Mischa Altmann

It’s International Towel Day to commemorate Douglas Adams (Author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). There’s even a cute website. While Mr Adams wasn’t the best author ever, reading his Hitchhiker’s Guide was superbly fun: all that useless technobabel and the idea of flying (well, missing the floor)… truly fantastic.

Apart from MySpace there’s a few other places to get your music from:

• !K7 - the label that I discovered via Kruder & Dorfmeister
• Thievery Corporation - they may have gone a bit bonkas (or probably have always been) but that doesn’t stop them from producing some tunes to worry your neighbours…

because i believe(?!) that the majority of the Internet has decent spelling skills, I use Google as spell checker and sometimes as expression checker. Recently I wanted to know more about the expression “your neck of (the) woods” so I search for:

1. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=”neck of woods” and
2. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=”your neck of woods”

Interestingly, the more restricting (specific) search request brings up more hits:

1. Results 1 - 10 of about 754 for “neck of woods”. (0.16 seconds)
2. Results 1 - 10 of about 933,000 for “your neck of woods”. (0.35 seconds)

How wierd is that?

listening to The Stravinsky Experience on BBC Radio 3 was fantastic. I forgot how much I enjoy the uninhibited joy and absurd pseudo-with Judaism good food and fun(ny) company!

I’ve also just started reading A Very Short Introduction to Judaism (OUP), which is a great read! It happens disconcertingly rarely that I find a sensitive, approachable, no non-sense book on a complex (and dividing) theme. I did, however, feel rather queasy about the recourring emphasis on Christianity. It made it seem as if the book’s audience was those of Christian origin wishing to understand more about Judaism. One cannot deny of course that Christianity played a major role in shaping Judaism (and of course vice versa).