Chit Chat

By Peloni

From now on comments on every post must relate to the content of the post.

Comments that don’t relate to the post must go here.

Any person who contravenes this demand will be put on moderation. Also their offending comment will be trashed.

The reason for this demand is so that people who want to read comments which pertain to the post, don’t have to wade through the chatter.

Everyone will be happier.

April 16, 2020 | 9,226 Comments »

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50 Comments / 9226 Comments

  8. “People also ask
    What does bad mean in slang?
    good
    “Bad” means good. Actually “bad” means even better than good”

    —-
    Chair
    “act as chairperson of or preside over (an organization, meeting, or public event).
    “the debate was chaired by the Archbishop of York”

    2.
    BRITISH
    “carry (someone) aloft in a chair or in a sitting position to celebrate a victory.”‘

    “An Academic Chair heads up a department at a university. This position is usually occupied by a Professor, and is awarded for many years of service or a history of achievement, like if you’ve gained international recognition for your work.”

  12. @Honey Thank you.

    Picarones are a Peruvian dessert that originated in Lima during the viceroyalty. It is somewhat similar to buñuelos, a type of doughnut brought to the colonies by Spanish conquistadors. Its principal ingredients are squash and sweet potato. It is served in a doughnut form and covered with syrup, made from chancaca.

    Wikipedia

  15. Edgar and Sebastien you both will remain in the “bad chairs”. Sebastien for being an annoying piccaron and Edgar for allowing himself to be taken in by Sebastien’s nonsense.

  16. @HONEYBEE-

    I believe that including me in your very proper intervention in this ridiculous series is not warranted. Perhaps a teacher’s way of “spreading the responsibility”. Sebastien’s little streak of mischievousness, often very funny, zoomed in on ME, which was O.K….within limits. But he persisted with nonsense that I tried to avoid. The remarks I made were all supported by sources, which I gave.

    The little streak become a bigger streak, no longer pleasant, but offensive, and has caused a rift in our hitherto very amiable relationship. I have no time for a tzilahachas, and had no intention of answering his offensive “grasshopper”.

    But I sincerely thank you, and glad for your “intervention”.

  17. Yamam dog killed in Shechem trapped teen terror victim’s murderer
    Police Commissioner Shabtai praises Yamam activities in Shechem, eulogizes dog Zili, a ‘real fighter on four legs.
    ”
    Israel Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai on Tuesday praised the Yamam commander and his unit for their operation in Shechem (Nablus), in which an attempted arrest turned into an elimination of wanted terrorists.”
    ‘

    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/357896

    We will mourn his loss.

  19. Sebastien and Edgar G both of you behave. If your were in my first grade class you both would be on the “bad chair” and facing the wall for fighting and language. Castigese.

  21. @SEB-

    For the lat time…… The two brothers Olinsky married two sisters who were Dutch Reformed Church adherents.

    The Jewish Chronicle article was extremely specific. You can read it for yourself in footnote “2” at the bottom of the O’Linn blurb.

    My family got the Jewish Chronicle every week all their lives and it was completely reliable. All our departed family members had their Obituary announcements in the Jewish Chronicle printed in London England.
    Every Dublin Community Household likely got it as well.

    These are my final words on this thoroughly useless discussion, made repugnant solely by you. Go and exercise your “smatsdik” on someone else.

  22. @Ed

    As you seem intent to carry this farce on, ad infinitum, I will direct my executors to keep it active for as long as you like..

    Maybe it’s in my blood. My great-grandfather was a rabbi (though I never knew him; he died at Auschwitz in 1944).

  23. Haha, well waddyaknow? Synchronicity in action. I really had no idea.

    SAN SEBASTIÁN DE LA GOMERA

    9,261 Population [2021] – Estimate
    113.1 km² Area
    81.86/km² Population Density [2021]
    0.38% Annual Population Change [2011 ? 2021]
    San Sebastián de La Gomera: municipality of Spain – Elevation: 128 m – Official Website – Postal code: 38880 – Licence plate code: TF

    I just wanted to know the population. Not just whistling Dixie, here, ya know.

    https://www.citypopulation.de/en/spain/canarias/santa_cruz_de_tenerife/38036__san_sebasti%C3%A1n_de_la_gome/

  26. @Ed

    Sid O’Linn, who died last month, was a top-flight footballer and cricketer. But few knew that he was also the son of a kosher butcher…But his Irish-sounding name concealed a hidden fact: Mr O’Linn, who died last month in Johannesburg at the age of 89, was born Sydney Olinsky, the son of a kosher butcher.
    daniel lightman

    BY DANIEL LIGHTMAN
    JANUARY 13, 2017 11:49

    Jewish Chronicle

    https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/the-truth-about-super-sid-1.430594?reloadTime=1660010981269

  28. @SEB-

    You know well enough I’m not basing anything on “Headlines” They are merely corroborating. You are deliberately obfuscating the clarity of my research results.. I’ve given you a load of facts, and the Jewish Chronicle article is conclusive. He was not born a Jew and never was a Jew.

