The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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Chanukah Notes- Superhero Edition

It is almost midnight and the house is relatively quiet. If I wasn’t wearing my headphones I could hear the soft snoring of sleeping children and the various noises of the house settling. It was a busy weekend, action packed and full of far too much activity.

More Chanukah parties. More time in the car. More time shopping. More time navigating and negotiating the various pitfalls and challenges that life places in front of us and more questions. Questions from the children. Questions from the wives, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers and fathers.

A man dressed as Santa approaches my children. My daughter shys away from him. A lady standing nearby tries to sooth her by saying “Santa doesn’t bite.” A few minutes later my daughter says “Santa Bites.” I try to cut this off before it gains traction but we’re in a store and her brother is bored so he starts chanting “Santa Bites” with her. They mean it literally and gnash their teeth at each other while laughing hysterically.

Speaking of laughing hysterically I am trying not to. It is a double-entendre and with my juvenile sense of humor it makes me chuckle. Later my son complains to me that the stores haven’t decorated for Chanukah. I explain to him that it is not important what others do but what we do.

We make a quick stop at the Verizon store. Oops, did I say quick. I meant it was intended to be quick, but the little curly haired boss decides otherwise. Somehow she manages to find three ways to slow the whole process down. Most of the time my children are very well behaved, but they have their moments. So I pick her up and tell her to take a nap. I don’t know who gets more out of it, her or me.

A short time later we’re home. Kids are showered, teeth are brushed, candles are lit and gifts are opened. My son is reading stories about superheroes to me. We’re engaged in discussions about whether Green Lantern could beat up Superman and do I think that I could beat up Batman.

Could I beat up Batman? I tell him it is a good question. He tells me that he is certain that my dad probably could have, at least when he was younger. And if my dad could beat up Batman than so could I. I listen to his rationale and smile. He tells me that he thinks that the biggest challenge is that I don’t have my own utility belt.

I smile at him and tell him that I have a plan. I’ll sneak up and pull Batman’s cape over his eyes and then while he can’t see I’ll take his belt and throw it away. Of course if I was fighting this Batman it is a foregone conclusion that I’d win. I am far too mean for him. Could I stop this Batman? Now that is a different story. What is that line, If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely…

But I digress. His thoughts about fathers and superheroes intrigues me. This is not the first time that I have written about this. I remember at my grandfather’s funeral my father stood up and said that his hero had died. It was one of those moments that will probably always stay with me because he was my hero too.

And I remember speaking with my grandfather about his father and realizing that his father was his hero too. And here I am, this man who sometimes feels like a boy and I have my own fan.

There is this little guy who watches everything I do and tries to do it too. And I think back to this post (Father’s Love Their Daddies Too) and remember that we all just figure it out as we go along. It is not always so reassuring, but that uncertainty is part of what makes life interesting.

One More Victory Over The Nazis

Through the years I have read many different tales about things that happened during WWII. Those tales contain some of the most horrifying moments in humanity as well as some of the most heart warming.

The Shmata Queen tipped me off to a story that I think many of you will find to be quite interesting.

BERLIN — As a young girl, Katrin Himmler asked her grandmother about the man in a black suit in a photograph hanging on her living-room wall. Her grandmother didn’t say much, but she cried.

The man in the picture was Ms. Himmler’s grandfather Ernst, a brother of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The little that Katrin’s family did tell her about her grandfather, who disappeared during fierce fighting in Berlin in 1945, was that he was apolitical.

Decades later, Ms. Himmler discovered that her family’s story was untrue. Her father, long suspicious, encouraged her in 1997 to go dig in wartime archives that the U.S. had recently returned to Germany. Ernst Himmler, she learned, joined Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party as early as 1931. Two years later, he joined the SS guard, the special unit responsible for carrying out many of the Nazi regime’s worst atrocities.

Now 40 years old and married to an Israeli Jew, Ms. Himmler says she was shocked when she found out that Ernst was in the SS. “It might sound strange, but I never considered this possibility,” she says.

For the full story please click here.

Related Links:

Giving Hitler Hell
Hitler’s Plan To Use Sex Dolls
Hitler’s Gas Problem

Hitler’s Gas Problem

Drexel University’s publication The Smart Set is running a story today that says that Hitler had a major problem with flatulence. It is too bad that this wasn’t a terminal disease.

“Guests at the Berghof, Hitler’s private chalet in the Bavarian Alps, must have endured some unpleasant odors in the otherwise healthful mountain air.

