Presence

Truth in Advertising

[Note: to get the full effect, read this post here]

A few weeks ago, the following ad ran in Baltimore's The Advertiser:

Last week, the following ad ran in Baltimore's Jewish Times:

They are the exact same picture, only in The Advertiser version, someone photoshopped skirts onto all the non-frum/non-Jewish employees.

Peninah and I disagreed as to the reason why the digital alterations were made. My theory was that The Advertiser refused to run an ad with "un-Tznius" women (I say "un-Tznius" in quotes both because it's a colloquialism and because there really isn't anything terribly "un-Tznius" about how these women are dressed). Peninah thought that the ad was altering in hopes of better marketing to frum people by making all the subjects of the ad appear frum. The reason why I think my answer is better is because most people would not think a black woman was frum just because she's wearing a long khaki skirt. Any other ideas?

Say it with me now: OIB.

A Day in the City (with Pictures and Video)

Penny and I are in New York on vacation for her birthday; A quick recap of some of the highlights from our day:

We saw Al Pachino outside the News Corporation building. I managed to snap a photo with my camera phone:

Here's how it went down. While we are waiting in the reception area to go up to TV Guide (see below), we heard the guy in front of us say he was someone's personal assistant (we didn't hear who); he had a list of people he would be signing in for a screening of some sort. Penny managed to catch a glimpse of the list, and saw Al Pachino's name at the top. We then heard him tell the receptionist that they would be arriving around 1:45. We went up to visit TV Guide, and as we got outside, looked at our watches: 1:30. So we hung out for about 15 minutes, and sure enough, here comes Scarface. I managed to position myself between the street and the entrance to the building so that Al would have to pass within about five feet of me and I could get a good shot with my camera phone. Al looked really old and his hair was dyed a yellowish-blond. We sent the sighting in to Gawker Stalker, but so far it hasn't made the site.

Back to TV Guide: Our good friend Sara works for TV Guide in the News Corporation building (same building as FOX News; she shares a gym with Geraldo), so we went to see her office. This is an office of people who get paid to watch TV and write about it; in other words, pretty much a dream job. Sarah introduced me to Michael Ausiello, a TV Guide writer who is a big Lost fan (he's done some interviews with the creators of the show). We talked a little Lost (we both think the third season is awesome; I'll post more about Lost later, cause last night's episode was good), and he was really nice (especially as we were invading his office). The office is otherwise pretty non-glamorous, but it was cool to see; and we got some complimentary TV Guides to take home.

We whiled the afternoon away, visited the Apple store on 5th Avenue (quite a unique structure), did a little shopping, and then headed uptown to The Colbert Report. We got there around 4:45, waited till about 6 to get in the building. Once inside, we waited another hour till about 7, when they brought us into the studio. We were seated in the back row, not bad because we could see everything fairly well, but at one some points a cameraman was directly between us and Colbert. Stephen came out and, before doing the show, took questions from the audience. One woman thanked him for challenging some senator about veteran health benefits, as her husband had been disabled while fighting in Iraq. I'm sure she meant well, and I'm sure there is a problem for vets, but it really killed the comedy mood, and Stephen took no further questions (I was considering asking him for mechillah). The show began, and went very smoothly, the did the whole thing in a single take.

The guest was neither Richard Dawkins (he was on last night) nor Deepak Chopra (phew). Instead, David Kuo, a former top-guy in the Department of Faith-Based Inititives, was there to plug his new book, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. The basic thesis of the book appears to be that the Republican party knowingly co-oped Jesus/Christianity in order to win elections.

Here's a clip of the interview:

The interview went on a bit long, and at the end Mr. Kuo gave something to Stephen, I think it was his cuff links. Stephen looked a bit disturbed by the gesture, and went backstage for a moment. And then he did a really funny bit involving Senator Rick Santorum and a complete set of The Lord of the Rings action figures:

And then it was over. Here's a post from another person who was at the show. Here's one last clip from the show, this is The Word (one of their daily segments):

Our final brush with celebrity of the evening came later at Abigael's when Daniel Brody of Apprentice fame came in with his wife. Penny knows Mrs. Brody, so we chatted for a minute (I don't think Dan remembered my posts on The Apprentice). Despite being fired early on, Dan is doing fine.

Then it was back to our pad, watch a TiVO'ed episode of Lost (which was AWESOME, more on that later), and then...a little blogging and trying to fall asleep. Tomorrow: Jake or Bust!

Fun with Pictures

If you're reading this from the home page, you'll see a new picture just to your right.

First person to figure it out wins a prize.

I'm going to work on a new banner as well, stay tuned.

Update: I've put a new banner up; I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time. All of them are, of course, highly recommended. For those interested, I've added these photos to Flickr as well. I was going to upload a larger banner image, making it easier to discern some of the smaller titles, but my camera battery died. Instead, I'm annotating this picture.

Temple Mount

While perusing Flickr for non-media photos of what's going on in Israel, I came across a bunch of pictures of some very non-Arab-looking folks on Har HaBayit. I was unaware that Jews, even tourists, were allowed up there any longer. I don't mean halachicly, I mean politically. Any ideas? I don't see any pictures from inside The Dome of The Rock, so maybe they are just allowed up, but not in (back in '90, we were allowed all the way in).

New Banner

I finally got around to making a new banner. I seem to have an unhealthy obsession with photos of books and libraries, and happened to be checking out Yahoo's new Creative Commons search engine, which led me to a Flickr page of photos tagged 'books' and this photo of the Bobst Library at NYU. The author has kindly licensed the photo for noncommercial, attributed use, so thanks to limonada for the stunning photo.
Looking at book pictures gave me some ideas for some shots to set up, now all I need is a camera...

O.A.R. pictures

We went to see O.A.R. at the 9:30 club last night. Good show. I took a bunch of pictures with our Kodak DX6490. I spent most of the time trying out differnt settings, seeing what worked and what didn't. Here's a black and white picture I took of Benj, the bassist. The rest of the pictures are up on my Flickr page.