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Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #109 (10/19/2014): EBOLA

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #109 (10/19/2014): Ebola

aired Oct. 18, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmaLeEb1jhA&feature=youtu.be

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 19, 2014.

A year ago, if someone came up to me and asked, “Have you ever heard of ebola?”, I would have said, “Sure, I’ve heard of ebola. I’m ebola. I go to the alley every weekend, and my high score is 230.”

How far we have come in such a short time that ebola has mutated from an obscure, 15-year-old virus to an American panic attack. In just two months, we’ve gone from, “Oh great. Africans are dying from something besides starvation and AIDS?” to “Close the schools, block the airports, fumigate the national parks.”

On some level, all this caution is good. Perhaps we learned from the AIDS years the penalty for looking the other way when horror happens to someone else. In 1984, Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch could blink at HIV and say, “Ehh, it’s a faigeleh plague. Maybe it’ll thin the herd.” Thirty years later, we look at Africa and go, “It’s not in our backyard yet, but we live in a small neighborhood.”

So missionaries and do gooders trek to Liberia and Nigeria and Sierra Leone to help contain the contagious. Good for them. Woulda been better if they’d gone with a one-way ticket. They come back to the United States, unaware that they’re infected. See, ebola is a disease that takes a while to show how insidious it is. Like marriage.

Anyhoo, what a shock! The missionaries and nurses come back on our soil, and we get our first cases in American hospitals, where the protocols are fammished because nobody knows what we’re dealing with yet. Some genius physician says, “Let’s bring the sick people over here because we can treat them better. How do we keep a zillion other people from being exposed? We’ll work that part out later.”

The minute we started bringing carriers over here, you knew and I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody sneezes, someone else inhales, they cough on a third person, and boom, you’ve got school crossing guards in Hazmat suits. How is that I can’t even put a bandaid on myself without fainting, but I know more than The Center for Disease Control?

What I admit I don’t understand is how this disease is spreading so fast. Ebola is not a virus like the chicken pox where a four-year-old bumps into a five-year-old, and soon both of them are home with mommy allllllll day long. Instead, Ebola is like AIDS in that it takes serious physical contact to pass the pandemic from person to person. You don’t get AIDS just from holding someone’s hand. Well, unless you’re holding it halfway up your tuchas. And even then you have to have an open sore for the bad germs to climb into.

Ebola is not carried by air or water, you don’t catch it from mosquitoes—in fact, patient zero apparently got it from a bat. So, if you’re a baseball player, watch out.

We can beg the ebola victims, or anybody coming from West Africa, don’t kiss anybody, don’t shtup anyone, don’t go on the subway and wipe your boogers on the grabby pole—tempting as that is. If you’re from some country where ebola is spreading like Iggy Azalea, go directly to a hospital or, better yet, turn around and get a boarding pass for the first plane back to Lagos. By the way, you have an uncle there who left you $3 million. All you have to do is bring a thousand-dollar downpayment to this lawyer on the internet.

But I digress. President Obama has chosen an ebola czar — I think I once dated a girl named Ebola Czar — but the dawdler in chief is stopping short of a travel ban. Which basically means: Dangerously ill people, keep coming over here, we’ve got a guy with a suit and a desk. Meanwhile, Frontier Airlines is dealing with a stupid nurse who flew from Dallas to Cleveland during her incubation period, and a Dallas hospital worker who’s stuck on a ship that can’t dock because he might be a carrier. (sings) “The blood Boat.”

And yet, through all of this, getting hysterical does nobody any good. The vast majority of people don’t go around handling blood and sputum and hypodermic needles all day. Unless they’re Andy Dick. So calm down. Take your vacation, go to school, eat at the cafeteria. Be happy that some African countries are closing their borders and keeping containment, and do not allow undue worry to keep you from enjoying your day. After all, life is just a bowl o’ cherries. If cherries carried ebola, then we’d have a problem.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. (Coughs) Just a cough.

—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-22F

Dave’s Gone By Interview (10/18/2014): BRAD ZIMMERMAN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews actor Brad Zimmerman

Topics include: My Son the Waiter, Judaism, George Carlin, Joan Rivers, acting

Segment scheduled to air Oct. 18, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Interview (10/11/2014): VICKY KUPERMAN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews comedian Vicky Kuperman

Topics include: comedy, Russia.

