Photo Friday (Vol. XI)

I had a difficult decision to make this week. Because of all my business travel I’m not much further along in getting that elusive 3^rd picture for a lot of you. So, I had to decide whether to just bag Photo Friday this week, or exercise some discretion.

In the end, I decided that I didn’t want to be responsible for Doctor Bean going through painful withdrawal and anxiety attacks so I opted to go the discretion route.

This week’s selection of photos is courtesy of Jack, owner and operator of ‘The Shack’. His requests were:

1.  A picture of the books you own. Shelved or otherwise.

2.  Picture of the music you own.

3.  Sunset from your home

The first one was sort of a duplicate since I had already posted a picture of the largest concentration of books in the house in one of the early editions of Photo Friday. However many of you (including Jack) cried ‘foul’ because your wanted to see books up close.

Soooo… This morning I went up to our Ma’amad / shelter (every Israeli house and apartment has a steel & concrete reinforced room with a steel door in case of… well, you know.). We use our shelter room as a sort of library for all the books and videos that won't fit on the living room shelves.

I have one or two shelves of very eclectic books in this makeshift library so I selected one shelf and snapped (shnapped!) a picture of the books there:

In case you can’t make out the titles, here is a list (from left to right):
Chutzpah by Alan Dershowitz (signed during an interview I did with him for my undergrad newspaper), Jewish as a Second Language by Molly Katz, Robert’s Rules of Order, Ship of Fools by Katherine Porter, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories by Ambrose Bierce, The Iliad and the The Odyssey by Homer, Civil War Stories and The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, First and Second editions of The ‘F’ Word by my Brother-In-Law Jesse Sheidlower (a very scholarly reference book containing everything you ever wanted to know about, well, the ‘F’ word), The Art & Adventure of Beekeeping by Aebi, Selected poems and prose of Edgar Allen Poe, Wuthering Heights by Bronte, Man and Superman by GB Shaw, Chagall (Zahava’s book), Short works of HD Thoreau, Last of the Mohicans by JF Cooper, Alaska by Micherner, Waiting for Gedot by Becket, The Plays of Anton Chekov, Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut, Kentucky Moonshine (a how-to guide) by Maurer, Zohar (don’t ask… it was a gift), How to Clean Practically Anything, The complete Book of Breastfeeding (no, not mine), East of Eden and Cannery Row by Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday is on my night table), Foe by J.M Coetzee, The Passion by Winterson, What it Feels Like (an Esquire selection), The Red Letter Press Book of Bathroom Trivia (another gift),The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley, Jesse’s Word of the Day (another book by my Brother-In Law), Bookbinding and Conservation By Hand by Young, Miss Manner’s Guide to Rearing Perfect Children and Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.

Next up is the music I own. This one stumped me. Did he mean this:

Or perhaps this:

There is at least one more wine crate of CDs somewhere in the house but I couldn’t lay my hands on it. The fact is I haven’t had much use for the CDs since I started using my iPod.

The third request is the one that I’ve been unable to fulfill. I am never home during the week at sunset, and on Friday and Saturday I can’t use the camera at that time of day. What to do… what to do?

So I decided to include a couple of pictures that were taken in Tzfat (Safed) last year of some beautiful stone carving on the side of a synagogue. I am a sucker for wood and stone carving (especially geometric patterns) and these made me think of the sun.

I hope these substitutions are acceptable:

Thanks everyone for continuing to send in Photo Friday requests. I’m going to have a lot of fun trying to fulfill them.

Shabbat Shalom!