spammer klutz of the day

[...]
Received: from ibm55941kl (unknown [62.90.241.68])
        by wormwood.pobox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5A7AB72684
        for <***@pobox.com>; Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:20:41 -0500 (EST)
From: respond@jewishbib.com
Subject: Important Juewish WEB Site

Dear Chaver,

Shalom!

We are happy to inform you that we have relocated to a permanent address:
[...]

I don't know who this spammer is, but a legitimate source claiming (via domain name) to be Jewish probably woudln't have misspelled "Jewish" in the subject line. And it's certainly not any domain I've had prior contact with, either from surfing or from a mailing list.

Traceroute implicates "barak.net.il". The word "barak" means "lightning". That's a thought: a lightning strike on their server room would be a fine idea in my opinion. :-)

I don't go after spammers any more unless they're persistent (most are one-shots who can't be found anyway), but I reserve the right to publicly mock the goofier ones.

(no subject)

It looks like I'm going to lead (part of) Shabbat services at my own congregation. Whee!

There's a Friday evening in December when both rabbis and the cantorial soloist will be unavailable (unavoidably -- this wasn't part of the original plan). So the worship committee, of which I'm a member (nominally co-chair) was just asked to lead the service. The rabbi wants five people, and I'll be one of them. (I'm assuming this breaks down as: kabbalat shabbat, barchu through shema++, amidah, Torah service, and concluding prayers, but I haven't actually been told that.)

I took the opportunity to point out to the committee chair that there are people on the worship committee with good voices and we do not need the services of one of the hired non-Jewish soloists if we pick the right people. We seem to be picking the right people (that is, she took all the off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions).

The deal with the soloists is this: on nights when we have our cantorial soloist we're fine; on other nights we have one of these hired soloists, most or all of whom are not Jewish. They used to do all of the cantor-led stuff, including the stuff that is only supposed to be led by Jews, which annoyed the heck out of me. In recent months the rabbi has been doing those parts himself, leaving the soloists with things like the opening and closing songs that anyone can do. I pointed this out to the chair and said "let's not back-slide". I really hope we don't.