Five middle names? And I thought my friend with the middle name "L" was strange.

It's definitely a small world. Today I have been dealing with a case from Orange County and sending emails to a worker in Goshen...

If you have to go up there, visit the Hall of Fame of the Trotter. I think Hanna Ingber had her Ba[something] Mitzpha there. I seem to remember Liz Gaines figuring in prominently. I might have touched her hip, yes, I'm pretty sure that happened.

I haven't been there since.

Actually, if you do have to go to Goshen, let me know, I'll tell you how to behave like a Goshenite. I've been to Williamsburg 4 times, it's only fitting. Never really raced well there.

Yes, I believe that the Hall o' Fame o' the Trotter was the designated bar/bat mitz"pha" venue for all 5 of the Jewish kids in Goshen. I think it helped that their parents collectively owned/ran the town.

I would like to see a showdown between either of the Ingber gals & Weissiecakes, actually.

I have no middle name, because I have a too-big first name, which is a compound name, and two of my daughters have the same middle name, which is the first half of my first name, and while I wouldn't have done it that way myself from the start, one of the twins came with that middle name already, and we only changed their first names when we adopted them, but kept their middle names, which were attached to other members of their natal family. Hence I have two daughters with the same middle name. And I'm sure some of those commas should have been semi-colons but Boston is going to choke again, so I don't care.

But I would be interested in what a bar/bat mitvah showdown would look like.

Whoa. You -adopted- twins? Damn. If I ever give birth to twins, can you adopt them as well? If not, I think I'd have to kill myself at that point.

Come to think of it, twins run on both sides of my family: one set in my generation, the other set the generation prior. What are my chances? Does that mean it's likely I'll have quadruplets?

"Francis ... counteracted by ... Vladimir... I need a ruling on that."

If Big Mike still has the executive chair, no balance has been achieved and Francis wins.

Big Mike is about 3 weeks away from a catastrophic heart attack. I'm biding my time. The coroner will show up and he'll be laying across his desk with no chair. A forklift will also be mysteriously parked in the kitchen.

Ya know, Bess, I seem to recall reading that fraternals don't really "run" in families, that the monozygotic identicals are hereditary, but that dizygotic frats are largely coincidental when there is a recurrence in a familial line. Now, statistically, I don't know why that would be so, but I think that's the way I read it.

But I will tell you this... do not wait until you are "older" to have your babies, because it vastly increases the likelihood of twins, because older women tend to more frequently release multiple ova. Which is dumb planning on the part of the Planner, if you ask me (and He didn't), because a twin pregnancy is HARD, and VERY hard on the bod of an older mama.

And if you ARE prone to twins because of a family history of monozygotic identicals, AND you wait until you're older so that you have multiple-ova releases, then you could pop off a dizygotic ovulation that results in two sets of monozygotic twins, and then, yeah, you'd have quads, and let me tell you what THAT would do to your bod. Bummer.

I had that working the other way around- that fraternals ran in families and identicals didn't, or at least not to a statistically significant level. I have something like "if you are a fraternal twin your odds of having twins increases 5-fold" in my mind, but I have no idea where I'm pulling that from. I was going out with a fraternal twin for a while, but we don't have any kids, so I can't back this up with any personal experience.

I can tell you that around 4% of all shipped eggs (you know, like from chickens in grocery stores) contain two yolks.

I feel like the tendency to drop multiple eggs at a time would be more genetically linked than the tendency to split your egg too many times in the early stage of embryo building.

Okay, here's the story, then the skinny:

"4% of all shipped eggs (you know, like from chickens in grocery stores) contain two yolks"

EXCELLENT statistic. I was once making an omelet for my brother and cracked an egg open and there were two yolks in it. At the time, I was trying to conceive, and according to the Old Wives, this is a harbinger of impending birth, so I was stoked, and trotted the bowl around to everyone in the house to look at the two yolks. Then I cracked the next egg, and it ALSO had two yolks. I flipped. Then trotted the bowl around the house again to the oohs and ahhhs of all. Then I cracked the third egg (because a good omelet has THREE eggs, of course) and with SIX yolks in the bowl, I merely stood in the kitchen howling until everyone in the house came running in to look at them. What are the odds of that? You can do the math... But my mama didn't raise no dummies, so I figured that the odds of three eggs in one carton all having double yolks was so astronomically off the hook that I considered it FAR more likely that some smart-ass at Oliveira Egg Ranch had grabbed all the doubles from the candling table and put them in a single carton for a lark. So I cracked another egg and A-YUH! And another and another... . I wished the carton came with one of those "This package inspected by (name)" tags, just so I could give the guy props. Such a good stunt.

Okay, here's the data: "A couple has a 1 in 80 (1.2%) chance of delivering twins; monozygotic twins occur in 1 out of every 250 births (0.4%) and dizygotic twins in 1 in 170 (0.6%) in the U.S. A woman who is herself a fraternal twin has a 1 in 10 (10%) chance of delivering twins. If she is an identical twin she has only a 1 in 170 (0.6%) chance of delivering twins.

The cause of monozygotic twinning is unknown. Fewer than 20 families have been described with an inherited tendency towards monozygotic twinning. (People in these families have a nearly 50 percent chance of delivering monozygotic twins!) Some evidence suggests that the environment of the womb causes the zygote to split in most cases."

