Tohu Bohu

Still here. Quite busy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger was musing on the differing attitudes toward this morning’s clock-meddling. My fondness for Daylight Saving is on record, but that seems to be a minority view amongst my friends and neighbors. Who, I suppose, want to get up and work out before work? I don’t really understand it, myself. Sunset at 6:52 tonight! Whoo-hoo! But there’s the bigger philosophical question of whether you feel robbed by the clock manipulation. I tend to see it as giving back the hour we got a few months ago.

But then, I was born in the summer. People born in the Daylight actually do get an hour free that first autumn of their lives. They give it back before the year is up, sure. But then they get another one! And they keep going like that, borrowing an hour from their future every fall and giving it back every spring.

Winter babies, though, lose the hour the first time they spring forward. And, yes, they get it back in the fall, but that just makes them even again, back where they started. As the summer children keep going ahead and then even, the winter children lose ground and catch up; they never quite match. When the summers get a free hour, the winters are just getting back to even. When the winters are having their hour stolen whilst they sleep, the summers are (reluctantly) returning their bonus. Year after year. Of course, the older folks of April and May may have been winters; the younger ones will be summers. This will be very confusing for those persons trying to determine whether to become optimists or pessimists; their hourglass is only half-full.

As I was musing, though, I remembered that I stayed on the Lord’s time until I was eighteen. Arizona folk respect the sun, but we don’t try to get more of it. I experienced the clock-meddling as something that other people did—a phone call to California would involve an hour difference in the winter but not the summer. An East Coast call would travel across three hours in the summer, but only two in the winter. I think I remember that this affected television schedules, but in those days the summer was all reruns anyway. No, my first extended experience of Daylight Saving was in the Pennsylvania autumn, which as it happens was my first extended experience of autumn, and my first real experience of the days getting significantly shorter. Perhaps, then, my pro-clock-meddling philosophy is more accurately attributed to… er… yeah.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ten years ago today, my Gracious Host announced that YHB’s Tohu Bohu was open for business. OK, not business. I can’t say as I have ever figured out what it’s open for… well, and it’s been open for ten years, is what it’s been open for.

I was hoping to write a note today marking both ten years and three thousand posts. Sadly, I have only posted twice this week, so this is the 2996th post on this Tohu Bohu. That’s probably as good a comment on the State of the Blog at present as anything I could write.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well. I did the monologue I talked about a couple of weeks ago for an audition. The play is As You Like It; the part I particularly wanted was Jaques. That actually was important to the monologue because I particularly did not want to be cast as Touchstone. Touchstone is the professional fool in the play, and he is particularly dire. Shakespeare’s fools are generally unfunny, and Touchstone, in my opinion, is among the worst—he has a million lines, most of them with very heavy puns or paradoxes, and the rest with fart jokes. It’s odd, actually, for a sexy play like this one, that there seem to be fewer dick jokes and more fart jokes than in most of the canon. Anyway, I loathe Touchstone. But I adore Jaques.

Jaques is the other fool, the amateur fool. He’s an odd duck, and everybody thinks of him as an odd duck. I think he’s the only character of note that doesn’t get married at the end (except for the already-married people, parents and whatnot). He’s a foreigner, with a foreign name, and he’s clearly an outsider. People are fond of him—maybe more indulgent than fond—and he has to be likable, but it’s not clear that he is likeable. He is melancholy, and everybody including himself talks about him as being melancholy, but he also has strenuous enthusiasms and jokes incessantly. In other words, he’s a challenge.

And, speaking of challenges, he’s got this bit about the seven ages of man. It’s not Top Five Shakespeare Monologue for audience expectations, not any more, but it’s probably still top ten.

Anyway. The monologue went no better than OK. The director asked me to do it again without “acting”, very simply, and I did, and he seemed to like that. Then I got to read the Rosalind scene, and again he had us do it again “more simply”, actually putting us in chairs facing away from each other. And then, since I was still around, he had me read Silvius for a Phebe in III,v. That was clearly just to have somebody for a Phebe to read with, though. I left the night thinking that I had done fairly well, but not extremely well. It would depend on who else was auditioning. As it always does, of course.

Then there was a callback, and another callback. I think the first callback was for the young persons; I was at the second one, for the Dukes and Touchstones and so forth. There were five us fogeys looking for the various fogey parts. I think there was one other fellow who was focused on Jaques particularly, a much older (looking) man with a quiet voice but a nice line in melancholy—If the director wanted to emphasize the melancholy aspect, that would be a perfectly good way to go. The other three were pretty good as well, though, and I left that callback not having any idea at all who would be cast as what. In particular, of course, whether I would be cast at all, and if so, in what part.

And… I found myself, over the next couple of days, wanting to get cast as Jaques. Really, really wanting it. Eager to get to work on the part, dig in to the text, think about the various possibilities. In point of fact, I braved superstition and did some initial research, looking at Alan Rickman’s essay about the 1985 RSC production and getting my hands on the correct volume of the wonderful Cambridge University Press Shakespeare in Production series.

When the email came, this morning, with the cast list attached, my gut clenched. The document seemed to take forever to open. And forever to scroll down the page through the fourteen parts and people who were neither Jaques nor YHB. And on the fifteenth line, there are both.

So. For those Gentle Readers who will be or can be in the area in May, Your Humble Blogger will be playing Jaques in As You Like It. And I expect that between now and then I will be writing about the part, about the play, the text, the process, and all the that goes with it.

So we have that to look forward to.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Yesterday, as I was browsing through the The King Center Archive, as I hope will be one of my MLK Day traditions, I came across an odd little note by Martin Luther King, Jr. called How My Theology Has Changed. It’s undated, but it begins “Ten years ago I was a senior in theological seminary”, which places it in 1960. It’s a lovely concept—It appears to be notes for an article—there’s a thirty-page handwritten draft called How My Mind Has Changed in the Last Decade, which I think is more or less the essay published as Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. The end of the short note that I began with, though, isn’t in the longer draft at all. Here’s my own transcription of the last item on the list:

I am happy to be alive during this period of history. With all of its tensions and uncertainties something profoundly meaningful is happening. Valleys of despair are gradually being exalted and mountains of injustice being made low. Yes, the glory of the Lord is being revealed. May we dare to believe that all flesh will see it together.

The beginning of the list, when he talks about the ten years since he left Crozer, is also absent from that longer piece draft:

Since that time many worldshaking developments have taken place—the emergence of many new nations as a result of the independence struggle, the momentous decisions of the US Supreme Court outlawing segregation, man dramatic exploration of outer space, the creation of more powerful nuclear weapons.

And here’s the closing of the published article, which is also new from the handwritten draft:

The past decade has been a most exciting one. In spite of the tensions and uncertainties of our age something profoundly meaningful has begun. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away and new systems of justice and equality are being born. In a real sense ours is a great time in which to be alive. Therefore I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that we face a world crisis which often leaves us standing amid the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. Each can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark, confused world the spirit of God may yet reign supreme.

So. In 1960 or so, at any rate, when he was thirty, Dr. King thought it was a great time to be alive. The thought that sparked in me was—do I think it’s a great time to be alive? Do I think that something profoundly meaningful is happening?

And the answer is, no. I don’t.

That may be an artifact of age: I’m a long way past thirty. In fact, I was startled yesterday to suddenly realize that I am a good deal older now than Dr. King was at the time of his death; he was so, so, so young. Also, despite his more wide-ranging description in the notes, Dr. King’s focus on the situation of black Americans has something to do with it—many white Americans don’t, at this remove, think of the 1950s as a time of worldshaking developments and profound changes. My Best Reader pointed out that a leader for LGBT rights, born in 1982 and ruminating on the events of the last ten years, might well describe this as a great and lucky time to be alive. That’s possible.

