Cyrus Farivar

At 105, the Rabbi Doesn’t Sleep Late: A century of poring over ancient Jewish texts has carved deep circles under Rabbi Yehuda Chitrik’s eyes. Decades of Sabbath- table storytelling have left him speaking softly and seldom. At 105 years old, he seems almost mortal. “He is not so good,” his daughter Shaindel Schneerson, 72, said the other night. “Right now, he’s saying his morning prayers” – she reported after dinner. “In the evening, he is doing this.” But even at…

NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a great show on Friday, in case you missed it. There were two segments that I really loved: The first, about the Internet in Iran (two of my favorite subjects), called “Internet Popularity Soars in Iran”, featured my second cousin, Karim Sadjadpour, who was quoted as an analyst in the piece. The second, called Exploring African Hip-Hop, profiled a West African and East African rap group and how rap, in Africa, is starting to really…

[redacted] (1:36:58 PM): hey FarivarCJ (1:37:22 PM): hi [redacted] (1:37:56 PM): whats wrong FarivarCJ (1:38:09 PM): nothing FarivarCJ (1:38:11 PM): why? [redacted] (1:38:24 PM): when people say “hi” they are usually mad or something [redacted] (1:38:34 PM): or annoyed FarivarCJ (1:38:34 PM): huh? FarivarCJ (1:38:38 PM): where’d you get that from? [redacted] (1:38:45 PM): just from my own experiences [redacted] (1:38:53 PM): hows everything

So at the time my article was published a couple days ago, I set up a little experiment to see how a relatively unknown idea propagates through the Internet. “HungryPod” turned up three hits on Google, and zero hits on Feedster and received an average of 30 unique hits per day. 72 hours later, Google now turns up 90 hits, Feedster turns up 9 hits, and within 24 hours of the story, Catherine Keane reported she received over 1100 unique…

Either way, I’m glad to see that someone is playing hardball around here. Says the WashPost: As Major League Baseball’s steroid scandal widened to include the sport’s most prolific active home run hitter, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said yesterday that he will introduce legislation imposing drug testing standards on professional athletes if baseball players and owners do not adopt a stringent crackdown on steroids by January. In the wake of the disclosure that San Francisco Giants slugger…

The WashPost ran an article today about two Massachusetts soldiers who were killed in Iraq. Their funerals were attended by Sens. Kennedy and Kerry. But down on the second page, this paragraph jumped out at me: On Sept. 11, 2001, during the moments before the attacks on the World Trade Center, Gavriel had been on the phone with a friend working in one of the towers, according to the news stories. That made it clear: He would go to Iraq.…

SpikyBras (via MeFi)

I generally like Penenberg’s stuff, but the premise of his newest piece just really threw me. His latest column on Wired News profiles Mary Hodder, someone who I met at Berkeley, actually in one of my classes at the j-school last year. She runs her own blog and is an Ÿber-connected mega-geek with all the blogosphere’s head honchos. Ok, cool. So ok, she doesn’t print things (neither do I, unless I have to — like Chinatown bus tickets). And I…

So, HungryPod is still fairly unknown as of the time of the printing of my NYT article. So I’m going to do a little experiment on the effects of an NYT article on things like Google and Feedster hits. As of now, a little after 9 pm [Pacific], Dec. 1, HungryPod gets three hits on Google and zero hits on Feedster. Let’s see what happens in the next 48 hrs.

French scientists have announced a beginning to an HIV vaccine. Here’s a really cool Mac program that allows you to watch French-language TV via Internet. And another one. And there’s a little bruhaha brewing with National Geographic labelling the Persian Gulf as “Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf)”, despite the fact that both in Arabic and Farsi it’s called the “Fars Gulf” (Fars being the province where the Farsi language originated, which when transferred into Greek eventually became Pers, hence Persia and…