Navel Ring Follow-Up

Man, yesterday's post got some mixed reviews. I don't mean that I pulled a Don Imus and insulted people, and now my financial backers are threatening to pull their funds; I mean that people felt the need to put in their two cents about the issue. From what people have told me, and from various pieces of literature I've been given, I've come to the conclusion that body piercings are generally frowned upon for a variety of less-than-satisfactory reasons. As with most things about which I feel strongly, a variety of less-than-satisfactory reasons is good enough for me. As I've mentioned before, I certainly don't have the proper intellectual ammunition to defend any conclusion one way or the other, az I'm just going to let the issue lie. This certainly isn't the place to discuss halachic issues, and I'm certainly not the person to do said discussing. And just to clear things up, since I got a lot of feedback yesterday, a little too much for comfort if you ask me, whether or not a girl has a navel ring won't affect my decision to go out with her or not. Another words, you can completely disregard anything I might have said yesterday about navel rings, diamonds, and any combination of the words "super" and "hot," especially if they were all found in the same sentence. For those of you who have been dedicated readers since before the days when I moved all my posts onto facebook, and for those of you who have come to see the light over the past coupla weeks, I would like to refer you to my post entitled "Favorite of All Time" from December 14th, 2006. There I discussed the reasons for a player or team being your favorite, and I came up with this brilliance: "What would happen if those criteria stopped applying?...This is the same for any kind of love...There can't be a reason you love someone or something. You love your team just because." Another words, what I said about navel rings was superficial and not intended to be serious. Now that I've successfully bludgeoned that point into submission, let's move on to other things.

Since today was such a nice day (just to clarify for those who read this post at any point after Thursday, April 12th, 2007, it was a horribly gross, wet day. In the words of the immortal Guy Gavriel Kay in "The Summer Tree," "Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain." Someone name for me one more author who could get away with writing a sentence like that.), and since I had time to kill between interviews, I ended up walking from 42nd Street and Madison Avenue to Kosher Delight on 37th and Broadway for lunch, and then from there to Waverly Place and Broadway to investigate the selection of Scotches at the Warehouse. Now walking straight down Broadway through different parts of Manhattan is crazy cool; there are so many different neighborhoods to see. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the Broadway by 187th Street where I live is the same Broadway by 116th Street where I went to school, and the same Broadway by 72nd Street where I used to gorge myself on sushi on Mondays, and the same Broadway where I was today in the 30s and in the village, and the same Broadway by Wall Street where I had my second interview. It's just cool is all.

Anyway, since I can't really afford to spend much money these days, because my roommates would kill me, I was trying to get some liquid chametz as cheaply as possible. Az I'm standing in Warehouse down in the village examining their selection and I noticed not only their bottles of Finlaggan, which I grabbed immediately; it's the first time I've seen it in the USA, and I've been looking for it all over the place, but also their obscenely low price for Lagavulin 16, my favorite reasonably priced malt. Now they used to sell it for $59.99, which is the lowest price in the city, and it's even lower than the one I saw at the Duty Free shop on the Canadian border by Buffalo, NY on my way back from Toronto. Now, they lowered their price to $49.99. Anyway, I didn't buy any because that's way too much for me to spend right now, but I'm definitely storing away that info for later.

Yesterday, I went to pick up a friend from the airport, and on the way back we stopped off at Grille Point for some more chametz. While he was picking up the grub, I went over to Gifts Plus to pick up some A Capella CDs for sefira. Now my two favorite A Capella groups, Six13 and AKA Pella, each came out with new albums this year. Az I was playing some of the songs in my apartment, and one of my roommates said that the songs couldn't be A Capella since they sounded too much like real instruments. I assured him that no instruments were used on the CDs and suggested that he try to think about fancy sefira music in the same way as fancy sheitels. One can assume that the requirement for married women to cover their hair is not designed to enable women to wear attractive wigs, because that would take away from the law's original intent, which was to prevent married women from enticing men other than their husbands. Az this totally awesome A Capella music, while technically still halachically valid, is probably only following the letter of the law and not necessarily the spirit. Either way, I'm still gonna listen to it. If anyone wants to steal some of it from me, that's cool; that's why I'm here! Besides, I like having visitors at the palace. Wow, almost 1000 words; good for me.

Oh, and just in case some of you get uppity, I was merely referring to the most stringent of halachic practices when I was discussing the "requirements" for married women to cover their hair, and for people to refrain from listening to instrumental music during sefira. Az don't anyone think that I'm telling y'all what y'all should and shouldn't be doing. Geez, I really gotta be careful what I say; I wouldn't want to insult the wrong people.