Magic Jewball

I can’t believe I wrote yet another rant against the concert ticket industry! Mostly because it kept this third Blogoversary post from being my 500th post. How awesome would that have been? I blew it. But whatevs! I’m happy to still be blogging because several of the bloggers I really loved and admired when I first started no longer are. Actually, a little bit of me wonders if they were on to something as I occasionally have nothing much to say and am afraid I’m saying the same shit over and over. Luckily, if you have as short an attention span as I do, the latter one doesn’t bother you as much.

Life has been very busy and weird lately and later on this year, I might be able to tell you why! It’s not the Jew & A book, which I’ve unfortunately not been able to work on (and I’m only working on the proposal here – there may be no actual book, except in our minds), it’s not my next charity project, although I hope to get started on that soon, and it’s not a super-secret cure for the economy, although I wish it were.

But in the meantime, there will almost certainly be more cookies, more New York, more baseball, more Judaism, more tennis, more music, and more exclamation points. Not there, though, that didn’t seem to merit any. Eventually, should the last one or two things get taken care of, there may even be kitchen pictures. Thanks for sticking with me, readers, RSS subscribers, commenters, and Googlers! You deserve all the exclamation points of my heart!

See? 500 posts, I kid you not. This will be 501, like the jeans…. and just as meaningless.

The last couple of years, I gave lots of stats, but this year I think I’ll just link to my two favorite posts of the year, one light-hearted and one not so much.

Onwards!

The Cure – Three

Sorry, it’s another Facebook post. So if you’re one of those people who aren’t on Facebook, think of the things I could have written about, like A-Rod (so orange! what’s up with that?). But I’ve snagged my biggest find yet, my college suitemate (later housemate) with whom I lost touch soon after graduation. See, those are the most exciting sightings on there: the person with whom you are the closest and who you haven’t seen in the longest time. It’s easy to find people you’re tight with now (the “are you on Facebook? I should friend you” people) and it’s about as easy to find people you knew a long time ago with whom you would have comfortably lost touch after Middle School (these are the folks you sometimes have to think about for a minute before you accept their friendship, and then you have the a-ha moment, look at their page once, and proceed to re-forget them).

I have a mental list of the people I am desperate to find, people with whom I had a close friendship and saw or spoke to every day. I’m not sure whether it’s the hope of renewing the friendship or just wondering what the hell they have done for the last fifteen years. Probably not the first because I have many excellent friends in the here and now and really, that ship has sailed, hasn’t it? Do I have anything in common with them anymore? Maybe that’s what I’m hoping to find out. But my list, which had been, until recently, three, is down to one and a half. I say this because my suitemate, with whom I lived for the first two years of college, is still in touch with suitemate #2 and has given me news of her. She may join Facebook but it’s OK if she doesn’t, I suppose. We had a fourth housemate but she is the one college friend with whom I have maintained a steady friendship, so she’s not on the list.

Still, there is something bizarre about having a stilted e-mail exchange with someone with whom you once had fights about who would wash the dishes, took long bus rides with to distant malls, danced with to Depeche Mode songs. Someone who gave you haircuts and borrowed your clothes and called you nicknames no one calls you anymore. What do you say to that person all those years later? Apparently, I’m not sure, because I took a break from the labored e-mail to write this post. It’s still easier to blog. I don’t know whether we’ll be actual friends rather than just Mark Zuckerburg Trademark Friends, but when I see her picture now, I am almost disappointed to lose the last image I have of her, sitting across from me at a diner in Baltimore in 1994. Or wearing those high-waisted 80′s jeans with floppy 80′s hair. Don’t ask what I wore.

So, you may wonder, who is the #1, the white whale? I have mentioned her before so maybe you already know. It’s my high school BFF (one of two) and apparently, she has fallen off the face of the earth. But one thing I know to be true: unless she’s now living on another planet, she will eventually join Facebook.

For personal reasons… (and not on Napster, or on the album anymore).

If you checked my blog some time after 9pm on Wednesday evening and before 2pm yesterday, you’d have been met with a bizarre error message with lots of php code on a blank white screen. I don’t think anyone I actually know did that because I feel sure one of you would have sent me an e-mail telling me so. But I don’t blame you. In fact, the new service for which I signed up last week didn’t and that’s their only job, unlike the rest of you. I may have to end my “friendship” with them.

Unless I’m posting or reading comments, I rarely actually go to my own blog. I only went because some time around 10am yesterday morning I realized that I hadn’t had a visitor in over 12 hours. No one. No one asking if Federer is Jewish or Googling for Simpsons jpegs or just wanting to know if I finally got to their Jew & A question. That was strange. So I went and got the weird ass message. That wasn’t good. But, maybe you noticed that last week I had some strange error messages too. Those appeared above my header and were the fault of my web host. They were updating their systems but eventually things got worked out. Either way, at least you could see the actual blog. But the fixes that worked last week didn’t this time so I called them (they’re called Hostgator, should you be interested). They had me actually look at the file in the error message. Oh dear.

It was the file that contains the instructions to make my header appear. It’s kind of like, “and when someone lands on your page, go fetch the file with all the flowers and the logo and the title, please!” But instead it had a lot of gibberish and tons and tons of spam keywords. It turns out the gibberish was code that instructed Google to forward anyone asking if Federer was Jewish who clicked on my link to go to spammy websites selling you stuff I won’t name here for fear of causing that exact same problem. And all the while my blog looked like a giant error message.

