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Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #112 (12/7/2014): Cos

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #112 (12/7/2014): Cos

aired Dec. 6, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/MaWHy74ejho

Hey Hey Hey! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of December 7, 2014.

How much smoke does there have to be before we cannot deny that there is fire? Well, when my wife is cooking, that’s almost every meal. But in the case of crime and accusation, at what point do look at hearsay and more hearsay and still more hearsay, and think, “It would be nice to have proof, but it’s time to presume the guy’s guilty until proven innocent.” Sounds ridiculous, but there is a logic to it. Does anybody in the world believe O.J. Simpson refrained from chopping up his ex-wife and her boyfriend the way Ted Nugent slices a deer? Can you hear the name Michael Jackson and not think, “He was bad. He was bad. Sham-on. You know.”

And now another black celebrity – well, Michael Jackson wasn’t exactly black, but be that as it may – Bill Cosby, beloved comedian Bill Cosby, has gone from “I Started Out as a Child” to finishing up in various teenagers. For years, Cos has been the cause of whispers, accusations, unsavory speculations and sub rosa scuttlebutt. There was even a civil suit – to continue the alliterations — but it was settled out of court, because a man of Cosby’s wealth could pay families off and leave the world guessing at his motives. After all, even if he was 100% innocent – which he may well be – he’d still have to hire a team of lawyers and endure his name being dragged for months through courts and headlines. And if he’s fully exonerated, the muttering won’t stop: “Oh, he probably did it. Those famous people get away with everything.”

At the same time, so many women, so many similar incidents, so many pointing fingers. Or something stubby pointing at their fingers. Janice Dickinson may be out of her mind, but was her night with Fat Albert what drove her there? And what about Judy Huth, the first accuser to actually subpoena his penis? Last week, Huth filed a lawsuit against the “I Spy” guy for drugging and raping her when she was 15. Too many years have passed for a criminal trial, but at least she’ll have her day in court — though it will still be a case of “he said, she said, he said, she said, he said, she couldn’t say because her mouth was full.”

Cosby is counter-suing, possibly because at this point, he realizes that “no comment” and “I didn’t do it…that time, or that time, or that time” won’t be enough to convince a cynical public – or all the movie and TV people he’s trying to make deals with. They’re all pulling out. Okay, you have five seconds to make your own joke about that, but seriously, Bill Cosby obviously had enough cash, power and influence in the last 40 years to make evil deeds go away. But did he? The burden of proof belongs to the accusers. It’s a little too late for DNA, hotel registries and presidential dry-cleaning bills, so their memories of couches, beds, baths and beyonds better be unimpeachable.

And by the way, I’m really not one of those people who blames the victims – or alleged victims – in rape or sexual-assault cases. But this woman who’ll be suing Cosby four decades after the fact… She was 15 years old when she met 40-year-old Cosby in the park. He took her and her friend to a tennis club where he bought them drinks – and I don’t mean Gatorade; more like a Get-`er Aid – and then he asked them back with him to the Playboy Mansion. I don’t care how naïve girls were back then, if you’re a teenager, and a guy your dad’s age asks you back to the Grotto, what the hell do you think is gonna happen? You think he wants to hear how you’re doing on the debate team? Well, in this case, yes! She helped him master-debate. Supposedly against her will. And against his willy.

And people scratch their heads. “If even half the allegations from different women are true,” we think, “how’d he get away with it? How did he get to be Cliff Huxtable instead of Inmate #42837?” But then again, look at Jimmy Savile over in England, and Rolf Harris in Australia. Beloved entertainers who did more – and worse – than Cosby, and didn’t hit the skids until years after their indiscretions. So, alas, there is precedent for extreme crime and delayed punishment.

What a rotten year it has been for comedians. David Brenner dead from cancer. John Pinette dead from weight issues. Joan Rivers killed by minor surgery. Robin Williams going through a period of belt tightening. Carlos Mencia…still not funny. And now, one of the top five greatest comedians of all time, Bill Cosby, not exactly having the last laugh.

I still hope none of this is true, and these are just gold-diggers or mass hysterics or bitter has-beens who never got the ingénue roles and music careers they wanted. But the realist in me realizes that the star of “Mother, Jugs and Speed” was a mugger with drugs and spooge. I know you were in “Let’s Do it Again” – but did you have to do it again and again and again? Oh Bill, how could you disappoint us this way? After all, it takes a special kind of genius to do something even more vile, even more unspeakable and horrible than “Leonard Part 6.” And no, I won’t be giving my children your chocolate pudding pops.

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

Dave’s Gone By Interview (11/1/2014): IAN FINKEL & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews musician & novelist Ian Finkel

Topics include: Fyvush Finkel, xylophone, novels, Jerry Lewis.

Segment aired Nov. 1, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

Sad Note: Our friend of the Daverhood, Ian Finkel, passed Nov. 16, 2020 at age 72.

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 Wretched Pun of Destiny #010 (11/1/2014): DOVES

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This Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Nov. 1, 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

*
10.
A magician is teaching his new assistant the ropes. He brings her to the back room where she sees three shelves – top, middle, and bottom – each with one live dove on it.

The trainer explains, “I do 20 shows a week, and these are the three birds I use for every show. The top one I call “Befores,” because you show him in the lobby before the performance starts. The middle one I call “Afters,” because you display him when I’m signing autographs after the show. And then the bottom one we use during the show.”

“So do you call him Betweens?” asks the assistant. “Or Middles?”

