Something cheesy this way comes

Why I don't subscribe to the Washington Jewish Week

2009-07-12T22:03:59Z

So I don't normally read The Washington Jewish Week - I find that "weakly Jewish" would be a better characterization, and clearly they're describing a world in which I don't much find myself.

However, Sarah brought home one this week because of a cover story involving a brouhaha in the suburbs, and I read it after I finished Axis. In particular, the story "http://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=11065">Music enlivens Friday nights at local shuls</a> got my attention.

Of note, the term shul (lit. "school") is a Yiddish term for a Synagogue, and usually describes smaller Orthodox synagogues. Very few Reform or Conservative congregations refer to their houses of worship as "shuls" - Reform typically use either "Temple" or "Congregation," and Conservative congregations typically use the term "congregation" or occasionally the Hebrew beit kenesset (house of assembly). You do find folks using the term "going to shul" in the Conservative world, but I have not encountered that formulation much in the Reform world (of course, I don't hang so much in Reform circles, so perhaps I've missed something).

Anyway, the article goes on to talk about how musical Friday night services have been attracting lots of folks at various synagogues, and includes the following howler:

Still, while using musical instruments is considered chillul Shabbat (desecration of the Sabbath) in the Orthodox domain and among some traditional Conservatives, lively Friday services filled with singing, dancing and clapping -- "Carlebach services" (after the noted "Singing Rabbi," Shlomo Carlebach) -- have been adopted in some Orthodox shuls, although WJW was unable to locate any in the Washington area. (emphasis added)

Let me Google that for you.

So I filled out the contact form, saying:

Apparently the WJW did not look for Orthodox Carlebach services in the greater washington area with any degree of thoroughness, because several exist and are easy to find.

The first google hit for "carlebach minyan dc" points to the service at Kesher Israel every Friday night - this Carlebach service has been occurring weekly for the past 6 years. There are several other Carlebach services at other Orthodox synagogues in the area - each of them is listed on their respective synagogues'' websites.

to which the WJW editor (!) responded:

The article featured musical services that use multiple instruments. Does that Kesher service use instruments?

Now, this is what I'd call piss-poor journalism.

First, there's a description of the Kesher Israel Carlebach minyan on the Kesher web page. Research is your friend.

Second, how in the world does that paragraph refer to Orthodox services which use multiple instruments? Reading comprehension is a good thing for those who work as editors. Furthermore, had the paragraph simply ended at the comma it would have been factually correct and merely showed that the Orthodox approach wasn't the focus of the story; pointing out that research was unsuccessfully attempted simply shows the poor quality of the research. Finally, there have been services at various Orthodox shuls in the Washington area which did use instruments: there have been drum circles and even musical hallel pieces (I'm not a fan, personally, but they're not too hard to find); those services just weren't on shabbat.

So hopefully they'll try a little harder in the future before giving up.

Recent books

2009-07-12T19:26:37Z

I discovered on vacation that P.D. James is not to my taste: I have been steadily experimenting with other genres, and her work was recommended to me as high-quality mystery. I can see what's attractive - her descriptions are full and lavish, and her characters are fully-fleshed out. However, I found that I just wasn't interested in having such a fully-described vision of the world she described. There was a lot more description than story, and that's not what I want to read.

On the other hand, Robert Charles Wilson's book Axis is revelatory. This is the worthy sequel to Spin, which itself was breathtaking in scope. This is the book which makes the shift from Alice to Dorothy: instead of merely reacting to the strange world in which they find themselves, the protagonists act to modify the world. There are some pretty profound moral questions which underly the plot - the entire utilitarian enterprise is questioned pretty mercilessly in it, and we get the first glimmerings of an answer to the nature of the giants in the sandbox. Highly recommended, but will make no sense whatsoever if you haven't read Spin.

Yet Another Modest Proposal, this time for health care

2009-07-12T17:46:29Z

Sarah has suffered from various and sundry conditions for several years, and one of the major components of these conditions has been joint pain. A few years ago, one of the exceptionally effective painkillers, Vioxx, was withdrawn from the market after a bunch of adverse cardiovascular events started occurring. Of note here is that Merck did not disclose the adverse events to the FDA before the drug was brought to market.

Merck withdrew the drug voluntarily, and has gotten its butt handed to it in lawsuits over the issue.

My thought is a little bit narrower - there are lots of drugs out there with non-trivial side effects which are nonetheless prescribed because they are the best available option: remicade, prednisone, MAOI inhibitors, pseudoephidrene, and many others exemplify this - heck, for that matter, asprin can have non-trivial side effects (tinnitus, ulceration, etc). Given this, and that Vioxx's side-effect profile is certainly no worse than prednisone, and that for certain types of joint pain, there is really no comparable alternative, perhaps we should come up with a different remedy?

