Something cheesy this way comes
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[The Franchise]
[Sarah]
[Ari EB]
[Elanit]
[ALG]
[Alon]
[Yutopia]
[Code Monkey Ramblings]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "thegameiam" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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04:38 pm
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Answers
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."
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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 ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 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.
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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.
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From Ari comes this Sluggy Freelance image. Now THAT is an American sentiment, in full-on Toby Keith style...
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: Zoe Keating, "Fern"
Tags: civilization, comics, politics, travel
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09:11 pm
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Tech Support
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!
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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) :(
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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.
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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.
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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!
Current Location: home
Current Music: The Blue Man Group, "Rods and Cones"
Tags: comics, family, house, networking, religion
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09:41 pm
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Experiment
Sarah and I saw Tom Stoppard's Rock & Roll at the studio theatre on Sunday. It was pretty good, but the love story in it didn't quite jell; I liked the characters, they were believable, and I wanted good things for them, but their interrelationship to each other wasn't quite fleshed out enough to be convincing. Interestingly, Syd Barrett's music and persona play a major part - this was a happy accident for me, because when I was young, I owned not only Opel (not just a car company!) and The Madcap Laughs but even Barrett and a first edition Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It's been a long time since I even thought about his work - while "golden hair" worked well in the context of the show, my favorite of his has to be "Word Song," which is exactly what it claims to be: a series of words (mostly nouns) which don't themselves form sentences. Anyway, as the play involves Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination, several of the characters are pretty serious communists, and proceed to make coherent and sincere arguments regarding the virtues thereof... it's a little bit like reading a book by the best plogiston chemist.
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I also finished reading Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (I totally want to write that with an enya), and it was good. The novel is the story of a friendship formed at Barnard in the 60s betwen a woman from a poor family (the narrator) and a woman who was from a wealthy family but rejected her roots (Ann). There is a lot of unpleasant activist-ese in the book - enough that there are some ponderous portions early on. Things get a bit more interesting later on after the narrator leaves college and deals with some of the disillusionment in the post-60s era. In the last half of the book, Nunez gets quite a bit more conversational, and her style flows in a less rigid manner - this is definitely the best part of the book, and then I had a hard time putting it down.
I found myself in some very uncomfortable passages in this book; I remember when I was a kid how I ran with the Socialists and assorted hippie-wanna-bes in SLC. Some of the slogans and attitudes touched painful nerves - I don't remember precisely how I came to encounter this. Actually, that's not true: one major catalyst for several years of self-loathing and anger directed at "whitey" has a single name: college. However, it didn't just start there - I remember the Mondale/Ferraro presidential campaign ad which included (with CSN's "Teach your Children" in the background) alternating clips of children crying and missles (presumably nuclear) launching. I remember being sensitive to this: I looked at nuclear holocaust as a foregone conclusion, which is pretty bleak for a 12-year-old.
At the University of Maryland, I remember encountering Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and being wracked with collective guilt over what I presumed were the crimes of all white people. When I went back to Utah, the socialists pretty actively recruited me, and I got familiar with Malcolm X and various Palestinian liberation writers - I internalized the deeply racist attitudes they preached (that white people were guilty of all of the crimes ever) and remained trapped in anger for several years.
Coming out of that experience took a long time - I was certainly insufferable, and I'm glad that some friends and family at least were willing to suffer my presence through that.
I finally had a cognition: any approach which attempts to apportion blame for the condition of the world, rather than exhorting each of us to do our small part to improve the little part of the world in which we find ourselves, is far more likely to be complete horseshit than to be enlightened truth.
Anyway, the Last of Her Kind is quite good, and definitely worth reading. There are some very frank moments where ideologies clash with reality, and in those moments the author lets the characters shine with their internal truths; this in turn makes them all the more human. Good stuff.
