Primrose Road

I wonder what it says about my site, readers, and/or the Internet that for the third month in a row, the most visited page on Primrose Road is a news item I posted back in August about a twelve-year old boy in court because his father wants him to undergo circumcision against his will.

According to this site's traffic details for February thus far, someone got to Primrose Road by searching for the phrase "my homework." So Google recognizes personal pronouns now? Perhaps I should search for "my dissertation" and copy and paste the first page that comes up. Other good ones: "william shakespeare ducky," "cansts," "false doctorates baptist." Looks like somebody's preacher is in trouble.

When the gentleman caller of Primrose Road told me this story about political-correctness-become-eggshell-walking, I thought he was kidding, but alas, it is true (at least according to the Associated Press): Santas in Sydney, Australia have been told to say "ha ha ha" in place of "ho ho ho".

"One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute."

Q: How do you resurrect a dying language with a rich cultural history? A: Death metal. The Jewish Daily Forward reports on Gevolt, a Russian-Israeli band that rearranges and performs traditional Yiddish songs like Tum Balalaika as death metal. The Forward praises the band's work and also brings up some of the contradictions they embody:

The band’s music is not a pasquinade, but rather a nuanced embrace of both serious Yiddish lyrics and serious metal traditions. Gevolt’s rendition of the traditional “Tum Balalaika,” casts clean, articulate vocals against a chilling background of liquid metal that closely resembles the German Neue Deutsche Harte (New German hardness) movement.