Once upon a time, there was some dumb oleh named Benji. He started a blog. A lot of people read it. It was possibly the thing he was most proud of in his life. Good times were had by all. Then he started posting on Facebook and Tweeting and doing more stand-up and other creative stuff and lost the motivation to write anything of great length. He put these thoughts down in this “state of the blog address” and may have accidentally sent the incorrect message that he was shutting down his blog. Traffic plummets.
Despite a move to WordPress with this here new site, the comments mostly stopped on his occasional posts and to add insult to injury, he recently discovered that both his RSS feed and mailing list were both broken which means there’s no way to know if his loyal readers were even aware of new content being generated over the last couple of months (I know my Mom wasn’t.) Feedburner indicates that somehow, right around May 8th, the number of RSS readers dropped by FIVE HUNDRED overnight, possibly the same day the mailing list broke. So what’s a blogger to do?
I’ll tell you what he’s to do. He’s to blog, dammit. The war zone may be down but it’s not out and I am not giving up. I’m getting back to writing starting right now. I’m a little afraid to announce outright that I’m staying off Facebook for thirty days, but for now, every time I get the urge to write something down, I’m going to resist the urge to post it on everybody’s favorite time-wasting website. We’ll see how long it lasts. We do all remember life before status updates, don’t we?
This graphic has been brought to you by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Anyway…I was catching up with my friend Deb the other day at Kalo on Derech Beit Lechem. That’s DERECH Beit Lechem, by the way. Because if you get in a taxi in Jerusalem in a major hurry and frantically tell your driver to take you to Beit Lechem as fast as he can, he will turn around and wonder what the hell you’re up to. (Not that I’ve done that. It was someone else. We’ll call him Smenji.)
Derech Beit Lechem (or Beit Lechem Way, I suppose….or literally, the way to Beit Lechem) is a street passing through the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bak’a. By the way, am I the only one who thinks it would be funny to start calling the Jerusalem neighborhoods by their Jewish names? Like Ge’ulim instead of Bak’a. Does anyone in this country even call it that? What kind of weird reactions would you get from people?
First date:
Girl: “Ehhh….so where do you leev?”
Guy: “Where everybody lives….Gonen.”
Girl: “Ehhh…waht ahr you talking about? Where deh hell eez dat?”
Guy: “Gonen, nu!? The neighborhood on ‘Srugim’!”
Girl (to herself): Ayze freak.
For all I know, the Arabic says “Some day, this will again be mine. Oh yes, it will.”
Anyway, I’m in Baka/Bak’a/Baq’a in the mood for something to go along with my cafe hafuch. What goes better with a cafe than a ma’afe? Ahhh….cafe v’ma’afe (coffee and a pastry). One of the all-time classic duos with a nice sound to it. Of course at any cafe, you’re confronted with that oh-so-critical question: “is there a special price?” That’s the whole fun of the cafe v’ma’afe. What’s the point of saying “cafe v’ma’afe” if you’re not going to get a discount for buying them both?
If you order cafe v’ma’afe, does the waiter just bring them both or is he/she obligated to tell you that even those they do in fact serve both cafe and ma’afe, there’s no “cafe v’ma’afe”? Ok, here’s my conclusion:
ALIYAH RULE #47: “If you ask for “cafe v’ma’afe, they have to give you a discount.”
You see, people-this is 21st century Zionism. Making this country a better place, one coffee shop at a time. Next time you’re in the neighborhood, we’re going to breakfast at Kalo. The one in Geulim.
Postscript: The coffee and almond croissant cost me twenty shekels.
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