Friday, December 11, 2009

vot, you vant I should write another blog post? oy oy oy....

A couple of footnotes to previous posts:
  • In correctly adding Mahela Jayawardene to the multiple 250+ scores list I omitted to mention that ex-Pakistan captain Younis Khan joined the same club back in February when he made 313 against Sri Lanka in Karachi to go with the 267 he made against India in Bangalore four years previously.
  • There's a brief interlude towards the end of Good As Gold where Gold is hanging out at a White House dinner with the ex-governor of Texas, who in alluding to Gold's Jewishness namechecks one Kinky Friedman, in his capacity as lead singer of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys.
  • As befits a Jewish novel Good As Gold has more than its fair share of Yiddish words and phrases scattered about, particularly in a highly concentrated 20-page riff/rant/ramble on the subject of Gold's putative biographee (is that a word?) Henry Kissinger. Yiddish has a uniquely large and comic array of words to describe someone in generally scornful terms, many of which have passed into everyday English usage, particularly in the USA. So to the obvious ones like putz, klutz and shmuck you can add nebbish, shlemiel, shmendrik, momzer, shlump, shmegegge - insults for every occasion. If you want more an online Yiddish dictionary can be found here, so make with the clickage, already.

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