    Are you denying this too??

    As you seem intent to carry this farce on, ad infinitum, I will direct my executors to keep it active for as long as you like..

  29. @Edgar Well, Of course, it’s in the body of the article, and more than one or two. Do you only look at headlines? Headlines are often misleading. You can’t say anything intelligent based only on headlines. That’s intellectual laziness. And from a voracious and scholarly reader of print books, I expect more.

  30. @SEBASTIEN-

    I just damned well googled AGAIN for the unpty umpth time “Sid Olinsky cricket”, as you did, and AGAIN, it came up-with his picture_and the Wiki article of “Sid O’Linn.”, also the same in the highlight .NO mention of Olinsky, except in the body of the article, which certainly was not there a few days ago.

    How long are you prepared to flog this dead horse.

    I’ve given you a ton of info about the :kosher butcher O’Linn…look at the Jewish Chronicle account. …… The guy was NOT a Jew….His mother was a Futch reformed Church shiksa, A tough group. He was not raised Jewish. Likely never knew his father was a meshummad. .

  32. @SEB-

    Yes, I read all that,I googled the same and only “Sid O’Linn came up. I saw that photo too…An odd looking son-of-a-gun wasn’t he?. He was actually an opening bat.
    I just read a Jewish Chronicle article which said that his father and uncle both married 2 Dutch Reform Church girls, and when he was a baby THEY changed their name to O’Linn. That there was a vague rumour that they may have done it because of Anti-Semitism.

    There was another originally Jewish cricketer who converted to Catholicism, whose name was also not included in the “Jewish Sportsman” list.

    Believe it or not, even so, his father was a “kosher” butcher so it didn’t say much for the Jewish Community of that small town…….

    Helen Suzman was involved in politics from mid 1940s and later in Parliament, for the first 13 years the only member of her Party.. She was an observant Jew, very liberal, visited Mandela and other prominent black prisoners, many times on Robben Island, (She died about 2009 aged over 90.).
    I used to read about her. She never changed her name (until she married Suzman)…….

    So that explains why Sid O’Linn, is not included as Jewish on any of the Jewish sports lists I saw, and also why it says “born Sid O’linn”.

    All very confusing.

  34. @Edgar

    But I searched in vain for a “Sid Olinsky”… Nowhere to be found.

    Sid O’Linn
    [“born Sidney Olinsky into a Jewish family,[2] he was a left-hander who batted down the order. He was a member of the South African tour of England in 1960,[3] the first to be confronted by anti-apartheid demonstrations, and scored 98 (his highest in Tests) in six hours at Trent Bridge before being caught in the slips by Colin Cowdrey.[4]”…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_O%27Linn

  35. @SEBASTIEN-

    Another little bit of “news”. You will, no doubt be surprised, to hear that I just now looked at a WIKI report on “Sub-Saharan Jews”. In the Sth African section, I opened “Sporting figures”. There were many names I recognised going back to Okey Geffin, a famous Springboks Rugby player who came to Ireland, and to whom I was able to speak for a few minutes. Ilana Kloss was there. I saw her many times in Tennis Tournaments. I saw cricket players, nut alas…NO Sid Olinsky……

    But I searched in vain for a “Sid Olinsky”… Nowhere to be found.
    Except maybe in the “Forward”…._.

  36. @SEB-

    I just now saw that O’Linn was born Olinsky. No mention of having to change his name because of Anti-Semitism. And he was playing 1st class cricket already by age 18. His parents and extended family must have all been alive, and surely they were all not already “O’Linns”.

    ***Odd……I looked at the very same WIKI article, which highlights his name as “born”… “Sid O’linn”…NO mention of O’Linsky.

    Yet , in the body of the article, it mentions that he was from a Jewish family. S-T-R-A-N-G-E. When I looked at that VERY same article at least 3-4 times in the past couple of days, there was NO mention of any Jewish family.

    ALWAYS, the Wiki Highlight giving particulars of personal info will give the ORIGINAL name, after “born”…

    I just looked up a few who’d changed their names, and it is as I’ve described. For instance, Barney Barnato, world, shows
    “born…Barnet Isaacs”. David Ben Gurion…”born…David Grun”…
    Michael Caine….”born…. Michael Joseph Micklewhite”.