“No,” says the magician. “I call him Bilbo.”

“Bilbo? If your top dove is called Befores, and your middle dove is called Afters, why is the bottom one that you use during the show called Bilbo?”

“Obvious,” says the magician. “He’s Lower Dove Durings.”

Dave’s Gone By #482 (11/1/2014): XY OF RELIEF

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Here is the 482nd episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio, Nov. 1, 2014. Info: davesgoneby.com.

Featuring: Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with xylophonist Ian Finkel; Inside Broadway; Saturday Segues (November, Wild Man Fischer); Wretched Pun of Destiny (doves); Dylan – Sooner & Later (elections).

Guest: musician Ian Finkel

00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce Weil (Marcia Strassman, Jack Bruce, couch mess)
00:55:00 SATURDAY SEGUE – November
01:17:00 Sponsors
01:27:00 INSIDE BROADWAY (news 01:27:30; reviews: Signal Failure (01:43:00), Bedbugs! (01:46:00))
02:01:30 GUEST: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Ian Finkel
02:41:30 THE WRETCHED PUN OF DESTINY – Doves
02:45:00 Friends
02:51:00 BOB DYLAN – Sooner & Later (elections)
03:27:30 SATURDAY SEGUE – Wild Man Fischer
03:50:00 DAVE GOES OUT

Nov. 1, 2014 Playlist: “Remember November” (00:55:00; Juliana Hatfield). “November” (00:59:00; Duncan Sheik). “November 5” (01:04:00; Love Spit Love). “November” (01:08:00; Tom Waits). “Mr. November” (01:11:00; The National). “Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite” (01:56:30; Bedbugs! 2014 off-Broadway cast w/ Chris Hall). “S’Wonderful” (01:58:30) & “Not on the Top” (02:38:00; Fyvush Finkel). “I Shall Be Free” ({Witmark demo} 02:57:30), “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (03:02:00) & “Highlands” (03:07:30; Bob Dylan). “Merry Go Round” (03:35:00), “Cops and Robbers” (03:37:00), “I’m the Meany” (03:38:30), “One of a Kind Mind” (03:40:00), “I Light the Pilot” (03:40:30), “Love Love Love in Everything You Do” (03:41:00), “Teen Age Idol” (03:42:30) & “Start Life Over Again” (03:45:00; Wild Man Fischer). “Take it Back” (03:58:00; Cream).

Signal Failure (w/ Sasha Ellen & Spencer Cowan)

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.

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 Wretched Pun of Destiny #009 (10/18/2014): REESE

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The 9th Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Oct. 18, 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

It’s the last day of a couple’s vacation. Alas, they immediately start to argue over which final tourist attraction to see before making their plane.

The wife says, “I want to see the Botanical Gardens.”

“Boring!” the husband says. “I want to see the Museum of Celebrity Artifacts.”

“Oh,” that’s just trash,” says the wife. “It’s perfect weather for the gardens. And I want to see the buttercups while they’re in full bloom.”

“Again, boring!” says the husband. “They’ve got all these curios at the celebrity museum, like Hank Williams’s radio and Marlon Brando’s shoes. And they just got in a cup of Reese Witherspoon’s urine from when she was arrested for drunk driving.”

The wife huffs, “Are you telling me you’d rather look at Reese Witherspoon’s urine than a flower garden?”

“That’s right,” says the husband. “Reese’s Pee, Not Buttercups!”

Dave’s Gone By #481 (10/18/2014): WAITER, WAITER, EVERYWHERE

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Here is the 481st episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio, Oct. 18, 2014. Info: davesgoneby.com.

Featuring: Part two of Dave’s chat with Dick Cavett. Plus: Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with Brad Zimmerman (My Son, the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy), Inside Broadway, the Wretched Pun of Destiny (Reese), Dylan – Sooner & Later (lyrics), Saturday Segues (Chuck Berry, Wait Staff)

Guests: comedian Brad Zimmerman, broadcast legend Dick Cavett

00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN (ebola)
00:23:30 SATURDAY SEGUE – Waiter
00:39:30 Sponsors
00:51:30 GUEST: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Brad Zimmerman
01:35:00 THE WRETCHED PUN OF DESTINY – Reese
01:37:00 INSIDE BROADWAY
01:55:30 Friends
02:03:30 BOB DYLAN – Sooner & Later (Lyrics)
02:33:00 RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #109 – Ebola
02:38:30 GUEST: Dick Cavett (part two)
02:57:30 Weather
03:00:00 SATURDAY SEGUE – Chuck Berry
03:19:30 DAVE GOES OUT

Oct. 18, 2014 Playlist: “Waiter” (00:24:00; Nellie McKay), “Waitress” (00:28:30; Jane Siberry), “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” (00:31:00), “Tip That Waitress” (00:33:30; Loudon Wainwright III). “I Will Never Leave You” (01:51:30; Side Show 2014 Bway cast w/ Erin Davie & Emily Padgett). “Tombstone Blues” (02:09:00), “Tombstone Blues” ({alternative version}; 02:15:00), “Tangled Up in Blue” (02:18:30) & “Tangled Up in Blue” ({live 1975 version}; 02:24:30; Bob Dylan). “Roll Over Beethoven” (03:03:30), “Havana Moon” (03:06:00) “Oh Baby Doll” (03:09:00), “Almost Gone” (03:11:30) & “Vaya Con Dios” (03:24:00; Chuck Berry).