Asarah B'Teves, the least-popular fast on the contemporary Jewish calendar, is tomorrow.

WorldNetDaily: Pat Robertson: It's Bush in a 'blowout':

Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson predicts President George W. Bush will be re-elected in a 'blowout' in November.
Robertson told viewers of his '700 Club' program broadcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network he had been praying on the subject over the past several days and believes God told him Bush would win handily.
'I think George Bush is going to win in a walk,' he said. 'The Lord has just blessed him. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and come out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him.'

Someone told me about this Yahoo group, FrumSex. The content should be obvious; I haven't read any of it and make no claims regarding the appropriateness of its content.

Not to detract from the caption contest, within photos of the same wedding, Ephraim notes the rather explicit effort to have an untied tie, thusly avoiding having knots, and the irony of that in light of the tallis, which is, in his words, "full of big fat knots."
Being unfamiliar with both the knots custom and the tallis custom, I'm welcoming reader input. On a cutesy level, you'd think "tying the knot" would be a good idea for a groom to be doing; also, ostensibly the idea of avoiding the knots is supposedly something to do with imitating a meis (dead guy), and therefore on some kind of heavenly plane -- again, something you'd think would be well to be avoided.
And the whole tallis vs. knots things seems like a perpetual superstition machine.

The Erev Shabbos Caption Contest

Go at it.

Zackary Sholem Berger and I are working on a story about the Williamsburg Jewish residents' gripes against the hipsters. In his research, he came across this, which I don't fully understand, but seems to incorporate ideas of rodef, and seems to be described in a Hyde Park thread as a "fatwah." I don't know what to make of this.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The world needs a 'new international order' to solve its conflicts and ensure peace, Pope John Paul said in his New Year's Day address on Thursday.

Interesting. Just found out that Allan Nadler, presumably the same Allan Nadler who wrote the Lakewood story, has authored this:

Allan Nadler, "Soloveitchik's Halakhic Man: Not a Mithnagged"
Modern Judaism, 13:119-147, 1993.

Blogging right now from Revaya, the latest addition to Washington Heights' kosher culinary experience, talking to, among others, Josh of Chakira and Ephraim of Town Crier and Jewschool. The service sucks (one of us had to wait an hour before finding out that they didn't even have the spaghetti he ordered) but the conversation is great.

Dei'ah veDibur - Information & Insight - OPINION & COMMENT:

It bears saying again: If the secular politicians really cared about the future of Klal Yisroel, or even the future of the State of Israel, they would make having many children a matter of national priority, and those who have big families, such as the chareidim, should be national heroes.

Daniel Pipes Has Been Playing Too Much Pac-Man.
He write:

An Islamist's Dream Christmas Display. Since 1984, the courthouse of the County of Santa Rosa, in Florida's panhandle, has had on one side of the building a Nativity scene. This year it is joined on the courthouse's other side by an "all-inclusive" Christmas display sponsored by the local chapters of Americans United for Separation of Church and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Pensacola News Journal, which reported this development, also thoughtfully provided a picture of the latter display at night, and it is memorable indeed, with a crescent surrounding and seemingly gobbling up a Star of David.

AKS discovers Liad Suez, a female Israeli basketball player at Villanova, who was recently named Big East co-Player of the Week.
One question; AKS writes

We've got ourselves a new Israeli sports star in the U.S.