I’d been hacked and the hackers changed the files in a way that I couldn’t change them back. It’s like they’re smart or something! And speaking of smart, I’m not. Because how did this happen? I didn’t upgrade my WordPress, which is the back end program that runs the website. And the older versions had vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to get in and hijack my site. See, as you know, I love my theme (that’s the site design) and it’s custom which means there’s no way to tell if it will work with whatever new version WordPress will dream up. And so I watched version after version come and go and stayed mired in 2007. Bad move, Becca!

I do back up my blog regularly but things have been kind of crazy lately and I haven’t done so since January 18th. Aha! you say. That’s why my blog went back to 1/18. Luckily, I was able to gather together all the posts and comments after that and cut and paste them onto my computer for later re-addition. Then I deleted the whole thing and used my back-up. All the bad stuff went poof and the hackers went off to other blogs, presumably to laugh maniacally and drink to evil. Then I stayed up till the wee hours backing everything up file by file and upgrading to the newest WordPress. If you think the fact that I skipped five upgrades meant I could just jump over them, you are sadly mistaken. According to the wise people at WordPress, I needed to do each and every upgrade and make sure my blog didn’t explode before getting to the Grand New Version. Which is safe. Phew. And not only did my blog not explode, the new version is pretty kickin’. You can’t see it because all you see is the blog, but the behind-the-scenes controls are awesome. What kind of dumbass would stick with the tired old version?

*cough*

Anyway, you can be sure I’ll be changing this little section in the About page of my blog:

Er, indeed. Actually, that was back when I wrote it. Now they’re on 2.7. Yes, kids, I did five upgrades last night. I did skip one. I’m daring like that. And please don’t think it’s like when iTunes upgrades and you push a button, see a progress bar, and wallah, you’re done. No, here you have instructions like, “erase all the files that begin with wp. Except that one. Oh and that one. And this one if you’ve changed it. But not if you’re upgrading from version 1.5. You may need to do ____. Or not.” They’re changing that with this version but it didn’t help me last night.

But who cares, JBall is back and better than before. For me anyway. Although the fact that it’s not directing you to spam is a plus for you, I’m sure. And you would never need any kind of enhancement, anyway. I know. But if you find anything wrong or broken on the site, please do let me know.

The last step of the upgrade, I kid you not, is “Do something nice for yourself. Consider rewarding yourself with a blog post about the upgrade, reading that book or article you’ve been putting off, or simply sitting back for a few moments and let the world pass you by.”

I don’t really think of this post as a reward. It’s more a thwack to my own forehead as well as a PSA to the world (thus the title). And after being up till 3 with this thing, I think sitting back for a few minutes would result in me falling asleep at my desk. But last night for some inexplicable reason I had a song stuck in my head and with all the downloading and uploading of files, I didn’t have enough bandwidth to play it on YouTube. So when it was done, I finally listened to it.

Aaaah.

And now you can have it stuck in your head.
Rush – Closer to the Heart

Hidily ho, blog readers. There have been some technical difficulties and the site has been taken back to January 18th.

I’ll be doing some updating tonight so tomorrow it will either be:

a. back to the present time.
b. broken and unavailable to you.

Please pray for a. TIA!

Edited at 1am:

It’s taken hours, I had to go through four separate upgrades, but it’s done and it works! Tomorrow, I add the missing posts back in. This is not because I’m too tired but rather because I left them in a text file at work. Oops!

More on this in another post. Now, I’m off to bake cookies for me and Pious B.

Er, that would be today. Time flies when you’re squinting at file names. Thanks for your prayers!

Edited at 11am:
Almost there, just a few comments to go….

Edited at 2:30pm:
Aaaaaaand, we’re back! Thanks for your patience. If you subscribed to a post after 1/18, you no longer will be but I doubt anyone else will comment anyway. I’ve opened up comments, I just didn’t want any while I was rebuilding. The next post will explain all this and all the glorious lessons I learned. I know you can’t wait.

I seem to be getting lots of searches on one topic lately. The trouble with answering questions in this fashion is,

a. it does a disservice to my regular readers.
b. it will take a while to get indexed by Google and by then people will have moved on.

But I can’t help myself!

The Hebrew on Boy George’s shirt in early videos says, transliterated, “Tarbut Agudah,” which means Culture Club. But backwards, since in Hebrew the noun comes first. So it kind of says, “Club Culture,” but actually really means nothing. But it was a good try! I have been getting a lot of Boy George queries lately because he’s recently gone to jail for some kinky sex crime or something. I was too busy being fixated on how he’s let himself go to really read the article. Ouch! Could anyone have been more fastidious regarding his appearance than George? How the mighty have fallen! It also means he’ll probably never tour here again because he’s a felon and won’t be admitted. But I’ve already seen Culture Club play and once was enough, so I’m not disturbed personally.

And while we’re chatting, Googler, I should also reiterate that David Nalbandian is not Jewish. Those questions are once again becoming prevalent because he won the opening tournament of the year, the Medibank Open! Woo! The Australian Open is going on now but since only two of you are concerned about that (although I’m sure countless lurkers care very much), I’ll try not to go on and on about it.

But hey, my interaction with you could have been like this gem I unexpectedly found while I was searching out lyrics for that “That’s Not My Name” song by the Ting Tings. You see, I had to know if her name was really Jaleesa.

Meaningful, right?

Is it wrong that I keep ending Culture Club song titles with, “….in jail?” Do you really want to hurt me… in jail? I’ll tumble 4 ya….in jail. Boy Boy, I’m the boy…in jail.

Luckily, this one doesn’t work.
Culture Club – Church Of The Poison Mind