The Way It Iz

Last week, one of the most heavily-anticipated albums in Jewish music history was released to the public. The fourth installation of Abie Rotenberg’s all-English songs came out in 2003, and 19 years later, we have an album that many of us thought we’d never hear: Journeys 5. Many of the classic messages and themes are present throughout the playlist. You have the Shabbos song (“Baruch Hashem – It’s Shabbos!”), the widow’s lament song (“The Ring”), and of course, the story about the hapless individual (“Lucky Fingers Max”), each sung by an appropriately selected guest star of Jewish music. There are also two tracks dedicated to the memory of legendary musician Moshe Yess, and an updated version of “We’ve Got the Music.”

Apparently, if you want to make your political or social point stick, a sure-fire way to get a win in your favor is to have major organizations, or even the dictionary itself, change the definition of a word or a term to fit your narrative. In recent years, we have seen the definitions of a variety of pronouns change, as well as “woman,” “court-packing,” and most recently, “racism.”

President Biden has delivered his first-ever State of the Union address. At least I assume he did. At the time of writing, the SOU is scheduled for Tuesday, March 1, so by the time you read this, it will have happened. It’s entirely possible that the President will have addressed many of these issues in his speech. But I’m not going to wait for that because like we do every year, it’s time to review the President’s year. For those unfamiliar with this, we give the good bits of the Biden Administration an up and the bad bits a down. So let’s get into upping and downing the first year of the Biden Administration.

Most of you reading this will know my name because of the articles you read on a somewhat regular basis. But I actually have another job. I run special projects for a company that services nursing homes and home-bound patients. For the last few months, my primary project has been the acquisition and distribution of monoclonal antibodies (mAB). Without getting into too much clinical detail, mAB are a treatment for a variety of diseases and conditions, and they have come to the attention of the general public recently for their effectiveness in handling COVID-19.

Why do people like Joe Rogan?

This is a question I’ve been grappling with for about three years now. For those of you who are somehow unaware of who Joe Rogan is, allow me to give you a short background. Joe Rogan first came into the public eye as a comedian who hosted the popular television game show Fear Factor back in the early-to-mid-2000s. Since then, he has become a commentator for UFC, and developed the most-listened-to podcast in the world. Rogan’s daily listenership is well over 10 million. For reference, the next closest daily podcast belongs to the New York Times, whose The Daily podcast brings in about 4 million listeners per episode.

Do you know that name? You should. If there was any decency in this world, the name Kristal Bayron-Nieves would be more famous than the names Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, Rayshard Brooks, or even George Floyd. Like the others, Kristal Bayron-Nieves was killed. However, unlike the others, the reason you don’t know her name is because she was not killed by a white man or a police officer.