And, of course, there’s this: Martin Luther King, Jr. was shaping his world. I am not. By 1961 he was head of the SCLC, and was important enough to be asked to contribute to a collection of essays by significant thinkers. If he was not yet the marble hero he became, he was already—at thirty!—nationally prominent and hugely influential. I suspect that such a man is always going to find himself in times of worldshaking developments, if only because he is a worldshaker himself. So the difference is not in the world but in the people.

Still. I think it’s a great time to be alive (and to be a fairly affluent American) just because of the creature comforts. I have air conditioning and sinus medicine; I have shoe inserts and mp3s; I have meat at the grocery store and water at the tap. I would not trade these decades of my life for those decades without penicillin and pinterest. But profound changes and worldshaking developments? I’m afraid my outlook there is grim.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So. It's Thanksgiving. Your Humble Blogger has had several conversations today about things for which thanks ought be given, and those are good conversations to have. Sometimes, though, those conversations degenerate into general lists of Good Things, which makes me cranky. This year, for some reason, I was thinking—what for the crankiness? Good Things are good! Why the hell not?

Here, then, is a list of some Good Things. It's a small list— I could probably (give the time and inclination) come up with a list a hundred times as long. Some of the stuff I have left off the list is every bit as good as the stuff on the list. The pie fight in The Great Race, for instance. Anyway, here's some Good Stuff.

Elvis Costello, corn chips, six-card lowball with a quarter option, pince-nez, broken consort music, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, pizza, baseball, very long scarves, doo-wop, Ruth Brown, Mrs. Lea's Bible Stories, autumn leaves, vehicles on rails, carrying my sweetie's purse, Steven Sondheim, the L. Frank Baum Oz books, summer nights in the desert, music on shuffle, handwritten letters, Joe Posnanski, hot ham and cheese on a bagel, Dominion, shoes, the Beale Street Blues, Buster Posey, overstretched rhymes, the sound of the street after snowfall, antibiotics, Eye-rolling, Eileen Atkins, reading a Dick Francis novel in the bathtub, getting out my summer hat, the freezer, silliness, Rose Tyler, raisin bran, Careers (the 50s or the 70s version), thermal underwear, the Rock Steady beat, Yossarian, the first meeting of Eomer and Aragorn, overshoes, on-line archives, sudden affection, Kazuo Ishiguro, candied sweet potatoes, The Minister's Cat, work gloves, klezmer, Nancy Pelosi, finding a new book in a favorite series at the public library, the Fourth of July, email, dick jokes, Tom Stoppard, being read to, listening to a massive storm, physical therapy, camaraderie, Lauren Sklamberg, baby carrots, Word-O-Rama, corrective lenses, odd live covers on YouTube, Susie Bright, Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco Treat), Guillotine, my new shirt with the blue stripes, terrible 80s pop, Alicia Svigals, getting the reference, the first day that it's still light when I get out of work, cheap long-distance, giving a copy of a favorite book, Ian McKellan, cider, Civ III, black socks (they never get dirty), the good tune to yismichu, Sol Lewitt, garden peas, Sorry (the game of sweet revenge), a good wide-brimmed hat, the big number at the Act One curtain, Hugh Laurie, stopping in the middle of reading a play to try out a line out loud, kite-flying weather, anti-depressants, patience, Psmith, funk, hearts, bowties, Swing, James Madison, flyleaf inscriptions, sunscreen, clickable concordances, tea.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thanksgiving week is one of the times when the director at my place of employment has everybody grab some cleaning supplies to make the place shine. And it occurred to me, as I was scrubbing coffee off the wall of one of the tutor rooms, that (1) they don’t pay me enough to do this, and (B) they pay me a lot more than they pay the cleaning staff.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I realized, after using the word crazy in my previous post, that it was World Mental Health Day. Which event may reveal me to be even more insensitive than I previously knew.

I have talked here, I think, about how I used to conceive of the human body as a machine. Specifically a car: you put in the right fuel, you take care of the various moving parts, and it goes and gets you where you want to go. Sometimes bits of it break and have to be fixed. If you smash it too badly, you can’t fix it. And all of that is true, more or less, but it turns out it’s not a terribly useful way to think about the human body. It also, by the way, leads to internalizing a mind/body split that I have come to find very unhelpful and inaccurate—the body is not a device for carrying some you around, but is at the least a part of who you are.

I went from the car concept to a chemical plant concept. While there still needs to be fuel in and waste out, and lots of infrastructure with moving parts that still can break, the important part, really, is getting the chemical balance right—the right balance of chemical intake produces the right chemicals, which are intake for the next chemical chain. Vitamins and sugars and proteins and whatnot are converted to sugars and blood and fat and muscle and whatnot, and the conversion process is calibrated differently for different people. So if you think about it as one of those puzzler videogames where you have to combine things to make the colors match up in order to level up, every time you play there’s a different mechanism for converting one color to another.

I came across something recently, though, that pointed out that a better metaphor is to think of the human body as an ecosystem. Well, as a rain forest. I am inhabited—we are all inhabited, science tells us, by organisms of a startling variety and quantity. These organisms interact with each other and with the infrastructure in unending combinations. They also interact with the organisms in other nearby ecosystems—every ecosystem contains smaller ones and is contained by larger ones, just a tree can be viewed as an ecosystem, a forest, a range of forests, a continent… the decimation of bats in one ecosystem is felt in the bug population of the ecosystem next door, and the butterflies in my belly cause your hair to fall out which increases my stress levels which interferes with my immune system which allows the reintroduction of wolves into my cerebrum.

Or something. Metaphors and analogies are just ways of thinking about things, you know, they aren’t intended to have one-to-one correspondence. The point is that everything is connected to everything, and that’s true of the inhabitants of your body and the inhabitants of other people’s (and animals’) bodies, as well as all the internal and external infrastructure.

And that, as least as I read it, we are starting to realize that mental health is not something distinct from physical health, that having a lousy digestion and having black depression are not as different as all that, and that having PTSD and having stomach cancer are not as different as all that. They’re not the same, you understand. They aren’t the same. But they aren’t as different as we all thought. They are all manifestations of fuckups in the system—and there are always fuckups in the system.

That, I think, is the lesson of the ecosystem metaphor—the system struggles to an equilibrium, and then something disruptive happens. A fire or a virus or a cancer or a glacier or a bad touch or a parasite or an epidemic or a car crash or insomnia or depression or arthritis or hunger. Something happens. And maybe nothing much happens, or maybe all hell breaks loose. And if all hell breaks loose, maybe there’s total breakdown and the system dies, or maybe a new equilibrium is reached. Until the next disruption.

The fact that everything is connected to everything means that it’s not possible to isolate the problem, that a butterfly in Shanghai can cause a proverbial in whatsit. It also means that there are potentially a million new equilibrium points, and a million paths to them. It’s a hopeful thing, to me. And a scary one, because many of those equilibrium points kinda suck. But a hopeful thing, too, innit?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the themes of Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, is t’shuvah. Literally, t’shuvah is returning—it is called repentance, sometimes, or restoration, perhaps, but the literal sense is returning.

We return, in our minds, to those things we were thinking about last year at this time. We promised to improve, to break our bad habits and form good ones, to make recompense for the harms we caused and to avoid making new ones. How did we do? How did I do? Where did I fall short? When I failed to keep a promise, should I make the same promise again? How can I keep it this time?

