What’s that, Science? You’ve got something important to tell us? What is it, boy?

The Sun appears to have jolted from its deep slumber, blasting tonnes of plasma into interplanetary space on Sunday, which is expected to collide with the Earth within the next 24 hours.

“This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on 4 August,” says astronomer Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It’s the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time.”

Wait, we’re all going to die in a hail of fiery solar particles? Oh GOD WHY NOW I HAVE SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR! I TAKE IT ALL BACK! I WANT TO LIVE! LIVE! Huh? Oh, it’s just going to be a display of auroral light? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I’m gonna go smoke.

You probably didn’t think you need this, but you do: Kanye West’s tweets as New Yorker cartoons. Memeriffic? Close enough!

by Bethlehem Shoals

Pish to the LeBron James television special, or Kevin Durant’s unassuming tweet that he would be keeping his talents in Oklahoma City. At least within my little world, no NBA star has generated more multimedia tailspin this off-season than new Knick Amar’e Stoudemire.

Last week the impossibly sculpted, explosive 28-year-old power forward proclaimed, via Twitter, that he was a Jew headed to Israel to study Hebrew, Yesterday saw the release of a completely baffling sitdown with the Israeli station Sport5, where Stoudemire insists on stumbling through the tough questions that the interviewer is trying to avoid. As much of a professional mistake as this may prove to be, I hereby give up trying to to decipher Amar’e’s Summer Challahday.

Then again, from the beginning my feelings about this have had little or nothing to do with the facts on the ground.

On the face of it, “Amar’e in Israel” remains one of the kookiest sports stories in recent memory. Yet, miraculously, the reaction was one of muted credulity. This despite the fact that Amar’e’s claim sprang up out of thin air and then some. Several days and one candid interview with (kosher) agent Happy Walters later, the jig is up: Stoudemire might have some Jewish blood, is a spiritual dude who loves him some world religions, and like so many other Americans, can’t resist the History Channel.

Now, one would guess, it would be time for all to exhale, put things in perspective, and then go to town on Amar’e-and just as importantly, on ourselves. Against all common sense, we had held back. No irony, sarcasm, or imminent date with catastrophe. We just sat there and waited for the truth.

Naturally, I felt myself overcome with guilt. Not only am I embarrassed by my willingness to suspend disbelief, but I also abandoned my post. During that first day of breathless anticipation, a goyishe friend expressed disappointment and dismay at the lack of snark. He likened the whole thing to a Mel Brooks joint and asked where “the acclaimed Jewish wit” was. To top it all off, he added, “The only person I’ve seen be ‘Jewish Funny’ about this whole thing is Amar’e himself, maybe.”

I’m not including snippets of this email to show that all my relationships are based on self-stereotyping, nor to suggest that, as a non-practicing Jew who regularly forgets what words start with haychet, I’ve somehow reduced my identity to a recognizably ethnic sense of humor. It’s more that, in the absence of any real Jewish knowledge or praxis, I fall back on that murky class of attributes that make for a “cultural” Jew. Failing to capitalize on such golden-and relevant-material was a kind of betrayal. Don’t worry, I’m rectifying the matter as we speak.

At the same time, though, I find myself obsessively re-tweeting Amar’e’s dispatches from the Holy Land. They’re remarkably mundane and relaxed; his observation that Tel Aviv was like Miami was certainly far sharper than intended. Still, here is one of my favorite NBA players juggling around the entry-level signifiers of my fathers, and my fathers’ fathers.

The Sport5 interview doesn’t need any cackling interloper; it practically mocks itself. Stoudemire vows to observe Shabbat, which would make him a greater pioneer for Judaism in pro sports than Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax rolled up in one. Since NBA teams regularly play on Fridays, it’s such an absurd suggestion that the interviewer doesn’t even bother to follow up. It plays like one of Christopher Guest’s opening scenes, or an interlude from one of those lo-fi network comedies I keep hearing about.

Yet I’m not laughing. Instead, there’s a disjointed, uneasy pride. And then immediately after, again with the guilt.

