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Dan's avatar

On the coins to part with... I know nothing about coins, but a man experienced in buying and selling collections once observed to me the following:

The person evaluating your collection should not be the person who in the same breath is proposing to buy it. For then they have an incentive to undervalue massively. Pay an expert a fee to provide an accurate valuation. That should be an entirely separate transaction from the act of selling.

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Dan's avatar

Yes, being Jewish in a country where the majority are Jewish is a massively different experience from being Jewish in the diaspora.

There are also differing degrees of diaspora-ness (diaspority?). One of the charms of Los Angeles for me is how Jewish culture is relatively normal compared with my experiences in the UK as part of a much smaller minority.

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Faith Current's avatar

your comment is a lovely counterpoint to the one I just wrote about Europe/the UK!

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Oleg Kagan's avatar

Even in the greater Los Angeles area it depends on where you are. There are many more Jews in West LA than in the San Gabriel Valley or Boyle Heights. Though, interestingly, Boyle Heights was a fledgling Jewish community 100 years ago.

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Faith Current's avatar

the observation about a common faith binding together a culture is not without merit, even if that faith is secular/cultural rather than practiced. I experience this whenever I'm in Europe, more so on the continent than in British, but also there. Even in the secular culture of Europe (far more secular than the US -- they don't fight about whether religion should be taught in schools, etc. the way we do because. reasons.), I can fee a cultural cohesion that I don't feel elsewhere. Cultural monuments, traditions are quietly bound up in the common spiritual heritage and even though my thoughts on organized religion are... less than charitable... I can't deny that it gives the vibe in a European city a substance and a richness that seems utterly lacking in the US.

It's weirder in Britain, because the constitutional monarchy makes the sovereign the head of the church and I think that makes people in very secular modern Britain a bit more uneasy than in, say, France, where they got rid of all that stuff in the revolution. But it's still there and again, there's substance there that's lacking here.

PS -- for what it's worth, and your Lady may be the exception and if so, god speed on the calisthenics, but I have yet to meet a woman who pants after the guy in the video. He looks too much like a cartoon. (tbf, I don't experience sexual attraction to men (or women), so I may be attracting friends who feel similarly)

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Oleg Kagan's avatar

I wonder if that cultural feeling you get on your visits to Europe has to do with the living history in those places. When I was in London many years ago, I saw a plaque on a building about it being there in the middle ages, which was significant because most of Los Angeles isn't even a century old.

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Faith Current's avatar

I'm familiar with what you're referring to, but no, that's more the standard thing people tend to notice in Europe. I'm talking about something quite different and much more subtle, the way that the religious history of Europe weaves itself into the culture there in a way that doesn't, at least to me, feel pushy or intrusive of religious freedom or separation of church and state, but still somehow infuses everything. I doubt I'll find the words for it here, but it's quite distinct from the sense of history you're referencing.

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Oleg Kagan's avatar

Well, at the very least, there are many religious landmarks that are visited by nonreligious people and are not used by most residents as places of worship.

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Oleg Kagan's avatar

I forgot to mention something I thought when I first saw your comment: I'm not doing calisthenics because it'll make me more attractive to Ashley or anyone else. Personally, I do think the guy in that video is handsome. I also see that his hard work has paid off in figure that he seems pleased with which inspires me. That said, my goals with exercise don't include looking a certain way or any kind of aesthetic consideration; for me it's all about general fitness and attaining specific capabilities (ie a 5K in a certain time, 100 burpees, etc).

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da-AL's avatar

my husband is from Iran, where basically anyone born Muslim better stay that lest horrible things happen to them & their loved ones. so here we have the wonderful luxury of not having to be religious. my father grew up in Spain, during Franco's worst, when was Catholicism was forced, so he was over joyed to not be religious here. dunno about coins except for the great town squares in Barcelona where old men would gather to trade them & stamps. It seems that the worth of something is way different than actually getting someone to pay that, alas. as for exercise, I'm enjoying zumba right now - it's a total happiness pill amid extraordinarily friendly classmates, no matter the club

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Oleg Kagan's avatar

Sounds like you're getting something like a runner's high from Zumba, which makes sense! In general, I suspect there's a primal satisfaction in moving in tandem with others. Sherwood Anderson wrote a very bad novel about this idea called "Marching Men".

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da-AL's avatar

maybe a bit of a runner's high - more, tho - dancing, music, fun people...

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