We return, in the rabbinic literature, to the Divine—when we fail to live up to our better selves, we alienate ourselves from the Divine. Now, as we pray, apologize to the Divine and to each other, and make recompense, we return to ourselves and to the Divine. We return, at least for a time, to those better selves that have been in the Divine keeping, waiting for us.

We return, in the body, to the synagogue. Some of us have been hanging around during the year—I was there last Saturday, and the Saturday before that—but whether we are returning after a fifty-one weeks or after a few hours, or even if we are turning to a new synagogue, we are back in front of the ark where we were last year.

We return, in the calendar, to autumn. Or spring, I suppose, if we are in the southern hemisphere. It’s the equinox, anyway. My experience of Rosh Hashanah, though, is of autumn, the trees beginning to turn, or at least (I grew up in the desert, you know) the nights and early mornings growing cool. Returning to school. Returning the sweaters to the closet and the swimsuits to the attic. Returning to shorter days, returning to longer nights.

And I intend to return to this Tohu Bohu. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’m just going to go ahead and tell this story, because there’s news about him, and it’s a blog. You know? I feel awkward about telling it, though, for reasons that will become clear shortly.

The year was 1991. The American Parliamentary Debate Association was going through the tail of a phase in which humor and improvisational technique was highly rewarded. In addition, we whiled away the time between rounds (whilst those who ran the tournament hand-tallied the results and chose pairings) by holding a competition in Public Speaking, which was neither more nor less than improvised stand-up comedy. There was a phase, somewhat later, when the ability to prepare cases (and respond to prepared cases), a wide knowledge base and logical clarity were the more valuable skills. And several phases, back and forth, I’m sure, over the years since then. At the time, though, we argued silly cases with utmost gravity, and serious cases with outrageous silliness, and deep philosophical cases with pop culture references, and debated pop culture itself, with both utmost gravity and outrageous silliness.

For those unfamiliar with APDA, teams are given a general resolution, and then the offense (or government) team has ten minutes to make a case from that resolution. The resolution could be something like Let your yea be yea and your nay, nay, and the case could be, oh, the US should withdraw from the UN. Or that steeplechase racing should be banned. There is (or was, at the time) a great deal of leeway. The more competitive, then, can come up with cases beforehand and adapt them to whatever resolutions they find. The Princeton team, particularly, was known for having a file of cases that they had already run in practice rounds several times. My alma mater, on the other hand, was known for coming up with a case in the ten minutes between the announcement of the resolution and the commencement of the round. Often terrible cases, but fresh ones. Instead of using our practice time to polish up cases to run in competition, we used that time running even more terrible cases that we knew we couldn’t possibly have run in competition. Often whilst balanced on a Bongo Board. We did share a few ideas (Draft the elderly! Eschew time travel! Abolish the penny! Shoot Orin Scrivello!) but we prided ourselves on never running a case more than once. My partner and I had to come up with the actual details of the case, the presentation of it, the analysis, all in ten minutes. That was what made it fun.

That is also, quite likely, why I didn’t win as many rounds as the Princeton folk. There’s nothing more depressing and embarrassing than reliving the sole time in my life that I achieved real (if small-scale) public success, like Bruce Springsteen’s speedballer, but they really were my Glory Days. I was never at the very top of the rankings, no, and I never won a tournament—or even made finals—or semi-finals—until my last tournament, but I took home a gavel nearly every weekend of 1990-1991. I was someone to be reckoned with. Those who drew my team would know that they would be arguing a new case, and a wide-open case, but possibly a bizarre and disorienting case. Particularly in that final year when I became enamored of the six-things-in-a-box style case, the canonical example of which is that you, the judge (or speaker) were given a choice of six objects to be stranded on a desert island with (a knife, a cookbook, a solar-powered radio, a sewing kit, a guitar or the Riverside Chaucer), our case being that you should choose—well, whichever one we picked to run on, and the opposition should pick a different one.

OK, one more bit of truly pathetic Glory-Days-ing: I did have one case prepared, and almost got to use it. It was a variation on the six-things-in-a-box case that I was becoming known for, setting the time-space parameters such that we would suppose the tournament had chosen to hold that round in a hot-air balloon high above the earth. Sadly, as the round begins, we discover that the balloon is leaking, and even after releasing the ballast, we will need to toss one of the five persons (the speaker and the four competitors) plunging to a hideous doom to save the lives of the remaining four. The case would propose that the leader of the opposition team should be sacrificed, with three independent levels of analysis. I swear I would have run that case had we lost the coin toss before the final round of Nationals, but instead Princeton ran that the US should intervene militarily to support the Kurds in Northern Iraq against Saddam Hussein. Ah, well.

We’re getting to the story I wanted to tell now. I promise.

Sometime in that Spring of 1991, I was in the finals of the Public Speaking competition for the tournament, and decided to break into song, as I did from time to time. These competitions, by the way, while technically extemporaneous, also provided the opportunity to work in prepared material. We had a couple of people who did stand-up gigs and could do a few minutes from that. I wasn’t disciplined enough to work out much material in advance, but I did some filking, the way you do, and had written a couple of verses of “You’re the Top” with various inside-APDA references, and was waiting for a chance to use it. I don’t remember exactly where I was when I did—I’m inclined to say Yale, which was late in the year, and a big tournament, and I seem to remember it was a big tournament late in the year. But it was more than twenty years ago, and frankly this whole story, like all stories of glorydays, should be assumed to be half true, half faulty memory, and half embellishment to make it a better story. And it’s a better story at Yale, I have to say, because the fellow this story is about won first speaker at Yale according to a website that is also half true, half memory and half embellishment.

See, this fellow I’m talking about was a tremendous competitor, a Princeton man (with all that entails), and in some ways the typical example of the Princeton debater. He was very smooth, very knowledgeable, and very practiced. He wanted to win, and although I must say he played fair (if I remember correctly, he used to say he would just as happily argue the other side of any case he ran, and sometimes ran the other side in another round later in the day) rounds with him were less light-hearted and fun than they might have been. And, probably simply by coincidence, I used to win rounds against him regularly. His case or mine, whoever I was partnered with (he and Dave Panton were partners all that year and the next; I never settled to a partner), even rounds my team ought to have lost turned out our way.

Which is why I ended the first verse with the line: I’m bound to lose/I’m Panton and Cruz/I’m slop/But if baby I’m the bottom, you’re the top!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Your Humble Blogger has been meaning to write about You Don’t Have to Be Pretty, an Erin McKean note I came across recently (don’t remember who linked to it) and which has been on my mind. For those of you who don’t know Ms. McKean (or know her work—I think there are Gentle Readers who know her socially, but that’s not relevant at the moment) among other things she has written a Dress a Day blog for years and years. She cares about how she looks, and how other people look. And she has to remind people that they don’t have to be pretty.

Probably all the Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu are aware, on some level at least, of what a no-win situation appearance is. You can conform to social expectations and suffer contempt for your conformity. You can withstand the pressure to conform and suffer ostracization for your strangeness. You can be attractive and suffer jealousy and objectification. You can be unattractive and suffer discrimination and rejection. It’s all bad.

On the other hand, while everyone is bound to lose, alas, in our screwed up world, everyone is not bound to lose all the time with everyone. We manage, somehow, despite everything. We like each other, somehow. We overcome, somehow, the terrible stupidity of our fashions. Or some of us do, or we do some of the time, with some people. We are insulted and made to feel inferior, it’s true—but we aren’t always insulting each other. Nobody escapes, but some of us survive, and in fact, many of us only suffer intermittently, at longer and longer intervals. Thank goodness.

