cheesedip.com

this moment

I love this amazing email received by Andrew Sullivan, it’s too great not to reprint here:

My grandfather, 86 years old and a veteran of WWII, just gave me a call. He was calling all of his grandchildren to let them know what an important night this was in the history of our country.

Grandpa drove a truck for over 50 years, and he told the story of how he drove with a team of drivers, 2 white (including him), and 4 black. When they stopped at the truck stops, the black drivers had to use seperate restrooms and showers, and had to eat in a small room in the back of the kitchen. Grandpa and his co-driver would eat in the back with the rest of the team, and while they didn’t speak of it at the time, they knew it was wrong yet felt powerless to change it, and believed that it would never change.

Tonight, he told me, we have come full-circle. Many people, especially the younger generation who supported Obama, will never fully realize the historical import of what happened tonight. But he wanted his grandchildren to know this story that he had never told us, and it was the second time in my 33 years that I have heard my grandpa cry.

[ via Squashed ]
P.S. Adding the tags in for this post just now, my eyes got a little wet; I think I’d just about forgotten how beautiful it is to feel this kind of hope, the kind Barack Obama inspires in so many.

the genius of victoria beckham

Believe it or not, Germaine Greer wrote an entire essay on Posh Spice—and it’s positive: “Victoria Beckham may have seemed the least talented of the Spice Girls but her real talent lay elsewhere. She is an artist in the same genre as Damien Hirst: marketing. In an era of bare bellies, painted legs, visible underwear, junk jewellery and grisly computer generated prints, she is a lone champion of elegance for working girls.”
(This makes more sense if you read Greer’s essay in gallery view, with accompanying photos.)

dot info

Besides the MTA and DesignNotes, are there other .info sites worth a damn? I realized a long time ago I was getting a lot of comment spam linking to sites on that top-level domain, so I added it to my filters and have been pretty happy since, but I wonder if there are any other sites besides these two that I should know about.
(Um, so since comments with .info in them automagically get junked, if you’re sharing an url please just type .ofni instead and I’ll change it manually after it goes through.)

chaptzem blog

My favorite blog find today is the Chaptzem Blog, which is devoted to news of interest to Brooklyn’s Hasidic community. It’s a great read, written in English with Yiddish mixed in, and it lets you peek at a community smack dab in your midst that seems like it inhabits its own parallel universe. This email written by a nineteen-year-old who wants a wife is great:

What really breaks me into little pieces is that my mother goes around telling all the shadchunim what a big learner I am and that I need a girl that will support me in learning for many years. I don’t know, but I just can’t see myself having to sit in kolel for the next who knows how many years just because my future wife and father in law thinks that that is what I am. I can see myself having a shiur every day after work but not to be stuck in a kolel for many years. It’s just not me.

I love that his email is so heartfelt, but also that even though the situation seems specific to his community, switch a few words and it’s totally something you’d hear from an Asian kid complaining about his mom. Our differences, sometimes they don’t really make us different.