Category: Odds & Ends

P.D.Q. Bach In Business

January 3, 2007 Music, Personal, Shtick

Loyal readers of the blog may have picked up on my interests in shtick and music, so it not come as a surprised to know that I would enjoy some of Peter Schickele’s work on P.D.Q. Bach.1 Last night I was fortunate to have attended my first P.D.Q. Bach Concert at Lincoln Center.
The best way to describe the experience would be to combine the music of classical composers, the irreverence of Frank Zappa, and the audience of Rocky Horror (though thankfully, without the drag). I’m not sure how else to explain the surreal and seamless synthesis of balloons, bicycles, basketballs, power outages, the hokey pokey, and a bagpipe vibrato.
If you find this sort of thing appealing or happen to be completely drunk, then check out come clips and the upcoming concert schedule.2

1. Many thanks to Ben Resnick for the introduction.
2. Though I doubt I can attend, I’m loving the fact that the April Fool’s concert will be held in a place called Fredonia.



Random Roundup

November 21, 2006 Odds & Ends

Every now and again there are a collection of stories which I find interesting, but not enough to write something substantive (not that I do anyway). Anyway I created a “quickies” section for this purpose, but I’m looking for a wittier title. Suggestions welcome, puns encouraged.
Here’s today’s list:

  • This excellent editorial by Dinesh D’Souza attacks the “atheist hubris” that religions are the primary cause of evil in the world. We wrote about this a few weeks ago, demonstrating that some atheists function similarly to religious fundamentalists. SIW had something on this recently, but his site is down at the moment so I cannot provide a more detailed link.
  • I doubt many of my readers were or are big fans of professional wrestling, but a not uncommon storyline was when a title match had a controversial ending and the official loser (a bad guy in this case) declared himself the “real champion,” carried around a fake belt, and generally get in the good guy champ’s way until the blowoff match on pay per view. Why does this matter? Because the exact same thing is happening in Mexico with the presidential elections. No word yet on the steel cage match.
  • At the NJDC phone conference someone asked if there was a concern regarding Keith Ellison being the first Muslim elected to Congress. The NJDC said that they were encouraged by Ellison’s positions on Israel and in general were not worried. Yesterday Ellison delivered a video address to a CAIR fund raiser. His remarks were typical Democratic talking points which is to be expected, but there could be some concern based on CAIR’s track record. In fairness there were other Representative who spoke (notably all Democrats) and addressing a crowd does not indicate total agreement with its policies. Still, the political world does place a value on which organizations merit appearances. It might be something, it might be nothing, but it will probably be fodder for someone.
  • I used to live in Spring Valley NY. Back then we didn’t roll this way.



Don’t Copy That Rabbi

September 28, 2006 Meta

Much to my dismay I recently discovered that this blog has been plagiarized. Specifically, my post The Mind Of A Matchmaker has been reproduced here1, links intact, indicating that the “Admin” actually copied and posted the HTML source code. That’s it.
No link back, no byline. Zip.

I feel like Metallica (and not in the good way).
Folks, this blog is published under a very reasonable license which really isn’t that difficult to follow. The basic gist is that anyone is free to reproduce this blog provided:

  1. There is proper attribution
  2. The reproduction is for a non-commercial purposes
  3. You don’t make derivative works from it

I haven’t had a problem with this until now since whenever this blog has been used I’ve been quoted and people have asked permission (which I’ve granted every time I can remember). When I found the post in question I immediately e-mailed the following to the Admin.

Dear Admin,
My name is R. Josh Yuter and run the blog YUTOPIA. recently came across your post here:
http://bitachon.com/forums/jewish-dating/164-the-mind-of-matchmaker.html
Which was copied unattributed from one of my earlier blog posts here:
http://yutopia.yucs.org/archives/2004/07/the_mind_of_a_m.html
I publish my blog under creative commons license which allows for reproduction of content, provided attribution is given:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
That said I will not request removal of your post, but would ask for the proper attribution and link back to the original post.
Thanks and Shana Tova
Josh

Thus far, no reply.
I have a shiur I need to write up on copyright law in halakha, but regardless of any potential issurim it’s just so simple to comply with the license that violations are very frustrating.

1. I know by linking there I am directing traffic to them, but the example is well worth it.



Up And Running…Again

July 3, 2006 Meta

Welcome back to the new and improved YUTOPIA!
I finally have most of the site in working order, including the Jewish Guitar Chords Archive. Search is currently down, but I’ll have to talk to Shaya about that. If you’re wondering, I’m using a heavily modified version of Lilia Ahner’s Stevenson style. The new layout and templates should help page loads. The code is certainly cleaner, with valid XHTML and valid CSS.
I’ll probably be making some smaller cosmetic changes as I notice all the new quirks. If you happen to find any problems or would like to offer helpful suggestions, please let me know.



Upcoming Updates

June 30, 2006 Meta

Dear Loyal Readers,
Sometime over the weekend, I’m going to be making some major updates to the back-end of the site. Although we moved to a newer version of MovableType some time ago I didn’t have the time to reset templates to take full advantage of all the features. Also, this will likely entail a change in the design, which in my opinion is long overdue. Hopefully I won’t mess things up too badly, but don’t be surprised if things appear a little messy at some point. Also I hope to get to writing some more including my thoughts on Edah’s demise and a few other things about which I have been thinking.



Past Comments Posted

March 31, 2006 Meta

Because I’ve been getting swamped with with spam posts, I’ve tried setting up MoveableType’s spam filtering. Of course, one such attempt resulted in my deleting all past comments, but those were thankfully recovered.
The setup now is that in order for comments to be posted, I need to approve them (yes I know the post-comment-submit page is horrid, I’ll get to that eventually). The thing is that many loyal readers were somehow flagged as “banned” commenters such that I didn’t even get an e-mail alerting me that these comments needed my approval. This meant that many legitimate and even insightful comments submitted over the past few weeks never got published. This has now been corrected.
I hope things will go a little more smoothly now, and many apologies for the delay.



The Chag Hasemikhah Drinking Game

March 23, 2006 Shtick

Every four years, YU holds its Chag Hasemikhah ceremony, celebrating their newly minted musmakhim. Some of you have seen the ads in the various papers, but many if not most have had the pleasure of avoiding every possible one.

I’ve been to two of these things before, and the best description I can give is that it’s a college graduation, but with all the speeches being given by Rabbis. To put things in perspective, the most memorable moment from the first one I went to was R. Tendler’s chair collapsing on stage during Ya’akov Ne’eman’s speech. 1

Due to the mitzvah of kibbud av va’em I will be attending the upcoming one on Sunday as this is my “hag hasemikha class” and just having my klaf isn’t good enough for some people.

At any rate, as a public service to those who find themselves in the position of being stuck in one of these things, Avraham and I got together and made our own drinking game to make the day a little more leibedik. 2

Notes:

  1. Seriously, this actually happened. ↩
  2. Besides, it’s not like it’s Purim or anything. ↩
[Continue Reading...]