This whole thing has been worrying at me, or I’ve been worrying at it, because (a) I’m a guy, and not addressed specifically by Ms. McKean’s excellent note; and (2) I’m a bit of a dandy, and put a good deal of effort into my clothes. So I get an odd sideways buffet from our culture’s focus on attractiveness and fashion.

For those Gentle Readers who don’t know me, I am usually dressed in either a grey suit or grey slacks and a waistcoat, with a dress shirt and a tie, most often a bow tie. When I’m outdoors, I wear a hat—a fedora for three seasons, and a straw hat in the summer. A few years ago, I phased out most of my white shirts in favor of dark-colored or vertically striped shirts; I have since acquired a couple of white shirts, for occasions and outfits that demand them, but mostly not. Here’s a reasonably representative sample:

I am, as you can imagine, often asked by people who don’t know me well, why do you dress like that, to which I usually respond I think it looks good on me. …and they all move away from me on the bench. But, in fact, I think this style looks good on me, or at least, looks better on me than another style would. And I care about that—I want to have a Look, and I want it to look good. I could wear khakis and t-shirts when I’m not at work, and khakis and not-quite-t-shirts when I am at work, but I don’t think men in general look good like that, and I’m quite sure I don’t. And I prefer to look good.

Do I think I have to be pretty? Do I think, in Ms. McKean’s words about the pressure on women, that I owe it to onlookers to maintain a certain standard of decorativeness? No. I don’t really think people care, and if anything, people are put off by my daily adherence to My Look. But I would rather look good than look lousy.

And, honestly, I think that people ought to prefer looking good to looking lousy. I don’t think that people owe decorativeness to me, personally, and if they want to look lousy, or if they don’t want to take extra time to dress, or if it’s more important to them to support some thing (a cause or an alma mater or an idea) with a t-shirt, I don’t resent it. It’s their choice, their haircuts and spectacles and tans and even their tattoos and piercings. I keep in mind that don’t know anything about the lives of the people I see at my place of employment or at my child’s school that might lead me to have a sensible opinion about what informs their choices. I know that some people think they look good when I think they look lousy, and that other people for whatever reason think their comfort and their look are incompatible and they must have, for whatever section of the day I see them, have chosen one over the other.

And yet. I think that a lot of people have let their satisficing down to a level between invisibility and not-looking-hideous. I find this saddening. I want to advise the college kids and young parents to spend just a little time finding a Look that is both comfortable and attractive, and then spend just a little time more time in dressing to make that look happen. It doesn’t have to be expensive (the Divine knows I spend next to nothing on my clothes) (well, other than my hats, and my summer hat this year was less than $20) and it certainly doesn’t have to be uncomfortable (I do not wear anything uncomfortable) and it doesn’t have to be fashionable. You don’t have to lose weight or work out. You don’t have to expose any bits of you that you would rather not expose. You can still look good.

And yet, you know, you don’t have to be pretty. I know, I know. Wanting to look good is part of the whole problem. And yet, wanting to look good is so obviously better than wanting to look lousy. I’m conflicted about this. I can’t think that most young people wearing t-shirts and jeans most of the time is solving anything, making anyone feel happier and better about themselves. At the same time, the pressure on people to be pretty (or handsome or stylish or fashionable or thin or tall or curvy or buff) is terrible.

I don’t have any answers. All I have, really, is my own experience: I dress up because I think I look better when I am dressed up, and it makes me happier to look good than to look lousy. That may apply to other people, too. You don’t have to be pretty—but you may find that effort put in to your style pays off in your happiness.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I had the exam dream the other night.

You know the exam dream. You’re sitting to an exam, and realize that you haven’t studied, haven’t done the reading, haven’t been to class. It was a math class of some kind, and before I got the exam paper, I figured that I know some math, and maybe I could bullshit a bit and get a C- or a D+. I know this isn’t the usual emotional state for the exam dream, but I have to admit, with only a trifle of rue, that it was pretty much my emotional state for my actual exams in high school and college. I mean, I had generally been to class, and had often done the reading, but I didn’t study much in high school. Even in college, I didn’t study as much as anyone else. What I had learned, in my primary school years, was how to do well on exams without resorting to knowledge of the subject matter. That got me through high school, and while it didn’t work in college in so far as getting a C- or a D+ is working for that scheme, I found it worked well enough for me.

However, when (in my dream) I actually got a look at the exam, it turned out to be some sort of applied math—physics or something that required memorization of formulae and that sort of thing. In fact, the first problem involved figuring out the paths of cannonballs from their shadows on the ground during the rising part of the parabola; I could just about imagine how one would go about doing that but could not possibly have come up with an actual answer. And unlike the math tests on which I was able to bullshit a bit and get a C+, clearly the actual answer was what the grader would be looking for.

It was at this point in my dream that I said to myself Wait a minute—I didn’t go to any of the classes. What the hell am I taking the test for? And put the paper back down on the desk and made to get up and leave the classroom. That’s when I woke up.

I didn’t, in the dream, know that I was in the dream. I don’t know if I figured that I was just in the wrong room, taking the wrong test—if I hadn’t attended any of the classes, I clearly wasn’t enrolled in that class, and heck, it was applied math, so I clearly wouldn’t have signed up for it in the first place. Or maybe I just figured that if I had skipped all the classes, and clearly hadn’t learned the material, I wasn’t going get a passing grade anyway, so why waste my time taking the test? All I remember is my holding the test, making some sort of connection, and thinking what the hell and heading out.

Except, as I say, that’s when I woke up. And it took me a long, long time to go back to sleep. It’s the first time I’ve ever had the exam dream that I remember. And I did it wrong.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Your Humble Blogger has an arthritic knee. Chondromalacia, in fact. Whoo-hoo.

I am told that my splay-footed gait is a substantial factor in this—my feet tend to roll inward on the ankle, so to compensate my toes point outward, knocking my knees together at enough of an angle to take the patella off its normally even keel and scrape it along the cartilage. What’s left of the cartilage. Anyway, to reverse this, I will need to wear a thing in my shoe, which shouldn’t be a problem once I purchase the funny thing (perhaps tomorrow morning).

I also need to forget how to walk.

More accurately, I need to train my muscles to forget exactly how I used to walk in order to reset themselves to my new gait with a thing in my shoe. Muscles have very good memories. They are creatures of habit. Like people, actually. The first step in the whole no-longer-crying-in-pain process is to confuse the fuck out of my muscles by stretching them to hell and gone twice a day. Once the muscles are sufficiently confused, I will walk around with a thing in my shoe and my muscles will develop a new habit that won’t involve cartilage-scraping. Or that’s the idea, as presented to me by an attractive young physical therapist with a calming voice, who I trust with my muscles, if not my cockles. Ahem.

So. Forty-five minutes or so in the morning and another forty-five minutes or so in the evening of holding absurd and uncomfortable postures has been added to my daily maintenance. Now, I don’t do a lot of daily maintenance on the body, certainly compared with other people. I wash, I brush my teeth, sure. I brush my hair, mostly for cosmetic reasons as I keep it short enough these days that not brushing it for a day wouldn’t be a health hazard. Also my hair is short enough that the cosmetic hairbrushing takes less than half a minute, most days. I eat, although most of my eating time is probably not accurately described as body maintenance. Taken all together, the half-hour of daily stretches for my chondromalacia patella probably doubles my usual daily body-maintenance time.

