It was a question everyone was asking, yet no one knew the answer.  Yonah was killed in a car accident and therefore could not be asked.  Why was Yonah where he was when he was killed?  He should have driven a different route to work!  He was in the wrong area!  He never drove in this direction!  Why was he there?

The answer came one night when the family had a guest visit the house of mourning.  The guest sat down and began a story that would answer this question and sum up Yonah Goldman’s life.

It was raining hard and there was a woman waiting for a ride on the side of the road.  She was soaked from head to toe.  Yonah, on his way to work, saw her and decided to pull over and offer her a ride.  She was not exactly heading to the same location as Yonah, but was in the same general direction.  Yonah offered her a ride without hesitation.  Realizing he could not just let her off in the pouring rain, he said he would take her to the nearest gas station, where she would have shelter, and a place to ask other drivers for rides to where ever she was headed.

As Yonah pulled out of the gas station his car was hit by a truck.  He was not killed immediately.  He was in and out of consciousness for almost an hour before finally being called by the holy one.  A Rabbi who had witnessed the accident stayed with Yonah the entire time saying Tehillim, Vidui/Confession, and finally the Shema.

No one in the family was surprised when they heard this story.  This was Yonah’s life.  He loved to help others, make others smile.  He would do everything he can to help.

Please show your love and support to Yonah and his family.  If you are a member of Facebook please join the Yonah Memorial group.  Please post stories and pictures.  The family is part of this group and they read and view everything. I am in the process of setting up a fund to help his wife Dina and son Benyamin. I will post more details as they become available.

He was such a sweet hearted person, always with a smile, always telling jokes.  I will surely miss him.

He leaves behind a wife and sone, less than a year old.

Yonah, we will all miss you!

UPDATE 12/3/2007:

Sorry for not writing sooner.  I am in contact with two organizations that are working out setting up some way to make a donation.  One will be for people located in Israel and one for people located in America.  I will post more information when it becomes available.

I have spent the last week thinking of all the good times I had with Yonah.  His untimely death shocked me very hard and I felt I was not as good of a friend as I could have been to Yonah.  I decided I had to visit the family.  I had missed the funeral and I “owed” it to Yonah to visit his family.

I must say I felt much better after visiting the family in Kiryat Arba.  They were so full of smiles talking about Yonah.  I myself was full of smiles.  Yonah’s mother told me that Yonah lived his dream, “he lived more years than most people living in a complete lifetime”.  She didn’t need to tell me this, I knew it.  I spent years with Yonah trying to figure out how to live in Israel.  Where to study, where to find the best jobs and where to raise our children.

Yonah will be here forever, he was buried on Har Hamenuchot, in Givat Shaul.

 You can read more about how Yonah was killed doing a chesed/kind deed.

Let me know what you think.

I am still trying to understand this entire episode in Las Vegas.  The reason I am still trying is because I refuse to use the necessary brain cells to figure it out.  OJ Simpson, the man EVERYONE knows, the one who’s old “collectible” jersey was in that hotel room, tells his friends to “pack heat”.  What an idiot!  He deserves to go to jail just for being that stupid!

It will be a crime if he did not go to jail, not for the fact he “packed heat”, rather for the fact he is bound to do something else stupid and we will have to deal with his face and name in the media again.

My wife reported to me over the phone that the our youngest was whizzing and the doctor wanted us to continue the nebulizer for 5 days.  Sounds like fun having to hold a mask on a child less than a year old.  THEY HATE IT.  But, we have no choice so we will do what we got to do.  This was hopefully going to help with the not sleeping and throwing up.  I was not so convinced…

The weekend was very rough.  I do not think I have slept a complete night in a week!  My oldest son is fine and by Sunday the itching was gone but not the bumps; they are still slowly going away.  Points to the Doc!  My younger son on the other hand was not doing to well.  He was up most of the last 3 nights.  He looks spaced out, not happy, not eating very much, and threw up so many times I stopped counting,which is not helping his lack of growth.  He hated the nebulizer so much we stopped doing it after the second treatment, plus the fact he threw up after each time.

On Sunday I looked to the heavens for help… and I got it!!  The babysitter called my wife to tell her the baby was running a fever.  I was so happy I decided to leave work and pick up the baby myself.  Now you probably asking yourself, why did we send the baby to the babysitter if he was not feeling well?  Simply because we had no reason not to send him.  He had no temperature, the doctor didn’t say not to and there was no way to pinpoint what was wrong. 

We have a temperature.  The best thing about a temperature is a doctor will most likely find the cause of the temperature and the problem will either be viral or bacterial.  If the problem is viral, you are out of luck and just have to suffer through whatever it is you have.  If it is bacterial, ANTIBIOTICS!  Later that night we had even better news.  The babysitter called again to tell us one of the children in group had Shigella.  It was getting better by the minute.  The doctor will have no choice but to finally give antibiotics.

Well, Monday morning my wife took the baby to his regular doctor.  The baby’s blood test came back and overall it was fine, except he is lacking iron.  The doctor said to stop the nebulizer, feed the baby soy based formula instead of milk based and PRESCRIBED ANTIBIOTICS.