    I’ve looked up about 60 who changed their names and they all have their “born” names in the highlight.

    I even trust the original Wiki article that I saw, before a trash rag like “Forward”.

    I used to have it sent by post to me for a couple of years, delighted to have found an actually Jewish Newspaper. At one time it was.. And it was in English, weekly or maybe bi monthly can’t remember. Very long ago.. I still those copies tucked away somewhere. I’ve NEVER discarded printed matter.

    I even had a few letters in it, but when I saw the way their “editor” cut and mangled them making it completely garbled, and they didn’t answer my complaints, I stopped my subs. The last one was the limit. I sent a corrective “Letters to the Editor” pointing out a bad mistake written about a person I knew VERY well indeed all my life.

    In their article about the Jewish shopping section of Dublin they discussed “Mrs. Beila Erlich” who then was the only kosher butcher left. Of course, she was NEVER married.

    {{{{ The Erlich family were the very smallest of about 6 -7 kosher butchers at one time. but the Community dwindled to less than a 1000, and the butchers died out and their children -strangely all daughters- married, all in England.

    So it made a story. There were 3 Erlich children, as “plain” as anyone could possibly imagine. They had NO relatives. The 2 Erlich girls were in the shoplette, a tiny sliver partitioned off from next door. (about 40 sq ft). with their illiterate father, They were stunted, with VERY bowed legs. Myer, the son, was at school with me, and looked like the “missing link” with actually black teeth, I mentioned yesterday, poor fellow.

    Some years ago I posted about one of his escapades. He was totally uneducated, except in Yiddish. He got the habit of stealing cars and joyriding around. One night, he stole a car, and drove it to a Picture House, The “Stella” in Rathmines. When he came out, he found that the battery had been stolen. Very indignantly he reported it to THE POLICE, just a block away. After they got the whole story they arrested him. This shows his “sayechal”…

    At his trial the judge said (headline) “You’re a clever little monkey of a fellow”. and gave him a big fine and suspended 2 year sentence. The Community had to pay the fine, as the family was always “needy”.
    His main facial expression was always a :friendly grin”……

    In later years, he was in and out of prison in England, where his “piety” would get him a job as a Reader in a shool, and he’d manage to scarper off with some cash. He always came hack to Dublin…like a bad penny. In our failing Family shool, when we could no longer afford to pay a chazan, he actually did the davening for a few years, and my dear father paid him something..He was remarkably fluent in every aspect of davening although I don’t think he knew the Hebrew meaning of the words. }}}

    The WIKI “Forward History” does not bear this out, but I KNOW what I know. There was an English language edition long before it says in the WIKI blurb.

    SO……maybe a magic wand touched that O’Linn article…….??

    ???????????????????????????????????????????

    1

  38. @Ted Would it be hard to install a laughing icon next to the like button?

    “Amnesty regrets ‘distress’ after report claiming Ukraine violated international law
    Rights group refuses to retract claim that Kyiv exposed civilians to danger by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, but stresses that it did not justify Russian aggression”

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/amnesty-regrets-distress-after-report-claiming-ukraine-violated-international-law/

    Taking a cue from the Pals?

  42. @Edgar “An old friend and team-mate form Dublin Maccabi Cricket Club (Carlisle) became the Israeli Cricket Coach, where he must have done a good Job. His name was Lennie Keye. He had the most Beautiful and Correct strokes, mostly practiced at the wicket AFTER he was OUT, trying to find out which wrong stroke he’d played.(before he made that “extra-long” walk back to the pavilion)

    A great stylist who rarely made any kind of big score, but very
    occasionally did. A NICE guy.”’

    S: Any relation, you suppose?

    ” Key appointed new England managing director to get Test side back to top of rankings amid humiliating run”
    John Etheridge
    17:22, 17 Apr 2022Updated: 21:14, 17 Apr 2022

    “ROB KEY has vowed to help England back to the pinnacle of world cricket after being named new team supremo.

    ‘Former Kent captain Key was confirmed as managing director in succession to Ashley Giles, sacked after the Ashes shambles.”

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/18290261/rob-key-new-cricket-england-managing-director/

  43. @Edgar “So you finally got that link open”

    S: Yes, in Safari; in Chrome it had told me I had run out of free articles when I tried to access it again.

    E: “ didn’t see any mention of the Goyisher Trueman, Fender or O’Lynn,”

    Article: “Historians of the game assert that the English cricketer Percy Fender was also restricted in his career because he was falsely suspected of being Jewish. In response, some Jewish players in England, South Africa, and elsewhere concealed their origins. Sydney Olinsky, a South African Jew, claimed to be an Irishman named Sid O’Linn.

