Huh. I never got the Grinch = bitter old Jewish man connection before. Pro'lly because as a kid I had almost no exposure to Jewish culture.

I grew up chock-full-o-Jews and I've never thought or heard anything of the sort.

The idea of baked latkes is ridiculous. The entire point of latkes is that they're fried in oil!

Oh, she argues that point, the baked ones have SOME oil in them!

Seriously. She's going to blog on it! It'll all be ok.

TOP TEN SPACE PHOTOS: Most Viewed

Damn, Phobos is one freaky-ass moon....

eta: This supernova is very pretty: [link]

I've heard the Grinch as grouchy old Jewish man thing before, but mostly as a sort of jokey thing.

(Actually, my theory about what makes Charlie Brown Christmas and the Grinch "approved" shows for Jewish kids is that, ultimately, the message is the same -- Christmas isn't about Santa and presents and lights and all that. Which fits in perfectly with the "it's someone else's holiday" message that most Jewish parents seem to want to give their kids. If Christmas is about Jesus, and Santa and lights are just the trappings of Christmas, then it's easy to explain to little Jewish kids why they can't have Santa and lights. If Christmas is about Santa and lights, then it's a lot more difficult to explain to kids why they can't have them.)

I am at work and, sadly, working. Go home and spend time with your families, people! I have Dirty Jobs DVDs to watch!

I've kept one ep of Dirty Jobs on my DVR, the one with the snake researcher catching Lake Erie watersnakes, which includes Mike lobstering in Maine with the two young men and also raking seaweed out of Lake Erie. That one just might be my favorite ep of the show as a whole, but my favorite job remains the ostrich farm.

Hem the pants of Emmett's new/used eBay tux

Why does Emmett need a tux?

Willow's line about having to go to Xander's house to watch Charlie Brown Christmas never made sense to me -- most of the Jewish kids I knew were allowed to watch that one. The ones that got more scrutiny were the ones about Santa and presents and reindeer and stuff like that.

I heard the author on (I think) Talk of the Nation yesterday, and I found it really interesting that A Charlie Brown Christmas was almost universally approved for Jewish kids, given that it's the most undistilled, straight-from-the-New-Testament Jesus-y theme of all the kids' Christmas shows.

Is it just me or should Malla be wearing a full body hair net to be cooking?

I heard the author on (I think) Talk of the Nation yesterday, and I found it really interesting that A Charlie Brown Christmas was almost universally approved for Jewish kids, given that it's the most undistilled, straight-from-the-New-Testament Jesus-y theme of all the kids' Christmas shows.

Yes!

I heard the author on (I think) Talk of the Nation yesterday, and I found it really interesting that A Charlie Brown Christmas was almost universally approved for Jewish kids, given that it's the most undistilled, straight-from-the-New-Testament Jesus-y theme of all the kids' Christmas shows.

I think that that's what makes it approved, really. None of the stuff about "all the children" waiting for Santa, or anything like that. Christmas as a Christian holiday sits much more comfortably than Christmas as a secular holiday.

(And also, until high school or so, Charlie Brown Christmas and the Animaniacs Christmas Special were pretty much the only things I knew about the Nativity. And together, it gave me a relatively decent understanding. I didn't actually read the New Testament until a few years ago, when I was in Rome and getting very confused in art museums and figured I ought to find out what some of the paintings were about -- I understood the nativity and crucifixion ones, and a few of the others, but a whole lot that were just labeled with somebody's name, I had no idea who that person was, and there were all kinds of symbols that I just couldn't interpret.)