Wednesday, March 21, 2001

All right, let's check on Springfield's most renowned near-Jewish family. The idea came to us from a site submission from Brian Rosman, who owns the Web's coolest religious Jewish site. No one compares to you, Brian Rosman, you're wonderful. And you're not even paying for this poetry. So, let's look at Simpsons and Jews...

W e d.C l e v e r

Counting the Homer

Krusty the Clown's father, Rabbi Krustofski, says this year, don't count the omer, count the Homer! Homer Simpson, that is...

The Homer Calendar is an interactive way to track the counting of the omer with Homer Simpson. I created the calendar as a lark last year (it's basically one joke taken to a ridiculous extreme), but it struck a chord and we had over 20,000 hits from all over the world. Rabbis were posting each day's page in synagogues, friends were emailing the site address all over, and it was a lot of fun. So this year I improved it substantially. For each day, you can find the blessing, count and a different Homer Simpson picture. There's now a one-page downloadable Homer Calendar that people can print out, covering the whole omer period.

One word about the Omer Counting thing: On the second day of Passover in ancient times, our ancestors brought the first sheaf of barley (amounting to a measure called "an omer") reaped that season as an offering to God. From that day, they began counting the 49 days to Shavuot, when they would celebrate the beginning of the wheat harvest by offering the loaves made of the first wheat.