Two bits of Passover goodness for you to celebrate the season. The first is a link to the recently published Passover TTT that has, strangely, really been making the rounds on the Internet, at least unlike anything I've ever been involved in. Do check it out - it's pretty cool, I think:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/scans_daily/499954.html

Secondly, here's my Passover Local Boy Makes Good column, to be published today. Goshen folks take note - I talk about growing up Jewish, but manage not to defame anyone. (I haven't seen the paper yet so the final printed version may vary from this:)

This Column Kosher for Passover

Happy Pesach! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s probably the Feast of Saint Barry or something right now and I’ve got no idea. Let’s face it, folks – there are an awful lot of religious holidays. But Passover was always one of my favorites, one of the holidays that I always looked forward to as a kid. Was it hard growing up Jewish in Goshen? Eh…not really.

As a kid, I used to joke that there were more churches than Jews in this town. Which was an exaggeration, of course. Although there were probably more churches in Goshen than there were Jews in my class, which was not helped by the fact that one of the Jews who should have been in my grade went to St. Johns. I still can’t puzzle that one out.

So being Jewish did set me apart a bit. But unlike the other things that set me apart back then (my utter lack of athletic ability or interest in sports, my tendency to sit by myself at recess and read, etc.) I was proud of the otherness my Judaism provided me.

Being the only one of my friends who was Jewish made me feel like the most exclusive member of an exclusive club, like being king of the presidents. Plus, it gave me something to complain about, which is a really underrated way of determining the worth of something. For instance when we sang Christmas songs in chorus, I would remain silent whenever we were supposed to say “Jesus.” This didn’t call attention to the plight of Jews in Goshen, nor indeed did it even get noticed considering I would continue to lip synch the word. But darned if it didn’t make me feel special!

At the same time, I know I’m lucky to live in a small town in New York instead of a small town in Kentucky. Being this close to the largest concentration of Jews in the world, you’d better get used to us or move on to more gentile climes. Which is not to say that I didn’t encounter any prejudice. There was the time when some guys threw a quarter on the ground in front of me because they wanted to “see who’s Jewish.” But let’s be honest – those guys were dillweeds to begin with. Can I say dillweed in this paper? We’ll find out together!

Despite what recent electoral results seem to say to the contrary, we seem to me to be becoming an ever-more-secular society. Most of my friends now are the same religion: Lapsed. But I still have my faith, and I credit that to a single occurrence. My rabbi, Rabbi Loeb of the Monroe Temple of Liberal Judaism (hooray for liberalism!) said to us young adults one day, “You can believe anything you like and still be Jewish. Unless you believe Jesus is the Messiah, ‘cause then you’re Christian, not that there’s anything wrong with that.” I’m paraphrasing here.

But that’s what did it for me. I don’t have to believe that God created women by pulling spare bones out of some dude if I don’t want to. And I don’t. I just believe that there’s a higher power who’d like me to be a good person, so I try to. And if I happen to crave a bagel next week, I hope the higher power won’t take it personally. I don’t care how fast we had to leave Egypt…matzo sucks.

To see some random LiveJournal community talk about how much they love something I wrote (a lot of), click here.

The strip itself is present as well, however it's a terrible scan and it's only funny if you've read X-Men comics. Well, most of it at least.

What an effin' week. In the last week one of our fish died, Brooke's childhood cat died and our only remaining gerbil died. In a WEEK. Oh, and the Pope, but the Pope wasn't one of our pets. Anyway, now I'm unreasonably worried about Calli and, oh, everything else. I'm a rational person, but I'm also a very superstitious person. So who or what did I piss off recently?

Also, my inker AND colorist jumped ship this week. Yeah, it's been one of those. On the plus side, Dan Hoak came to stay for a night. Much reminiscing and musing on adulthood were to be had.

Also, it's been a while since I've said this here, but Brooke's amazing. My new advice to everyone is to get married. If you don't like it, tough shit. Get married, jack.

Does anyone else think the new Weezer single "Beverly Hills" sucks eight kinds of ass? If we invented a time machine, after we prevented history's great tragedies, we should go back to the 90s and make sure Weezer sell lots of copies of Pinkerton so Rivers Cuomo wouldn't be afraid to write songs that are worth a crap. Who's with me?

I'll answer those "describe me" posts as soon as my life stops sucking. In the mantime Book of Shenanigans is on temporary hiatus, so here's last Friday's Local Boy column.

The Great Indoors

It’s funny how geography affects your perception. If you say to someone outside the state that you live in upstate New York, they’ll say, “Oh, like Albany?” Then you’ll meet city people who, when you say you live upstate, say, “Oh, like the Bronx?” …No. Not like the Bronx.

City peoples’ perceptions of this area are off in a number of highly amusing ways. For instance, this is not “the boonies.” It can’t be the boonies when there’s an Outback Steakhouse within 10 miles. I think that’s what it says in the dictionary.

I think one of the reasons for this perception is our wild animal population. You won’t see a herd of deer foraging on Madison Avenue, so when city people come up here they tend to be shocked by the sheer amount of the animal kingdom we share our town with. Sometimes they can be beautiful, like deer. And sometimes they can be annoying and destructive, like deer. And sometimes they can turn your life into a living hell, like when animals kicked my wife and I out of our first apartment.

We were just married and living together in a basement apartment in downtown Goshen. Brooke had sworn she had heard noises in the bedroom at night and I, caring and brave husband that I was, had mumbled that she was dreaming and should go back to sleep.

But the next night as we sat in the room, we distinctly heard animal noises coming from a hole in the floor that, for some reason, had never seemed like a major problem before. It was our first apartment, and for all we knew apartments were supposed to have holes in the floor. We were reasonably sure, however, that apartments weren’t supposed to have holes with something deep inside them making scritching, scratching noises. So we headed to the hardware store to get some insulation, the thinking being that if we plugged the hole with insulation it would be too itchy to get through for whatever was down there. I kid you not.

When we came back in an hour later I walked into the bedroom and found myself staring at the source of the noise. Not a squirrel, as I had expected, or even a rat. It was a skunk. A big one. And it was fully inside our bedroom.

The next couple of days were a whirlwind of patching holes with the help of our landlord, only to have the skunk make another hole he could get through in a different room, often while we were standing a few feet away. It was like playing Whack-A-Mole, only if you tried to whack this thing it would probably emit a foul spray that would make you and everything you own smell terrible for the rest of your life. Eventually we realized that we had to move out, and within a day we were totally gone and living in my mom’s basement. Luckily, somehow none of our belongings ever got sprayed.

Now I ask you, does a town where you can get chased out of your home by skunks sound like the boonies to you? And before you answer…might I remind you that Middletown has not only an Outback but also a Chili’s and a Red Lobster?