Confessions from the Killer Mime Cult

No hockey this week, next week the second round should be finished, so I'll have more interesting things to write about, at least in regards to hockey. So, I've been a bit bummed, maybe not depressed by the reaction to Korpo Radio. Everyone who listens to it, says they like it, but so far, after working on it for over a month, only 96 people have visited it (including me, so the number is probably actually much lower). Rainbow Boy gets around 44 hits per day, with no promotion, and I spent weeks trying to promote it. I don't think that I will give up, but I guess I have to realize it is a hobby, nothing that's ever going to make me money. Part of the problem is the lack of material, so I'm just broadcasting the same stuff over and over again. It's boring, to say the least. I think that I will overhaul it completely. I've read a couple of interesting books, the first-Born to Kvetch, all about the contribution Yiddish has made to English, which is quite alot. It was also interesting to read about Jewish culture not from the perspective of victimhood. Which leads me to what I am currently read, The Lost, by Daniel Mendelson. It's the story of how, slowly over time, he discovers what happened to certain family members who died in the holocaust. I had two thoughts when I was confronted with this book-the holocaust was the result of economics. There's a bit about anti-semiticism in Poland before the war. I recently bought three coins, as I have started to collect coins. One is from 1933, one is from 1932, and the other is from 1938, just before the war broke out. The earlier coins are dignified. They show Jan Sobieski, the Polish king who saved Europe from an Ottoman invasion at the battle of Vienna in 1635. The other is of a woman's head, very much in the style of the 1920's, stately, and beautiful. The one from 1938 is completely different. It's of Jozef Pilsudski, the moderate dictator of Poland, the one who had finally managed to obtain independence for Poland. But by 1938, he had died, and Poland's leaders respected Adolf Hitler, and ennacted a harsh boycott of Polish Jews, trying to extract money from them. It backfired, leaving most Polish Jews impoverished by the time Poland was invaded. It is a chilling thought to think of where these coins were at that time. The Nazis, too, partly, financed the German economic miracle through the extortion of Jews. I think, this is just my impression, though, that the increasing harshness of these policies were an attempt to take money or property from them in the most efficient way. There's a part in the book, where Mendelson describes a massacre during which 1/6th of a town's Jewish population were killed, after which the parents of the victims were required by the Germans to pay for the bullets which had been used. But I have slowly come to realize, the biggest tragedy of the holocaust, is not the suffering of these people, which was horrible, but the absent present. Poland should be bustling with Jewish life, it should be a multicultural democracy. It should be the best place to live in Europe with a strong tradition of tolerance. Instead, it's a country where twenty five percent of the population was murdered. Sometimes by Germans, by often by their neighbours. Where those who survived were cheated out of their property.