Here's my idea: cancel Merck's patent for the chemical, and then allow rofecoxib (generic name for Vioxx) to be sold by the various generic drug manufacturers.

This would avoid us having this sort of "exclusionary rule" in medicine - the fact that Merck behaved badly should not deprive those suffering from pain their best hope of relief. A whole bunch of folks, upon hearing that Merck was withdrawing Vioxx, immediately stocked up and can draw a linear relationship between their remaining supply and the number of pain-free days they can expect.

So for all the folks thinking about health care reform, please consider how you'd handle this situation.

Great Neck

2009-07-09T00:28:48Z

Someday, a physician will tell me that the right treatment for what ails me is chocolate milkshakes and blow jobs.

That day wasn't today.

Last Sunday, at band practice, we were doing "What'd I Say" and the big finish (like many rock songs) is timed by one of us (me) jumping, and then everyone stops when I land. However, I didn't realize that I was standing under a duct which left me with about 2" of headroom. Basketball isn't my thing, but I can jump more than THAT...

Add to this the neck stress from the great American wipeout, and you can imagine that this has been an uncomfortable week.

So I saw a chiropractor today for the first time, and it was quite interesting. He adjusted my neck with a couple of sounds I normally associate with horror movies, and leaned on my back in a very strong way. Before he started, he warned me that I would feel kind of beaten up for a day or so, and I can report that this is absolutely true: I feel like georgetowner and Ari played hockey with me as the puck.

However, the treatment for me on a long-term basis is lots and lots of push-ups, except I need to look up (this will strengthen my neck and upper back more). I can report that those are harder than normal ones, and I tire a lot faster at them. I'm still waiting for the pleasant prescription.

Dealing with contractors is like sleeping with prostitutes

2009-07-07T02:55:10Z

You never know what festering sore will turn up later.

In our case, the festering sore left over from the multiply-bungled basement renovation (what? you wanted the closet finished? We never planned to do that!) was uncovered this morning.

But I'll start at the beginning.

A few weeks ago, we started hearing a chirping noise in our house. This is normally what happens when smoke detector batteries go bad, and given who who my family is, we have a whole bunch of smoke & CO detectors. We changed a zillion 9V batteries, and all was settled. Except that it wasn't: it turned out that something continued to chirp - the human annoyance is dwarfed by the effect on poor little Kacy, who would shake so hard that it looked like her tail would fall off. Once the chirping started, she'd go hide under the boxwoods in the backyard.

On Shabbat a few weeks ago, it got bad, and we figured out that there was something going on with the alarm system. We found a neighbor who was willing to take the battery out of the alarm panel, which caused it to change the chirps to more human-annoying beep series. After shabbat, we got the company to send out a tech who told us about the virtues of the "status" button. All well and good.

On Friday, when we returned from the beach, we were greeted with more chirping. We discerned that the powered smoke detectors in the basement, along with the alarm system were causing a problem, and once everything was hard-powered down the chirping stopped. Yesterday morning, we plugged in another detector, and turned the alarm back on. A few hours later, we were rewarded with incessant chirping - faster this time, and after I got home, I timed it to every 36 seconds. We spent about 4 hours last night trying to track it down, basically unplugging every powered device on the first and second floors, and removing batteries from everything that has them.

Still no luck, and the dog was worse for the wear: we "slept" with an air purifier on at about Cessna-engine volume, and I spent another three hours this morning searching for what it could possibly be. We called the alarm company to come out, and the tech put back all of our disconnected pieces and wished us luck, but conclusively showed that it wasn't their stuff.

I pulled out some insulation from the ceiling through a utility closet, and was looking between the finished ceiling and the joists (and the floor above) (this required a flashlight and mirror), and lo and behold, there was another smoke detector, sitting on the wrong side of the ceiling.

Well, #$%&.

The detector isn't attached to anything - it looks like it was just tossed up as the last act before the ceiling was closed up.

I spent another hour attempting to fish this out - it's a full 68" into the ceiling (thus closer to the other wall than to where I can get at it (I was using a tape measure to try to hook it, because there's a wicked 135° angle to make). No dice. However, the detector's battery has stopped for now, so perhaps it's finally given up, and we won't have to rip open the ceiling anyway.

So here is a good example of how a contractor can waste your time and sanity years after the project is completed. The moral of this story is "inspect EVERYTHING yourself."

Answers

2009-07-05T20:54:57Z

Parasailing was awesome. As Sarah put it, "it's cheaper than therapy and so safe that you don't have to sign a liability waiver."