As a religious Jewish journalist, the halachos of lashon hara and related guidelines for proper speech are major determinants in how I work. Back when I was at The Commentator, discussion of our work in light of the various moral teachings was very common. And while I rarely engage in such discussions with other journalists nowadays, it is still a part of the dialogue, especially as regards blogging, since "newsworthiness" here generally has a lower standard, and lower-standard news is in most places the gossip pages and similar stuff. I make a very sincere effort in my endeavors here to approach our content with a scrutinizing, journalistic eye. Each of the Elders contributes his own specialty, so the journalist's perspective is not typically that taken by the others; however, they are equally concerned about these matters coming from their own perspectives.
I remember the first letter that the Commie got that complained about one of my articles on objectively false grounds, and how it had me stunned and unable to write for a few hours. Since then, I've become quite familiar with the reality that for all of my care in reporting objective truth, many readers (or even people who haven't actually read the content in question, just heard of it), and most often those claiming some kind of halachic superiority -- a "frummer than thou" attitude -- willfully distort the truth about myself and my writing, or make speculations that have no basis in actual observations, and freely spread these rumors among people they know, and even those they don't.
I rather feel that journalism and its standards has given me a set of specific practical guidelines that serve quite well to keep me on the correct side of Judaism's moral teachings regarding speech, and when I find people willfully engaging in distortion or speculation about who I am or what I write, it occurs to me that these journalistic standards serve quite better to preserve a proper speech conduct than the obviously-ineffective moral teachings of Jewish text; without journalistic or academic standards for establishing fact and avoiding the spread of false and potentially slanderous information, it seems, care for truth is set aside.
In the Gregg Easterbook flap, for instance, Meryl Yourish said that she was shocked at the impact her words had; it seems to me that the guidelines the Jewish ethic provides helps us, in this internet-ed, inter-connected world, to realize that we need to be careful about what we say and how we say it. And, again, applying a journalistic standard of truth and relative newsworthiness helps give us positive rules (what to say) rather than just a negative against which to work (what not to say).
As I said, it's always surprising to me that people claiming an halachic, frummer-than-thou superiority have no problem engaging in outright slander, so far as either journalism or a Jewish ethic is concerned. It's quite ironic that so many such people do so in an attempt to discredit myself and my journalism. I've had conversations with editors where they said they'd received letters saying that my coverage of a given topic couldn't be trusted, because I'd made some statement on Protocols or in some other article I'd written; without fail, each instance of such was blatantly false, drawn out of thin air, often involving intentional misquotation. Why these people do it, I don't know. There's another, only slightly less libelous, strain of critique of mine and the other Elders' work, and again it just confuses me to the nth degree. In reading comments to an earlier post, I came across these two:

...Witness how the owner of this site is positively licking his chops in anticipation of getting his hands on it. WOuld that be in order to foment a new scandal -- or would it be that he has a purely academic interest in the matter and his intellectual curiosity is just burning inside of him?...
I'm with you SD. The owner of this site probably hasn't read enough Beis Yitzchak articles to fill up one hand's worth of fingers. I'll assume they have read the R. Wieder piece on Hashchasas zerah levatalah and the controversial article in Beis Yitzchak 31 about Avos Nezikin (Bet some of you elders didn't even know what that article was about!)...

Shmuley Boteach's latest, May God be restored to the British Isles, is a scathing attack on anti-war Anglican Church leaders:

If George Bush never wins another election, if he indeed never passes another piece of legislation, I will still remember him as one of my greatest sources of religious inspiration for teaching me to what lengths a human being must go in order to save human life.
And even in the worst case scenario, if he went to Iraq insincerely – if he did it to enrich the executives of Halliburton, or to avenge his father's honor, or because America needs Iraq's oil – I would rather have an insincere politician who saves lives rather than ostensibly God-fearing church leaders who do nothing to stop the murder of their human brethren.
Many of us wonder how Europe could have quickly become so immoral, how polls can show that the majority of Europeans believe that Israel and the United States – two outstanding democracies – can be identified by the majority of Europeans in opinion polls as the greatest threats to world peace, well ahead of Bashar Al Assad, the rotten House of Saud and Moammar Gadhafi. To answer this pivotal question, one need look no further than the hopelessly misguided shepherds of this forsaken and forlorn flock. For if the religious leaders are not rooted in morality, why would we expect the people to be?

Its another boring week in the Jewish Press letters section. Only five letters, and none particularly interesting. The highlights are Rabbi Riskin and Ruth Messinger respond to recent editorial attacks, only to get more of the same. The only particularly interesting tidbit was this ditty from Brooklyn's Josh Greenberger. I'm not sure if it rises to SLOW levels, though...

