The bread of affliction

Stolen from magid: the world's first Matzo Sculpture Competition.

The official theme was "Home," contestant Eric Goldberg said, and his three little matzo dioramas were meant to represent his parents' home, his grandparents' home, and now (the one with the matzo futon), his own home, as an NYU student.

"They gave me a foundation," he said of his family, and you just know that somewhere out there, there are two generations of Goldbergs very proud that their boy is spending his $39,000 education gluing matzos together.

Unfortunately, since this wasn't the winning entry, the article doesn't supply a picture...

Casa Frumoasa: a postscript to Romania

If Romania were a conventional tourist destination, the extraordinary decorative variety of its village houses would be a major selling point, and there would be big glossy books of pictures on sale throughout the country, not to mention the postcards. As it is, it took some detective work when I returned home to track down Jan Harold Brunvand's Casa Frumoasa, a scholarly monograph on the subject, illustrated with an abundance of rather grey black and white photos. Costing, inevitably, about three times what I'd expect to pay for that coffee-table tome. It's an excellent introduction to the subject, and also makes clear how much of what struck me - the boldness of the colours, the exuberantly cut and folded sheet metal - is a modern development of the tradition. But the photographs, while informative, are frustrating - particularly because it is clear from the text (and I think from the quality as well) that these are colour photographs reproduced in monochrome.

So it's a delight, as well as a frustration, to discover that many of these original colour photographs, as well as some others not included in the book, are available on Professor Brunvand's web site.