You have to understand me.  I am not a big fan of antibiotics and neither is my wife.  She is into holistic medicine, message therapy and so on.  It also happens to be our doctor is not big into antibiotics, which is one of the reason we like him so much.  He likes to wait things out, try other methods to solve problems.  He tends to use antibiotics only when needed, and yes, sometimes that need is more for the parents than the child, but in this case it was for the child.  Our Baby had an ear infection.

Our baby started antibiotics at 4:00 p.m. and only received one dosage (it is for 2 times daily so we couldn’t give it twice on Monday).  The difference – our baby slept through the night for the first time in a week!  A gift from heaven.

On a brisky, cold fall morning… 

It has been a rough week. Both of my children have been sick. Usually it is not all bad but both my children were sick and we had no idea what was wrong with either one. That is simply the worst. It all started Friday morning…

Somehow Fridays has become “the day at the doctors” day. It turned out to be a family trip this Friday. My oldest son had itchy bumps on his left arm, which started to spread slightly, but could not be anything bacterial because he just finished antibiotics for an ear infection. My younger son, well, he is a book to write about (not gaining enough weight, cough for a month, throwing up randomly, .etc). This particular Friday he had wheezing, coughing, and throwing up, talk about a triple play.

We did not see our regular doctor because he was not available so we went to the next available doctor.  Sometimes it pays off because the new doctors tend to take a step back and look at the general picture.

So…

Our oldest son he thought out loud about a bunch of different possibilities (even if I could remember what he said, I probably couldn’t even spell them… on the other hand, I could not even guess how to spell them!), He called in another doctor for a second opinion and told us “let us see how it is by Monday. If it goes away, who cares what it was, and if it doesn’t, come back. BECAUSE if it does not go away it WILL get worse and then we will be able to make a prognosis.” Now that sounds like a plan. Continue suffering and I will see you in a few days.

Our youngest was not that simple. The doctor ordered blood tests, nebulizer test, and come back on Tuesday to see his regular doctor.

Well there was no point on keeping our oldest around the doctor’s office so I was “sent” “home” with the oldest.

FYI…

“sent” = I can’t take care of the youngest anyways so it makes sense for me to leave.

And

“home” = stop by the super market, with the sick older kid, and pickup (what ends up being a huge list)… on your way home.

To Be Continued…

I know many of you will say “Google has the right to decide what goes in their index”, well they did, BUT things have changed and they do not now! Hell, the government and the courts have said it in the past, but things have changed drastically in the past few years.

Today Google controls more than 60% of the search market and that number is growing. This has happened to many companies in the past – they grow too big, become pricks, and the government needs to come in and control them. Case study most of us will remember – Microsoft. Does Microsoft have the right to bundle whatever they want into their operating system? No! Why not? Simply because they control the market and they hurt competition!

It is not just the fact Google is the most used search engine. It is also the fact that a very large part of their revenues come from Adsense. To quickly explain what adsense is – Google has a program that allows websites to run ads. When someone clicks on the ads, Google and the webmaster share the revenue. When a web site decides to run its own ads instead of using Adsense, Google is losing out on revenue, BIG revenue.

You still want proof that Google controls the market? The fact that every web site owner is now changing their underwear because of the latest PageRank update shows how much power Google really has and when you combine it with their control of the “Ad sense” market, MONOPOLY! Let me lay it out in a simpler way:

*Google: We need to raise our revenue. Let us get more websites to join adsense. But in order to do that we need to kill the “link sales” market.

*Web site owner to Google: “Google, we don’t want to share revenue with you. We want to sell our own ads space and keep 100% of the revenue.”

*Google: &^%$ (pick any 4 letter word) you!!!!! We will force you to use our revenue sharing system. We will penalize anyone selling text link ads (the fact they say if it with “no-follow” or thru a reroute you won’t get penalized is a joke. How the hell can anyone tell you how to sell ads and it lowers the value of the ad, directly affecting the revenue of the web site owner!)

*Web site owner: Bring it on!

* Google: NO TRAFFIC FOR YOU!

*****Google = TRAFFIC NAZIS! ****

If you read deeper into it you will find the news mentioned something about tax write offs?  I am not an accountant, but I have done financial reporting for departments in large corporations.  Things sseemed to be doing a bit better with the last three quarters ending in profits, but apparently that was just bogus, inflated or bull*&^$ (take your choice).  It is kinda crazy a company can hid losses that big for such a long time.

Either-way, it would be nice to be in a position to have that money to lose.

*Do not stand in front of the team banner when 50 strong, adrenalin rushing, well padded, football players are rushing the field!

It is a shame people have to bring up blond (just read some of the comments on YouTube). This is all about being obsessive. What is the difference if the banner is falling apart when it is about to be destroyed?

My take on this – Don’t get obsessed with something if it really doesn’t make a difference.

Note: Nice grab by the cop and below the belt on comparing Britney Spears to a monkey!