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I read the final installment of Marc Andryko's Manhunter, and this also is quite good. It's a shame that DC killed the story - I'd happily read the adventures of Kate Spencer indefinitely, and while I like Javier Pina's artwork more than Michael Gaydos, the latter is certainly no slouch (I had encountered his work on Alias previously), and he does a fabulous job.
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I just encountered Rob Gonsalves artwork, and it's really cool. It's somewhere between Escher and Margritte, and given that I like both chocolate AND peanut butter there, it's no surprise that I'd find his work very much to my taste.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Led Zeppelin, "In My Time of Dying"
Tags: books, comics, rant, reviews
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10:26 pm
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reverse chronological order
Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is really neat: he engages in high-concept science-fiction, and yet the humanity of the characters not only shines through, it's the best part of the story. I don't know whether there are any other works set in that universe, but if there are, I'm definitely going to read them. One of the narrative structures that he uses is the "normal guy who's friends with a genius" - it works quite well in that we get to see the genius's motivations filtered through our narrator's eyes. Definitely recommended.
John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades is excellent. If you liked Old Man's War, you'll love this (and if you haven't read OMW, you totally should). TGB is a bit more thoughtful than OMW in terms of the politics of the larger society. Unsurprisingly, this is highly recommended for anyone who read OMW.
Christopher Moore's Lamb (the gospel according to Biff, Christ's childhood pal) is a clever concept (obvious in the title). Moore's writing is of the Douglas Adams / Terry Pratchett vein, and has some intensely funny bits. Unfortunately, the intensely funny bits are the smaller part of the book rather than the larger - I found myself getting more and more distracted from reading it. Only recommended if you are a big Pratchett/Adams fan.
Gail Simone's Birds of Prey - I reread her whole run on that series, and it stands out as some of the best superheroing in this decade. I wasn't a Huntress or Black Canary fan until I read Simone's take on them. Her use of Shiva is the first in a long time to capture the up-front coldness that I remember from O'Neil's The Question. Of note is that the book is disproportionally female - Ed Benes does tend to put in a lot of gratuitious fanservice-type artwork, but the story is so good that it can be overlooked.
I found Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction on sale at a thrift store. It has all the charm you'd expect from a political thriller written by a self-described socialist/Trotskyite. I wasn't able to finish it, and I don't recommend it at all.
Elizabeth Lynn's A Different Light plods along with not very many surprises. Meh. It's better than a kick in the head, but I was hoping for more from my reading time. Only recommended if there isn't anything better in easy reach.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  sick
Current Music: The Offspring, "She's Got Issues"
Tags: books, comics, s-f
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10:14 pm
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Who watches Saturday Morning Cartoons?
h/t Scipio (the blogger, not the general who defeated the Carthaginians)
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: Prince - Purple Rain | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: comics
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09:51 pm
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You got Zombies in my Porn!
A while ago, I had wondered about the intersection of the zombie meme with the porn industry. Now I know what happens.
And for what it's worth, that comic (Girls with Slingshots) is fabulous, and worth an archive trawl.
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This is a video which justifies YouTube's existence - Bela Fleck & the Flecktones doing a live version of "Big Country." Wow.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  sleepy
Current Music: Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, "Big Country"
Tags: comics, music, porn
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05:09 pm
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I can't believe I actually have unfiltered Internet access right now
This will only make sense if you have read Watchmen.
I recently got a chance to play around with NetBrain, which is YAAMMT (yet-another-autodiscovery-mapping-management-tool). However, it's pretty impressive, both for making maps which are quite pretty and also for presenting managemnt information in relatively useful manners. I think that it's more of a flathead screwdriver than a swiss-army-knife, (i.e. it's a useful member of the toolbox, but there are lots of things it doesn't do).
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: Oasis, "Morning Glory"
Tags: comics, networking
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08:55 pm
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Tidbits floating in my brain
I just encountered the song Fight the Good Fight, by Triumph, and that is a hella-good. How in the world did I not know about them in the 80s?
