Nuggets

A couple pop culture nuggets before a work-related entry…

*** I recently watched the first season + the first three episodes of season two of 30 Rock thanks to DVDs a recently COS'd volunteer left.  It's a really funny show.  It's like a combo of Arrested Development and Larry Sanders, including guest actors that starred in both of those shows.  (Gob from Arrested Development plays the gay GE executive who likes the NBC page, and Rip Torn was on Larry Sanders and plays the GE CEO.)  The show reinforces my crush on Tina Fey, who, I have to say, is fighting a Celebrity Deathmatch-like fight with Scarlet Johansson for #1 on my celebrity list, a PPV I would buy.  Also, Alec Baldwin is a comedy powerhouse.  Including The Departed, was he always this funny?  I can't really remember anything he's done besides The Hunt For The Red October before Harrison Ford took over the Jack Ryan character (and Ben Affleck destroyed it).  I need to stop with this minutiae, I just mentioned six movies and TV shows and seven actors in this paragraph.

*** In addition to numbing my mind on TV, I read two novels in a row written in the last few years that re-imagine modern Jewish history, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth and The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.  I didn't realize that they both were based on kinda the same idea until after I read the Roth and in the first chapter of the Chabon. 

The Plot Against America is narrated by a young Philip Roth and is about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite in real life, beat FDR in the 1940 presidential election on an isolationist ticket and aligned himself with Nazi Germany.  The novel follows how Lindbergh's policy affects Roth's family and Jewish neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey.  It was a great book, one of the best I've read since I've been here, a cool idea, so imagine my surprise when I opened up The Yiddish Policemen's Union the next day, and, what do you know, another parallel universe modern Jewish history. 

The history this time is that after World War II, Israel loses the 1948 war and the Diaspora is allowed to live on land in Alaska with a "lease" of 60 years.  Yiddish is the spoken language on the settlement, the English language is called "American," and slang for "dude" or "guy" is "yid."  It's written like a noir from the 40s or 50s, which I realized anyone could do if they write in the present tense and use strong imagery.  ("Landsman weighs the sholem in his hand now – a cute little Beretta .22 with a plastic grip – poisons himself on nicotine, tries to understand the lamentations of this black Delta yid, Mr. Johnson.")  I liked the Roth book better, but it might be a situation like The Prestige and The Illusionist, two movies revolving around the same subject released around the same time: you prefer whichever you saw first.