===

There was a Civ game at a friend's house yesterday. One new player, stoic rule in effect, no civ card limit. I drew Babylon, and had one of my best trading games ever. My border was pretty much solely georgetowner (Assyria) and after some initial kerfluffle, we settled down in a way which was much more to my benefit than his. Matt left one turn before we finished (yes, we actually finished the game on shabbat, with enough time to davven minha!), and we declared his stuff to be "pirates" at that point, but I think that the final outcome would have been a lot closer had he not left. I had just lost about half of everything to a civil war (with Matt as the beneficiary), and he would have really had an opportunity to hand my butt to me.

My final score was 4607, and toward the end of the game I had the overwhelming majority of the high-point-value cards (Philosophy, Democracy, Monotheism, Theology, Mathematics, Mining).

I tried one thing this game to great success: I didn't buy low-value cards at the beginning. My first four cards were Music, Deism, Agriculture, and Engineering, in that order. The other trading key is that the five and six card stack are totally the best ones to collect.

Of additional note is the steady improvement of shoshiboo (Africa), who finished second - she's gotten a lot more aggressive, and that's doing well for her.

I do think that a civ card limit would prevent one player (me, in this case) from running away with the score - I probably ended with about 20 civ cards.

===

Gov. Palin's resignation is disappointing to me - I do understand that she's become a whipping girl for the left wing, and that due to this, the Alaskan government may be better off without her than with her. However, it's still disappointing: an essential component of the Western-style-grit which I found so appealing is never surrendering in the face of adversity. So I'm disappointed.

===

From Ari comes this Sluggy Freelance image. Now THAT is an American sentiment, in full-on Toby Keith style...

thegameiam @ 2009-07-03T08:56:00

2009-07-03T13:14:09Z

So Sarah let me back in the water yesterday, and there were no incidents. The woman who had been sitting next to us on the beach asked whether I was okay, and mentioned that she thought the whole thing was awesome. I guess it's like "baywatch" for middle-aged women...

Even better, she and I are going Para-sailing in a couple of hours before heading back home. w00t! Look for me on the evening news, when I do my "up" impersonation...

====

A /. poll has made me think about something. One commentator put it thusly:

Are you sure you're an American? I grew up in a suburb where only "safe and sane" fireworks that didn't blow up or fly were allowed.

People lit off rockets and M-80s all over the place.

I always used to think, "Breaking laws we don't like. What better way to celebrate the true spirit of Independance Day?"

This is sort of the "radar detectors are a libertarian blow for freedom" argument - while it doesn't work in all cases, the ironic use on Independence Day does have some appeal.

===

The Washington Examiner points out a thoroughly inappropriate action on the part of the Washington Post. Perhaps they could use a refresher on what it means for a newspaper to be independent, rather than merely a propaganda arm of entrenched interests.

Newspapers should not just be grease in civil society - they should be the watchmen on the walls of freedom, ever vigilant, and working to ferret out corruption wherever it appears. Instead, the Post, the NYTimes, and many other venerable institutions have become lap dogs rather than watch dogs.

The only actual asset that a newspaper has (other than the office building) is its credibility. It's sad that they squander it, and even sadder that the price is so low.

===

Viking Mini Golf is awesome. Four of us went, and while the "viking facts" became less and less credible as the course rolled on, it was still fun. It was good to spend some time with cousin E and her fiancee M (who has the coolest-sounding job ever: roller coaster designer).

backboard

2009-07-01T18:34:20Z

No, not the kind from which a basketball will bounce. Rather, the kind where blocks are inserted next to your head and your arms and hips are strapped down to total immobility.

I found myself on one of these today.

But let me start at the beginning:

Sarah and I are vacationing with a bunch of my cousins and their SOs at Bethany Beach. There's a lovely resort which has a tram to the beach, and we availed ourselves of this very trip this morning.

First of all, the blessing upon seeing the Ocean is sheasah et hayam hagadol (...who made the great sea). This is a blessing I have not had opportunity to say before: I have not been to a beach in more than 10 years.

Personally, when I'm on a beach, I like to be in the water, playing in the waves. The water is quite cold, but the aerobic exercise of moving around in it gets the temperature up pretty fast.

So I had finally talked Sarah into joining me in the water, and we were bodysurfing near shore. A particularly bad wave came, and my surfing had what could only be described as "epic fail." I pretty much landed on my face in the sand (I'm still getting sand out of my nose a few hours later), and felt a pain in my neck/back/shoulder.

I landed on all fours, and faster than I could blink a lifeguard was behind me helping me stand up, and immobilizing my head with his hands (his fingers were on the bridge of my nose). A few more lifeguards came over, and one of them picked up my legs (!) and I was carried onto dry sand near the lifeguard station.

