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Trivia
• On November 4, 2008, the average American voter
traveled 1.1 miles
to vote and it took 20 minutes 12 seconds.
• Forty-seven percent of American voters select straight party lines when
voting.
• Patti Sue Daygull of Louisiana
has moved so often and so regularly, she has voted every year for the past
28 years but never in the same district twice.
• In the 2004, 1256 votes were cast by absentee ballot by people who died
between voting and election day.
• In Jersey City, NJ, the ballot for November of 2000 had
a record 68 separate offices and issues to be selected.
• The average American who paints a bathroom in
his/her home will spend 7 hours 17 minutes on prep work, painting and
cleanup.
• More than fifty percent of Americans over the age of 40 wait for the
evening before making long-distance telephone calls even though they have
flate-rate plans.
• Growth rates for toenails can vary much as much as 127 percent from one
week to the next. The reason behind this phenomenon has not yet been
discovered.
• Twenty-one percent of fax machines in the United States had received
nothing besides ’spam faxes’ for more than 11 months.
• Banker and philanthropist J.P. Morgan had a desk made out of
steel-reinforced balsa wood.
• As of 2007, more vehicles have traveled on the New Jersey Turnpike than
any other road in the world.
• Nolan Ryan has touched more baseballs than any other person.
• In “polite society” in the nineteenth century, sperm whales
were called “manly whales”.
• The earliest-known hangers for garments were found in archeological digs
in Mesopotamia and date back 3300 years.
• The average American high school student has 146 different ‘away
messages’ saved for use with Instant Messaging applications.
• Voldemort, the dark wizard of the Harry
Potter series, was the most popular write-in candidate in the
2008 Republican primary election, easily beating perennial favorites such
as Superman and Mickey Mouse.
• The Guinness Book of World Records
gets about 150 applications annually for “cutest baby.”
• Over 9,000 people in Des Moines, Iowa signed a petition urging the United States to immediately end its
occupation of North America. The
organizers wished to demonstrate that people often sign petitions without
agreeing with them, but even they were surprised at the high level of
support for American withdrawal.
• Over two-thirds of Americans polled agreed with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s quip
that “the world needs less love and more common decency.”
• In honor of Rudyard Kipling’s 140th birthday, Oxford University
asked students how much they like Kipling. Nearly half responded that
they’d never kipled.
• 12 percent of
Icelanders under the age of 35 say they were members of a rock and roll
band at some time in their life.
• On October 22, 1998, Slava Gilusick of Haverford, PA,
claimed the last unused three-character ID for AOL Instant Messaging.
• India
exports more human hair, in total and per capita, than any other country.
The color of 99.502 percent is classified as “black” or
“ebony”.
• Sarah Palin and Joe Biden both weighed 6 lbs 15 oz at birth.
• Meatloaf is mentioned more often than any other dish when people are
asked to name a ‘comfort food’.
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Today’s
Papers
Fight To Save Citi
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal lead with the
late-night announcement of a plan to rescue ailing banking giant Citigroup.
Under a plan that the NYT describes
as “radical” and “complex,” the federal government will
protect Citigroup from potential losses on a pool of troubled assets worth around $306 billion. On top of that, the Treasury
Department will inject $20 billion into the company—in addition to the $25
billion the financial institution has already received from the
department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. The LAT highlights that this is “the largest single rescue
effort thus far in the current financial crisis.”
The Washington Post off-leads the Citigroup rescue but leads with word that
President-elect Barack Obama and Democratic leaders are considering a huge
fiscal stimulus plan that could total $700 billion over the next two years. Transition officials aren’t
confirming that something of that magnitude is being considered, but more
Democrats are raising it as a possibility. USA
Today leads with a look at how those who will be flying over the Thanksgiving holiday have a better chance of
making it to their destination on time this year. Efforts to decrease
congestion at New York
airports coupled with the schedule cutbacks by financially struggling
airlines have cut down on traffic and have decreased delays.