Jewish Week publisher Gary Rosenblatt seems troubled that "... every Jewish child knows about the heroism of Judah Maccabee and his brothers, though the saga is of marginal importance today. But so few are familiar with the courage and accomplishments of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Begin and Sharansky..."
This shows a serious lack of understanding of his own religion and a total disregard for its age-old established values.
The Battle of Jericho, for example, was fraught with miracles, courage and accomplishments, and culminated with the Jews entering the land of Israel as a nation for the first time. Yet, although most yeshiva students learn of this historic event, there are no holidays or widespread celebrations commemorating the battle.
Apparently, physical prowess absent redeeming spiritual values is not much cause for Jewish celebration. Whereas the Jews` entrance into the land of Israel for the first time had great potential, the battle itself was basically a means to an end.
The courage and heroism behind the story of Chanukah, on the other hand, were directly responsible for the salvaging of the Temple ruins and allowing the Temple-related services to continue. It was a case of courage and heroism for the sake of spiritual values, and such a message is as relevant today as it was then.
I`m a strong supporter of Israel. But bereft of any spiritual values or aspirations, our repossession of the land of Israel in 1948 would have had little more significance than conquering Teaneck, New Jersey. (And while we have, in fact, just about conquered Teaneck, we don`t have a holiday called Teanukah.)
The Jewish nation was never about flaunting military might or conquering land. As for Chanukah being an "ugly story," as Mr. Rosenblatt puts it, that would be the case only if we were celebrating our having had the might, the courage, and the willpower to sacrifice our people for a conquest that represented no loftier objective than acquiring a piece of land.
Mr. Rosenblatt must remember that we are not Jews because we have Israel; we became Jews first and then we were given Israel. The fact that there are many Jews today who rant and rave about Israel, yet display no other tell-tale signs of being Jewish, is about as ugly as a story gets.

Kneidlach And Machine Guns: G.I. Joseph — Ours To Fight For. Kudos to Menachem Wecker, Arts and Culture editor at the Commie, for his appearance as Guest Columnist in the Jewish Press' art section.

Josh Marshall is unhappy with Abe Foxman's recent column in WaPo. I love it when Marshall talks Judaism.
Marshall is wrong to criticize Foxman for making generic, catch-all accusations, because -- as Foxman knows better than Marshall, but Marshall could pretty easily discover by spending some time at the ADL's website -- there are real specifics to back this up.
Sharon eating Muslim children? It wins the 2003 British Political Cartoon Society Award. Calling him a Nazi? This is only a fringe example of something that's very popular. Sharon as racist? Mahmoud Abbas said so!
But Marshall isn't a monitor of anti-Semitism, and it's perfectly reasonable that he'd be left unawares. He's right to complain of Foxman's grouping "unrepentant hard-liner" with the rest, but he's wrong to say that these worse ideas haven't filtered into the realm of polite discussion; they have. Sharon is villified in these terms nearly everywhere by someone prominent and respected. And those ideas have become part of the critique of Sharon as an "unrepentant hard-liner." How do you sift them out? By applying a rational bullshit meter. It's clear that far too many people have their bullshit meter on Israel and Sharon set way too high.

Shosh receives a shidduch resume via e-mail. Her response, in paraphrase: This, you call a resume?
To be serious, I suppose it's a problem that someone's viewing a disability as the major point of discussion about a guy...but the real problem is that these resumes are taking the place of real relationship-building in the first place.

Just under six hours left in 2003.
Quick: name your favorite Protocols posts/comments, and other Jewish happenings of the year.

The Shot That Will Be Heard 'Round The Blogosphere.
Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the Palestinians:

THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a "neutral arbiter" in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Just read this post and follow the links to see how they feel about America.
And read this piece by Amir Taheri on the Iraqi "resistance," which notes Palestinian terror connections by the Iraqi insurgents, and features a Palestinian "journalist" egging them on.
These folks are our enemies, and deserve to be treated as such. They don't deserve a state of their own. It's not clear that they even deserve to keep what they've got. I don't think this means that the Bush Administration should be taking direction action against them -- closing off their funding via shutting down Saddam is a good start, and a policy of slow strangulation directed at Arafat and his fellow terrorists is probably the most politic at the moment. We need to try to squeeze off the EU funding, too, especially now that it's been admitted to be part of a proxy war by the EU not just against Israel, but America.
But let's stop pretending that what's going on between Israel and the Palestinians is some sort of family misunderstanding. It's war, and the Palestinians -- and their EU supporters -- think it's a war not just against Israel, but against us. We should tailor our approach accordingly.
UPDATE: Reader Matt Gaffney emails that this post is "too shrill." Well, that's why I don't like writing about the Palestinian issue -- if you tell the truth, which is that these guys are enemies of civilization, in the grip of a psychotic death cult that will probably lead to their destruction, then you sound shrill.
I also don't write about it much because the Palestinians, fundamentally, are the cannon fodder of other people who don't like the United States, and the real way to resolve this problem is to deal with those other people. And so it's those other people who get the bulk of my attention.
But the amount of pious crap spouted about the Palestinians is so vast that every once in a while I do feel the need to cut through it by pointing out the facts.