Segment aired Oct. 11, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #108 (9/28/2014): Opiyum

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #108 (9/28/2014): Opiyum

aired Sept. 27, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/eEhsyp6F2SQ

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 28, 2014.

You know how you can never eat only one potato chip? Or M&M? Or pound of
brisket? Well, a chef at a Chinese restaurant in China dreamed up a way to keep his customers coming back for more. And more. And more. A fella named Zhang wanted to make sure hungry diners chose his noodle shop over all the others in his province, so he did what any entrepreneurial sociopath would do: he went out and bought several pound of poppy buds. That’s the stuff you make opium with—for those of you who don’t live in California or Colorado.

Anyhoo, he pounded the poppies into a powder and sprinkled it into the flour for his noodle recipe. Since opium has a narcotic, addictive effect, Zhang figured customers would start eating his entrees, develop cravings, and return for more. Considering that Chinese food automatically makes you crave more of it an hour later, Zhang seemed to have a foolproof scheme. That is, until one of his diners decided to drive home. Police made a routine traffic stop, gave the guy a breathalyzer, and lo and behold, he was high, and he be holdin’.

The poor shlub was arrested and held in prison for two weeks. All the while, he protested, “It was the noodles! It was the noodles!” You can imagine how that went over with the warden. But the customer convinced his family to go eat at the noodle shop a couple of times. Police then agreed to test the family, and—you got it—they had more poppies in `em than Dorothy, the Tin Man and all those midget eunuchs combined!

The police—or, sorry, this is China—the po-rice, allested the lestaulaunt owner and put him in jail for two weeks. Now the driver is suing the city for wrongful arrest, and the restaurant owner is saying, hey, poppy seeds were actually common in Chinese cooking before they were banned a few years ago. I guess they were poppy-lar. Heh heh heh dammit.

What I don’t get about this story is two things: aleph: why you would buy a hundred-dollar bag of drugs to sell 24 cents worth of noodles. And beth: why any restaurateur would think you need opiates to get people hooked on noodle soup. Ask any Jewish grandmother. If you’re sick, if you’re under the weather, if you’re just plain ravenous: put a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of you, already you feel better. Just from the smell, let alone the heat, the taste, the slurpy lokshen.

Real Kosher chicken soup is its own addiction, especially with those giant matzoh balls that are heavy but light but heavy but light but heavy but light. And for those who think chicken soup is not a drug, why do you think they call it Jewish Penicillin?

Now, let me be clear: I am against any chef or anybody tampering with food by using harmful ingredients, be it hippies sharing funny brownies at Woodstock or Monsanto shpritzing everything with growth hormones and high-fructose corn syrup. But at the same time, it’s not as if we can cast the first stone. The guy who invented Coca Cola was a morphine addict who was crushing coca leaves into his wine. In the late 1800s, a local prohibition forced him to change his recipe – not to take the cocaine out, just the alcohol. However, on his own volition, he nixed the cocaine and replaced it with syrupy sugar — which, as we know from our children, has no addictive or drug-like properties whatsoever.

Nevertheless: let the story of Zhang be a lesson to anyone who wants to turn chow mein into cow-caine: desist and resist! Or, put another way, you can use your noodle, but don’t turn us into noodle users!

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27556

Dave’s Gone By Interview (9/27/2014): FREDA PAYNE & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews singer Freda Payne

Topics include: Band of Gold, jazz, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.

Segment aired Sept. 27, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #107 (9/21/2014): Gwyneth

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #107 (9/21/2014): Gwyneth

aired Sept. 20, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF1GwetYq3E

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 21, 2014.

Over this summer, I had my beefs with celebrities – some Jewish, some not – and their bashing of Israel over the Gaza War. Celebrities who are either misinformed or simply too damn dumb to know who their friends are in this world, versus who the enemies are. Who is creating a climate of death and destruction versus who is just trying to live without being hit by rockets every day? So fie on Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem and Rihanna and that putz from Pink Floyd Roger Waters, and Chuck D, who’s been salting his lyrics with anti-Semitic slurs since day one. You wanna know what a Terrordome is, Chuck? Go live in Israel and be forced to live under an iron terrordome so that Hamas rockets don’t fall on your black ass. Why don’t you do that, Chuck D-spicable?

