky having that much sway? I think not.

The email’s a hoax, folks. It all started with last year’s uproar about Holocaust denial in Great Britain’s schools, a rumor that developed out of the difficulty of teaching reality to children with parents espousing fundamentalist Muslim rhetoric at home.

Some well-meaning doofus heard the rumor about a teaching ban on the Holocaust in the “UK” and, in typical self-centered American fashion, confused the United Kingdom with the University of Kentucky and wrote an email to everyone he or she knows. It’s like a perverse game of “telephone” with all the misinformation about the misinformation going off like bombs in people’s inboxes.

As for the much maligned faculty at UK, they want everyone to know they most certainly are teaching about the Holocaust:

In fact, Jeremy Popkin, one of UK’s top historians, has been teaching, without complaints, a course on the Holocaust that he created in 1979. UK was one of the first 10 to 20 schools in the country to offer such a course, and it started a Judaic studies program a decade ago.

Let’s stop the madness, people! Google your internet rumors before you send them on.

Sheesh, with jeans becoming de rigeur synagogue wear, it’s only a matter of time before the t-shirt tallis catches on.

Only from Heeb Magazine, peeps.

By the way, comments are closed until I return from vacation – no one, but no one, can handle coming home to three thousand porn spams. Bon voyage!