Barth Gimble makes everything better.

“I spent Purim at a shiva” is just further proof that phrases that sound great as Country & Western titles are a lot less fun when they describe your life. Four people I know died in the past week, among them an uncle for whom “beloved” was a lot more than a term in an obituary.

And we’ve got Pesach cleaning to look forward to.

So praise the Lord for YouTube, which not only lets me watch Manfred Mann and his band do “My Name Is Jack” the three times a week that I’m in the mood to do so, but also features this, by Manfred’s brother-in-initials, Martin Mull, who wouldn’t care that Manfred’s real name is Lubowitz. Now that I seem to have become a food writer (“not so much a cholent, as a meditation on tummy upsets”), I find that Mull’s song sums up my own attitude to the reaper in one little phrase. (YouTube wouldn’t let me embed the video here – but please go look. You won’t regret it.)