I do not have a daily exercise regimen. I pretty much don’t ever exercise as body maintenance; any exercise I do is part of some other task, either amusing myself, moving myself from one place to another, or accomplishing something I want done for other reasons. It’s a moderate amount of exercise, taken all in all, most of it walking around the library that employs me, but it isn’t deliberate. Other people go to the gym three times a week, or jog in the morning, or otherwise spend some hours devoted to exercise. Some Gentle Readers have been doing stretches of this kind for years, just as a maintenance routine. Some have more elaborate systems of dental hygiene. Some prepare special foodstuffs as body maintenance aids, or have some cleansing ritual. Some do a sort of mental body maintenance (I know a woman who does crosswords defensively against the prospect of memory loss; she doesn’t enjoy them, but then she doesn’t enjoy her treadmill walking, either) or meditation or visualization intended as maintenance. I don’t.

I do believe that it’s reasonable to put some effort in to maintaining the physical plant. I reject the whole mind/body split thing, but if I can use it’s terms for a moment, I’ll say that I am on good terms with my body. I certainly accept that the limitations on my body are limitations on me—I can’t fly, and I can’t both drink caffeinated beverages in the evening and sleep at night. If I eat the wrong things, my digestion will be bad; if I sink to the bottom of the ocean, I’ll drown. Eventually, I will die. I accept those things. Many of them are easier to accept, I’m sure, because I am so physically average in so many ways. I’m of middling height, middling weight, middling looks. I can run, but not quickly; I can sing, but not on key; I can see, but with glasses.

This, though, this sudden requirement that I spend an hour and a half or more every day on body maintenance. I don’t know. I’m having trouble accepting it. It seems like such an unreasonable demand. I mean, I like to watch movies, but it wouldn’t occur to the movie-watching aspect of me to hold myself hostage, that if I don’t devote an hour and a half every day and watch a feature film that I will put myself through incapacitating pain. Frankly, I’m disinclined to negotiate under these conditions. On the other hand, my Best Outside Alternative is… excruciating pain? Surgery, followed by either more rehab or vastly reduced mobility, and more pain anyway? This knee has me over a barrel, doesn’t it?

And yet… I am wondering whether what is really going on is just an ordinary adjustment to my having had abnormally low levels of body-maintenance in my routine for so long. What about you, Gentle Readers? How much time (over a week or so) do you spend doing things you think of as body maintenance?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The kitniyot question, in a nutshell, is how to decide what foods are like other foods. Y’all know, I imagine, that Jews (those of us who keep Passover) give up bread, that is to say ordinary leavened bread, for the whole week. Technically, we give up chumetz, bread that is made with wheat, spelt, barley oats or rye. We also give up other foods made from those plants, which are considered to be chumetz, except for the unleavened matzah which is made under certain strict conditions. For a week, we don’t eat bread—we don’t eat sandwich bread or baguettes or rolls or pita or bruschetta or any of that stuff. The point being, more or less, to remind us that it’s Passover, that we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and the Divine brought us out with a strong hand, and an outstretched arm, and with signs and wonders. There was no time for our ancestors to bake bread, so we voluntarily give up bread for eight days to identify with them. Not that difficult, actually, and it does (in my experience) keep my mind focused on the holiday. I never get to the end of the day during Passover without being reminded that it is Passover.

Now comes the complicated part: you know how we don’t just give up bread-like-stuff, we give up everything that’s made with those five grains? Well, we also give up things that are made with things that are like those five grains. Which makes sense: if we give up wheat bread but eat corn bread all week, Passover is less present in our minds than if we give up corn bread, too. So there’s this category of kitniyot, things that are similar to chumetz, which we give up as well.

Digression: By we, here, I’m speaking about Ashkenazic Jews; Sephardic Jews have different customs. These customs (minhag) have something of the force of Law. That is, in the absence of any really good and persuasive reason to abandon a minhag, you are responsible for upholding it and passing it along to your children. As you would expect, the Rabbis have always been conservative in those choices. So it’s not like I can declare myself a Sephard for a week and eat rice. I mean, I can do that, but then I can just have a nice ham on rye, too. But the Sephardim can eat rice during Passover and still be keeping; and that I can’t do. Different people, different customs. It’s how it works.

So what is kitniyot? Rice, buckwheat, millet. Obvious. Also sesame seeds. Also beans, lentils, peas, soybeans, chickpeas, and other legumes. Why? Because those things are like the other things. The category is actually something close to edible seeds in pods (see this OU article), because in a general way, you can take those seeds and grind them like wheat and make a flour. On the other hand, we don’t count potato starch or nut flour as kitniyot, and it’s much more common to use those things for making biscuits than it is to use mustard seed or lentils. But that’s the tradition, and that’s how it goes.

There are arguments, within the tradition, of whether, having disallowed soy, for instance, it is permissible to use soybean oil to cook with, because after all, soybean oil isn’t much like anything you would do with the five grains. And what about high-fructose corn syrup? I was taught that it was no good for Passover, because it’s essentially corn—but then, it isn’t really much like chumetz, is it? Rabbis have different opinions about peanuts, and different opinions about peanut oil, of course. Caraway seeds are explicitly allowed, although one is supposed to examine them carefully to make sure there isn’t any chumetz mixed in with them. Lots of rules, lots of interpretations. There’s an annual six hundred page digest that includes a list of permissible brands of various things, and the Chicago Rabbinical Council has kindly indicated recommended spray deodorants. The OU and the CRC and other groups will happily guide you away from companies who don’t schmear them enough are insufficiently careful to keep flour dust out of their factories.

Which brings us to the other half of the kitniyot problem. Ashkenazi such as YHB who wish to keep kosher during Passover (but not for the other fifty-one weeks) are faced with a choice. We can assign the first half of the kitniyot problem to some Board of Kashrut somewhere and hope that (against all odds and evidence) they are not on the take, or we can use our own judgment. The second seems obvious, but in addition to the problem of individual judgments not adding up to a community tradition, there’s (for YHB, at least) the problem of trying to ascertain whether I think green peas should be OK for Passover because they honestly aren’t much like barley, or whether I think green peas should be OK for Passover because I like green peas. Is a bit of corn syrup sweetener enough to make my can of soda chumetz? The answer seems to depend on how thirsty I am, which is not quite rigorous.

And then—it’s obvious to me that toaster waffles are not OK for Passover. When I go to the store and see all the stuff that is obviously not OK for the purposes of keeping Passover in mind, and then have to decide if it’s OK to eat the ice cream, well, if I want to eat the ice cream, I’m going to eat it, even if it turns out that I accidentally got the kind that has corn syrup sweetener. Because: toaster waffles. Am I right? In fact, corn on the cob. Because: toaster waffles.

So. I can use my own judgment, which frankly is not to be trusted, because I am naturally biased in favor of the things I want. Or I can give the job of judgment to the authorities who frankly are not to be trusted either. And this is all up for grabs because of how difficult it is to tell if X is enough like Y.

Is this job enough like the way I want to spend my day? Is this manuscript enough like a book? Is this meal enough like nutrition? Is this house enough like a home? Is this haircut enough like handsome? Is this candidate enough like my ideal? Is this policy enough like justice? Do I make all these judgments myself, or do I let some authority make them for me?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

So. I’m driving along in my car, and it occurs to me that I have a lot of pairs of glasses with me. I have my sunglasses on, and my regular glasses are in my pocket, which is pretty typical for me when the sun is out. So that’s two. And I am, I admit, a trifle nearsighted, so I keep an emergency pair in the glove compartment, because if for some reason my glasses break while I am out, I will need them to drive home. This makes perfect sense, right? It’s not crazy at all to keep a spare pair of glasses in the glove compartment. Probably some of you Gentle Readers do that, don’t you? Don’t you?