Here, though, the problem isn’t that I’m letting down some part of the “cultural Jew” core curriculum. It’s that I’ve stuck myself with it, and on a daily basis, feel okay about it. What kind of self-respecting Jew can listen to someone make a mockery of a religious tradition-you can decide whether its appropriation or just stupidity-and come out feeling better about his background for it? Why will I never tire of Amar’e Stoudemire’s quest for my faith? Because in many ways, I’m no less of a tourist than he is. Just with the right genes and kinship diagram.

At breakfast the other day I sat next to some older women discussing their Yiddish singing club. I wanted to shoot them a knowing glance, or drop something into my own conversation to indicate I was down. I bet Amar’e probably would have felt the same way.

It’s this wounded, over-eager part of me that wanted to believe Amar’e in the first place. Still-life of me with Jews; Jews raining down every time Stoudemire scores. The circle is complete and the logic irrefutable. Then, we rest.

Except there’s another key difference here-that is, aside from the circumcision, bar mitzvah, and whatever other bare essentials mark me as a member of the Tribe. When I wail like this about who I am and where I came from, it’s understood as private gone public. You can say it’s an act; I would rather think of it as an enactment of some internal peril that belongs not only to me. I’m not sure I feel this terrible about my special heritage all the time; it’s not all burden, caricature, and thinly-veiled conservatism. I almost feel like I’ve stumbled into this pickle, much like Amar’e in his interview.

Oh, and if you were worried, I’m fine with “Jewish-ness” even as “cultural Jew” makes me cringe.

Amar’e, though, is growing up in public with only the slightest twinge of self-awareness. I realize that there’s something odd, even disturbing, about my willingness to play along (in fits and starts) with his fantasy. That’s the tension that leads to stuff like writing. Stoudemire, on the other hand, is just out there without a net, hardly schooled as to how silly he seems. Does he take Judaism serious? It would seem. But no one’s done him the service of showing him how Serious 2.0 actually looks.

(That is, if any of us know. Is Twitter hopelessly raw and confessive or the ultimate means of cheapening legitimate introspection?)

That’s the problem with Amar’e. He believes entirely too much in his crackpot talking points. To me, his overseas venture is nothing but object, designed to make me feel both better and worse about my place in Jewry. As for the man himself? Until he starts to feel that pull of insufficiency, even foolhardiness, he remains worlds away from me. My culture inspires him; for me, more often than not, it serves-yes, you guessed it-as a source of guilt.

Or, if you’re sick of that refrain, it’s as much about critique as it is affirmation. Maybe someone should throw a good zinger at Amar’e, some kind of stinging, unanswerable retort that makes him feel like a schmuck for the rest of the day. Without undermining his interest in Hebrew and Israel, it would at least give him a window into what a fraught, endless statement “I am a Jew” really is.

Bethlehem Shoals, a regular contributor to NBA FanHouse, is a founding member of FreeDarko.com, whose Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will be published by Bloomsbury, USA in November.

“They were looking for a new salty snack and became aware of a machine that processed corn meal under high pressure into a long tube shape. They also discovered that if they used a high-speed blade, similar to a propeller, they could cut three-inch-long tubes, which then could be flavored with orange cheddar cheese and seasonings.”
–Robbie Yohai, speaking of his father, Morrie Yohai, and colleagues at his Old London Foods company, who, in the late 1950s, invented Cheez Doodles. Former braces wearers everywhere would be excused for feeling that a sort of justice has been done, but also, surely, a pang of remorse and great respect, upon learning that the elder Yohai died of cancer last week at his Long Island home at the age of 90. He was also a Jewish mystic and published two books of poetry.

“Millions of Americans who by objective standards belong to the working class or lower middle class have persuaded themselves that they are part of the professional-investor elite, because they have worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.”
–YES. THAT.

Yesterday we got some hate-mail-really though it was more like mildly upset mail-about referring to William S. Burroughs as a “dirty old poet.” And while I really like me some Burroughs-I did sit around and listen to “You’re the Guy I Want To Share My Money With” as a teen, so!-I realized that I also deeply, terribly dislike him. You know why? Those guys were all the worst. Setting aside the drugs and alcohol and their sons claiming to have been molested, at the age of 14, by friends of their father’s, and, yes, the wife-shooting, it’s also true that Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (a NAMBLA member, lest we forget) and their gang-some of whom are somehow still living, so, let’s not name names-were literary rockstars who kept a steady supply of boy groupies as disposable sex toys.