After Citigroup’s stock
plunged about 60 percent last week when it became engulfed in a crisis of
confidence, executives and federal officials began intense negotiations to
try to prevent the problem from spreading to other big banks. “This
time … the company in jeopardy is truly gigantic,” notes the WP.
Citigroup is the largest U.S. bank by assets. It is involved in so many
aspects of the financial system—and in more than 100 countries—that it
seems to fit the very definition of “too big to fail.”
Under the plan, the government
will protect Citigroup from losses on a $306 billion portfolio of assets
mostly made up of loans and securities that are backed by residential and
commercial real estate. Citigroup will be responsible for covering the first $29 billion in losses. (The LAT says $36 billion, because, it specifies, the $29 billion
would be on top of approximately $7 billion already in a rainy-day fund.)
After that threshold has been reached, the Treasury Department, the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp., and the Federal Reserve will absorb 90 percent of
any further losses.
For its trouble, the
government will receive $7 billion in preferred shares—on top of the $20
billion of preferred stock it will get for its additional cash infusion.
The government didn’t mandate any changes to the company’s leadership, but
the banking giant did agree to grant the government power over its operations. The LAT notes that the government can now “effectively prohibit stock dividends for
the next three years” and everyone says Citigroup had to accept limits
on executive compensation and to agree to implement a plan to modify
mortgages to avoid foreclosures.
Of course, no one knows
whether it will be successful. The NYT highlights
that this will be the “government’s third effort in three months”
to stabilize the markets and could be used as a
precedent to rescue other financial firms. To recap: First, the government
said it would buy troubled assets, then scrapped that plan in favor of
injecting money into financial institutions. Now it’s made it clear that
it’s ready to try a mixture of the two for certain institutions. The
previous efforts led to a bit of optimism in Wall Street, but that optimism
has always proved short-lived. The WSJ points
out that the portfolio involved in this rescue is really only a drop in the
bucket for a company that has $3 trillion in assets, including $667 billion
in mortgage-related securities alone.
In a separate piece inside,
the NYT points out that this new plan “raises about as many questions as
it answers,” particularly if it’s seen as a model for an industrywide
rescue. How does the government decide which assets to include? How would
potential losses be calculated? Has it even considered all the assets that
could lead to losses in the future? Even if this helps the market as a
whole, there’s no guarantee that it will pervent problems in financial
institutions further down the road.
It’s unclear how influential
President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for Treasury secretary, Timothy
Geithner, was in the weekend’s negotiations. The WP and LAT both
say that as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner was involved and kept
Obama updated. The NYT agrees
Geithner was critical to the negotiations on Friday, but says he backed
away a bit after news began circulating that he would be appointed.
The WP adds a little historical gem by pointing out that Citi’s origins can
be traced back to a firm called First National City Bank that, in the
1920s, repackaged and sold bad loans from Latin
America and billed them as safe securities. After the scheme
collapsed, it became Citibank. Decades later, repackaging bad loans as safe
securities is at least part of the reason why Citigroup is suffering so
much heartache. Curious about how Citigroup got into the predicament it’s
in today? If so, be sure to read yesterday’s detailed NYT piece that explains how the company went
from being worth $244 billion two years ago to $20.5 billion today. The
story is particularly interesting, considering that Robert Rubin, Treasury
secretary under President Clinton and an economic adviser in Obama’s
transition team, plays a starring role in the saga.
Speaking of Rubin, the NYT takes a look at how Obama is
creating “a virtual Rubin constellation” in his economic
team. Obama’s three top economic advisers “are past protégés” of
Rubin, who also has ties to other members of the president-elect’s
transition team. But even though the three advisers once shared Rubin’s
formula of favoring balanced budgets, free trade, and financial
deregulation that was so popular in the 1990s, they all recognize that
times have changed. They’re now following Obama as he promises to increase
regulation and plans to take the country deeper into debt.
While the WP says the next fiscal stimulus
package could involve as much as $700 billion, the real number could prove to
be even greater. The LAT says
“congressional allies” are talking about a program that could
total as much as $900 billion of new spending and tax cuts.