It may sound like a Woody Allen scenario, but medical historians are unanimous that Adolf was the victim of uncontrollable flatulence. Spasmodic stomach cramps, constipation and diarrhea, possibly the result of nervous tension, had been Hitler’s curse since childhood and only grew more severe as he aged. As a stressed-out dictator, the agonizing digestive attacks would occur after most meals: Albert Speer recalled that the Führer, ashen-faced, would leap up from the dinner table and disappear to his room.

This was an embarrassing problem for a ruthless leader of the Third Reich. With uncharacteristic concern for his fellow human beings, Hitler had first tried to cure himself when he was a rising politician in 1929 by poring over medical manuals, coming to the conclusion that a largely veg diet would calm his turbulent digestion as well as make his farts less offensive to the nose. A rabid hypochondriac, he would also examine his own feces on a regular basis and administer himself camomile enemas. Hitler decided to swear off meat completely in 1931, when his niece (and presumed romantic interest) Geli Raubel committed suicide: When presented with a plate of breakfast ham the next morning, he pushed it away muttering, “It’s like eating a corpse.” From that squeamish moment on, great piles of vegetables, raw or pulped into a baby mulch, were Hitler’s daily staple. (All cooked foods, he decided, were carcinogenic). He showed a particular fondness, culinary historians assure us, for oatmeal with linseed oil, cauliflower, cottage cheese, boiled apples, artichoke hearts and asparagus tips in white sauce. Strangely, Hitler was unfazed by the fact that this high-fiber diet was having the opposite effect on his digestion than what he had intended: His private physician, Dr. Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that after Hitler downed a typical vegetable platter, “constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”

For the full story please click here.

Stalin’s Jewish Lover

Ynet has an interesting story about Stalin and his Jewish woman.

The communist tyrant Joseph Stalin was known to be an anti-Semite who planned wide-scale purges against the Jews in his latter days. Yet the fact that the Soviet ruler planned to annihilate the Jews did not prevent him from having an affair with a Jewish woman, and to take care of her daughter until her mother passed away. According to some evidence, Stalin may have even married the woman.

The affair was disclosed recently thanks to a letter discovered by an historian named Nicolai Nada. The letter, which was placed on the desk of the general secretary of the communist party Georgi Malenkov in 1953, the day Stalin suffered a stroke, was kept in a classified party file for years.

Just a few months ago those in charge of the file were persuaded to reveal the letter, and this is what it contained:

Dear Comrade Malenkov!

I am the daughter of Ana Rubinstein, the former wife of Comrade Stalin.

As he is in ill health, I ask you to let me see him. He knows me since I was a child.

R. Sabashnikov (Kostiokovski). If it is not possible to see him, I ask you to grant me an audience on a very urgent matter.

Date: 04.03.55

For the full story please click here.

Some Masada remains questioned

MASADA, Israel – An Israeli anthropologist is using modern forensics and an obscure biblical passage to challenge accepted wisdom about mysterious human remains found at Masada, the desert fortress famous as the scene of a mass suicide nearly 2,000 years ago.

A new research paper published Friday takes another look at the remains of three people found at the site and given a state burial by Israel as Jewish heroes. The remains, the study says, could actually be those of the Jews’ Roman enemies.

The remains of two male skeletons and a full head of woman’s hair, including two braids, were found in a bathhouse by archaeologists in the 1960s. They were long thought to belong to a family of Zealots, the fanatic Jewish rebels said to have killed themselves rather than fall into Roman slavery in A.D. 73, a story that plays an important role in Israel’s national mythology.

The bathhouse remains became a key part of the site’s story. Yigael Yadin, the renowned Israeli archaeologist in charge of the first dig, thought they illustrated the historical account of Zealot men killing their wives and children and then themselves before Roman legionnaires breached Masada’s defenses.

Upon finding the remains, the crew “relived the final and most tragic moments of the drama at Masada,” Yadin wrote in his book documenting the dig, mentioning that the woman’s “dark hair, beautifully plaited, looked as if it had just been freshly coiffeured.”

“There could be no doubt that what our eyes beheld were the remains of some of the defenders of Masada,” he wrote.

Along with other bodies found at Masada, the remains were recognized as those of Jewish heroes by Israel’s government in 1969 and given a state burial, complete with Israeli soldiers carrying flag-draped coffins.

But anthropologist Joe Zias and forensics expert Azriel Gorski write in a paper in the June issue of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology that the remains buried with honors may not have been those of Jews at all, but of Romans.

For the full story please click here.

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