    ‘Eventually, a certain exotic cachet became attached to Yiddishkeit. In his later years, a garrulous star named Fred Trueman, definitely non-Jewish according to his official biographer, fictitiously claimed to have Jewish roots.”

    https://forward.com/culture/480270/cricket-jewish-antisemitism-theodore-herzl-tom-stoppard-harold-pinter/

  44. @SEBASTIEN-

    So you finally got that link open… Why repeat it, I read it already. Much of the mention of cricket in it is a kind of philosophical choosing of cricket to typify normalcy…according to Goyish standards. Herzl knew as much about cricket as to put in his eye without it smarting, and only knew the name of the game and what it typified.

    I didn’t see any mention of the Goyisher Trueman, Fender or O’Lynn,

    Although Trueman, a very defiant character, renowned for stubbornness which even cost him his automatic place in Test Matches, once he found out about his maternal grandmother, wore a Magen David.

    Never having spoken of it before you could not have known that I actually played cricket for several years in Israel, A lively League, inspired mainly by Sth Africans, with whom I played, and Indians in Ashdod, where their “pitch” was mostly sand, littered with stones. When facing their fast bowler, the ball hit a stone, and became uncontrollable, hit my nose and broke it. That is a story in itself……

    I was brought to hospital. The doctor (in the Sabra style), cursorily stuck a piece pf plaster on one side attached to my cheek, “straightening” out my nose. I pointed out that it still was not straight. So he became more “careful’. He said the small air cavities below the eyes and etc, were crushed beyond repair, but I’d still be able to breathe..!!!

    In typical (Sabra) fashion he said, “you are already married, and have your children, so it doesn’t matter how you look”.

    I recall that Ashdod match very well because of the once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon that occurred. I’d had my nose broken before, also at cricket; (The Gentleman’s Game) but in Ashdod, I SAW the ball hit the stone, and rise erratically, Everything SLOWED DOWN ENORMOUSLY, I could see the ball slowly coming towards me, but was rooted on the spot (instead of ducking as usual). I saw the ball slowly turning in the air, so SLOWLY that I could clearly see the individual seam stitches on it, but could do nothing to avoid it , right onto my nose.

    Once in a lifetime is enough. !!

    STILL, no one has answered my original query serious interest in the game and knowledge about the importance and uniqueness of a “hat-trick”.

    And I don’t mean from looking it up in WIKI.

    An old friend and team-mate form Dublin Maccabi Cricket Club (Carlisle) became the Israeli Cricket Coach, where he must have done a good Job. His name was Lennie Keye. He had the most Beautiful and Correct strokes, mostly practiced at the wicket AFTER he was OUT, trying to find out which wrong stroke he’d played.(before he made that “extra-long” walk back to the pavilion)

    A great stylist who rarely made any kind of big score, but very
    occasionally did. A NICE guy.”

  45. @Edgar The article said that. Of interest:

    “…So in colonial India, privileged amateurs delighted in the Bombay Jewish Cricket Club. In South Africa and Australia, Jews were also drawn to cricket as an opportunity for otherwise sedentary intellectuals and others to maintain physical fitness.

    One such was London-born Israel Abrahams, author of “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages” and “Chapters on Jewish Literature.” Abrahams wrote about cricket for the Jews’ College Journal, published at a London rabbinical seminary.

    Yet his avocation caused friction when Abrahams was appointed to replace Solomon Schechter to teach Talmud and Rabbinic literature at Cambridge University. In February 1902, a missive from Schechter chided Abrahams for his extracurricular interest in cricket as a distraction, among other time-wasting Anglophilia: “You must excuse my frankness with you, but this is a Rabbinic Chair, and the first thing which will be required from you is not Hellenism or English history, but the exposition of Rabbinic texts.”

    Schechter’s disdain for cricket as trivial compared to Yiddishkeit was echoed by the father of Maurice Perlzweig, later an official of the World Jewish Congress. Perlzweig would recall that at a London school, he was taught to play cricket and football, which his father disapproved of as “rather barbaric forms of activity” that “took me away from serious things which I might have been doing.”

    Such fears did not preoccupy non-observant Jews such as Theodor Herzl, whose utopian novel “Altneuland” (1902) predicted that in future, young Jews would avoid ghetto pallor by playing cricket on idyllic green fields. Cricket was included by Herzl among competitive games that would be played “like the English [do]” in an ideal Jewish colony.

    Indeed, cricket pitches were constructed in pre-statehood Israel to make recent immigrants from South Africa, India, Australia and the United Kingdom feel more at home. The historian David Vital erred in claiming that “no one ever played cricket” in Palestine. In fact, settlers and British colonial officials, among them English Jews, were drawn to the sport. However, as in earlier years in Europe, when basic survival for inhabitants was at stake, focus on sport was necessarily intermittent.