Meanwhile, other famous folk have been fabulous! Howard Stern, Bill Maher, Joan Rivers – she should rest in peace – Woody Allen, who gave a wonderful, insightful interview about the situation. He was the first one to say that if, back in 1948, the Arabs had treated Israel like a friendly neighbor instead of hornets’ nest, everything would be different. Notice: it’s all the funny people, the comedians, who see through the Palestinian PR poppycock. I guess it takes a humorist to shoot the arrows of logic through balloons filled with hot-air. Or, in the Arabs’ case, airplanes filled with terrorists. Thank God the funny people get it, because all these self-inflated “serious” actors and musical artistes – they look in the mirror and see Felix Frankfurter staring back at them – instead of the hot dogs they really are.

Even so, I come today not to vilify my enemies but to glorify my brethren and, in this case, sistren. In celebrity news last week, it was revealed that the Jewish people will be gaining a notable. The decades since World War II have seen our numbers chopped by the Holocaust, by assimilation, by intermarriage, by – you should pardon the expression – conversion (ptooey!). Now, the Orthodox are doing their best to reverse the trend. They’re shtupping and shtupping and being fruitful and multiplying, which has been heavenly to the cause, even as it’s been hell on the welfare rolls.

But we cannot rely merely on the horniness of our most devout cohorts to bolster our population. It is a delight, therefore, to report that yes, we’re getting one back. Someone who, if nothing else, raises the overall good-looks quotient of our nation by at least a percent or two.

Gwyneth Paltrow, a shikseh goddess if there ever was one – tall, blonde, willowy, pretty as a picture, and pretty in motion pictures – Gwyneth Paltrow is converting to Judaism. Now, to be clear, she’s already halfway there. Her father was television producer Bruce Paltrow, a proud member of the tribe. Her mother, however, is the lovely non-Jewish actress Blythe Danner. She’s the one on TV commercials hawking Prolia, a pharmaceutical that helps weak bones, which is ironic because you don’t get nicer bones than Blythe Danner or her kid.

Little Gwyneth was raised in a home with both religions, which she found very nice. But in recent years, she’s been studying Kabbalah, which is a weird, mystical occult offshoot of Judaism. Kind of liked dungeons and dragons, only the dungeons are synagogues and the dragons have big noses and law degrees.

But Paltrow is not just being swayed by a cultish micro-sect. She’s done her homework. In 2011, she appeared on that TV show that delves into your genealogical history. She went into the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side and looked at pictures of her father’s father’s father – a great Rabbi. And his father, also a Kabbalistic Rebbe of note. With people like that in your lineage, what are you gonna be, a Presbyterian?

And Ms. Paltrow has said that she wants to bring her children up, quote, “in a Jewish environment.” Well, she’s in Hollywood, so she’s already there. But she’s got one kid named Moses – so come on, she might as well have named him Jewy Jewberg – and the other child she famously named Apple. Well, is there a more Jewish fruit? From Eve in the garden to the treat we dip in honey for a sweet New Year, the apple is a treasured food for our people – and it doesn’t clog up your tuchas like matzoh.

And speaking of eating, Paltrow has said that she loves to cook and feed people, making her a Jewish mother, and she has amazing genes, making her a Jewish princess. And hey, considering all the macrobiotic laboratory crap she eats, she’s a Jewish doctor, too!

Now, all of this could just be a star’s fad, or Paltrow trying to find herself after consciously uncoupling from her shaygitz husband of more than a decade. Whatever the reason, I hope it takes. I hope she finds in Judaism a beautiful way of life – not from all the rules, not from the mystical narishkeit, but from fully joining a people that has survived the worst the universe can throw at them and still turn to each other and say, “Really? Those shoes with that shirt?”

