Make Sure Your Chairs: have armsAh, wedding season: Weekends fill up with nuptials as our friends and relatives (and maybe even a few of us) march down the aisle and get hoisted up on chairs to wave napkins and hope they don't get dropped. Weddings are beautiful and fun, but as anyone who has ever watched Bridezillas can tell you, they rarely go off without a hitch. Here are some tips for anyone who wants to avoid common Jewish wedding disasters.

1. Check Your Hebrew: If you’ll be having any Hebrew text on your invitation or program, and if you’re not really comfortable with the language, have the text proofread by someone who can catch typos, grammatical errors, and other miscommunications. I’ve seen invitations where ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ became ‘My father is my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ because of a typo. And a ketubah where ‘bride’ became ‘easy girl’ because of a spelling error. Don’t trust the artist or printer to be your Hebrew language expert.
2. Read Your Ketubah: If you’re going to have a ketubah, read the translation ahead of time to make sure that you’re both okay with it. As I’ve written before, it’s kind of a bizarre document, and many couples are uncomfortable with the traditional text. This is the kind of thing you want to talk about months before the wedding, especially if you’re having a ketubah made just for you. You don’t want to hear it read at the wedding and think, “That’s not very romantic.” Be prepared.
3. Test Drive the Glass: There are few things more embarrassing than watching while a groom haplessly stomps on a napkin over and over until the crowd finally hears a satisfying crunch. If you want to use a glass, try a very thin champagne flute. Or cheat and use a light bulb. Remember to save the shattered glass so you can have it made into a mezuzah for your home.
   
4. Find Chairs With Arms: You will be hoisted into the air, and if you have arms to hold onto, you’re less likely to fall or feel unsteady. It’s also good to have some strong friends and relatives on hand.
   
5. Choose Seven Friends: The seven wedding blessings need to be said under the chuppa following the grace after the meal. You may want to give the honor of the first seven to various family members, and the second seven to good friends. Just make sure whoever you ask is comfortable reading Hebrew out loud in front of a lot of people.

Using the international language of dance to woo allies in Africa, President Bush is enacting a new strategy in order to help heal America’s wounded reputation abroad. Watch as our Commander-in-Chief shakes it at a political gathering yesterday with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

This week we tip our hats to Soccer for his/her insightful analysis of the Israeli YES HDTV ad that I wrote about on Monday.

Is the Bottle Dance: not something we can mock?
Soccer wrote:

I think it is brilliant: The commercial is saying that if we do what the Chareidim dont allow, we will have fun, (as we watch chareidim having fun being against it)!

And then later wrote:

Tamar, crazy but I was also in BJ this shabbos! Dont forget what I thought was another terrific point that Rabbi Feldman made: which was the fact that the chareidim, arguably passionate, committed and religiously devoted people, have somehow become seen as a caricature of themselves. There was no concern that YES would be seen as insensitive, irreverant, politically incorrect, andti-traditional, or anything else other than creative, humurous, and original. The chareidim have lost such credibility that those who would never parody blacks, Ethiopians, homosexuals, housewives, or environmentalists can parody chareidim with impunity. Doing so will sell more televisions.

This is a really nice look at the levels that this commercial is using to parody the Charedi community.

I think it’s a shame that Charedim have lost such credibility, but I think it happened as a result of their overboard reactions to anything that they find problematic. It’s simply not an effective way of running a community, and it of course affects whether or not the rest of the world is able to take the Charedi community seriously.

Anyway, it’s interesting to think about how it’s somehow acceptable for an Israeli company to mock Haredi rabbis, but if this commercial was running in Germany or in the States, I doubt we’d find it amusing. More likely, we’d be offended.

This is one of the better things I've ever seen on YouTube: Filipino prisoners in a jail on Cebu island have a morning exercise routine with a difference. The prison governor has now taken to uploading the results for the world to see, and they're pretty spectacular. Full story here.

One to consider for Gitmo, maybe? And what song would you pick?