BBC News reports that Phiona Davis of North London will not be held responsible for stabbing her 80 year-old great-grandmother 130 times or for similarly attacking her former boyfriend, since she is quite obviously insane. Davis was apprehended last October after setting multiple fires and chanting “I am the Messiah” on the front porch and was a devout fixture at London’s Kabbalah Centre. Davis claims center members tried to control her and were sneaking around her flat, which might be true; you know it is a cult and all.
Aww, the poor souls in the Kabbalah Center spin room must be doing their own psychotic dance right now, just when they thought the press would stop dissing them and JTA gave them some legit coverage.

Yes, it’s that guy, the one whose face you always see in the movies. Not as the star, but usually as the hero’s affable sidekick or some other secondary character. You might remember him as the sweaty, Neidermeier-inspired Dean Pritchard in Old School, or perhaps you caught his short-lived time as a lead actor in ABC’s Cupid In our humble opinion, Jeremy Piven steals the show whenever he gets any lines, like in HBO’s Entourage as lead character Vince’s snarky L.A. agent. Sure, he might be encouraging some Jewish stereotype of lecherous ambition, but Jer’s a true M.O.T., so he’s just playing it genuine, yo.

The fattest, most treacherous hurricane ever to hit the Atlantic (gosh, we love superlatives) should be decimating Cuba just about now, with warnings for Florida and Louisiana later in the week. For those observant Jmericans concerned that evacuation warnings may throw their Rosh Hashanah observances for a loop, it’s worthy to know that Jewish law grants permission to miss synagogue if disaster looms. In other words, if Ivan starts stomping towards you, leave the apples and honey at the table and get the hell outta Dodge.

Any time someone mentions the number “six million,” we get the creeps. But what could be as innocuous as six million paperclips? That’s how many of the shiny, tiny office supply a Tennesee school collected to demonstrate what that scary number actually looks like. It started as a way to help these white, Christian, American children get a handle on the Holocaust; what ensued was a triumph for Jewish history and the assurance that no one, at least in one small town in the South, will forget what Hitler did. Maybe we’d all prefer to, except that we can’t. Their project is the subject of a documentary soon to be released from Miramax, aptly titled Paperclips.

Our favorite old-time actress Lauren Bacall is back onscreen with Nicole Kidman in “Birth”, a film with the disturbing premise of Kidman becoming obsessed with a 10 year-old boy. We’ll probably see it anyway just for Bacall, since we read her autobiography By Myself twenty years ago and always felt a kinship for the Jewish girl who seduced Hollywood with her sultry voice. At 19, she possessed a sexy, regal presence than any anorexic skankwhore actress could ever hope to match (she married Humphrey Bogart at 19. He was 46. Can you blame him?)
Now Betty (we know from her book she hates her stage name) is almost 80 and still exudes just so much moxie! She even put Kidman in her place after a reporter mistakenly called both of them “film legends” at a press conference. “She can’t be a legend,” scoffed Betty. “You have to be older.”

Beersheba-born Adi Neumann puts her emcee skills to the test tonight as host of the behind-the-scenes look at Teenager of the Year Modeling Competition on Israel’s E! channel. They did it just for you, really.

We’re too famisht this week to think a single clever thing to say about tomorrow’s 9/11 anniversary or the upcoming New Year. Could it be that we actually take this stuff seriously?
Nah.
Shabbat Shalom, homies.

Everyone has at least one insane person in their romantic past. Someone who looked so hot you just had to get in his or her pants, but once you did, it unleashed a tsunami of emotional drama so huge it could wipe out the entire eastern seaboard. You know what we’re talking about; the fifteen messages in one night, the drive-bys, the dead squirrel on the doorstep…some of us get sucked into these tornadoes of dysfunction for a time, then get the f* out, even if it means leaving all our stuff behind, changing our idenity and moving to Madagascar. If we all only adhered to what Sam Shmikler calls “The Mickey Rule” in this week’s Jewish Journal, we’d avoid the sexy blondes with a gleam in their eyes who always seem to wind up stealing our underwear.

Our bubbe never cooked much because of her arthritic hands, so the few times she made us blintzes became a family legend. We can still recall what we affectionately called “the mixture,” a creamy concoction of cottage cheese, sugar and blueberries, wrapped in thin pancakes and fried. We treasure that scrap of our childhood, the taste of warm food in a dark kitchen, safe with our grandma. What we wouldn’t give for a batch of those blintzes now, and we promise to attempt it sometime this New Year. If you don’t have any comfort food memories of your own, check out SF Gate’s Rent A Grandma series, Jewish edition.

It’s always a fashion conundrum deciding what shoes to wear on Yom Kippur, since Jewish law forbids us to don our leather Fluevogs for synagogue. Our rabbi always favors a pair of fugly, canvas, no-name sneakers, which we would decry as a style shanda except that even we consider it bad form to criticize bima fashion mistakes. But since sneakers seem to be the obvious choice for the “no-cow” rule on the Day of Repentance, we need to take a look at the alternatives:
Obviously, Nikes, Pumas and Adidas are out for their global slavery issues. We’ve always geared towards boring, oh-so-unstylish New Balance trainers because supposedly their made in America by happy, well-paid union workers, but Ha’aretz debunks that myth by reporting that most of their product is made in Taiwanese sweatshops just like the big boys’. Even our beloved Chuck Taylor All-Stars, an excellent choice for the Yom Kippur stye-conscious, have been co-opted by corporate schlockmesiters (Ha’aretz reports in the same article that Converse was bought by Nike last year.)
Searching out on the fringe, Adbusters’ Black Spot Sneakers could fill the void for Jewish anti-globalization, counter-couture fashionistas, except that Michael I. Niman has revealed that Adbuster’s founder and publisher, Kalle Lasn, is a raging anti-Semite. Bummer. So as far as our Yom Kippur ensemble goes, we guess we’ll follow in the rabbi’s footsteps and head out to Wal-Mart for a pair of Keds. Perhaps next High Holidays season Jmerica will come out with our own sneakers, manufactured by Oompa-Loompas with a dental plan, right here in the good ‘ol U.S. of A.