Hatred of Israel is the most striking symptom of the Western disease. On the face of it the dilemma there is a no-brainer for any classic liberal: A consensual government is besieged by fanatical suicide killers who are subsidized and cheered on by many dictators in the Arab world. The bombers share the same barbaric methods as Chechens, the 9/11 murderers, al Qaedists in Turkey, and what we now see in Iraq.
Indeed, the liberal Europeans should love Israel, whose social and cultural institutions — universities, the fine arts, concern for the “other” — so reflect its own. Gays are in the Israeli military, whose soldiers rarely salute, but usually address each other by their first names and accept a gender equity that any feminist would love. And while Arabs once may have been exterminated by Syrians, gassed in Yemen by Egypt, ethnically cleansed in Kuwait, lynched without trial in Palestine, burned alive in Saudi Arabia, inside Israel proper they vote and enjoy human rights not found elsewhere in the Arab Middle East.
When Europe frets over the “Right of Return” do they mean the over half-million Jews who were sent running for their lives from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq? Or do they ever ask why a million Arabs live freely in Israel and another 100,000 illegally have entered the “Zionist entity”? Does a European ever ask what would happen should thousands of Jews demand “A Right of Return” to Cairo?
Instead, the elite Westerner talks about “occupied lands” from which Israel has been attacked four times in the last 60 years — in a manner that Germans do not talk about an occupied West they coughed up to France or an occupied East annexed by Poland. Russia lectures about Jenin, but rarely its grab of Japanese islands. Turkey is worried about the West Bank, but not its swallowing much of Cyprus. China weighs in about Palestinian sovereignty but not the entire culture of Tibet; some British aristocrats bemoan Sharon’s supposed land grab, but not Gibraltar.
All these foreign territories that were acquired through blood and iron and held on to by reasons of “national security” are somehow different matters when Jews are not involved. Yet give Israel a population of 250 million, massive exports of oil and terrorists — and wipe away anti-Semitism — and even the Guardian or Le Monde would change its tune.

Meredith lists a bill of complaints against her SDJs ("Shidduch du Jour").
Also, found via Meredith, a couple of interesting posts at Adina's Anecdotes; in the first, she articulates her feminist demand for equality:

I walked into Eichler's in Flatbush and purchased a mishna berura six volume set. Following my purchase the salesrepresentative asked me if i wanted it "gift wrapped" -chas vehalilah that it would be for me!

It has been brought to my attention that a little dating advice would be appreciated - well, here goes some, even some that nobody before would dare to tell you:
- always open the doors for your date, allowing her to walk through first
- always offer to pay for all your dates, and in the event that she offers to pay, insist on paying for the first couple of dates even if she is a feminist.
- never allow your eyes to wander while on your date

Fascinating, seemingly random post from the Head Heeb:

Until the pogrom of 1941, Iraqi Jews were a largely middle-class community and one of the most assimilated in the Arab world, so it is probably no accident that Iraqi Jews were among the few who really considered themselves Arabs. Two professors, one Israeli and one American, demonstrate that for some this identity has died hard. In the United States, we have Ella Shohat, a cultural studies professor at the City University of New York who has questioned the "Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew." Israel has Professor Sasson Somekh, who has followed a similar career path in Arabic literary studies and calls himself "the last Arabic Jew."
Being an Arab Jew is something very different for the two professors. For Shohat, it is a matter of identity politics, a means of opposing what she sees as the subjugation of the Mizrahi identity by the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Somekh appears much more comfortable with the synthesis of the two cultures, and has made a life's work of making Arabic literature accessible to Hebrew-speaking Israelis. Shohat is an anti-Zionist, while Somekh has come to regard his Arab heritage as part of his Israeli identity.
The difference between the two may be a matter of age as much as personality. Somekh is 70 years old, Iraqi-born and educated in the 1950s, while Shohat was educated in the 1980s at a time when identity politics held greater sway in academia. Shohat is also a second-generation, Israeli-born immigrant at one remove from the political conflict between Iraqi Jews and Muslims, and has a more idealized view of the the prewar Iraqi Jewish middle class. To a certain extent, Shohat's Arab Jewish identity is something she reinvented as a political statement while Somekh's was part of him from birth. The very process of reinvention by the second generation, however, shows that it's premature for Somekh to call himself the last of anything.

George W. Bush makes a "four figure" donation to the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.

Interesting NYT article recently about Marketing Strategy across relgious/secular lines in America

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | The "Jewsploitation" craze:

Jonathan Kesselman's 'The Hebrew Hammer' is the manifesto for a hip, hype-driven 'new Jewishness.' But here's a news flash: American Jews aren't actually black, and anti-Semitic stereotypes aren't automatically funny.

