So, I'm the Ultimate Answer, Right?

The world is expected to hit SEVEN BILLION in the next few weeks, and I'm kind of scared and horrified. Considering that in 1900 there was only 1.6 Billion people, we've done some insane growing. Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know. But I do know that this BBC "What's Your Number?" thing is pretty cool.

As for me -- being born on September 30, 1983 makes me ...

the 4,715,318,382nd person alive on Earth 

and

the 79,459,287,777th person to have lived since history began

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but if you add up all the digits of what number person alive I am on earth, it adds up to 42, which, according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life. So that makes me the answer, right? 

Even more scary? These facts. 

What's next? The global population will continue to increase during your lifetime and beyond, reaching 10 billion by 2083. However, the rate of growth is expected to slow. Little of the current growth is happening in developed countries like yours. 

[So when I turn 100, the world population will have increased 20 fold since 1500. *Shiver.*]

Longer lives: In your area, women can expect to have one or two children. People are also living longer. This means people of working age like you will be supporting increasing numbers of older people. By 2050, there will be just 2.2 working-age people supporting every person 65 or older. In Europe, this will drop to two. 

[Awesome! So ... I really should start saving now.]

Battle for resources: It is estimated that your group of the richest countries consumes double the resources used by the rest of the world. The UN estimates that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. [

NASA better hurry up and find us some more planets to destroy ...]

Did you know? By mid-century, the world's urban population is likely to be the same size as the global population was in 2004. 

[This scares me more than the stat that the amount of bandwidth used by YouTube is equivalent to the bandwdith used by the entire internet in 2000.]

850 people: the amount the population has grown while you've been on this site

[I wonder how many were conceived ....]

Should this make me not want to have babies? Or to contribute to world growth so that we'll adopt some other planets and stop killing this one? It kind of also makes me want to do more to be green, recycle, and stop spending money. 

We'll see if any of that happens.

A Published Newsie, Again

The first "news" article I ever wrote was way back in college when I worked as a copy editor and copy desk chief at The Daily Nebraskan -- the official newspaper of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and proud owner of many Student Pulitzer Prizes, not to mention a later deadline than the actual local paper (making it an awesome place to work for breaking news).

You see, I wanted the Arts and Entertainment editor to write up a piece on a Slam Poetry competition in Omaha, but he just didn't have the manpower. "If you want it in the paper, write it yourself," he said. So I did, and I never wrote another. Too much pressure, a chance of being edited, inability to write my own headline.

But my good friend @Mottel pointed someone in my direction and thus comes the second, long-awaited installment in my "news" reporting career, this time for Lubavitch.com.

Read the article here!

And if you really want to read my first "news" story ever published, it's here. 

Note: I wrote a lot of satire pieces for the Daily Halfasskan, which was our April 1 joke issue. For some reason writing fake, hilarious stories carried a lot less pressure than "real" news. 

The Every-now-and-again Hodgepodge Post

For some reason, my dermatologist is fascinated with kabbalah (that is, he's fascinated with all the hoopla), so during my procedure today I explained what (little) I know about it to him. When I was there last week, he asked questions about why I was Jewish, if you recall, which I blogged about here. I just thought it was interesting, and if anything, it kept my mind off of the bit that was going on on my back. Two weeks of gauzing and healing and hopefully I'll be done dealing with this blasted problem. It's funny because I asked him whether genetics play a role in skin cancer, and he said that a lot of the time they do, but a lot of the time it's also time spent in the sun. The thing is ... I don't know if you all have looked at me lately, but I'm the last person you see sun bathing. I learned to love my pasty-white skin early on and I actually avoid the sun most of the time. How peculiar then, eh?

At any rate, I thought I'd share a few tidbits of information I found lately relating to the world o' Judaism in some capacity or another. So here you go, all the stuff that's fit to print.

+ Starring presently as Squeak in Oprah's The Color Purple is someone you might not suspect to be a Jew! It's Stephanie St. James, who is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. St. James, whose father is a Guyenese-born Israeli, identifies herself as neither African or American, but identifies very strongly with her Jewish roots and intends on raising her eventual children in a Jewish home. You can read her story here.

+ I know I blogged about the only kosher culinary school before, but I can't seem to find a link. The school, Jerusalem Culinary Institute located in Israel, was sort of a difficult venture for Jews in the Diaspora. Though many successful Jewish and kosher cooks come out of other programs, many have wanted and sought out a school that focuses on kosher cooking. Well, guess what!? Recently opened in Flatbush in New York is the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts. The intensive program is six weeks and costs a mere $4,500. There's a story by JTA here.

+ A new documentary focuses on the gap between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, questioning when and how it happened. The film follows American Jews of all walks as they visit Israel. I guess the film came out earlier this year, but it's the first I'm hearing about it unless I completely missed something. The film is called Eyes Wide Open and you can visit the website here.

+ Over on Jewsbychoice.org, Shimshonit has blogged about an upcoming book by Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis. Yes, had I chosen Brandeis over UConn, I could probably have experienced greatness. But, well, those hefty student loans just didn't appeal to me. At any rate, his new book sounds pretty fascinating. The book, A Time to Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew, explores not so much the why to be Jewish, but the how. From what I can gather, it's an essential introduction/reintroduction to Judaism.




That's all for now, readers. Come back tomorrow when hopefully I have something worthwhile to say about my impending move to Connecticut where I will have to settle into a college-style Jewish community, how it will relate/compare to my undergraduate experience, and what it means for shul-going ... and how often I might trek myself down to NYC for some Jew-time on the weekends (Peter Pan buses, hooray!).