I should note that without my glasses I see about as well as a mole. I can generally tell earth from sky, but I wouldn't put money on it.

After some lifeguard discussion, the slid a backboard behind me, and put a collar on my neck. Repeatedly, I was asked whether I could wiggle my toes (yes), squeeze my fists (yes) or did I have any pain or numbness (no). Then they laid me down and the shore paramedic came over, and told me that I was going to the hospital for x-rays. At this point, they strapped me into the backboard and put the blocks next to my head.

I kept saying "I think I'm okay" but the lifeguards and paramedics said that they wanted to protect against the worst possible case.

They carried the backboard with me on it (this is a weird feeling) to a shady part of area on concrete, and the EMS personnel showed up. After another three or four rounds of these questions and a few scary stories from the EMS guys, I declined treatment, and they let me stand up on my own.

Lesson: lifeguards are HARDCORE. However, their diligence and expertise is pretty cool. I'm impressed.

Another lesson: I apparently have "clumsy" on my X and Y chromosomes - Sarah said "that's it, nothing fun for you EVER" and muttered about what would possibly make me think that riding a motorcycle was a good idea.

So maybe I'll spend the rest of the time playing with nothing more dangerous than string. On second thought, maybe the string isn't so safe after all...

Vay Cay Shun

2009-06-30T16:06:33Z

Today begins something uncommon for me: an actual vacation. I'll leave behind the assorted work headaches, politics, and related rant-worthy material for some time sitting on a beach. Oh hell yeah.

Sadly, Kacy can't come to the cabin, but happily a friend will dog-sit for her.

I've been looking forward to having some "not hurrying" time for a while - I've noticed that entirely too much of my life is spent in an interrupt-based queueing mode, where the thing that's most important right now is what gets worked on, and everything else gets pushed down until that task gets popped. This might be an opportunity to act in a different way.

===

Lifting weights is addictive! I've started doing that with a couple of co-workers, and it turns out that I like it a lot. Given that my experience in a gym as a kid was more of the "try not to get stuffed in a locker" variety, it's a bit eye-opening.

===

The Franchise will triumphantly return in August! We're playing a street festival as a trio, and after that will start auditions for a fourth.

Also in August, I'll be headed to RTP, NC to take my CCIE R&S lab: hopefully this goes well, because the test is all kinds of crazy expensive, so I have no desire to re-do it.

Fellowship

2009-06-28T19:07:21Z

I just got back from something unusual. A prominent older member of my synagogue invited the Rabbi and a whole bunch of folks who have converted to come to brunch and share our stories. There were about 18 female converts or folks in process, two male converts (including me) and three male SOs.

I admit it: I was pretty skeptical of this - I'm something other than "touchy feely," and "kumbayah" is something I hope never to find myself singing around a campfire.

However, this experience was really neat for me. I often feel like my experience is or has been uncommon - most people don't convert, most converts aren't public about it, and so I'm left as David Levado (by himself). I hadn't realized how much I would have in common with the stories of the other converts, and I also hadn't realized how much I would appreciate their perspectives on the matter.

I heard several things I instinctively agreed with: that once exposed to Truth, one can't ever truly turn away; that the process was frustrating and rarely straightforward; that most of the people had been through two conversions.

However, I also heard some perspectives which were enlightening: from a person who started his quest by trying to understand the story of the two trees in Genesis, that etz hayim hi l'mahazikim bah (it is a tree of life for one who grasps it) shows the active component of religious faith - one has to grasp the Torah for it to be an etz hayim; that the frustration of the waiting for the conversion melted away once it was not viewed as a finish line, but rather as a starting line.

RBF indicated that the national statistics are reflected in the group who attended - the ratio of women to men is 8.5:1 in terms of both conversion students and successful converts.

Several of the people present said that this was the first time they have shared their story publicly - I'm glad to have participated in something which allowed them the space to do so.

thoughts from a long week

2009-06-26T22:04:23Z

I'm glad that President Obama has finally come around to something which approaches my position (in the way that a beverage made from powder out of a jar can approach "tea"). If only he could have realized sooner that the reward for coddling or negotiating with thugs is more thuggery...

===

It is better to to enable OSPF on an interface via a network statement and set it to passive than it is to redistribute a connected or static route. A single type-1 LSA and SPF run is less taxing on a network than the E1/E2 LSA which is carried to all of the non-stub areas.

===

If the environmentalists are correct, and carbon insertion into the atmosphere is a serious problem, then the best and most effective way to minimize those insertions is to make it vastly more expensive via a tax. This will necessarily result in higher energy prices all around. "Cap and trade" is a way of camouflaging the cost - however, like all forms of camouflage, it does not change the underlying reality. If energy prices do not substantially increase, the amount of carbon inserted into the atmosphere will not decrease substantially.