And again: in case my glasses break when I’m at work, I keep an old pair in my satchel. I have had the experience of having my glasses break when I was at work, and my Best Reader had to come in and rescue me. I sat in the back of the office and kept very still until she arrived. Did I mention I am a trifle nearsighted? I could not have safely crossed the street, much less made the trip on the T. So I keep an old pair of glasses in my satchel, just in case. Which, I hardly need point out, is perfectly reasonable, and not crazy at all. It just happened that I was taking the car, and so had both pairs of emergency backup glasses, as well as my current specs and my shades.

And my pince-nez. Because, you see, if I’m going to be wearing pince-nez during the show, I need to wear them during rehearsal, so as to be used to them, which isn’t crazy at all or anything like it. Just taking the pince-nez to rehearsal, like I am taking the shoes I will be wearing, like the women are bringing their corsets and so on and so forth. Nothing at all unusual about that.

So the fact that I was driving around with five pairs of glasses wasn’t, you know, odd or anything, was it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It occurred to me, as I was washing dishes this morning, that my children hardly ever see grown-ups eating food they don’t like. I wonder if that’s true for children, generally.

That is, if I have taken a bite of some vegetable matter that I find loathsome, and the eyes of the children are upon me, I don’t (after my mouth is empty) state that the taste was awful, but that it was high in potassium, and therefore I will have another helping please. In truth, Your Humble Blogger is hardly ever in that situation, because my Best Reader is a wonderful cook who is also accomodating to my somewhat idiosyncratic tastes; I eat my vegetables because they taste so good. But if they do not, my instinct is to pretend to the children: That’s not bad at all, I might say, perhaps a little salt.

The small ones, then, having come across some bit of something that might be nutritious but noxious to their juvenile taste, are told that it’s good for them, that they need to grow up big and strong, to encourage their teeth and bones, to blah blah blahdeblah blah, and that they can be excused after eating that much. And, to the credit of my particular offspring, they do—we have been very, very lucky in the food-pickiness category as compared to the wide range of kids. But the concept that humans eat things that aren’t tasty for health reasons is modeled to them only by other children.

We have made a deliberate effort to model chore-doing, and we don’t hide the fact that it chores are a pain in the proverbial. During the toddler years, it was much easier to do household chores when the children were asleep or otherwise occupied, but I took advice from some book or other which pointed out that then the children grow up thinking that dishes magically cleanse themselves, that laundry simply appears clean and folded and put into drawers, and that the crud on the floor dissolves into the air. Nor to we falsely sparkle and grin: our children know that pulling weeds makes our backs sore, that cleaning out the trap in the kitchen sink disgusts us, and that while laundry is not difficult or laborious, it is not fulfilling or inspiring, and I grow tired of it while there are still loads to go before I sleep. Our children know that we do things that need to be done, and often slack on those we can slack on, until we can’t slack on them any longer. It may be spinach, but we choke it down.

Actual spinach, on the other hand, my Best Reader finds tasty either boiled or raw, and I quite like fresh spinach from our garden and don’t mind small amounts of the bitter, slimy boiled stuff. Which, I should say, only winds up on my plate at someone else’s house, where the politeness factor kicks in. I am (I hope) good enough at being polite that my children aren’t seeing me as a model of choking down unpleasant food for a good reason—and, anyway, that’s a separate issue from the eat-it-and-be-healthy that is a big part of children’s meals.

In truth, I hardly ever eat anything I don’t like. I eat a lot of things I like, and a few things I don’t mind, and sometimes I eat things that I like but am bored with (particularly for lunch, if I am uninspired), but I hardly ever eat anything I don’t like. And my children are presumably aware of this, and are also aware that on occasion they are pressured to eat some things they don’t like. This isn’t fair to them, and if there’s one things children notice, it’s injustice against them.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger has mentioned before how I have come to listen to music: a complicated system of ratings that allows me to randomly shuffle from thousands of songs I am not sick of. For the last seven or eight years, most of the time I am at home, this nearly-infinite playlist is on. Before that, of course, most of the music I listened to was in the form of an album of some kind. I had a few mix tapes, and a handful of CDs that collected different performers, but almost everything I listened to was forty-five minutes to an hour from one group of performers, in one musical style. I was born into the Age of the Album, and grew up in it, and that’s how I thought of music. Even the mix tapes were mostly ways for people to introduce me to new bands so that I could get hold of their albums, and then listen to the albums.

Of course, I was unusual, I am led to understand, because I never listened to commercial radio. Not by choice, anyway. Oh, that isn’t quite true—there was, oddly enough, a station in San Diego that I remember fondly from my childhood vacations, which introduced me to The Cramps. But I have always found radio commercials profoundly irritating—they don’t quite keep me from listening to baseball, but I do shut it off at times—and of course I never understood why I would listen to a song I didn’t like while waiting on the speculation that I might like the next one. I did do that sometimes for music videos, but then I was also less irritated by TV commercials as well, and in the heyday of the music video, I had cable and could waste a good part of a lousy three-minute song checking the other channels. Also, I was a teenager. Yich.

Where was I? Oh, yes—even in the Age of Albums, lots of people listened to a gallimaufry of music from different sources, on radio and in dance clubs, but I did not acquire the taste for it until sometime around 2000. What happened at that time (more or less, as I don’t really remember the years) is that I finally got tired of choosing CDs for the player, and as there was now the technology to play music continually, choosing only music I like, well, I adopted it. But I adopted it for home, when I was sitting at my desk by my computer; in the car, I still listened to CDs. Well, in 2000, I didn’t own a car, but I think I was listening to CDs on a Walkman-like device of some kind as I walked or rode the bus. I didn’t get a portable mp3 player until, I believe, 2005 or so.

I bring all of this up because I have finally, it seemed, got tired of listening to albums in the car. Our car stereo has no very easy injack for a mp3 player, and I find the player-to-radio adapters irritating, so I have continued to listen to CD albums in the car up until very recently, when to accompany my drives to and from rehearsal (and other places, although some of my driving is accompanied by WNPR, when they aren’t playing shows I dislike, such as three to four pm, repeated from nine to ten pm) I have put together a half-dozen mix CDs. I didn’t spend much time on them—I asked my player to cough up fifty or so good songs, and I threw twenty of them onto a playlist and burned it to CD, and then I did it again five more times, and will probably do a few more. Because it turns out that I really prefer the mixes to albums, even when they are good albums.

I find this change disconcerting, though. Not for practical purposes, as I know I can still choose to listen to a CD all the way though, if I get the hankering for a musical or a concept album. Just that the Age of the Album was my age, you know? And it’s over for me, now, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger has been thinking about the passage of time.

Time passes. Listen! Time passes.

This Tohu Bohu is more or less nine years old; the best anniversary for the blog is probably February 24. Nine years is quite a while for a blog, I’m told, although of course I have been reading blogs that have been going on for longer than that. I’m still not sure what purpose it all serves, but it has gone on for nine years; I have been blogging for long enough to have written out my ambivalence over the then-upcoming invasion of Iraq.

Earlier in the week The Youngest Member marked his fifth birthday. It seems like a bigger deal than the fourth or sixth, but developmentally, it isn’t. Developmentally, this is the first birthday on which he remembers a previous birthday, but that’s about it. We still can’t leave him home alone.

On Wednesday, I figured out that the sweater I was wearing had been made twenty-five years previously, give or take a few weeks. It’s a mother-knitted sweater (the best kind), one of only two remaining in my active wardrobe. Well, three, but that’s counting one that was knitted for an elder brother. My two sweaters were ones I mostly designed (the grey one with the dark blue honeycomb pattern, and the garnet one with the white diamonds), and they are just about my favoritest garments ever. They have held up to twenty-five years of wear, more or less weekly wear during the appropriate months; the hand-me-down has been in the rotation for at least ten (tho’ I think it was not often worn before that). Our mother stopped knitting for our generation altogether when her first grandchild was born, eighteen years and thirteen days ago. That grandchild is waiting to hear from the colleges she has applied to.

