I love my Mum's Banana Cake!

Shopping!!!

Sunday in the Park

Gonging in the Troops at Ivan's Office
 

Heading into the Passover season, I have been unusually busy in the office as we have experienced a peak surge of casework like nothing we’ve ever seen. The quota of 65,000 H1 cases is utterly insufficient and will probably be broken on the very first day the government accepts cases which is April 2. They will probably have 85,000-100,000 cases submitted. The quota needs to go to approximately 200,000 per year.

I am hoping for the next 2 months to slow things down a bit and enjoy time with Karen and Elizabeth as Karen completes her second trimester and as Elizabeth enjoys being the only child and has become exceedingly cute. We are going to take a good number of holidays and you should get interesting notes and photos to see on this site.

Despite all this, I’ve been maintaining a global watch. In the US, there is real fear of a market correction and the latest volatility is something I’ve seen more than once before in the year preceding such corrections. I am still holding my equities but plan to sell them later in the year. I think the real problem will occur in the first quarter of 2008 when so many of these below-normal mortgages actually come due and everyone has to figure out who blinks first. The question is whether this mortgage problem spooks the rest of the market. So far nobody really knows but what is clear is that the market is unstable and looking for an excuse to go down. That excuse could come from anything – China, Thailand, the weather on Mars, you name it.

Giuliani is beating McCain because even conservatives know the war sucks, they can’t go after a sitting republican prez but they don’t want another one who agrees with it. Notice that Corzine in New Jersey is backing Clinton; I think that’s the mark of a savvy politico who thinks that Clinton will not be flavor of the month after Obama has been run through the mill over the next year.

Two suggestions in the Middle East. For the Israelis, Peretz the defense minister ought to just resign his post and stop the pretense of being the defense minister. The sight of him looking through binoculars last month at military exercises on the Golan Heights at length and not noticing that the lens cap was on is just too much to bear. For the Arabs, call the Israelis’ bluff and come out and say that they accept that the Right of Return means the Right to Go to a Palestinian State. Why? Because they all know that this is the only real result anyway and according to a recent poll of Palestinians only 10% think they’d actually want to go back to pre-1948 Palestine. As long as they keep talking about having Palestinians return to Israel, they’re never going to get anything and so far that’s been the case. If they do take this position, then at least the Israelis now have to either come to the table and deal with them or have to explain to the whole world what their excuse is and nobody will buy whatever that excuse is. Until they all figure this out, it’s just talk about talk.

Funny thing happened at Avis rental car. My $180 rental fee went down to $60 after the telephone agent gave me a special agent’s discount after I got really upset about something. Turns out there are really low rates if you demand them. I was pissed off that I was being quoted rates on the phone and that the confirmations I was getting over the Internet included so many taxes and surcharges that were more than double the rental rate that I was just simply so pissed off that I wasn’t going to rent any more cars from Avis and that frankly it just didn’t pay at that point to rent the car over alternatives.

Rabbi Mintz’s Passover Lecture Notes for those of you looking for something interesting to say at the Passover Seder: The origin of the Stealing the Afikoman ritual as part of the Passover Seder (kid steals a piece of matzah cracker and holds it for ransom till the end of the meal) started in Eastern Europe about 500 years ago. Nobody really knows when it started but within 100 years or so it got so popular that everyone was doing it and writing articles for and against it. The Afikoman has the same numerical letter equivalent in the Hebraic alphabet as the word “Meerma” – by trickery – which was used to describe how Jacob took the birthright from Esau which was on the night of Passover when according to legend he gave the Afikoman (greek word meaning dessert first used in the Jewish lexicon during the Mishnaic period in the first century of the common era) to his father Isaac. Many Sefardic Jews give clothing as part of the Afikoman ransom since part of the deception of Jacob was dressing like Esau. The Afikoman bridges the past and future through the children. The Passover seder’s first half commemorates the Exodus and the second half of the liturgy is all forward-looking. This is backed up by the fact that Rabbi Hillel’s opinion (as opposed to Shamai -- both major figures of the Mishnaic period) is adopted meaning that the first 2 paragraphs of the Hallel service are said before dinner instead of only the first paragraph. The second paragraph talks about leaving Egypt and it might have made sense that the meal commemorates the Paschal sacrifice while still being in Egypt. That was Shammai’s view. But Hillel says the meal is a thanksgiving already having left Egypt as part of this commemoration which is the Seder. The Afikoman dessert is therefore part of the future and some have the custom to take a piece of that matza and hang it on the wall all year long and then put it into the chulent stew the following year on the last sabbath before Passover. It is sort of a ode to the future that despite all the curves and mysteries of what lies ahead, we can look forward to the next year and hope through the Afikoman that all will turn out OK just as it did for Jacob from the very beginning. 

We all wish you a happy Spring holiday season!