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The recession seems not to exist in the Washington area - I'm aware of openings which pay well without requiring extensive experience, and am finding very few folks expressing interest. Go figure.
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Apparently the public-charter-school with an emphasis in Hebrew is a spreading phenomenon - Orthonomics has the goods about the Englewood, NJ school district. Yay! This can be an important part of the puzzle, becuase the existing way that we're funding this just isn't working.
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I've read a bunch of good books recently: To Say Nothing of the Dog and D.A. by Connie Willis (D.A. is a great young-adult novella very much in the tradition of The Menace from Earth, and TSNotD was fun, but not as good as Doomsday Book); The January Dancer by Michael Flynn (neat storytelling vehicle - it's a medieval approach to a science fiction epic, following the various owners of a specific artifact. Neat!). Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million is probably the best book on mathematics I've ever read. That could easily be a complete course for a motivated individual or a home-school curriculum.
In graphic novels, Fables vol 11:War & Pieces shows how to make a war story compelling - this is the ultra-mega-mega war story which has been foreshadowed for the past several years, and Willingham doesn't dissapoint. Morrison's All-Star Superman is strangely compelling - I wasn't into the whole pre-Crisis Superman continuity and weirdness: I really liked John Byrne's Man of Steel reboot; but Morrison is applying a modern sensibility to the silver-age concepts, and it works swimmingly. Quitely's artwork doesn't hurt either...
I'm on the edge of abandoning Greg Bear's City at the End of Time - it's just too damn hard to figure out what's going on, and that makes it hard to read.
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I was able to finally get some writing done for work - I need to do a technical analysis of why X technology is better than Y technology, and have the report be something that can be presented to people who don't understand either one, and also serve as a guide for the actual implementation. eek. And after reading Tufte, my whole perspective on how to go about presenting diagrams has completely shifted; and of course, where I would have used a powerpoint before, now I feel compelled to write everything down in paragraphs with footnotes.
Off to walk the dog...
Current Location: home
Current Music: Foo Fighters, "Baker Street"
Tags: books, comics, music, religion, s-f, work
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10:04 pm
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I don't have a brain the size of a planet
But apparently some other folks do.
Bill Willingham talks about his rededication to heroism. Willingham has been a favorite of mine for a long time, and I consider him a substantially inspirational influence on my songwriting.
And johncwright pointed out Tom Simon's essay on why ironic approaches to literature fail to create beauty. This essay is an absolute must-read, and I wish I had read it sooner.
And just to show that I don't enjoy good mockery along with the rest, Stuff Geeks Love includes this lovely bit:Geeks of course need this energy because of their demanding lifestyles. Sitting in front of a television set or computer screen and eating junk food can really take a lot out of you. Rather than actually eat food that provides nutrition or turn off the anime and go to sleep, they’d prefer to pour more junk down their throats and continue running around Azeroth. Some geeks have gone so far as to suggest that they need so much caffeine to keep their amazing minds working at full speed. One fewer Red Bull and their argument about why Batman would win against Iron Man will suffer.
(confession: I have, and enjoy wearing, a caffeine molecule T-shirt, although it's really theobromine which is my chemical stimulant of choice)
(second confession: Batman wins because he would have boobytrapped Iron Man's armor ahead of time, duh)
And of course Cracked lists the 6 creepiest comic book characters of all time.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sick
Current Music: Augustine - This Is An Expert Bomb | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: books, comics, rant
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05:04 pm
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Out of the park, Homer!
QC nails teh funnay.
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And Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is sheer genius - he lays out the principles of how information should be portrayed graphically, with rules like "the number of information-carrying (variable) dimensions should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data." It's like reading The Art of War, except for data analysis.
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Kacy has had an upset stomach for the past couple of days, and has had horrendous gas, but I don't really have the heart to not let her sit on my lap. Argh. I need to invest in nose-plugs...
