Magic Jewball

Better late than never! I know, you’ll be the judge of that. But here we are, the usual effort on my part to answer the questions of the world’s searchers who come to this site.

paul banks drugs

No! I’m shocked!

jew tv

Isn’t this unfair? Everyone seems to have their own channel but us. And they say we control the media!

really snappy answers to stupid questions

Um, this.

famous people who lost someone dear

It does seem terribly unjust but even the rich and famous cannot buy immortality for their relatives. So I would have to say, all of them.

lyrics to the food emporium theme

Someone built a store just for me
Food Emporium, Food Emporium
Prices to make you faint, we guarantee
Food Emporium, Food Emporium…

the godfather the five families

Let me see…. Corleone, Tattaglia, Barzini and…. Ragu? Prego? Newman’s Own?

cream puffs suck

Loser!

jew buy german mini cooper car

The Mini Cooper is British. Are you thinking of Volkswagen? See here.

locked out apartment how much locksmith charge

A lot, brother, a lot.

real stupid questions about americans

Wow, that’s a tough one. How come they only eat McDonald’s? Why are they all religious freaknuts? Do they enjoy being fat? Must they wear those stupid fanny packs while traveling? Did they really elect that guy?

my neighbors may have a prostitution ring

Mine too! Oh wait, that’s how you found me. That whole Google thing. Right. Carry on.

whole foods bakery department manager salary

I believe they pay them in scones and two-bite brownies.

becca save me

I’m trying!

skim latte in hebrew

Golly, I have no idea; they didn’t teach that in yeshiva. Can this wait till I go to Israel next month?

bar mitzvah good deed theme

That’s an excellent theme. Kudos or, as we say, mazal tov.

kevin youkilis star of david

No, silly, he’s a star of the Red Sox.

famous people who get into trouble with the law

Try here:
The Smoking Gun

reasons why you would love a person more

They could like cream puffs.

what kind of underwear does rafael nadal wear?

The kind that constantly have to be picked out of your ass.

nude women

I could not possibly be near the top of the list when you Google this. No freaking way.

conservadox mean

It means you’re somewhere between the Conservative and Orthodox branches of Judaism. I wrote a whole post about why I changed my sidebar description to that but it remains unpublished. It wasn’t funny enough. I have standards, I tell you!

ca plane pour moi translation

Wooo-ooo-oooo-ooo, you are the king of the Devon…. Yeah, I only know the English parts.

hebrew labriut

Bless you! No really, it’s what you say when someone sneezes. Although it actually means “to your health.” I mean we’re religious, but only idiots think your soul is coming out your nose, thus requiring the aid of the Lord.

make me pregnant magic

Erm, that’s not magic, my friend. I mean, it could be, I guess, depending on your experience.

federer jewish?

question stupid?

heinrich maneuver lyric meaning interpol

Did you not read the very first item on this list? No, of course you didn’t, I hadn’t written it yet. Anyway, Paul Banks is on drugs and none of his songs have any meaning at all. How are things on the West Coast…. of pretentious, meaningless lyrics.

And our “No one explained to me how Google works” award goes to:
grocery chain store-if there is any website like this plese show me

Top 5 searches after “is Famous Person X Jewish?”
1. oprah six years to live (damn you, Alex!)
2. interpol ticketmaster password
3. simpsons porn
4. jeremy blake
5. laurent delahousse

Sorry, only 30 seconds. No wonder you can’t figure out what it means.
Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver

It’s late Sunday night and you know what that means! Blog changes! Why? Because Sunday night is the night I do my blog back-up, in case Houston, TX where my server is gets hit by an atomic bomb or, you know, I hit a wrong button or something. They’re equally likely, people! Anyway, once I’m doing that I start to think about all the little plugin ideas I’ve been hoarding in my Google notebook from the 85 geek feeds I subscribe to. Inevitably, I will put a few into action. No one’s really reading on Sunday late night, they all have less bloggy things on their minds, so if I fuck up, only three people on the West Coast notice. Most of the tweaks you don’t see but this week’s are all visible and so, I’d like to show them to you. Let’s go clockwise, shall we? On the right, in the sidebar, you can see two fun new things to play with. The lesser fun thing is the print button, and it has a check-off list so that you can just print the posts you want on a plain white background without all the round boxes that so prettify my blog. It goes to pdf first and then prints. This is dedicated to Monkey Girl who once printed out pages upon pages so she could catch up. No more “what you see is what you get,” sister! I gave it its own box but I may move it to the footer. Although that’s getting crowded. More on that in a moment.

The next one is for all the people who hit refresh hour after hour and curse me for not providing new content. Now you can have a random blast from the past! In the Blogroll/Links area, there’s a new Meta section (I moved “Who’s Linking to Magic Jewball,” which takes you to Technorati’s list of just that, in there too since it’s also meta) and in it is a new link called “Random Post.” Go ahead! Try it! See where it takes you, it should be different each time. Commenting is turned off on old posts, however, so you’ll just have to keep those burning thoughts to yourself, alas.

In the footer is a new link to subscribe to my blog via e-mail. See, I tried to turn you all onto RSS and lots of people did go for it (thanks!) but many of my readers are not technologically proficient (love you guys!) and so you just check forlornly. Which is OK, but I worry about you and all the things you could be accomplishing, like curing cancer or looking at porn. So for you I’ve added this special button which you just click, a form comes up, you hand over your e-mail address, and each day that I have a new post you get an e-mail to let you know. I think I have it set up for 7-9am Eastern US time, but who the hell knows. Point is, you’ll know.

