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This Week
Wonders Of A Wordsmith
W
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ords, words words! I'm so sick of words ..." Well, thank
you, Liza Doolittle (My Fair Lady); but I disagree. Nothing
is as wondrous as words and what can be
worked with them.
Where some people have trouble with the simplest defini-
tions and struggle to find just the right word, others find
that they can turn an even more clever phrase with the
manipulation of words.
If you like puns, then consider some of these daffynitions:
• Abash : a great office party
• Autobiography: a history of cars
• Bassinet: what every fisherman wants
• Counterfeiters: workers who put together kitchen cabi-
nets
• Dermatologist: one who makes rash judgments
• Geometry: what the acorn said when it grew up
• Hanging: a suspended sentence
• Intense: where campers sleep
• Laundress: a gown worn while sitting on the grass
• Paradox: two physicians
• Relief: what trees do in the spring
Often, you will find that someone has an interesting outlook on
things and can perceive irony in our everyday lives. These traits led to
the following, which you can also view on the Figure Skater's Web site:
• Adolescence: the period when a teenager feels that he will never be
as dumb as his parents
• Teenager: an adolescent whose hang-ups do not include his
clothes
• Americans: people with more timesaving devices yet
less time than anyone else in the world
• Budget: a method for going broke methodically
• Coffee: break fluid
• Experience: the name we give to our mistakes
• Lame duck: a politician whose goose is cooked
• Multitasking: screwing up several things at once
• Professor: one who talks in someone else's sleep
• Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark
• Suburbia: where they tear out trees and then name
streets after them
• Resume: the closest any of us will ever come to perfec-
tion
• Stupidity: letting a child with stomach flu sleep on a
top bunk
• Diet: a brief period of starvation followed by a gain of
five pounds
• Irony: buying suit with two pairs of pants and burning a hole in
the jacket
• Kids: people to be nice to since they are the ones who will choose
our nursing homes
If you'd like to continue this line of reading, may I suggest a clas-
sic work, The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Do not keep your
findings a secret (Secret: news you tell to one person at a time). El
Protest Iran Leader's Visit
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit
will hold a public protest at noon Monday, Sept. 22, at the Holocaust
Memorial Center in Farmington Hills to object to Iranian leader
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's scheduled appearance at the United
Nations.
Members of the Jewish and wider community are encouraged to
join the protest against Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel and anti-Western
pronouncements, and his repeated denials of the Holocaust. Speakers
at the event, including Rabbis Aaron Bergman of Adat Shalom
Synagogue in Farmington Hills and Charles Rosenzveig, director of
the HMC, will call for diplomatic, political and economic sanctions
against Ahmadinejad's regime, which has threatened Israel and is
pursuing nuclear weaponry.
For information about the protest, please call (248) 642-5393.
bered 600,000. Demographic estimates indicate that there are 120,000
Jews alive today who were 15 years old or older and were in pre-state
Palestine at the founding of the state — 20,000 native-born Israelis
and an additional 100,000 immigrants. There are several hundred
more who were volunteers from abroad.
To participate, contact Aryeh Halivni (Eric Weisberg), executive
director, at info@toldotyisrael.org .
- Keri Guten Cohen, story development editor
Recording Israel's Founding
Toldot Yisrael is a nonprofit organization dedicated to recording and
sharing the firsthand testimonies of the men and women who helped
found the State of Israel. Thousands of video interviews will be con-
ducted with members of Israel's founding generation and used to
create an interactive database and extensive archive. The footage will
be developed into a Web site, films and educational material that will
bring authentic accounts of the creation of the State of Israel to the
general public — both in Israel and the diaspora.
Toldot Yisrael's target interviewee is someone with sufficient recall
of the period leading up to and including the founding of the State of
Israel in 1948. This would likely be a person who was at least 15 years
old at the founding of the State (born 1933 or earlier) and would now
be close to 75 years old or older.
Israel's Jewish population in 1948 on the eve of statehood num-
A10
September 18 2008
- Keri Guten Cohen, story development editor
Tel Aviv Gets Ready To Party
Tel Aviv is set to mark its 100th anniversary in 2009, and the city "is
gearing up for one of the biggest parties in Israel's history:' says Arie
Sommer, Israel Tourism commissioner for North and South America.
Celebrations will be yearlong, but the kickoff is April 4, 2009, with a
massive concert in Rabin Square, complete with multimedia experi-
ences and performances by international stars, the New Israeli Opera
and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta.
Founded in 1909 on sand dunes as a garden suburb of ancient Jaffa,
Tel Aviv very quickly burgeoned into a metropolis, styling itself as "the
first Hebrew city in two millennia."
By the 1930s, architects escaping the Nazis were creating the wealth
of Bauhaus buildings that gave Tel Aviv its unique look. By the turn of
the 21st century, the city had become home to dozens of world-class
restaurants, a fashion scene that combines Milan, Tokyo and New York
and a wealth of world-class cultural institutions.
"If Jerusalem is our Washington, D.C.," says Sommer, "then Tel Aviv
is our New York — the center of business, entertainment, and all the
excitement associated with a big city that is also a beach resort on the
Mediterranean."
Full details of Tel Aviv's centennial can be found at visit-t1v.com and
at www.goisrael.com.
- Ken Guten Cohen, story development editor
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as well as past simchahs all
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Online Poll
This week's poll question:
Should Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be
allowed to address the United
Nations?
Visit the JNonline.us
homepage, below the left
menu, to cast your vote.
Last week's question:
Is Israel making too many
concessions under Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice's
peace initiative?
Last week's poll results:
Yes: 75%
No: 25%