So I stand corrected.

"Dizygotic twins are slightly more likely in blacks, in women between 30 and 40 years old, in tall and heavy women, in women who conceive soon after stopping birth control pills, and in women who have had several previous pregnancies." ... So I qualified in three out of five of those. Hmmf.

That's how I came to research that as well, though I only got 2 twin-yolked eggs in a row...

http://jankowski.bigwhoop.org/images/photos/2004/04/october-fun-week/eggs.jpg

If you hadn't been screwed over by an egg packing prankster, and the eggs were in fact randomly sorted and packed, you'd have a 1 in 15,625 chance of getting three twin-yolked eggs in a row.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

NoNONONONONo!!

Put the mouse down and move slowly away from the computer, Eric...

This looks drug induced! Or else it's going to induce drugs.... ARRRGH!!

See those little rectangular icons? You can click on them. The "fugly.css" stylesheet is under the white and grey one at the moment.

This is to celebrate the most significant sporting event of the past decade, possibly since 1986. Other than to mention how embarrassing it must be for Yankees fans to see the upper deck emptying by the 6th inning and to hear the Red Sox fans taking over the house that Ruth built in the 8th, I can't gloat solely because I hate the Yankees. The last 3 nights of baseball, however, make me reconsider my position that the entire league should be disbanded. I'd settle for just giving hockey the axe at this point.

Interesting how it's back to your old link section...including the porn site that's not mikey b's old address and no mention of this Red Sox fan.

Okay, not only are these colors jarringly out of whack, but the format is all screwed up and you're linking to a site of mine that no longer exists.

I am, however, pleased to know that you are not a Yankees fan. That is somewhat pleasantly surprising.

I find the colors oddly soothing. It makes me relax, taking me to a happy place where children run free and dogs chase tennis balls.

Harrrumph. Whaddya gotta do to get a good headstone around this joint?

Eric, I'm really surprised that these other Gosheners I'm acquainted with actually considered you a friend. I mean, you rooted against the Yankees. You're like the only person from Orange County who roots against the Yankees. Wait...my cousin did this year because they traded her hottie Andy Petite. Other than that, it's unheard of. And certainly amongst your social circle.

Back in 1996, I rooted for the Yankees because it had been 18 years, "18 f***ing years!". It was exciting and all that. Since then I have grown to hate them.

Heck, at this point I even like the Red Sox. However, in general I don't like baseball too much. It's so boring for 162 games a year, only to get interesting in the fall.

The best was when Goshen fireballer Dave Pahucki, a classmate and friend of Matt et al was drafted by the Red Sox. It was an unfortunate event for them I think.

It's horrible for us, but he was always a Mets fan, so how much did he know anyway? We do have a Dave Pahucki (boston uniform and all) baseball card residing on our refrigerator though, so it's not all hatred, it's distanced respect.

You think we could have any effect with a write-in campaign to get him added to their WS roster?

Dave Pahucki was drafted by the Red Sox?!

[insert Kujawski-style "Whattt?!" here]

i hope you guys aren't planning on running for office. did you really mean to highlight your anti-semitism on the web?

I think I'm still clear to run for public office if we look only at this post. Any rulings?

But in general, yes, I think you've stumbled upon the site's mission statement: "highlight anti-semitism on the web". It's just an overview, the high points if you will. Not really promote, necessarily, just highlight. And only as it pertains to the web. Oh, how I've missed your luxuriantly thin skin.

Well, looks like the gang's all here now.

Yes, Furstie, discussing Karl's 5 middle names is clearly anti-semitic behavior. So is not knowing how to spell bat mitzvah. You should be ashamed of yourself.

And if I ever decide to run for office, I will beg you to delete my comments from this post. It can never be known that I declared that 1990s Goshen was run by the parents of its 5 Jewish kids, via a hidden command center in the basement of the Trotting Horse Museum.

No no...it CAN and SHOULD be known, because that's actually true! I'd use their actual names, but as I've pointed out before, there are certain people in Orange County who would profit considerably from my "untimely demise", as it were. I believe that any more public name calling (I've already identified the county executive) would rattle the wrong skeletons and what have you, possibly motivating them to bring their plans for me into fruition.

It's not just Goshen. We're also running the media, Wall Street, the Bush administration, the banking industry, the legal field and don't forget medicine. We see you when you're sleeping, we know when you're awake, we know when you've highlighted anti-semitism on the web, so you better be yid for yiddness sake ...

Just in case you've come here looking for the source of the whole Hanna Ingber Antisemitism and Goshen Defamation Debacle, but you haven't read the entire sordid history with the whole cast list, I'll just add right here that the above smart-assed comment was posted by a Jew, a proud, Jew-loving Jew, living in Florida, never been to Goshen.

You can read more about my Jewishness here http://furst.bigwhoop.org/archives/002833.html#comment-9519, or here http://ae.bigwhoop.org/archives/002827.html or lots of other places you could google up. If you enter my first name and google that, you'll even get my challah recipe.

It's my people and that's my fun poke at what I then thought was a sarcastic, light-hearted comment. Boy, was I mistaken. But go back to those other places for that story. I just wanted to clear that point up here, since my self-deprecating Jewish humor has been used to call my friends anti-semites, and I don't think that was very nice.

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