So once again, we're pursuing a bad idea in the stupidest possible way. d'oh!

===

I care a lot more about what's going on in Iran than I do about Michael Jackson. Judging by media coverage available around here, that makes me uncommon.

OSPF follies

2009-06-21T17:13:22Z

I learned something new about OSPF the other day: route type beats longest match (!) in certain cases.

Here's an example case:

A - B - C - D

There are four linearly connected routers, all participating in the same nssa, and for some reason hosts connected to A and D which are both looking for the exact same default gateway with the same subnet mask (192.0.2.1 for example). Assume that all link costs are 10.

B will select the interface toward A as the route for 192.0.2.1, and C will select the route toward D. No surprise there.

So what if I want the host 192.0.2.2 to connect to A and 192.0.2.129 to connect to D?

I could place a static route for each of the /25s on A and D - "ip route 192.0.2.0 255.255.255.128 fast0/0" or some such, and redistribute those as type-1 external routes. If I add no additional metric to them, I'll see this on router A:

C 192.0.2.0/24
S 192.0.2.0/25
N1 192.0.2.128/25 metric 30

However, on router D, I'll see the following:

C 192.0.2.0/24
S 192.0.2.128/25

So what happened to the static route that A is originating? Well, it turns out that B considers the OSPF internal route for the /24 and the OSPF external route for the /25, and immediately picks the internal route regardless of the netmask. This is a known design behavior in OSPF - this doesn't happen in the other case because the routes are different in respects other than the netmask.

One solution is to not announce the VLANs as internal routes at all: "no network 192.0.2.0 0.0.0.255 area X" and announce an additional static route for the whole /24 from one side or the other. Another solution is to apply secondary addresses to the interfaces and treat all of the routes as internals. The better solution would be to actually link A to D, and share the interfaces across the same L2 network - this can be done with l2tpv3 or another tunneling mechanism. However, the best solution is "don't do this at all" - a single broadcast domain shouldn't be built in multiple locations: arp timeouts are a non-trivial problem.

Courage

2009-06-21T15:25:32Z

I have not been closely following the events in Iran - I only see the summaries from the various news round-ups - but it's hard not to be impressed with the intensity of emotion being expressed by the protesters against a regime which routinely brutalizes protest.

I contrast this courage with the feckless response of the US President, and I am saddened. I, as an American, like to see us as the shining city on the hill - the tireless advocate for the struggling masses yearning to be free. I do not understand why President Obama's response reads more like campaign-style political calculation rather than advocacy for freedom: wasn't one of his significant attributes the ability to inspire through words?

One touchstone I return to often to describe the difference between the US and the not-free countries in the world is that we have people doing all kinds of difficult things to get in, while they have people doing all kinds of difficult things to get out. Let's not forget that we hold the torch which is the beacon of liberty across the generations - we should rise to the occasion of liberty's defense when the moment presents itself. I hope that President Obama remembers that the cruelest betrayal we can commit is the abandonment of the principles on which we founded the US: that all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We should not hope for stability when that stability denies people those rights.

surprisingly absent

2009-06-19T08:49:56Z

I've been seeing a higher-than-usual volume of traffic from advocates of DC voting rights lately. Surprisingly, one completely absent suggestion is retrocession of the populated portion of DC to the state of Maryland. I think that that would be the most straightforward approach, and there is no constitutional sleight-of-hand required to make it work. Washington is a relatively affluent city (especially compared to Baltimore), and the population bump to Maryland would justify between 1-2 congressional representatives.

Tech Support

2009-06-17T01:37:07Z

I had an amusing / frustrating experience today: I had to call for support on an issue which was affecting my stuff. I got to someone who was smart, but he didn't really believe my diagnosis of the problem. I had to go through several hours of showing how my stuff was all correct, and therefore what had to be wrong was his stuff. After a few iterations of this, he said "hey let me go check on something." Heh. So yes, after a few more hours of work on the part of others, he let me know what the problem was, and hopefully it'll be fixable tomorrow. Slam dunk!

====

NANOG 46 is finishing up in Philadelphia tomorrow, and I'm bummed that I didn't get it together to go. It wasn't even all that far away, but it may as well have been on the moon. I missed the vixie keynote too (see above) :(

=======

This past weekend was stuffed with family: my mother and stepfather came for Shabbat dinner, and then on Sunday we had my father, stepmother, half-sister & her bf, and youngest half-brother. And all of these were grill-based extravaganzas. There's nothing that stokes the primal caveman in me quite as much as impaling meat and cooking it burning wood.

