See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Carmine Santa Maria
Brooklyn Daily
I’m madder than the bully who picked on a 74-pound weakling in school (me) and got demolished by the kid’s sister (my sister) who kicked him in the you-know-where many times, proving that size doesn’t matter, but instant action does!
Look, you all know that the Christmas season celebrates the birth of a Jew, and I don’t need to tell you that got me thinking about his remarkable race. And better than expanding this thought on my own, I’ll do what I always do when I’m short on my word count and cut-and-paste from a better writer than me, in this case, Samuel Clemons:
“If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way, properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.
“His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.
“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.
“The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Just in case you didn’t recognize the author, it’s actually Mark Twain!
In last week’s column I blasted PBS’s commercials on Barbra Streisand’s big back-to-Brooklyn special. We all love Channel 13’s programing, so I’m linking up another blockbuster special pertinent to this column that occasionally gets repeated that you should catch about the Jews’ immense contributions to Broadway. Outside of Cole Porter, all the great musicals of his era were written by Jews: Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Julie Styne, Jerry Herman, Steven Sondheim, Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Larry Hart, Comden and Green. And even Mel Brooks (yes, the guy who wrote my favorite funny song, “Springtime for Hitler”).
During this era, one out of every four New Yorkers were Jews, the rest were, as my lovely wife Sharon might lovingly say, goyim — including me!
Now’s the point in the column where I write one of those transitions that leaves you scratching your head.
How about those weathermen this past week predicting all of those snowstorms that never happened? Fail! I know a couple that made it to Atlantic City in four and a half hours on Sunday, and made it back to Brooklyn in only two hours on Tuesday. Don’t you find that odd? And you’re telling me a 50 percent accuracy rate is good? Hogwash!
You would think that with all of this “state-of-the-art” meteorological equipment like that Duplo satellite radar and the “Reel Feel” temperature, and the fact that you can call ahead to the town over and ask what’s happening there, giving you a good idea what is going to happen here, that these guys would get things right once in a while.
Well, fact is, they don’t. And I don’t understand it, because if we can find and take out moving trucks half across the world through the use of satellites, why can’t we get more accurate and precise predictions!
With such unreliable weather forecasting, I can’t understand why anyone would want to go spend big, big bucks to attend football games to freeze to death, unless they’re harboring suicide double pneumonia death wishes.
I’ll leave you with this: “It’s warmer in the country than it is in winter, so stay warm!”
(Editor’s note: I don’t know what that quote means, but Carmine has final edit).
Screech at you next week!