    Nonetheless, in 1920s Mandatory Palestine, cricket was seen as a means for judging an individual’s inner merit. When [Norman Bentwich,] (https://www.amazon.com/Hebraism-Greek-Anthology-Norman-Bentwich/dp/B00CLC2S6O/?tag=thefor03-20) the British Mandate’s attorney-general, dropped a ball during a match, he worried that another participant, high commissioner Herbert Samuel, would hinder his civil service career thereafter out of pique.

    Meanwhile, in the diaspora, Jewish writers coping with a brutal century found equilibrium in cricket, even amateurs who played poorly like the English Jewish poet Siegfried Sassoon. From a wealthy family and hampered by shell shock from World War I military service, Sassoon wrote several odes to the sport.

    Likewise, during World War II, the game’s genteel aristocratic aura enticed such enthusiasts as Victor Rothschild, a Cambridge University zoologist and wartime maven in bomb disposal, disinformation and espionage.

    Cricket was also a balm for recently escaped refugees from Europe, as recounted in Robin Devries’ “My Mother Took Me to the Cricket” about a German Jewish family’s assimilation to Australian life.

    A 1939 photo in the State Library of New South Wales entitled “Jewish Cricket” shows spectators kvelling at a match played in Paddington, New South Wales, far from the hellish ordeals that European Jews were facing at the time.

    …This aura of safety, protection and belonging, was part of why cricket was important for English Jewish writers who grew up during and after the war, like the playwright Tom Stoppard. Of Czech Jewish origin, Stoppard used cricket to assimilate to English ideals, as propounded by his antisemitic stepfather.

    …Even more violently attached to the game was Harold Pinter, whose often-brutal public persona was certainly not tamed by its presumed refinement. Yet Pinter, who played the game ineptly according to friends, saw cricket as an “aspirational” game. His reveries about the sport are best seen in allusions in his play “No Man’s Land” the characters of which are named after past great players, and cricket matches dramatized in his screenplays for the films “Accident” and “The Go-Between.”..

    https://forward.com/culture/480270/cricket-jewish-antisemitism-theodore-herzl-tom-stoppard-harold-pinter/

    There’s a Jpost article by
    Zaki Cooper and Daniel Lightman QC are the co-authors of “Cricket Grounds from the Air”.
    Which also mentions:

    “Long before the emergence of the State of Israel, the possibility of cricket in a Jewish state was visualized by Theodor Herzl who, in his book Altneuland, painted a picture of Jews playing cricket on the green fields of the promised land.”
    https://www.jpost.com/opinion/australian-jewish-cricket-602635

  46. @SEBASTIEN-

    I’ve made Michael “mad” lots of times, he doesn’t mind, it allows him to exercise his very capable Bible knowledge, he and I both know that he is not Anti-Semitic, which he was accused of, but exactly the reverse, a genuine supporter of the Jewish State.

    I just tried that link again, had no trouble opening it. Maybe , just for you, it’s “The Missing Link”….

  47. @SEBASTIEN-

    Percy Fender (not a Jew) and Freddie Trueman (also not a Jew but his grandmother was-but…she obviously “married OUT”, so how much of a Jew was she…?) were very well known Test Cricketers, especially Trueman. who was one of the greatest fast bowlers in cricket history. Fender was a pre-War player and Trueman a post War speed demon.

    When I said “half”, I meant that I regarded the article as rather less than serious, verging towards derisiveness. I’m sure you already knew that I didn’t mean that I like half and disliked the other half, One of your “tongue-in-cheek” comments.

    I’m surprised that you can’t access it. I had no difficulty, and I know nothing about computers except to press the cursor over the link.

    I just looked up “Sean O’Linn and find he actually existed as Sid O’Linn, a Sth African top class cricketer who played a few tests, also a professional soccer player for Charlton Athletic in England.

    But not a peep about him being a Jew named Olynsky. I think the writer was using his imagination. In the 1960s in Sth Africa there was NO reason for anyone to hide his Jewishness. There was a big, influential Jewish Population and much of the industry was formed by Jews.

    Barney Barnato (real name Isaacs) was a son of a London second hand clothes dealer. I used to read about him in the Jewish Chronicle, but mainly about the string of Barney Barnato Childrens’ Homes. We used to have a “pushka” like the one we also had for the JNF.

    Only much later did I find that he was an original De Beers owner, and sold out to Cecil Rhotes for multi- millions, then went into gold mining and made another few dozens of millions. A striking story, it seems he died in an unexplained “accident” at sea..