Noami Chana reviews LOTR:ROTK. I'll have what to say when I finally get a chance to watch it (looks like Sunday the 11th)....

Word around town is that we may yet have another scandalous sefer on our hands, this one being the latest issue of Beis Yitzchok, the annual journal of Yeshiva University's seminary. Word has it that an article within it has some words to say about the sixth commandment and how it may/may not apply to certain people. I hope someone can bring a copy to me, and that anyone who's read it already can provide some more info in the comments.

Jewschool's first birthday was yesterday. Ah, I remember when Protocols was so young, back in the day.

DAVID BROOKS in today's NYT:

As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book, 'The Transformation of American Religion,' evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.
So we have this paradox. These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility, ecumenical understanding and blurry boundaries.

On the Contemporary Significance of the State of Israel:
Messianism, Nationalism and the Religious Zionist Dream
Five Lectures originally delivered in Winter 2002 by
Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, Dean
The fourth video in this series will be available online
Thursday, January 1, 2004
www.rav.org/library/video
The final installment will be online January 15.

Choire Sicha's obsession with all things Jewish continues. He finds this:

And notes this:

Rough translation, according to a guy I met on the street: 'How long did it take the Twin Towers to fall? 8 seconds. How long will it take to save Williamsburg from the artists???' (He stumbled over the word 'artists,' so I suspect it's a not-so-polite term for hipsters.)

The Tale of the Aggressively-Driving Mohel, and The Young Man What Caught Him Via E-mail. (via Gawker)

If you haven't checked out Dave Barry's year in review column yet, you really should. It more than lives up to standards. From the looks of it, he thinks we should've been paying some more attention to North Korea.

It could be worse...:

A Gloucester supermarket has taken on a vicar to offer spiritual and practical advice to shoppers and staff.
The Reverend Roger Leigh will hold two surgeries a week at Asda in Bruton Way as well as walk the aisles.
Customers come from a variety of faiths - including the city's large contingent of Muslims.
The Minister said: 'I'm not there to convert or preach.
'I'm there to counsel on practical and spiritual matters. My job description is to be helpful.'
The idea of using a supermarket greeter has been imported from the US where Walmart, which owns Asda, is based.

Naomi Chana, obviously, manages to sum up the holiday season better than any of us possibly could:

Finally, a topic which was brought up only academically among us: does anyone except the characters from the comic strip "Curtis" actually celebrate Kwanzaa? And if you belong to a family which celebrates both Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, how many candles and in what order do you light on Friday, Dec. 26th, the eight night of Hanukkah, the first night of Kwanzaa (Umoja), and Shabbat? Also, can you substitute a hanukkiah for a kinara and just leave two candle-slots empty at each end?

The idea was a good one, but the actual photoshopping was a bit off.

Interesting:

First, someone who shall remain nameless has told me that oversexed, hot Yahoodias are a staple of Arab soap operas. There's always a chick named "Esther" who's ready for a roll in the hay, or (this being the Middle East) a sand dune.

Hassidic Musician has a pair of good posts up. The first transcribes a back-and-forth between Country Yossi and one of his magazine's readers (yes, his magazine, yet another corner of the Jewish media world) over the question of proper attribution. It's really quite precious, and Hassidic Musician ends the post with a note on the idea that Shlomo Carlebach tends to get ripped off without attribution more than others. Scroll down for the second post.

A bit late, but you've got almost a year to work on it now: USB menorah. (via EclectChap via Guardian)

There'd been talk since last week about yet another Jewish Press editorial hacking at the Forward, but I hadn't gotten my hands on a print copy and they seem to have waited longer than usual to post this, the online version.
My first reaction to it is confusion. It's a bad thing for the Jewish Press that, in striving with great effort to demarcate its position as opposed to certain other J-weeklies, its editorials are horribly written, bordering on meaningless as a result. I'd enjoy some good newspaper tit-for-tat more than probably anybody (which is one reason why it'd be great if all these papers had blogs), but the Jewish Press has gone on a quite specific rampage against the Forward in recent months with assertions that leave you going "Huh?" instead of "Oooh!"
This editorial is far from coherence, much less the art of the shtuch.
The JP should either hire a decent editorial writer or give up on attacking the other papers; what it's doing now is just embarrassing.
But since it addresses stuff I worked on, it's (only) somewhat appropriate that I respond.

