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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Feb. 12, 2009 / 18 Shevat 5769

It's all in the numbers

By Jim Mullen


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | FIVE. To save a few billion a year, the Post Office is thinking of cutting mail service down from six days a week to five. A few billion? Let's just make it every other day, and save a few more billion. I'm trying to think of a single piece of mail I've gotten that was so important it couldn't have come a day later without changing my life. The phone bill came on Thursday instead of Wednesday? Heads will roll! The fifth L.L. Bean catalog of the month comes a day late? How should I vent my outrage? I needed that Canadian blanket coat yesterday! Oh, the humanities.


I don't know if the people at the Post Office have heard about it, but there's this new technology (if "new" meant 40 years old) called e-mail. It's like regular mail except it moves at the speed of light and you don't need a stamp, and it's faster, better and cheaper. And there's another thing that helps a lot when you positively, absolutely must get a message to someone right away. It's called a telephone. I've heard they're easy to use and it's almost as if the person you are talking to is in the room with you. I predict that, someday, almost everyone will have one.


EIGHT. I heard that a woman who had octuplets already had six small children at home. My mother had eight children. So did Sue's mother. But not all on the same day. They both managed to stretch it out over couple of decades. Then the older kids could help out with the younger ones; it was a system that worked, (except for all the fighting for attention, the hand-me-downs, the teasing, the cruel tricks we would play on one another, the years and years of intense psychological... but I digress...) in the era of big families and stay-at-home moms. One of our neighbors had 13 children. They named the last one Osmond Jr. We figured they had run out of names. It was also the long-gone era of names, too. Bob, Jim, Mike, Joe, Betty, Pat, Susie. Now if you name a kid Bob, you have to spell it funny, like Bhobb, or the kid will go through life traumatized because he's not unique. I can't prove it, but something tells me more Bhobbs end up in therapy than Bobs.


ONE TRILLION: When did you first hear that word? When Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer used to say "billions and billions" that seemed to be pretty much the highest you could go. Then came a gazillion, but that just meant "a lot." I think I was about 30 when I first heard "a trillion." But a trillion means something. What was the biggest lottery prize ever? $430 million. A lot of millions, right? A billion is 1,000 million, more than twice as much. You'd have to work very hard to spend a billion dollars. If you bought a new $100,000 luxury car every day, it would take you 27 years to spend $1 billion. It would get boring. Warren Buffet has something like $50 billion. He must be bored to death. Congress just debated a near trillion-dollar stimulus bill. I hope it works. What scares me, though, is that I might start hearing a new word. What's the word for 1,000 trillion?


20/20: Our library has a large children's section. And guess what — children's books are printed in type THIS BIG! Publishers seem to have this exactly backward. It's old geezers like me that could use the large print. What do they think, I'm wearing tri-focals because they are so good looking? I'll bet you 95 percent of all book buyers wear some kind of reading glasses. I know they make large print books, but why don't they make them all large print? I don't want to open a best seller and feel like I'm reading the fine print on my credit card policy.

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Jim Mullen is the author of "It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life" and "Baby's First Tattoo."


Previously:


You're damaging your brain with practical skills
The real rat pack
The unspeakable luxury of the Park-O-Matic
Gross-ery shopping



© 2009, NEA

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