Nothing Says Chol Hamoed Like a Miscellaneous Post

On a Personal Note
I'm moving to Long Island on Monday. Starting in January, I'll be attending NYU's MS in Publishing program and living in New York City. I expect New York to provide a great deal of inspiration for heebnvegan posts, in particular because of the large Jewish community and the exciting vegan options.

Sukkot
Chag sameach! I was supposed to eat and sleep in a friend's sukkah last night, but Mother Nature had other ideas. We did enjoy a wonderful all-vegan Shabbat dinner indoors, though. Click here to read Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster's post on The Jew & The Carrot about reusing your lulav and etrog.

My New Favorite Quote About AgriProcessors
"By now, the scandal of Agriprocessors has been chronicled from Stephen Bloom's book Postville to Nathaniel Popper's investigative reports in the Forward to Julia Preston's coverage in The New York Times to the muckraking blogger FailedMessiah.com. No sensate American Jew has any reason to be unfamiliar with the rudiments of the case ...."
—Samuel Freedman, The Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2008

Kapparot
On Sunday, the JTA published another article about kapparot. It included this great quote from PETA's Hannah Schein: "I want kashrut to live up to what it's supposed to be, and to be this model, the whole 'higher authority.' It’s been very frustrating. It's been a real sort of embarrassment to see how the kosher industry has conducted itself. As a Jew, that impacts on me."

Yochanan Lavie's Parodies
Last month, I linked to "Rubbishcan Rock," a hilarious parody of "Jailhouse Rock" by FailedMessiah commenter Yochanan Lavie. Click here to read FailedMessiah's post from Thursday counting down Yochanan Lavie's 13 best parodies.

(Update 9/19/09: I reflected back on my promotion of "Rubbishcan Rock" and regret making light of Sholom Rubashkin's situation in this manner.)

Contests
In July, Mike Gruss from The Virginian-Pilot wrote about some of the fun contests I've entered. As Gruss discussed on his blog on Monday, I had a big milestone last weekend: I entered two contests in one day!

Zydepunks
I've talked about New Orleans' Zydepunks a few times. They're a fantastic folk-punk band that plays some zydeco and klezmer. It's nice to see that last month, another blog talked about the Zydepunks from a klezmer perspective.