Time passes. Listen! Time passes.

Jamie Moyer is in spring training camp; was pitching in the big leagues before this sweater was knitted. I could, I suppose, mark out the milestones of my adult life by the arc of his career. He was with the Cubs when I met my Best Reader; he was with the Cardinals when I graduated college; I think I saw him pitch for the Red Sox during our sojourn there; he was with Seattle when I got married; he moved to Philadelphia around when I moved to Connecticut. Pitchers and catchers—including Jamie Moyer—reported last week to Spring Training.

A couple of weeks ago, the State of Arizona celebrated its centennial. On February 14 of 1912, the Union admitted the last real state. I wrote something about it for the 75th anniversary, for my high school paper. A month before, I had attended a march to support a state holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.; I may have been wearing that grey honeycombed sweater. Time passes. Two months after Statehood in Arizona, the Titanic sinks, and Downton Abbey starts. A couple of years later, my grandfather’s family flees Jaslow, finding refuge in Prague. He would have been around eight, I suppose, at that time; his great-grandson, who was named after him, turned five this week. As I said.

Time passes!

The crocus blossom I saw yesterday, by the sheltered corner of the house, was buried overnight by the wet snow.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, and Your Humble Blogger has been out of town for several days, happily interacting with many people in (as the kids say) real life, and hasn’t had much internettage. And now the sun is going down on the first night of Hanukkah, and I haven’t wished all of you a happy joyous Hanukkah.

I have been so busy, in fact, that I am going to ask y’all Gentle Readers for help rather than doing the research about this question that has been bugging me all day.

You know how Kermit the Frog is an entertainer who plays, among other characters, Kermit the Frog—similar to Gracie Allen or Jerry Seinfeld playing versions of themselves in their television shows. Right? So, here’s my question: was Kermit actually a newsman who went into the entertainment wing of the business, or was he just playing a reporter for all those years?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s the beginning of gift-shopping season here in the US, which is a Bad Thing of course, but there it is: it’s the beginning of gift-shopping season. So I think I should post my Philosophy of Gift Giving, for your amusement and argumentation and whatnot, in part because I am having a lovely quiet day today and have time to write it up, and in part because I think it’s a Good Thing to think about gifts rather than just purchasing them without doing the thinking part.

So. Let us for the sake of convenience and clarity call the first person Mookie and the second Sasha. Mookie is preparing to give a gift to Sasha; it may be Sasha’s birthday, or it may be some other gift-giving occasion for either. Mookie and Sasha are close, and they like to make each other happy, which is why Mookie is giving Sasha a present. They may be lovers or relatives or friends or business partners, but the relationship is close enough that Mookie is giving Sasha a gift, not out of a sense of obligation and cultural norms, but because he likes Sasha. This is the reason for gift-giving.

The first thing is to list the criteria for a truly great gift, which are four:

1. Something that Sasha would never buy for himself, but would like to have. Sasha might think it’s too frivolous, or a tad too expensive for what it is, or never have heard of it, or anything, but for ti to be a truly great gift, it can’t be something that Sasha might have bought the week before or the week after and been happy about it.
2. Something that nobody else would give to Sasha. Sasha gets a lot of great stuff, but only Mookie would think to get him that one thing.
3. Something that Mookie wouldn’t give to anybody but Sasha. Maybe because it wouldn’t be funny, or because it would be awkward, or because Mookie’s the only one who knows Sasha has always wanted one.
4. Whenever Sasha uses the gift, he thinks about Mookie, and Mookie giving it to him. Or if it’s a decorative thing, whenever Sasha sees it. Or if it’s an event, whenever he remembers it. Or whenever he wears it, or reads it, or feeds it.

Now, it’s rare that you can get achieve all four, and even rarer that you can achieve all four for anybody but a spouse. The fabulous scarf I knitted for my Best Reader is as good a gift as I have ever given, and in part that’s because I hadn’t at the time made very many fabulous scarves, so it was particularly rare. Giving her another fabulous scarf this year would be a good gift, but not a great gift. The posters my Best Reader made for me with collages of album covers are truly great gift, as were the tickets to Richard III back in 1992. A few others, here and there. A gift that achieves two or three of the criteria is a very good gift indeed. A gift that achieves one of them is probably pretty good, too. Any hand-made gift, of course, achieves Criterion 2, and if it’s nice enough to keep around, probably Criterion 4 as well. And it’s easier to satisfy Criterion 3 with a gift that is made yourself or commissioned. I think a mass-produced gift can be truly great, if it’s the right thing, although honestly I can’t come up with an example, unless tickets to a show count.

What do y’all think? Have you ever given a truly great gift? Or been given one? Do you have similar criteria, or totally different? Are the four criteria useful in choosing a pretty-good gift, or do I need an entirely different set for the less-inspired gifts that I will be giving as well?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger would like any ideas y’all have for replacing the Google Reader Notes feature that is no longer available. I didn’t use the thing the way Google wanted me to, so I suppose I can’t blame them for not continuing to support my off-label use of their system. Still, I need something new, and maybe y’all use something for a similar purpose.

It’s like this: The Google Reader allowed me to make a note of a page I was on, typing a short note and adding the entry to a list of links/notes. It was for sharing the links and notes with my Google Buddies, but I could (and did) uncheck the box for sharing and simply have a private list, which I could access from my Google Reader page. Mostly, I used the list for news stories and blog entries that I thought I might want to write about here in this Tohu Bohu. Many of them I simply deleted on a second look, deciding that there wasn’t anything in there that inspired me to blog, but sometimes I actually found a way to write about the thing after it had percolated for a while on that list. Also, if I came across a reference to a book I wanted to read, I put it into that list; I could pull up the citation when I was at work and either get or request the thing.

So. What I want is a way to keep lists of web sites, ideally with the ability to make a short note for myself indicating why I wanted to keep the site for. This may sound like a job for Bookmarks (or favorites or whatever terminology a browser uses), and in fact it is, only I specifically want to be able to access the list from different computers. I don’t, however, want to synchronize all my bookmarks—when I’m at work, I want my work bookmarks, and when I’m at home, I want my home bookmarks, and when I’m on the road, I want my road bookmarks, but I also want a list that I can get to from all those locations.

I don’t want to share the list with anybody (sorry, y’all, but the ones I actually have something to say about make it into this Tohu Bohu); I would on the whole prefer that the list not be part of a social networking site, even with tools for making a private list. I am probably not going to sign up for a new social networking site even if it has the tools I want. I would be willing to add on a Firefox widget, but I’m not going to change browsers (or operating systems) for this, and I find the page for figuring out which Firefox extensions and add-ons to use unhelpful in the extreme.

I could write the URLs on my forearm.

This seems like one of those things that would be very easy to create, but that there wouldn’t really be a reason to bother creating it and disseminating it. It made a nice addition to an aggregator—now that I think about it, I would almost certainly be willing to change to a different aggregator, if it’s a good one. Any recommendations?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sorry about the blog hiatus, but Your Humble Blogger is without power (or heat or hot water) at home. I am getting on-line for about half-an-hour a day, and I'm afraid I'm not using it on blogging. Nor am I using valuable computer battery time on writing blog notes, as we are using the laptop for DVD-watching during our slumber parties.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Your safety is our number one concern.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your Humble Blogger begs your indulgence; there are technical problems with this blog. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Mostly, it doesn’t, lately. So if you have been getting a 503 error or otherwise can’t get to this page, please let me know by email (y’all know my email, right? My nom de net at the domain the blog is on? Or, in a worst-case scenario where that thing bounces, at gmail?) or commenting here, if you can load the page to comment. My advice is to use the RSS feed, which seems to be working fine, as does the lj version, but if you can’t get in here, you can’t comment, so that stinks. Again, feel free to email me your comment and I will try to get it onto the site for the rest of Gentle Readers to read if they have the comment feed on their aggregators. Whee!