Welcome, Golden Gwyneth, to the fold, and when your kids turn 12, look me up. I can have them chanting the Haftorah like Yossele Rosenblatt in three months flat, or your money back. Well, some of your money back.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

Dave’s Gone By Interview (9/20/2014): IVOR DAVIS & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews journalist Ivor Davis

Topics include: The Beatles, Charles Manson, Ronald Reagan, Brian Epstein

Segment aired Sept. 20, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #106 (9/7/2014): Uzi Does It

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #106 (9/7/2014): Uzi Does It

aired Sept. 6, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM9w34BrJf8. AUDIO: https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27571

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 7, 2014.

Chuck D once rapped, “My Uzi weighs a ton.” If only Uzi submachine guns did weigh a ton, then children couldn’t pick them up and fire them. But, of course, submachine guns are made purposely to be lightweight and portable yet still cause massive damage in a brief amount of time. Like eating sugar-free Gummi Bears.

Last week near Las Vegas, a nine-year-old girl was practicing on a gun range. As Lewis Black would say, I shall repeat that. There’s an Arizona firing range, about an hour from Sin City, where tourists can go practice their marksmanship under instructional supervision. Among those tourists last week: a nine-year-old child. (Not that there are any nine-year-old grownups – unless you count kids with the aging disease that makes them look like Mr. Magoo.) This little girl was doing so well with regular weapons, that her instructor, Charles Vacca – the late Charles Vacca – said, “Oh, what the hell. Let’s give her a repeating assault weapon, and see how she does.”

She did not do well. I think most parents will tell you that a nine-year-old girl can barely control her bladder, let alone a semi-automatic machine gun. Charles Vacca instructed the precocious tyke to pull the trigger and fire off one round at the target. Which she did. But you know, bullets are like potato chips; you fire one, before you know it, you’ve emptied the whole bag. The difference between a snack food and an Israeli-made weapon of mass destruction is that a can of Pringles doesn’t have a kickback. Well, unless they’re made with Olestra. A machine gun, however, in the hands of someone who weighs fifty pounds, is gonna squeeze off fifty rounds. One of those bullets managed to find its way to the middle of Charles Vacca’s forehead, which is why he had to cancel the rest of his classes through next Thursday. His return after that depends on whether Moshiach comes on Friday and revives him.

Otherwise, you’ve got a dead guy, a child who has to go through life knowing she killed him, and a gun industry saying, “Hey, freak accident. We don’t need minimum age requirements, just height and weight suggestions.” Morons.

But there is some good that can come out of this tragic incident. When this moppet murderess grows up and goes to college, she is the last chick any frat boy is gonna date rape. (“Steer clear, bro. Remember what she did to the last guy who grabbed her arm?”) Also, in the big book of karma, you gotta figure this is payback for every deer that was ever minding its own business, frolicking in the woods and suddenly, BAM!, she’s on the hood of a four-by-four. For once, Bambi’s mother gets to snicker and go, “How’s it feel, asshole?”

Lastly and bestly, this episode does serve to showcase the glorious superiority of Israeli technology. Arabs can fire a thousand rockets out of Gaza, with two or three – almost by accident – hitting targets and causing damage. But the Uzi submachine gun? You pick that up and point, and you’re looking at a Jonestown massacre in seven seconds. That’s craftsmanship!

Anyhoo, the Arizona Last Stop shooting range where all this went down, is still open, still packed with customers, still promoting, quote, “a Desert Storm” atmosphere with a base age requirement of eight. I shall repeat that: eight. Folks, I have an eight-year-old kid, and I won’t even let her use a cheese grater. Yes, I have to tolerate chunky wedges of parmesan on my linguini, but she keeps her fingers, and I keep my sanity. Well, such as it is.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, going out with a bang, from Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

Dave’s Gone By Interview (9/6/2014): JANIS IAN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews singer-songwriter Janis Ian

Topics include: At Seventeen, LGBT, Judaism.

Segment aired Sept. 6, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Interview (8/30/2014): SANDY HACKETT & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews comedian Sandy Hackett

Topics include: Buddy Hackett, Rat Pack, comedy, Jerry Vale, George Carlin, Sam Kinison.

Segment scheduled to air Aug. 30, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com