Jewlicious commentors rule.

Especially when they buy the beer.

This is difficult for me to admit, but being a member of a star blogteam like Jewlicious doesn’t come with the perks I thought it would. Oh, sure, I have a string of potential crash pads from Jersey to Jerusalem and sometimes ck buys my loyalty with wholesale American Apparel clothes , but frankly, I wasn’t expecting crash pads and clothes so much as I was expecting palatial dwellings heavy with the aroma of frankincense and tasteful oud music. And dancing girls. Copious, nubile dancing girls.

Unfortunately, in what would turn out to be a pattern, ck totally let me down. But as it turns out, sometimes the best parts of being included in the Jewlicious Entity come not from our despotic leader, but from our commentors.

Allow me to explain. If you’ll recall, I arrived in Israel about three weeks ago sans luggage, place to live, clothes and a significant chunk of my admittedly already tenuous sanity. Night had fallen, it was Shabbat, and I was walking from Mt. Scopus to Rechavia to grovel and plead for shelter from my esteemed co-blogger Laya (okay, I didn’t have to grovel and plead, she actually offered). My route took me through Meah She’arim, the Charedi neighborhood noted primarily for preserving the language and customs of the shtetl, abusing improperly-attired women who pass through, stoning the police for minor slights, and being the location of the infamous the-Middle’s-wife-spitting-incident. As I walked through hoping nobody would throw a specially-prepared non-muktzeh rock at the obvious shaygetz, I heard somebody call out “Michael!” Fairly confident that I probably didn’t have any admirers in a neighborhood where houses don’t have TV, much less Internet access to certain boobalicious Jewish blogs, I kept walking. But then my name was called out again, and I saw two figures in black suits and black hats heading towards me.

Just as I was about to claim that any non-complimentary posts about the Jerusalem Badatz in Jewlicious’ past had in fact been written by the GrandMuffti and that any shiksas skeletons in my closet were all part of a grand misunderstanding, one of the black-suited figures stuck out his hand and said, “Michael! Hi! Ybocher.”

Yes, this apparation who had appeared out of the blackness of a Meah She’arim was none other than friend of Jewlicious and frequent commentor ybocher (and his Gibraltarian friend Nissim). ybocher is sort of the Jewish equivalent of the Last of the Mohicans, a Jew born and raised in Poland, a country, due to certain, ahem, historical unpleasantnesses, with a Jewish population roughly commensurate with that of North Dakota. Ybocher now splits his time between his native land, New York, California and Jerusalem, where he studies at Ohr Someach (but hey, nobody’s perfect). After I recovered from the surprise of being recognized on the street in a Charedi neighborhood from a blog, ybocher and Nissim escorted me along some of the rest of my way.

During the course of the next couple weeks, ybocher was gracious enough to not only convince me come out of my hiding place indoors, but buy all the drinks too. I can offer you Jewlicious readers one solid piece of advice: if you happen to find yourself, for whatever reason, drinking with a Pole, do not attempt to compete. I repeat, do not attempt to compete. Otherwise, in a matter of an hour or two, you will find yourself sobbing in a corner unable to form complete sentences, while the Pole, who has drunk twice as much as you, calmly discusses matters of international finance over a game of chess as if he has ingested nothing harder than Celestial Seasonings.

But anyway, on behalf of myself and Jewlicious, I want to thank ybocher, now back in Poland on his way to New York, for his hospitality, even if I got a hangover. And I also want to razz him on his countrymen electing a former child actor.

Then again, we elected Reagan.

So many thanks to my friend ybocher, and I hereby propose a drinking contest between him and ck upon their next meeting. Poland vs. Morocco…the eternal battle continues. I can’t wait.