This weekend was the first time I had to spend a serious amount of time with the bf, and he's delightful. They're both mechanical engineers, and it was really nice to get to know them a bit better.

I had another in the long series of religious conversations with my dad, and I think I've figured something out: the God he believes in is one he understands. For me, the God I believe in is one I specifically don't understand - if I could understand God, I would have to BE God. This is reflected in how we both deal with troubling passages in the Bible: I start from the premise that I don't understand God's will, and that my task is to figure out how to apply it in this world; my dad starts from the premise that the troubling passages are more likely to be the literary equivalent of campfire stories.

Obviously I like my way better. However, it's a good realization to have: it'll help me understand where he's coming from in our future discussions.

=======

Better Days came to an end. It was really good, and I hope that Naylor writes some more - I like his work a great deal.

=======

We ate the first of our home-grown squashes tonight, and there are about 20 (!) tomatoes on a plant which is taller than Sarah. Delicious!

Not all those who wonder

2009-06-11T02:33:34Z

actually want to know the answer. In any case, I'm laying low due to exceptionally high levels of busy. See you in a while...

Accomplishments

2009-06-08T01:23:20Z

This week, I received my copy of the Koren Sacks Siddur, and it's everything I've wanted in a prayerbook. happy happy, joy joy! Rabbi Sacks' commentary and translation are brilliant, and are a breath of fresh air in my spiritual world. All of a sudden, I can remind myself what it is about kabbalat shabbat that makes it worth saying.

===

Today, I spent a lot of time on my knees, in a remarkably non-kinky way: I mopped the floor, sans mop (hel-lo rags!) . I think the floor is better, and hopefully I won't have to do that again anytime soon.

The tomatoes are coming in nicely - there are nine so far, and I'm still living in a place of radical amazement about it.

===

I got promoted! I finally made it, after the grueling interview and documentation process, and that brings me to a happy place. Off to teach another class next week...

On Partnership

2009-06-04T01:56:17Z

I have been very surprised by how much something means to me.

I planted a squash plant in one pot, a tomato and three peppers in another, and in the third, horseradishes, garlic and cilantro.

The tomato and squash plants have been growing pretty much every time I don't look at them - the squash now has four or five large open flowers, and several small squashes growing behind them. The tomato is about four feet high, and has a bunch of small pretty yellow flowers. The horseradishes have leaves which are nearly two feet high (!) and have been quite tasty [1].

And I had no idea how amazingly spiritual I would find this.

Little old me is a partner with the Holy One, Blessed is His Name, in the act of creating food by the sweat of my brow. Admittedly, I haven't sweated a whole lot: this year has been quite damp, and I have barely had to water plants, let alone do anything particularly elaborate, but the principle is there nonetheless. Every day, I find myself checking the plants, lest a plague of locusts descend on them without my knowing - and of course, that could happen and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it.

This is a little bit like the experience on Sukkot (Booths/Tabernacles) where I emphasize how dependent I am upon God's providence for all of the myriad ways in which He supports me: from the covalent carbon double-bond, to the krebs cycle, to the fission of hydrogen in the sun, to the sodium-potassium pump, to the breath of soul He breathes into me each day. How elaborate are the testimonies of creation to the lovingkindness of the Creator! I lack only the discipline to acknowledge that every breath should exalt His praises - I am merely me, flawed and imperceptive, and I take these daily and constant miracles for granted.

I'm used to the idea that vegetables come from bins in a store, and meat comes in packages in plastic (actually, it comes wrapped in paper from Wasserman & Lemberger, but that's beside the point). I'm not used to being reminded of agriculture in quite such an immediate way.

I am in awe.

And today, as I spoke with a female friend who is pregnant, I am even more in awe: I will never experience the level of partnership with God that she has, and I would be lying if I didn't have a twinge of jealousy about that. She will be able to directly experience what it means to bring new life into the world.

And I am even more in awe.

===
[1] a horseradish leaf is delicious on a turkey sandwich, and a couple of horseradish leaves add a mellow kick to either kale or collard greens (but add them near the end of the cooking because horseradish is so much more delicate). The stems are the hot part - the leaves have the flavor without the burn.

Do I have to say "I told you so?"

2009-06-04T01:29:12Z

So I now own a lot of GM bonds. Regardless of the fact that I am in fact a very conservative investor (I only invest in companies which are recently acquainted with the idea of "profit" and "dividend"), I too get a piece of the bloated corpse of an automobile company which hasn't been good at making cars which people want to, you know, buy for quite a long while.