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Buttery - Come Together | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: books, comics, kacy
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05:56 pm
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Roundup of oddities
Here is an interesting visualization of Iceland's financial meltdown
And here is what is wrong with Sears customer service (h/ts Megan McArdle)
A fascinating collection of images on a blog (NSFW!) it was this post about Rorshach that first drew my attention.
My phone has been acting up: apparently there is a cell tower down in the area, and when I did the live chat with a tech support agent, I was told that there is no online system to see when it will recover. Booo, hiss...
EDIT: I almost forgot: Lucid Absinthe just got certification from the OU, and I confirmed that from the OU themselves. w00t!
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood:  bitchy
Current Music: California Guitar Trio - Punta Patri | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: absinthe, comics, networking, porn
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06:17 pm
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Maintenance Windows
A set of changes which theoretically could be done in under 5 minutes ended up with a maintenance window which was 6 hours long due to this group making sure that that group would be able to schedule it, and leaving some padding in, and then verifying with another group, etc.
Total time for the changes? 25 minutes. Including notifications and verifications. Booyah!
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I highly recommend watching this British PSA Then watch it again. This logic applies in so, so many areas...
h/t OSC.
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I know how she feels.
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A modest proposal I could support - I think that the distinctions between states are sometimes overwhelmed, and the Senate should be more than a storing ground for those with Presidential ambition.
While we're at it, could we please amend the 21st Amendment to remove section 2? A major explicit purpose of the Federal government is to regulate interstate commerce. Transport of alchohol between states should therefore be a federal matter, not a state matter.
Now THAT would be change in which I could believe.
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Silvertide - Ain't Comin' Home | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: comics, politics, work
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10:25 pm
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Good, bad, and coyote
Good: my cousin Jon reviewed Lingua Franchise yesterday. It's thoughtful, although I have a tinge of sadness that that lineup is no more. More on it later.
Bad: Have you suspected that high-fructose corn syrup was really bad for you? - there seems to be more evidence in this direction.
Coyote: Jeph Jaques delivers the booty call. I've rarely seen it depicted in this pathetic a manner, and yet, it captures the essence perfectly.
For seriously ugly, we have to turn to the intestinal tract, Sarah's to be precise. She had her colonoscopy and endoscopy last Thursday, and the anesthesia didn't work. Let me repeat: the anesthetic didn't work. The level of suck here isn't really fully measurable - just imagine waking up in surgery, and yep, that's about right. Yikes. She's recovering well, and is made of stern stuff, but that's a hell of an way to add insult to injury.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Coheed and Cambria - 2113 | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: comics, music, sarah
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02:44 am
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Insomniac posting
This makes me sad. Andreyko's Manhunter (which sounds like it should be gay porn, but isn't) is one of the better superhero comics currently being published. It's unfortunate that DC is not recognizing that the purchasing patterns represent a fundamental shift away from the monthly floppies and toward trade paperbacks. DC does a decent job of publishing the trades, sure, but they should consider moving to a "trade only" publishing approach - once per quarter, say. This book would be an ideal one to use for the experiment.
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My top 5 comic series of all time are:
1) Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. duh. The plotting is so tight that on the tenth read you're still finding new tidbits. This book reshaped the possibilities of graphic novel storytelling, and everything since 1986 has to acknowledge its debt. Inspired Rorshach, by the Franchise
2) Starman, by James Robinson & Tony Harris. Definitely the best superhero book of the 90s. Robinson has an obsessive love of the golden age, and none of the golden age heroes have looked better than they did here. This too is a book not about a superhero, but about a person who happens to be a superhero.
3) Bone, by Jeff Smith. Best. Fantasy. Ever. This is the cultural opposite of film noir - the wide open vistas and often silent storytelling evokes beauty and majesty at every turn. Note: the one-volume edition is REALLY heavy.
