What's the special Torah reading for Martin Luther King day?

Bereshit 41:15 (Chalom Chalamti ...).

Oh no, not a variance!

Mail-Jewish has a nice discussion going about halachaic issues in obeying the law of the land. One writer wrote “Since pulling a permit also involves a permit fee, avoiding a permit is tantamount to stealing from the city …” I wonder whether we should call it stealing when the city’s cost of processing the permit exceeds the permit’s price. And that reminds me of a wonderful anecdote which I hope you will enjoy. Here’s a case where the government would definitely have preferred NOT to be paid for the permit…

I was working in a small town a few miles from my home, at a small startup, a subsidiary of Exxon. Our offices were at a place called “Research Park”, a bundle of buildings full of small computer companies, many other small businesses hoping to make a big buck, a restaurant, a few lawyers and accountants, and a place selling cars. We were developing new kinds of office computers and at one point we needed to build six identical computers, so we advertised for someone with hardware manufacturing experience. This brought a call to our CEO from the local government.
“You can’t manufacture in Research Park,” he was told, “You’re not zoned for manufacture.”
Our CEO explained that we were just doing research into office computing, and maybe some development..
“You’re not zoned for research in Research Park,” he was told. “You can’t do development there either. You’re just zoned for accounting and lawyer offices and that sort of thing.”
Research Park had ALWAYS been full of computer companies. And the very name! Our CEO was really puzzled. “What about all the other computer companies?” he asked.
“Look,” said the government official. “Just don’t make it look like you’re manufacturing alright? I don’t want get into the other stuff.”

Well this may surprise you, but apparently Exxon is scrupulous about the law of the land. We applied for a zoning variance. The application was unhappily accepted. It took eighteen months to get our variance, during which time Exxon’s lawyers and the town’s lawyers spent more time than any of them wanted to spend. Throughout the whole process, I think the town was afraid that all the other companies were going to ask for variances too. But I believe none of them did.

Uh Oh, another "rational" calendar...

Uh oh, a rational calendar…
I don’t know how reporters manage to be so credulous that you get news stories like this. If you follow the link back to the original story, you find this guy proposing a 364-day calendar. “To keep the calendar in synchronisation with the seasons, Henry inserted an extra week - which is not part of any month - every five or six years.”
An extra week? Just what everybody wants.
Many years ago, proposals for rational calendars were common, but they all attempted to SIMPLIFY and put calendar makers out of business. The general idea was to have 52 weeks plus a special day that is not a normal day of the week (on leap year, there would be yet another such special day). That day might be called “Lithe” instead of Monday. You wouldn’t have to buy a new calendar every year.
Now here’s the good part: If we adopted a calendar like that, our Sabbath would fall on Saturday one year, Sunday the next, and (more or less) so on. AT LAST there would be years where we could do what everybody else does on Saturday!
Sadly, religious groups of all faiths do not seem to agree with me. They are all against the rotating Sabbath, and have killed such reforms.
By the way, if you think the computer-year-2000 business was a mess: calendar reform would mean throwing away or seriously revising every old program. There would be NO QUICK FIXES!

Tight Shirts, loose Shirts…

I have tight shirts and loose shirts. When I’m buying, I always have to think about which kind I need. I think I look relatively good in the form-fitting shirts. But when I wear a loose shirt, I can roll the sleeve up high enough to wear my Tefillin.

An incongruous pair:

I was once taking a walk when I saw in the distance, an incongruous pair; A young man wearing a wide black hat and haredi garb, talking animatedly to the short, thin woman beside him scantily clad in short bright red shorts and a similar minimal red halter. As we approached I suddenly understood the obvious explanation for this pair:
I was looking at a new B.T. and his mother.