Kosher Entertainment: January 19, 2005

In which there are holy (snow) rollers.

Categorized

Eeeh, the first big snowfall of the year! Yippee! Naturally, the big snowstorm had to hit on the one day I actually had to go somewhere — “somewhere” being the semi-annual Professional Society for That Job I Do (Twin Cities chapter) conference. This is the first time I’ve actually been able to get to the conference; living in West St. Paul, practically every PSfTJID shindig was impossible to get to without taking at least three buses and starting out in the wee hours of the morn. But now we live right down the street from the college where the conference is being held — heck, it’s less than ten blocks away!

Today I happened to be looking out the window when I saw a group of Hasidic Jews trudging down the sidewalk. Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath, when Jews are prohibited from working (that includes driving), and this neighborhood has a largish Jewish population, so it’s not unusual to see men in black clothes with long shaggy beards schlepping along the sidewalks at all hours of the day. (I’m allowed to say “schlepping,” because that’s a Jewish word and I’m Jewish. It’s okay to poke fun at your own people.) So here comes a group of four Jewish men, looking like shaggy black crows against the piles of pristine snow. The man at the back, who’s wearing a large Russian-style hat, stops, and the others stop and turn to look at him. He says something, gesticulating widely in such a stereotypically Jewish manner that I can’t help but giggle. He seems to be making some grave theological point. And then — then the shaggy-bearded guy next to him tackles him, knocking him backwards into the snow and pretending to punch him in the belly. The other two men watch them, keeping a little ways away as though they don’t want to be associated with the madness. So here we have two Orthodox Jews wrestling around in the snow, two other Jews looking on with grudging interest, and a bunch of really confused drivers honking at the melee. I’m cracking up, of course — it’s not every day that you see such serious-looking types just blowing off steam.

Speaking of blowing off steam, I found out what not to do for entertainment when you’re all alone in a dark apartment at night. Fresh from an hour of Lost and an hour of American Idol, I stumbled across a site which has some samples from what are called “numbers stations” — shortwave radio stations that broadcast nothing but numbers, numbers, numbers. Apparently, the numbers are read by some nameless person, usually female. No one knows exactly what the numbers mean, but it’s speculated that they’re some kind of code used for espionage. As a dedicated collector of conspiracy theories, I wonder that I never heard of this before. The samples are said to be highly unsettling; stupidly, I downloaded a few, and had a listen. While I was alone, mind you. Alone in a mostly-dark apartment, with a dim light behind me and nary a sound to be heard, especially now that the scrabbling rat is gone. I listened, and it wasn’t that freaky. Not really. Just numbers, numbers, more numbers, read by a bored-sounding woman. I switched to a tone sample. Again, not that freaky. Just weird tones, like a child’s music box or a demented clown’s theme song or an ice cream truck full of dead babies or — aaagh. Eegh. AAAAAGH!

Needless to say, all the lights in the apartment went on pretty quickly after that.