4) Fables, by Bill Willingham. The best currently published series, this is a science-fiction-rules take on classic fantasy. Brilliant stuff, and there is biting social commentary in both the types of conflict and the resolutions. Inspired the framing of Storybook Romance, by the Franchise
5) Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. This morphed from a superhero/horror book to Gaiman's masterwork of metaphysics. Inspired Static, by The Franchise.
6) Honorable mention to Girl Genius, by Phil & Kaja Foglio. The best currently-published adventure story. Brilliant stuff, and worth reading online, but supplementing with dead-tree editions. Don't get the black&white omnibus editions - those are cheaper, but the color editions are worth it.
It's safe to say that while the comic connections of songs like Rorshach & Storybook Romance are pretty obvious (to say nothing of Big Bad Wolf or Superhero), not too many folks have picked up on Static. The hint is this: listen to the song, and the go re-read the first trade paperback volume, and it might be a bit more familiar.
Current Location: home
Current Music: none
Tags: comics, music
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12:40 am
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The Dark Candidate Returns
Anyone who has ever read The Dark Knight Returns should definitely go check out Matt Shepherd's take on TDKR and McCain. Hilarious!
However, I think he means it to be unflattering to McCain, but he might be forgetting that the fellow who was "young, in his prime" is the mutant leader who would go on to murder the mayor before his eventual defeat at Batman's hands. Even more, the "joke" is Superman. But anyway, it's excellent work.
Current Location: home
Current Music: none
Tags: comics, politics
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11:04 pm
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An amusing pair
I did a bit of an archive trawl on Casey and Andy today, and among the umpteen zillion really good strips, two stood out right now:
how to get a job with DHS
And the other which got my attention is made a lot funnier by a tacky conversation I had with Sarah recently - we were talking about zombies, which are known to moan/shout for their favorite meal: "brains... brains..."
( tacky background story behind the cut )
Anyway, this particular C&A "strip" (hehe) tells me that others have thought of this joke before...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: none
Tags: comics, porn
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02:57 pm
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throw down
Ari issued a challenge to me over shabbat:
Who is a bigger chick magnet - my daughter Aliza, or your dog Kacy?
Now, not one to shy away from a challenge, I accepted - I believe that the two of us are going to need to dress in polo shirts & khakis, and walk our respective charges around a couple of neighborhoods (we're totally going to look like a gay couple), and see who wins. Aliza is a mighty cute baby - easily one of the cutest I've ever seen. However, she doesn't wag, so I believe I know who's going to win this.
As a couple of points in my favor already, allow me to point out today's Doonesbury, and of course, Kacy DID have a song called Chick Magnet written for her... (in addition to Lojack and Punk Rock Dog, AND having made a cover appearance on an album, and won "best in show", and even appearing as the "action shot" of her breed on Wikipedia - yeah, Aliza's going to have a heck of a "cute" challenge here...)
As an aside - the lead guitar on Chick Magnet was one of the ones which came out exactly the way I wanted it to: it's hard to get the song from head to fingers if you're not a true virtuoso, but it worked there.
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Painted more steps today. whoo.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: none
Tags: comics, house, kacy, music
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10:22 pm
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A lot more colors in my world
hat tip to TDP for the title. Good acoustic music, and nice folks with whom to play a show.
We finally picked a color for the second bedroom: there are about 15 different splotchy squares on the wall - I told Sarah we should go with a multicolor thing, and call it modern ("Mondrian-esque") but she didn't go for it... So Nob Hill Sage it is, and while we're at it, our bedroom will be Tropical Dusk.
And our bathroom is oh-so-close: once the contractor can get the grout stains off the floor tile (grr) and seal it, we're done. I can't wait.
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Mike presents some really depressing Peanuts panels - I think Lucy is particularly Sartre-esqe there: hell IS other people, and she's just the person to inflict it upon our hapless Charlie.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"
Tags: comics, house
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04:45 pm
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Amusement
a wonderful short film called "Heroes"
More about the SuperFriends than you ever wanted to know. Here is a bit about Lex Luthor:SUPER RATING: 1 - 8?