But I didn’t forget my RSS readers. You’ll notice a footer with some new options in each feed item. Some of you will remember my old blog on Blogger (perhaps the only time I’ve ever switched away from Google, but face it, Google, Blogger sucked back then). Anyway, back when I had an empty footer it had my old slogan in it. I’ve added that into my RSS feed for fun, plus an option to e-mail my post, should that float your boat. I already had a way to see how many comments there are on a post but now you can subscribe and be alerted when one gets added. They also had options available to add my posts to Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us but I don’t think I’m really that sort of blog, so if you want to do that, you’re on your own.

Lastly, some of my favorite folks, my commenters, have a new option to check-off a box that will e-mail them if anyone comments after them. I tried to sell you on Commentful but I’m going to go ahead and guess that no one is using it but me. So since you’re already giving an e-mail address to comment, why not be notified when someone else says, “ew, I hate what you said?” It could even be me! Although I’d say it more tastefully. Want to be notified? You have to leave a comment. Psych!

One of these days I will set up a page to thank all the designers of the brilliant items on my bloated plugin list as well as the guy who does the famfam icons which are all over my site. Famtastic!

So in summary, I continue to make my blog prettier and more fun, all the while establishing new ways to ensure you never actually come here.

Tears for Fears - Change

So you know Soxy, consistently among the Top Commenters? Former Reader of the Month? Lychee martini drinker? Of course you do! Well maybe if she wants to keep slamming the Yankees she should go get her own blog!

I have a feeling these words may come back to haunt me.

PS, welcome to the world of blogging, Soxy! Writer’s block is only a day away.

Aretha Franklin / Eurythmics - Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves

So it’s been several days since I posted and, what can I say, there’s nothing compelling to write about. The weather’s beautiful, the Nike+ Nano is rocking my world, and I made fantastic chipotle salsa this evening. Fascinating, I know. So you know what this all means: blogging about blogging, everyone’s favorite. But I decided to actually take a page from JF over at 365questions and answer his “Are you a blog addict?” quiz. I did the official one and I was ahead of him (or behind him, depending on how you look at it), 75% addicted to blogs as opposed to his 71%. Let’s try this one now.

Before I do the quiz, let me just say, yes, heartily yes. I hope I haven’t given anything away.

I don’t usually copy people’s posts verbatim, but I kind of have to, to answer the quiz, don’t I? So here goes.

1. You wake up in the morning, turn on the computer, then only, go to the bathroom.

Well, no. But only because the bathroom is on the way to the computer. I’m just efficient that way.

2. You go out of the bathroom, sit at your computer and open your blog’s homepage, just to see it’s still there.

I have faith in my blog. I go to my stats first. I think that makes me even more of a blog addict.

3. You have breakfast and then you allow yourself 10 minutes to check your stats from the day before. You go to work.

I can do both at the same time! And then I go to work.

4. You work. Once or twice in the day you check your email and if you have comments, you discretely log into the admin and approve them. One more click to clear the spam, and you check who’s on your blog right now. You know that the security guys may be wondering who is accessing an URL with wp-admin in it so you don’t stay around too long.

My e-mail pings me all day and I do indeed check it as soon as I hear the beep. But I don’t really get spam comments anymore since I turned off the ability to comment on posts older than 30 days. Spammers don’t seem to dig fresh & new posts.

I always know who is on my blog. Well, I don’t know who you are, but I know your town. It looks lovely, by the way.

I never considered my IT department. Uh oh. Actually, they’re establishing a new policy this month that will block a lot of websites. I may have to quit my job.

5. You have a look at your feed reader after lunch, just to keep up to date with the news. You can star an item here and there for later, or post one of two things to delicious, or even send yourself a link, for further investigation…

Oh dear. I read my feed reader all day. If it gets to 100 I start to panic. If it gets above 200 I close my browser because I can’t bear looking at it. But usually I don’t let it get above 20.

6. You go home, change clothes and start up the computer. Your real day starts.

You can check comments and stats on a Blackberry between the office and home and even when you’re out to dinner. I wonder why people have stopped inviting me to dinner.

7. You consistently read all your feeds until you have zero items left.

OK, yes.

8. You have a firefox extensions for checking Digg, posting to Reddit, Stumbling Upon, posting to Delicious, and adding favorites to Technorati.

This is the only thing that I don’t really do as it’s not so much my thing. But I do go around commenting on other people’s blogs. Does that count?

9. You are reading this post.

Am not!

10. You wrote this post.

Oh FINE. You got me.

I’ve used this one before but I don’t care.
Neil Finn - Addicted

I slept in today, as I would do every day being that I go to sleep at 2 or 3am on the average night, but it’s Sunday and so I can. Of course, as everyone must know, it’s the day of the Wimbledon final, which begins on British, five hour ahead, time. Neither Federer nor Nadal care very much about my sleeping habits and the tournament director didn’t consult me either. This is where TiVo comes in. Of course, I avoid all my news and sports feeds and hope for the best. But around a certain time, my stats started to look like the below. Sure, I could have guessed who won anyway, but it didn’t occur to me to stay away from my referer stats, even if it were humanly possible for me to do so. Oh well. It’s still a great match.

ETA: It was a fantastic match! I can’t remember the last time a Federer match went to five sets. But in the end, one guy was just more feder than the other.