Special cats and dogs issue

Unfortunate school motto

It says "educating future change makers".  (I know it's barely legible.)

Weinreich, College Yiddish

This is the book to get if you want to learn Yiddish the old way: some grammar, some vocabulary, some reading, followed by more grammar, more vocabulary and more reading...thirty chapters of it. Beware about the "College" part of the title; this book is laid out like college books were long ago, which makes it different from the appearance of the $250 French 1 text you'll find in your college bookstore in 2014. Weinreich is systematic and serious-minded, pitched to the attention spans and English reading skills of the college students of his time (the 1940s, 50s and 60s). When you're done with this book, you'll be able to read the Forward, Peretz, Asch and the others: very satisfying. That's what I was looking for, hence my five-star rating.

On the other hand, this is not the right book for you if...
1. You don't want to learn the Hebrew alphabet. (In that case, you can try Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish , which spells everything in Latin letters. Nothing wrong with that, except you won't be able to read real Yiddish elsewhere. Like it or not, the Yiddish alphabet is the Hebrew alphabet.)
2. You mostly want to learn to speak, not read, Yiddish. There's no CD or online component. Of course you might be fortunate enough to be using this in a course with a real teacher...
3. You're mostly interested in picking up pithy sayings and learning about the culture. In that case, try Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (P.S.) , or The Joys of Yiddish , among many others. (Each chapter here does end with an interesting couple pages of cultural interest, but of course the main thrust is teaching the language.)

I have a couple of complaints. The end-of-chapter vocabulary lists (though not the end-of-book general vocabulary) are alphabetized awkwardly; "das leben" comes before "zorg" because dalet comes before zayin. So it takes longer than necessary to find words. Compounding this problem are two more: the indentation is awkward, and the vocabularies miss some words, so you waste time. I'm commenting on an older edition, though, so maybe the newer ones have been fixed... 

What, me pay?

"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."

Seen in The San Jose Mercury News

Deadly serious, in a cheery sort of way

Supply-demand singularity!

From the Washington Times

Word quickly spread in the Louisiana towns of Springhill and Mansfield that a food stamp glitch was giving recipients an unlimited balance on their Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards, causing two local Wal-Marts to be completely ransacked on Saturday night.
...
“It was definitely worse than Black Friday. It was worse than anything we had ever seen in this town,. There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no meat left. The grocery part of Wal-Mart was totally decimated,” said Springhill Police Chief Will Lyn.
Over the course of two hours, frenzied shoppers filled their carts with everything they could get their hands on, but when the cards came back online at 9 p.m., people abandoned their carts and left, the Daily Mail reported.

Visual Ed Assn, Blank vocabulary cards

I should have believed the other reviewers who warned that, of late, Vis-Ed has been using a thinner card stock. Well, they're right. That by itself isn't so terrible, except what hasn't changed is the size of the box and the number (1000) of cards. And so where Vis-Ed boxes used to be full of cards, the two I got in today's mail have an inch or so of empty space, which means that unless I stuff something in there, my deck of cards will collapse (and it's awkward to lift them back up).

So, five stars for the concept; it's served me well over many years. But three stars for the barely-adequate thickness of the new cards and *one* star for not thinking to at least stuff 10% more cards per box so as to spare us the annoyance of a collapsed deck (as described above).

(amazon.com: "6 people found this helpful")