Hello Dave

I walked home from work today and saw a girl speeding by on her bicycle with a trombone peeping halfway out of her backpack. I wonder if she was in the Orchestra.
I stopped at Burritoville (which is, quoting from the sign behind the counter, Mexcellent) and was waiting around for my order, when I realized that the 5 kids sitting in the corner, 3 girls and 2 boys that looked about 16-18, were saying grace over burritos and sprite. Very few behaviors mark you as a tourist quite as completely as praying in a Burritoville in the East Village.
At my table was a bucket of candy, Reese’s and Hershey’s kisses that are free for customers (and they give out free chips and salsa. Mexcellent). One of the praying kids, tall and blond and 16, walks over to the table, grabs the entire bucket and hustles it over to his friends. The girls sitting at the next table over looks at me and we both start hysterically laughing. Take a handful of candy kid, take two, but don't grab the whole thing like you're going to devour it while making it impossible for anyone else to use it. He may pray, but he has no manners.
On one of the phone booths right outside was one incarnation of the "Anti-Semitism is Anti-Me" ads that star Naomi Campbell, a little Asian boy, and a mysteriously gendered pastor. (Is NYC really in serious need of an anti-Semitism campaign? Or is this for the RNC? I think the ads are probably, intentionally or otherwise, more of a booster shot for a flagging pro-Israel sentiment than pro-Jew. And yes, those things can be separated). I think one of these ads should contain an obviously Jewish person. Yes, that kind of defeats the ostensible logic of the ad, that anti-Semitism hurts more than just Jewish people. And if you're actually anti-Semitic, why would you care if the "me" in the photo you're anti is obviously Jewish? You in fact are anti that person and you know that. If you're anti-Semitic, however, you might not know that you're anti-Naomi Campbell and really cute Asian babies. And once you learn that it's only a matter of time before you renounce your Jew-hating ways. Right.
So why not pictures of Jewish people that look Jewish? In the sense that the ads are really saying it's bad to hate Jews because it's bad to hate humans, it might be good to show that some regular looking Jews are humans too.
The other thing I think whenever I see the ad with the pastor is, don't you have enough fish to fry being a kind of mysteriously gendered member of some Christian church? No offense or anything, but I'm not sure you're actually helping the cause, seeing as you kind of need ads protecting yourself from defamation. It also further clouds the purpose of this ad campaign: a lesbian pastor is only a welcome figure in certain communities, and most of them are already entirely accepting of Jews and/or Jewish themselves.

Finally, and unrelated to walking home, in Slate's lead article today was this observation:

"Even a casual viewer of Hardball knows that the first rule of an election that involves a sitting president is that it's a referendum on the incumbent. This election, however, has turned out to be the opposite. It's a referendum on the challenger. Kerry probably isn't responsible for this turn of events, but he's benefiting from it: The referendum on the incumbent is over. President Bush already lost it. This presidential campaign isn't about whether the current president deserves a second term. It's about whether the challenger is a worthy replacement."

This struck me as being true when I first read it. And then I wasn't so sure. Interesting either way.