The book, treated rather inartfully, as it turned out, the traditional notion of the specialness of the Jewish people. It is an enormously complicated and nuanced issue — and an obviously sensitive one — and requires great care in its telling. Yet the Forward sensationalized it in rather simplistic terms, exploiting the discomfort in certain Jewish circles with the concept of Jews as the "chosen people." Perhaps more tellingly, the Forward seized this opportunity to savage the esteemed Rosh Yeshiva of the Lakewood Yeshiva in much the same way as the above-mentioned letter writer described the leader of Agudah as "pretty stupid."

It is noteworthy that the folks at the Agudah, once they learned of the impending Forward story on the book, reportedly spent days trying to persuade the newspaper of their misunderstanding of the issue and the harm their spin would cause in Jewish/gentile relations. (The Forward mockingly noted that "several ultra-Orthodox communal spokesmen tried to convince the Forward not to report [the book`s] existence.") Apparently, nothing has been gained for all of Agudah`s fawning over the years.

In tandem with the story on the book, the Forward also carried, right next to it, another story on an imminent Congressional grant to the Lakewood Yeshiva for the establishment of a Holocaust library. Lest anyone think in terms of coincidence, the Forward notes,
The allocation comes as attention is focusing on a book written by Rabbi Saadya Grama, a graduate of the yeshiva, arguing that gentiles are "completely evil" and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species.
To what avail then, have been all the years of Agudah`s obsequiousness? Maybe Agudah will begin to get it now. The Forward newspaper is neither a "neutral" forum on Jewish religious issues, nor is it a place for Agudah to appear.

Please note my e-mail address change on the right for Protocols-related correspondence.

Reader Yoel points out that the Van Leer Institute, bringers of the Rav Soloveitchik conference webcast, have a whole archive of interesting video, including the Yeshayahu Leibowitz conference they ran last year.

IsraellyCool interviews Imshin.

Two stories I heard at a Chanuka dinner party of sorts last week, both of which were followed by "You've gotta post that."
Story #1:
At some point in the recent past, MTA, Yeshiva University's high school for young mens, had a problem in the dorm, with some kid walking around stark naked. Various solutions were approached, then abandoned. A decision was finally made to consult R' Yitzchak Cohen, the loudest, most hyperbolic rebbe that YU owns. His volume is of great renown, having been used to shake unsuspecting students from spiritual slumber...or any slumber. Similarly, his criticisms and mussar at times are kind of charming in a way that doesn't reflect naivete, but perhaps something like aloofness.
Anyway, so R' Cohen, having been recruited to deal with young Mr. Happy, walks into the dormitory's hallways, and as he rounds a corner comes face to face with our nudnik nudist.
Enraged, R' Cohen screams, "A bochur without tzitzis!"

Story #2:
Apparently lots of women are seriously asking rabbis in "singles communities" about the halachos relating to single women going to the mikvah and pilagshut, a halachic category for concubinage. The idea is that these young-ish adults aren't ready to get married, are interested in having sexual relationships, and see nothing in the strict halachic approach that would keep them from doing so (so long as it's monogamous), so they're asking if the supra- or meta-halacha ideas that have developed over the past millenium or so imposing greater restrictions on sexual practice can be overlooked.
Again, what's going on is that women are asking the question of rabbis (with a reported generous uptick whenever Steven I. Weiss attends prayer services in the area), and so far I don't think any of my sources have heard of permission being granted in any specific situation. Whatever results would reliably take into account what the kids are saying these days. So what are the kids saying these days?

NYT: Putting God Back in Politics:

The separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values from the public square. America's social fabric depends on such values and vision to shape our politics — a dependence the founders recognized.
It is indeed possible (and necessary) to express one's faith and convictions about public policy while still respecting the pluralism of American democracy. Rather than suggesting that we not talk about 'God,' Democrats should be arguing — on moral and even religious grounds — that all Americans should have economic security, health care and educational opportunity, and that true faith results in a compassionate concern for those on the margins.

Of AdAge's 10 Ads Americans Won't See, two are religiously, umm, relevant.
Mr. Kipling's Virgin Birth has a nativity play directed by a baker, and Cockroach Woman has a lady discover what her next life is like when she doesn't buy light bulbs for which a portion of the proceeds go to monks.

Noon -- Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of the Kwanzaa celebration speaks at House of the Lord Church about the seven-day holiday; 415 Atlantic Avenue (between Bond and Nevins Streets), Brooklyn.