Whatever the exact number may be, everyone says Democrats in Congress want
to pass legislation at the beginning of the new year so Obama can sign the
new stimulus package quickly. Besides the obvious point that such huge
amounts of spending will dramatically increase the national debt, there’s
also concern that it could prove too
much stimulus, which would create massive inflation once the
economy recovers. But many seem to agree the real risk is doing not enough
rather than too much.
The WSJ also notes Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is
considering asking for the second half of the $700 billion bailout package to
implement new programs, which would mark a reversal from what he said last
week. Paulson apparently would use the funds to make it easier for
households to borrow money and to reduce foreclosures.
The WP takes a look at how the Federal Reserve has been
playing a relatively quiet role in the crisis. Even as the Treasury’s every
move is analyzed and debated, the Fed has lent $893 billion to a variety of institutions that
are having trouble getting a hold of cash to continue operating. In some
ways, it’s carrying out the original goal of the TARP program by allowing
financial institutions to put up troubled assets as collateral for the
loans. But it’s doing it all out of public view, as the Fed is refusing to
reveal not only which companies are asking for money but what collateral
they pledged. The Fed insists this type of secrecy is necessary to avoid
creating a stigma for the firms that ask to borrow money, which would make
the program much less effective, because companies would be reluctant to
seek the central bank’s help.
In other news, the LAT takes a look at how there’s
growing concern in Iraq that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is setting
himself up to become “a benevolent Shiite Saddam.” Once dismissed as a
weak leader without real power, Maliki has been able to navigate his
relationship with the United
States and stands to gain if the
security agreement is approved this week as expected. He would then
officially become the man who brought an end to U.S. occupation, which could
help him consolidate power in January’s provincial elections. Supporters
dismiss the suggestion that Maliki could become a dictator but say that Iraq needs
strong leadership in order to move forward. “In some ways, we are
seeing a return to traditional Iraqi political culture, where authority is
centralized in the person of the leader in Baghdad,” A U.S. official said.
The NYT points out that after preaching to his 20,000-member
congregation that they should strengthen their marriages through Seven Days of Sex, the Rev. Ed Young told the couples
yesterday to keep going. “We should try to double up the amount of
intimacy we have in marriage,” Young said. “And when I say
intimacy, I don’t mean holding hands in the park or a back rub.” Young
insists this is not a publicity gimmick but rather a simple way to feel
closer to a spouse and to God. “If you’ve said, ‘I do,’ do it,”
he said. What about singles? “I don’t know, try eating chocolate
cake.”
The Making of Modern Hebrew
Two books on the revival of an ancient tongue.
Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky
Sunday, November 23, 2008; BW11
RESURRECTING HEBREW
By Ilan Stavans
Nextbook. 219 pp. $21
YEHUDA AMICHAI
The Making of Israel’s
National Poet
By Nili Scharf Gold
Brandeis Univ. 445 pp. $35
In the Bible, the Book of Ezekiel begins with
the heavens opening to reveal a stunning vision of God. Above the angels,
astride a throne, like a fire encased in a frame, the prophet sees a kind
of “hashmal.”
This word is unique to Ezekiel’s vision; in
the entire Hebrew scriptures, it appears only there. Its exact meaning is
uncertain, but the Talmud — the vast compilation of Jewish law, lore and
interpretation from the first centuries of the Common Era — offers a
powerful etymology: It comes from the phrase “Creatures of fire . . .
keep their silence [Hebrew: HASHot]
and murmur [u-meMALelot].” Thus, tradition holds
that the mysterious hashmal is the aura surrounding the heavenly throne,
woven from the breaths of angels, so sacred as scarcely to be audible, even
to God.
Yet on the streets of Israel
today, hashmal is everywhere. As any child can tell you, it means
“electricity.”
The reinvention of Hebrew as a modern, spoken
language is an astounding story, underappreciated not only abroad but even
in Israel
(which may be a paradoxical sign of its success). As this one, small
example indicates, it is a story of extraordinary inventiveness,
achievement, complexity and, also, loss.
