I love to drive and I drive a ton. Somehow my odometer in my 99 Subaru reads 235,000 miles. Driving and music are a fitting combination and thats great because I love music too. I was recently talking with my buddy Kalman a fellow music junky who drives a lot for work and he told me he rarely listens to music in the car anymore. I was shocked and proceeded to call him a sellout, mamzer and a bunch of other unmentionables. After all why would someone have 10,000 albums downloaded onto an external hard drive with a full 60gb I-pod if they weren’t listening to music. His answer was that he has decided to become productive while driving.
What, head banging to punk rock, 80s metal and klezmer wasn’t productive enough for him? I thought about how much nose picking I get done in the car, and all the calories I add while munching on sugar laden road snacks, and all the sight seeing I can do to the sweet sounds of the Dead and random bluegrass stuff.
Books on tape, mussar shmuzim, chofetz chaim yomi?!!!!!!!!! Dude your not 45 years old and going through a midlife crisis I said. Remembering all those poison shows and jam band hippie affairs, and watching them go down the drain in the name of productivity. 5 guys in fishnets and makeup singing about cruising the boulevard on the night is not that productive I learned.
Then something interesting happened. I know the dudes from The Shmuz and one of my old buddies said he would “hook” me up with some stuff to listen to and than I can be productive at a low price. The website only charges $3 for a cd of the famous Rabbi Shafer throwing his maddening mussar at you with powerful punches and with a whole ton of useless factoids such as a short history of Walt Disney and the story of the first oil discovery in Pennsylvania in 1865. Yes indeed I could learn Torah improve myself and gain good useless information to use on my next shidduch. What did I have to lose?
As I listen to the stack of seven cd’s I just got frum Yechiel Zlotnick at The Shmuz I will review the different shmuzim.
4 responses so far ↓
1 // Feb 10, 2007 at 7:24 pm
You forgot to mention that you can download the Shmuz for free in mp3 format at THESHMUZ.COM. They also have streaming video of most of the shmuzim with a PDF of footnotes on the site. It isn’t really necessary to pay 3 bucks for a cd.
2 // Feb 10, 2007 at 8:55 pm
For those of us who do not have access to the internet it is a great service to buy those cd’s. And yes they rock and make the car ride feel like a beis medresh
3 // Feb 12, 2007 at 10:06 am
Does that low price include the sexy bumper sticker for your car. That sticker is such a chic magnet.
4 // Feb 12, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Yo dont be rockin the coolest bumper sticker since the support your troops ribbons came out. I rock one of them- they are free after all. It sits proudly next to my sticker that states “I drove the Alaska Highway both ways” so if you see those stickers on a Subaru outback you know its me.
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