As a relevant aside, the last two times when I went car-shopping, I disproportionally preferred American car companies: I bought a used Geo Metro (with all of about 12 squirrelpower in the 3-cylinder engine [it looks with jealousy at a typical lawnmower]) and had that until it could no longer pass inspection; after that, I bought a 2000 Saturn SL2. It's been decent, and I've enjoyed it, even though I could have gotten more car for the money if I had gone for the Toyota which I had looked at at the same time. I've sucked it up and paid when it requires disassembling the engine to replace a thermostat. I've cheerfully kept the car running, and hope to do so for a while longer.

So if I was going to buy a car company, it wouldn't have been GM.

Is there anyone who thinks that it was a good idea for the US Government to borrow money to give to GM, so that we could walk them through bankruptcy where they don't shed as much as the bankruptcy task force thought they should, and then leave the US Taxpayers with owning a majority stake in a company which has a zero percent chance of making that investment profitable?

I'm so glad that we elected the smart guy last year - who knows what damage the other guy would have done!?

A Great Bit

2009-06-04T01:17:20Z

I have found the perfect paragraph which sums up precisely why John C. Wright's fiction is awesome:

I spent half an hour looking over Ulysses by James Joyce, and certain books by T.S. Eliot and e.e. Cummings. Our copy of the first book must have contained printer's errors, and a lot of them. There were nonsense words and run-on sentences on every page. In one of the chapters, the printer had left out all of the punctuation. I am certain the author must have sued the printing company for putting such a thing out on the bookshelves with his name on it.

From Fugitives of Chaos, page 49

The awesomeness of deflating distended gasbags knows no limit, and this is a wonderful example.

An insightful essay on the impact of religion in western civilization

2009-06-02T02:14:10Z

John C. Wright quotes an excellent essay by Theordore Darymple. Definitely worth reading.

a bad, bad joke

2009-05-31T21:18:53Z

Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the earth. I can not, however, move your mother. h/t /.

Two perspectives

2009-05-31T19:26:04Z

I finished two books this week, and they both looked at things I knew from different perspectives.

First, Zoë's Tale is a retelling of the events in The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony from the perspective of Zoë, who was a critically-important supporting character in those works. The surprising thing, to me, is that Scalzi did such a good job with Zoë's internal monologue and her interactions with Gretchen and Enzo. I think that the focus on her development as a person was a good choice - both the encounter with the Roanoake natives and the Consu are thoroughly enlightening, and the moral quandry in which she finds herself feels quite authentic to me. Definitely recommended, but treat this as "fourth in the trilogy" (i.e. read the other three first).

Second, Self Made Man by Norah Vincent was fascinating and gripping: I pretty much couldn't put it down. Norah lived for about a year and a half as "Ned" and immersed herself in traditionally all-male environments to try to understand the difference in perspective. I'd give her a B in terms of capturing my experience of the male condition - I have no truck with strip clubs or monastaries, and I find those two pretty much repellant examples of excess in physicality (either via indulgence or via abstinence) - but several of her other experiences struck a chord with me. As an example, I think that her cognition of the bowling league as populated by men who take a utilitarian rather than class-based view of the world is correct. She was surprised at how un-racist and generally non-judgemental the working-class folks were, and while I think her suprise is authentic, this is no surprise to me. She correctly identifies the men as being "too tired to waste their time on racism" - these are men who work in difficult occupations and are not too terribly interested in the bugaboos of class-based or race-based thinking.
However, the part of the book which was most insightful to me was her experience as a "man" trying to pick up women and date them. Vincent has some very strong things to say about how she was treated, and I think that this is something which dating women might find informational - at least in a "see how the other half lives" way. I think the biggest flaw with the book was that her analysis was largely in extreme areas of male behavior - she didn't, for instance, examine a job environment other than what she calls the "red bull" jobs: the high-pressure door-to-door sales environments (which she completely nailed, btw). I think that her generalization from those to the corporate office environment is one of the weaker ones, and while there is some commonality, it's not quite how she thinks it is. I strongly recommend this book as an entertaining take on an insightful experiment. Good stuff!

in case anyone is unclear on the concept

2009-05-27T03:12:33Z

I know of very few areas of Jewish life which more readily lend themselves to half-measures than Kashrut (keeping kosher).

There a few relatively bright lines, and then a forest of murk afterward.

One bright line is the person who says "I keep kosher."

This means that s/he wouldn't eat non-kosher food, no matter where s/he finds him/herself. Holding the bright line on this occasionally leads to some challenges: the staff meeting in the non-kosher restaurant, etc. The variation inside that level of bright line basically comes down to what one does in that particular circumstance: if you decline to attend (because it's in a non-kosher restaurant), that's one level; if you bring your own food and eat it, that's another; and if you order a salad or some such, that's a third.

The next major bright line is "I keep a kosher home."

