If You Tickle Us...

So the day has arrived, the game's afoot and kick off just hours away. The vuvuzela shofers will sound, the home team will cheer the players bought from overseas by cheque book scribblers and not a few brown-bags if not brown-nosed bungs. The fans will wrap themselves in the team colours of black and white, many own goals will be scored, the captain is guaranteed to be ruled offside and if I'm not careful I'll shortly be running out of metaphors. But what do they hope to achieve and how do we measure their success? If a sell-out crowd is what they're after they have secured it by shrinking the stadium and summoning the kids which are never in short supply round here. We do have them for a reason, after all. If logging off or filters is their aim it may cause a temporary upward blip and then life will settle back to its normal course just as it did in the USA. The organisers will want to see how widely the event is covered on websites which their filters would otherwis...

Another day another poster. The anti-internet rally organisers have been pasting our walls for the last fortnight with the palette of colours technology places at their disposal while the opposition uses nothing more than an old fashioned word processor and so must do with black and white. The message however is clear: Leave the kids at home - this is not where they belong. If you want the kids to see their gedoilim take them to a shul not a stadium. The organisers have spent a fortune to shrink the stadium so that banks of empty seats are not flashed round the world by tweeters at the anti-tweeting rally. All they need the kids for is as a stop gap and so at worst they might have to readjust slightly the partition. Moving the goalposts is what they call it at Leyton Orient.

Hurrah for common sense! Finally someone is prepared to say what many are thinking and saying in shuls and mikves up and down the square mile that the event is an ego trip of our dear Rov and Rosh Hakohol and the expense, the invitees, the leaflets and the venue are simply to show that we can do everything that NY can. Except of course that NY has an eiruv . It may be for the wrong reasons but how refreshing to see a contrarian view in these mad times. Reb Elyokum may also be concerned only with children, teens and koilel yungeleit rather than the event as a whole but then one must be mad to want to bring kids along in the first place. Incidentally, the Schlesingers are also the ones who won’t hold their events in YHS which suggests they know a lot more than we do. Reb Elyokum: we’re all Briskers for a day!

Open letter to rabbis banning the internet (Yiddish) I would love to translate this letter which has been doing the rounds on the internet and if only I found the time. (Any takers?) It was written in response to the New York anti-internet rally in May and a recent incident which scandalised the Satmar enclave in upstate New York when a father of several kids was kicked out of the family home after confessing his atheism to his wife. Basically the letter blames the ills of the internet’s influence on our society on our rotten education system. If the rabbis are really interested in doing something about the problem, the letter says, they should stop navel gazing, banning and controlling. Instead they should institute some sorely needed reforms, teach children the beauties of a Judaism that isn’t about excluding, banning, beatings, petty disputes and power struggles and our children might not be dazzled and fall for the world outside their ghetto on their first point of encounter. ...

Inquisition… Enlightenment… Reform… Communism… Zionism… Technology – Find the odd one out In the race to the bottom that the anti-internet campaign has become it appears that no form of words is too stupid, no expression too trite, no metaphor too far fetched and no analogy too extreme for the fearmongers and thought police organising these events. Strange then that despite the apparent strength of their convictions and the steadfastness of their resolve the organisers will not spread the message beyond Hebrew and Yiddish speakers. Unlike strawberry, grape and fish infestations in which the English language is squished for the sake of saving a Jewish soul from the hazards of creepy crawlies, saving us from the catastrophe unleashed by the internet is confined to Hebrew and Yiddish speakers. So as a public service we will provide a blow-by-blow translation of the clarion call for a mass stampede to Leyton Orient’s home ground as leafleted daily in tabloid typeface, brash graphic...