In Resurrecting
Hebrew, Ilan Stavans sets out to explain how an ancient, holy
tongue was converted into a contemporary, secular language. He values
Hebrew’s new vibrancy but also describes its development (some would say
coarsening) in less than a century into a “messy, boisterous, even
chaotic” pastiche. This slang-filled, everyday mixture of Hebrew,
Arabic and English seems almost as far removed from the elegance of the
first generation of modern Hebrew writers as it does from the stark,
rock-hewn language of the Bible.
Stavans, a professor of Latin American
culture at Amherst
College, is a gifted
scholar and man of letters. His book is essentially a travelogue: Spurred
by an enigmatic dream, Stavans went to Israel, where he had lived for
a year as a young man, to explore his Jewish identity and his emotional
relationship to Hebrew. His quest quickly led to the figure at the center
of spoken Hebrew’s revival, the late Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922).
Born in Lithuania
as Eliezer Perlman, Ben-Yehuda moved to Palestine in 1881, 15 years before
Theodore Herzl published The Jewish
State, the founding manifesto of Zionism. In Jerusalem, Ben-Yehuda established several
newspapers and went about creating — with his wife, child and their
bewildered domestic help — the first Hebrew-speaking household in
millennia.
He adopted a fierce secularism and equally
fierce cultural nationalism in which the revival of Hebrew was central. As
Stavans writes, “Ben-Yehuda’s Zionism was linguistic. You might almost
say he wanted Jews to create their own country so that they could speak
Hebrew in it.” This required new vocabulary, and so Ben-Yehuda
embarked on a decades-long project: a massive Hebrew dictionary in which he
offered stunningly erudite etymologies both for existing words and for the
terms he was inventing.
He was not without foes. Traditionalists
recoiled at his unabashed secularization of the holy tongue, while many
other figures of the Hebrew revolution, like the colossal poet Hayyim
Bialik and the towering essayist Ahad Ha-Am, thought his work soulless and
mechanical. Arguably, that group of writers left an even deeper imprint on
contemporary Hebrew than did Ben-Yehuda, but the rebirth of spoken Hebrew
is nearly inconceivable without this difficult, quixotic man.
Stavans’s journey proceeds mainly through
conversations with passionate and learned interlocutors — including
waitresses and cabdrivers as well as linguists, translators, historians and
writers — to which he brings a relentless inquisitiveness and deep love of
language. Amid a flood of books about Israel, he offers a new and
revealing angle on its society.
Yet some things are missing. Stavans notes in
passing but does not explore the fact that Hebrew never really died:
Throughout history it remained a universal Jewish written language, used
not only for liturgy but also for legal opinions, philosophy, mysticism,
travel writing, poetry, natural sciences and more. Indeed, all that
richness is on display in Ben-Yehuda’s dictionary.
Another gaping omission is the role that the
rhetorical force and flavor of ancient Hebrew have played in shaping today’s
Israel.
Stavans makes no mention of the ways in which, as the historian Gershom
Scholem suggested in the 1920s, Zionists thought they were secularizing an
ancient language but actually were summoning biblical echoes and attitudes
into modern life. This observation has been borne out in the politics of
religious Zionists, whom Stavans never mentions. They are among the leading
standard-bearers of Hebrew in an increasingly globalized Israel, where many elites seem
to be switching to tech-infused English as fast as they can, another
phenomenon he neglects.
The complexities of the Hebrew revival are
also at the center of Nili Scharf Gold’s exhaustively researched,
passionately argued and highly persuasive study of Yehuda Amichai
(1924-2000), Israel’s
“beloved unofficial national poet.”
Born Ludwig Pfeuffer to an Orthodox family in
Germany, Amichai fled
with his parents to Palestine in 1936,
trained as a teacher and fought in Israel’s 1948 War of
Independence. His reputation rests above all on his collection Poems: 1948-1962, in which he emerged in open rebellion against the
ideological verse of the Independence
period. In its stead he offered spare, beautifully measured lines that
mixed everyday speech with allusions to classic Jewish texts and prayers, a
contemporary style with ancient echoes that seemed new and quintessentially
Israeli.