Pretty much it was as gross as anything you can imagine about the lifestyle of a hair metal band in the 80s. By the first-hand accounts I’ve been told, they didn’t care if the boys were 15 or 22 or were clearly extremely damaged from terrible childhoods; also, some of the groupies had sex with them all. And I’ll always think of Burroughs as “old” because, first, he was born in 1914, after all, and to people born in the 60s and 70s, Ginsberg and Burroughs and their pals all were unspeakably old, in that way that anyone over 40 is already unfathomably old to someone who is 18.

And sure, lots of this was truly consensual, even the stuff that’d be considered statutory rape! And there’s a whole crop of a generation that can pipe up at a dinner party and be all, “Burroughs? Ha, I remember when we shared a huge spike of heroin and we had sex! Hilarious! Can you imagine?” It’s a good story!

(Related: one of the things I find refreshing about many of the gay millennials, by the way, is that it seems like more of them feel comfortable with and only largely attracted to people their own age. That’s a good development.)

But just like “free love” so often meant that “chicks” should stop being “uptight” and have sex with whatever man wanted them to put out, fundamental to the whole post-beatnik and “groovy” literary and art scene of gay men was an idea that these, yes, old dudes came to think that it was their right to leverage their literary reputations to screw whichever troubled young boy most recently wanted their autograph.

So on some level, I’ll always carry some enormous dislike for the characters that pop up to be the new-again counterculture heroes in movies like Milk and Howl. They were, apart from some of their excellent qualities, also totally skeevy, gross, drugged-out predators.

Once you know that the reality TV “star” “phenomenon” is merely a set of nonsense network-packaged narratives, stories and characters deployed to capitalize on the news outlets that need “information” to sell their own products, particularly when those news outlets don’t care that the information they present is actually the product being sold itself, and that the whole thing is a business ploy wherein publicity is made through various entities using other entities in a cash-funded reputation market, well then there’s no point in treating reality TV as a cultural product. Sorry, Hank Stuever! You’re right about reality TV, but you’re just feeding the beast. Particularly since your Washington Post newspaper is running a “preview” of the “latest installment” of Real Housewives alongside your criticism. Reality television is only a capitalist product-a great one, in those terms, as it lends itself to multiple repackaging and distribution. (See also: “LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY”!) But the only way out is all the way out. We know for a fact that you can sell newspapers another way.

“Guns are hugely attractive. They are perhaps the best-made consumer products we can buy. What else that you buy today will be functioning exactly as well 100 years from now as it is today? I actually think Michael Moore had it right in Bowling for Columbine. The problem in the United States isn’t guns, it’s fear — fear that serves many, many interests and thus will be hard to squelch.”
-Dan Baum wrote a piece in the current Harper’s about concealed-and not so concealed-weapons. He talks about it here. (For more on how easy it is to get a concealed weapon permit, see our handy guide.)

I don’t watch any of the “Real Housewives” shows, because even with life being as interminably long as it is, it is still too short, but if every episode somehow involved one of those ladies hiding out from a bear I’m pretty sure I would have to make it appointment television. Anyway, housewife Caroline Manzo of Franklin Lakes spotted-and, the world being what it is now, tweeted about-”the biggest f***ing bear in the world in my front yard.” Everyone wants to get into the act.

Yay! We made the biggest (unintentional!) oil spill in human history! (Bonus: the second-largest oil spill ever was also in the Gulf of Mexico.) What do we win? Is it a new planet? Called Pandora? With flying ladies and dragons and magical sources of energy? Even better news: according to the NOAA forecasts, as you can see in their most recent forecast, all the oil is gone! Hooray. Oh… all the surface oil. Hmm. Also: “The annual summertime dead zone caused by low oxygen levels in water along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline this year is twice as big as last year’s.” It’s the size of Massachusetts. So I would suggest, since the Gulf of Mexico was already a giant bomb-infested filth-hole, that we just kill the whole thing with fire. Though I guess it’s anoxic where it isn’t flammable, so that won’t work. Nuclear bomb?