This was a hard rating to come up with. At first, it started off at 1. He has a bald head and some gadgets. There are people on TV at four in the morning selling us juicers and fruit dryers that are as qualified as that to be super villains. But then I realized how brave someone has to have to put their bald head up against Superman. Just the fact that he tried makes him the fucking embodiment of Eye of the Tiger. Do you think Lex's clothes are so tight because he's putting on weight? No, they're just being sucked inward by the gravity caused by his huge balls.
Unfortunately, Meredith Gran has let a lot of her old stuff go by the wayside, so I didn't find a way to point out the old "SuperFriends with benefits" T-shirts... sigh.
Current Location: home, but leaving now
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Rademacher, "If You Got Some Magic"
Tags: comics
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10:56 pm
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A couple of good things, sequentially
I noticed in last week's haftarah (prophetic reading) something interesting: Jeremiah 17:5,7 included the following lines: "Cursed is he who puts his trust in man ... Blessed is he who puts his trust in the LORD..."
I find those to be a pretty striking condemnation of Humanism - not only would one not receive the blessing, but such a person would receive the full condemnation of a curse. Perhaps this presages Kant's idea of God as a moral necessity?
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We had a lovely shabbat lunch which included our dear friend K - he's moving to Seattle (and saying goodbye to the sun), and we're going to miss him a lot. His leaving the community brings an era to a close for me: he was one of the people I met early on when Sarah and I moved here, and he was always kind and good to me. I appreciated his overlooking my awkwardness as I learned how to be an Orthodox man. Of the four people I most looked up to and modeled at the time, two other (MR and GL) had already moved away (one Aliyah, and one to Kemp Mill), so this leaves DS as the last one standing here. I'll miss him, but he said he'd come visit a lot, and the opportunity he's getting does sound fantastic.
Anyway, he brought a wine I had not encountered before: a 2006 Psagot Cabernet Franc. It was delicious, and apparently is next to impossible to find in the US (heck, it's so rare, it's not even listed on their website).
Another treat was getting to meet Sarah's second cousin, who lives not too far from us - he's a nice guy, and is about to head off to law school. I hope he doesn't lose the urge to stick it to the man...
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We finally got around to doing some more plantings: the lantannas at Merrifield were really scrawny, so I got a petunia to go along with one in the big pot out front in case it doesn't thrive. This year's herbs will be basil and rosemary, and I'm finally trying to get some shade groundcover between the holly and the honeysuckle - we'll see how that goes.
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I got to jam with Todd today - that was a lot of fun: he's got the same type of rhythym-guitar style that I do, and we recorded a track of a song he's been noodling with for a few years. I also got to turn Jannie on to Action Philosophers!, which I think should replace the first month of every Freshman philosophy course out there - Van Lente and Dunlavey have equaled Gonick in accessability, and have the twist of presenting biography rather than sequential history. Excellent stuff.
The reason Todd and Jannie were down was the wedding of one of my cousins to a delightful young man whom she's dated for more than 8 years (!). They're a heck of a pair of overachievers, and yet they somehow manage to be people who are good without pretense. I have a bit of angst about one aspect, however, which is that the groom is Jewish, and my cousin (unsurprisingly) isn't. This just makes the latest in the tangled web of sort-of-Jewish marriages in my family:
J & K, Sarah and I, B & A, V & G*, R & D, G & M*, T & J*, M & J - the *s represent couples where neither party is Jewish by anyone's definition. We ARE the intermarriage issue...
Neither of the couple have publicly expressed particularly strong religious feelings (rather, they've got stronger cultural identifications, and those blend better than religions do), so it's unsurprising that that wouldn't be a barrier between them. I hope that God blesses them with wisdom and insight when challenges arrive, such that they have a common language with which to address problems as they arise.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: none
Tags: comics, family, house, music, religion, wine
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