This means that non-kosher food doesn't come into the person's home, regardless of what one does outside. In many cases, folks will "eat dairy out" (with varying levels of self-deception about the provenance of the utensils, ovens, etc), and in a smaller subset of cases you'll find folks who "only eat in either kosher or strictly vegetarian restaurants" (occasionally among this crowd you find people who do not believe that kosher supervision is a priori required, and folks who take that position are overrepresented among those who complain bitterly about their local rabbinic supervising agency).

And that's it for bright lines. I've encountered folks who make various other fine distinctions, but I have not encountered any other states which I would characterize as "stable" - they tend to be intermediate waystations on the road to either greater or lesser kashrut observance.

Now, one thing to note, before any complaints are lodged, is that I didn't describe what either of those bright lines means from a practical perspective - i.e. how does one do this or that.

I do think that the two different states can be a window into an opinion of what kashrut means: I would describe the former as more concerned with one's personal observence (i.e. where will I eat?), and the latter as more concerned with community standards (i.e. will people eat in my home?).

For myself, I think that my stomach matters more than my dishes: keeping kosher has formed a bridge between me and the countless generations of Jews before me. I have had to learn restraint, and had to learn to live without many of the ubiquitous conveniences which others share, and I think that it improved me as a person to do so. I understand that I'm in the minority (hell, I'm in the minority at my synagogue, let alone in the larger Jewish community), but I think it's worth it for me.

Chasing the wind

2009-05-25T17:51:36Z

Yesterday, Rolling Thunder came through DC, and that's always an awesome thing (in the original meaning of "awesome" - that it inspires awe). I personally am quite touched at the use of the quintessentially American symbol - the motorcycle, which normally carries with it images of freedom and mobility - put to the task of honoring those who have died defending that very same freedom. There is a circularity of meaning there which I appreciate a great deal.

We got a chance to talk to a couple of riders from Chicago while we were walking Kacy - this was their third year or participating, and they remarked on the good reception they received here. I think that's great, because I remember the stories of the mistreatment that the Vietnam vets got at the hands of those who did not themselves serve, and I remember how all of the jobs that I got in the 80s and early 90s had mandatory paperwork about how vietnam-era veterans could not be discriminated against (!). Personally, I've noticed that veterans make great employees - the ones who have worked for and with me understand both how to give AND how to take orders, and that sometimes you give them and sometimes you take them. Anyway, I'm glad that these guys get a warm welcome (although Kacy attempts to chase away motorcycles, which is funny in that she probably weighs less than a single motorcycle tire...).

Sarah and I have an understanding about motorcycles - we both think that they're about the coolest mode of transport possible (with the possible exception of spacecraft), and we'd both love to ride, but her nerves would be shot through and through if I were to start riding (not because I'd be unsafe, but because there are a lot of idiots on the road, and motorcycles don't offer the kind of idiot-protection that a steel cage does). So she says that when I'm in my 70s, it'll be okay to ride (with the thought that a guy who gets killed riding a motorcycle in his 70s is "he died doing something he loved" but a guy who dies in his 30s the same way is a tragedy). Now that's something about getting old to which I can look forward...

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I finished John Scalzi's The Last Colony last week, and it was excellent. I know that this was meant to be his last story of the John and Jane, but I also have Zoe's Tale in the hopper, so that abstention was short-lived. It's an interesting thing to chart the progress of John Perry through the books as his feelings toward the Colonial Union change: he begins as hostile to this unknown power, sees how their methods work, appreciates it, and only later begins to experience the disillusionment which all large organizations foster. Scalzi is probably my favorite author right now, and the only tinge of regret I feel reading his books is that there's one fewer for me to read in the future...

Last night, I finished John Steakley's Armor, and it was good. I found some of the overdone machismo to be offputting, and I think that Steakley waited too long in the book to explain some of the motivations of the characters, but the end result is worth the read, and worth waiting for.

There is a commonality in these books - the ineptitude of governmental beaucracy as applied to individual cases. In TLC, the ineptitude is on full display in the patronizing attitude of the Colonial Union and their inability to grasp the magnitude of the problem they're in. In Armor, the ineptitude is personal: in a Heller-esque sense, this is what happens to the man who falls through the cracks in a system which does not understand the nature of the war it fights. This commonality rings true to me - I've seen just enough bureaucratic systems to see how their interdepartmental politics often completely swamp the overall objectives of the organization, and how meaningful positive change is resisted to the last breath.

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this is something I've been saying for a long time - we need fewer people going to college and more plumbers and electricians. A good plumber who does radical things like "return calls" and "show up when he says he will" can charge pretty much anything he wants to. Thar's gold in them thar hills...