Scharf Gold, a professor at the University
of Pennsylvania, probes Amichai’s Israeli-ness in two ways: first, by
exploring his formative experiences in Europe and, second, through skillful
use of nearly 100 hitherto unknown love letters written by the poet to a
woman who left him — and Palestine — in 1947.
Amichai belongs to a founding generation of
writers who, according to Israeli mythology, gave up their native languages
to write exclusively in Hebrew. But Scharf Gold shows that, in reality,
Amichai remained deeply engaged with German culture for decades and even composed
a number of poems in whole or in part in German, then translated them into
Hebrew. She also demonstrates that major poems ascribed to his experiences
in 1948 were written earlier, emerging from his personal life and not the
crucible of war, though he carefully covered his tracks.
She refers throughout to Amichai’s
“poetics of camouflage,” a locution that makes sense when we
think of the stigma the new and would-be heroic state of Israel attached to
the aged and victimized diaspora. But although camouflage is undeniably a
part of Amichai’s work, it is not the whole story. His 1958 poem “Not
Like a Cypress” reflects his desire to remain himself but also to be
part of a greater enterprise, emerging “Not like a cypress/Not all at
once, not all of me,/But like grass, in a thousand shoots,/Wary and green.
. . . “
At the close of Resurrecting Hebrew, Stavans poignantly notes that
“my search for Hebrew was for something far more multifarious than a
language. . . . It was an existential condition, a way of being, of
establishing contact with others, with God, and with myself.” Perhaps
Amichai, in the subterfuges that Scharf Gold reveals, was also seeking to
connect with his people, his multiple homelands and his God. Those strange
and strained connections are part of today’s Hebrew and Israeli cultures;
they are creatures of fire that alternately murmur and keep their silence.
·
Yehudah Mirsky, a former
State Department official, is a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Planning
Institute in Jerusalem.
He is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.
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Headlines
If
His LSAT Score Is Good, This Kid’s Got a Big Future
“US
Teen Lives 118 Days Without Heart”–headline, Reuters, Nov. 19
Is
That Supposed to Count as a Miracle?
“Lawyer: 3 Saints Took No Steroids”–headline, Associated Press,
Nov. 19
How
Could a Flight Attendant Help a Land Plane?
“Flight Attendant Helped Land Plane”–headline, Globe and Mail (Toronto),
Nov. 19
Now
He’s a Flight Risk
• ”Canadian
Prisoner, Too Fat for Cell, Released Early”–headline, Los
Angeles Times, Nov. 12
• ”Obese Have Right to 2 Airline Seats: Canada Court”–headline, Reuters,
Nov. 20
The
Preferred Term Is ‘Citrus-American’
“Orange Man Faces Murder Charge”–headline, Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.),
Nov. 19
Though New Zealand Is
Even Worse
“Australia
Not so Awesome Say Critics”–headline, Internet Movie Database,
Nov. 19
Maybe
He Was Just Happy to See Herself
“Woman Hit Be Man With Gun in Pants”–headline, Gaston (N.C.)
Gazette, Nov. 19
News
of the Tautological
“Paris Hilton Will Come to Party”–headline, Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), Nov. 22
News
You Can Use
• ”Find the
Right Global Dance Partner”–headline, AdAge.com,
Nov. 20
• ”Tips to Stop Wild Turkeys From Terrorizing
You”–headline, Boston
Globe Web site, Nov. 19
Bottom
Stories of the Day
• ”USA
Gymnastics Hears No Complaints About Karolyis”–headline, Associated
Press, Nov. 19
• ”Huckabee Won’t Rule Out 2012 Run for
President”–headline, Associated
Press, Nov. 19
• ”Michael Moore Has Mixed Feelings About a Big 3
Bailout”–headline, Detroit
News, Nov. 20
• ”Obama Naming Washington Insiders to Cabinet”–headline, Star
Press (Muncie, Ind.), Nov. 20
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