Blue and 20

Good afternoon, People of Stroock's Books. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all our Moose eating cousins in North America. You bastards. 

A Nor'easter slammed the Jersey shore yesterday. The storm surge bisected our own LBI, which is standard. We're only getting some light rain here.  

The last of the hostages are home. Is it over? Can we finally stop obsessing? Do we stop wearing Israel T-shirts to the gym? These are not easy questions. Not for us. Not for any man. 

As we write this, we're watching Prime Minister Netanyahu address the Knesset ahead of President Trump. Boy is Bibi tongue bathing the boss or what? Who can blame him?

Here comes Yair Lapid, leader of the Opposition and fierce critic of Bibi. Relax, it's his job. As the great Benjamin Disraeli once said, the job of the Opposition is to oppose. And so he did. 'We are not going anywhere,' Lapid declared. Nope. Not going anywhere. 

And here's Trump...Whatever one thinks of the man, the president, there's never been a better friend to Israel and the Jews in the White House. The American president addressing the Knesset is a hell of a thing. 

Sports wrap: the Jets suck, what else can we say? Carolina beating Dallas salvaged the Stroock family sports weekend. Dallas, you're 2-3-1 and your defense blows. Suck it. 

Pointless Nostalgia Week: the first day. We're on the fives, 2025, 2015, etc....Today we're thinking about autumn 2005. This was our best year substitute teaching at Bernards High School. We were called in several times a week. At $85 per it really added up. Bear in mind a HS sub isn't expected to do much, and has free time during all the regular teacher's prep time. We used that free time to work on magazine articles and A Line through the Desert. Heck we often wrote during class time. They didn't want us actually teaching. 

We had a great time. At 32 we were one of the younger teachers in the school. Trust us, some real dinosaurs were there, teachers who'd been at the school since the 1950s. The heavy metal revival was just kicking in, and that autumn we saw kids wearing some of the old black heavy metal T-shirts from the 1980s. We liked the kids, and we think most of them liked us. We were able to be laid back with the kids, having established the previous year that we weren't afraid to write student's up. In fact, when one class got out of hand with the pretty young sub we thought was a student when we first met her,(textbooks out the window), we were sent in the next day to straighten things up. In retrospect, we were a little too loosey goosey with other people's kids and we'd do a few things differently today. But it was a great year. Golly, that senior class is pushing forty now...