I don’t have the tech mojo to fix this thing, and my Gracious Host is doing his level best, but, y’know, he has other demands on his time and this seems to be complicated and not quick to fix. Le sigh.

Anyway, Your Humble Blogger is going to try to keep blogging through this, and post the things when I get a chance. Please be patient, and please don’t give up on me. Sooner or later, I’m bound to post something interesting, just by accident.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger has been meaning to write a note about Facebook and Google Plus, and I suppose the latest FB foofaraw is as good a place as any to start. FB, as you may know if you are on it, has changed its news feed as part of a bigger change in the way it wants people to use the software. A lot of people hate the change, including, natch, Your Humble Blogger. Not that any of us liked FB’s interface before, because it stinks on ice, but we had grown accustomed to it, perhaps had put in some effort to customize it to our own preferences (as much as we could), and now—BAM!—it’s all screwed up again.

The thing is this—people don’t like Facebook. We like interacting with our friends and our friends, our old high school classmates and cousins and so on and so forth, but we don’t like the Facebook itself. Maybe some people do, but it seems to me that most of us don’t. This isn’t terribly surprising, as most of us don’t like much of our software. I don’t like my word processor. It works, and that’s good, but I don’t look forward to using it. I don’t like livejournal; people did seem to like it for a while, and perhaps a lot of people who use the site more than I do still like it a bunch, but I have the impression that the bloom has gone off the proverbial. I have the sense that people like Twitter, that they enjoy the whole interface (however they are using it) and like to be on it; I’m not on twitter at this time, so I don’t know. I know that a lot of people like Pandora, that using Pandora is pleasant or fun in addition to listening to the music. I like Google Reader, which I use as my aggregator. I like YouTube, actually, now that I think about it. Facebook? People don’t like Facebook.

Of course, I don’t like Google Plus, either. This was made worse by the fact that Google Plus doesn’t like me—or, rather, they don’t want people using pseudonyms on Google Plus. As Your Humble Blogger is pseudonymous, one of those people who has been using the same nom de net for years in a variety of places, this makes Google Plus seem very unwelcoming, which affects how I think of their set-up. Not that they have actually kicked me out—but I am lying low over there, and have transferred my Google Reader and Calendar to my proper name account, for fear of losing them altogether. If any of y’all are at all interested in the whole nym fight, which is actually quite interesting, there are plenty of places to read about it from people who are more interesting and have more at stake than YHB, but here I’ll just state that it got me off on the wrong foot as far as liking the thing.

Not that Google or Facebook need me or anybody else to like their product. They just need us to use it. If Microsoft proved anything, it proved that people will use products they don’t like using. They might be the right products to use, even if they aren’t likeable. So I suppose the question is what product to I use? What do I want from a social network?

The first thing about social networks, of course, is the desire not to be Left Out, that when something interesting happens, we will be in on it. And, in fact, they are terribly useful for that; I have found out about events and performances, personal milestones, sales, and all sorts of things ranging from the tiniest trivia to sparks to Act Now. My initial foray into Facebook was because an old high school friend of mine died, and I didn’t hear about it for a month or so; I guess am unlikely to miss such a death or a birth or a marriage again for a while. So that’s all right.

Other than that, I suppose what I really want from a social network is for my clever, witty friends to amuse me constantly. My preference is for them (y’all being a good subset of them) to do it at greater length, on their own blogs or on mine. Google Plus seemed to be set up for multiple paragraph notes and comments interspersed with the one-liners, but I’m not seeing a great deal of that—of course, I’m not seeing a great deal of anything, because most of my clever, witty friends either aren’t on Google Plus or aren’t posting things to amuse me (because I am Outside the Circle—the Circle metaphor really, really isn’t working for me over there) with four or so friends posting every day (some multiple times) and another two or three posting on occasion. That’s not going to keep me amused, particularly if the notes are brief enough to be the soul of wit.

People talk about the death of blogging, you know. Not just about this Tohu Bohu and how rarely I post these days, but that in general people no longer want to have their own blogs to write posts about the things that interest them, when they can participate in a greater stream of a social network. Unfortunately, social networks are mostly terrible blogging platforms (I suppose LJ/dream is an exception, there—LJ seemed to do the social networking thing and (to a lesser extent) the blogging platform thing very early and very well, and had almost no influence on the social network craze) (except on dreamwidth and similar sites, I suppose, which themselves aren’t very influential on the craze). One reason why Twitter’s success followed Facebook’s, I think, is because after a few months of writing and reading the brief status updates that are that site’s stock in trade, the switch to an absolute character limit is easy. I miss long posts, I miss rambling posts, I miss being amused and provoked by my friends. Sigh. Not that I really think blogging is dead, or close to it—many GRs and other friends have journals or blogs, and update them more often than I update this Tohu Bohu. But still.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger hasn’t given up the Tohu Bohu. I’m still posting; I’m just not actually posting anything. I opened a word processor the other day to write this I’m still here post and didn’t get anything typed at all. Not that I’m horribly busy—I am quite busy, but not to the point of panic. I’m afraid this Tohu Bohu has taken a bit of a lower priority than some of the other stuff, on the assumption that it’ll still be here.

Don’t be fooled, though, into thinking that I’m posting again just because I am actually posting something. I am just popping my head in to comment that the main thing I learned from this list of teams with three good young pitchers is that there aren’t enough major leaguers called Hooks.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[I feel very strongly that people should take some time today and wrestle with (and celebrate) this thing that Dashiell Hammett wrote, even as we, in this country and elsewhere, are quite rightly focusing on that moment when the beams fell. -V.]

Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that was devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important that each detail be related exactly as it had happened.

At the beginning Brigid O’Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness, obviously more surprised by his telling the story than interested in it, her curiosity more engaged with his purpose in telling the story than with the story he told; but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible.

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

When he had reached this point in his story the telephone-bell rang.

“Hello,” Spade said into the instrument. “Mr. Cairo? …This is Spade. Can you come up to my place—Post Street—now? … Yes, I think it is.” He looked at the girl, pursed his lips, and then said rapidly: “Miss O’Shaughnessy is here and wants to see you.”

Brigid O’Shaugnessy frowned and stirred in her chair, but did not say anything.

Spade put the telephone down and told her: “He’ll be up in a few minutes. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had a automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.”

Spade had not been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade’s room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.

“I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway it came out all right. She didn’t want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her—the way she looked at it—she didn’t want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

“Here’s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

“He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally in the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

[From The Maltese Falcon, of course.]

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

OK, a quick Yorkshire Day question for Gentle Readers—which eighth of the year is your favorite? Let’s number them:

1. Winter Solstice-Groundhog Day. Xmas and New Year’s. Snow, ice, sledding, that sort of thing.
2. Groundhog Day-Vernal Equinox. A miserable month of dreary, grey foulness, but followed by the first intimations of Spring!
3. Vernal Equinox-May Day. Opening Day, and Spring in all its glory, depending of course on where you live.
4. May Day-Midsummer. Verdant summer, the end of the school year, and the really long days.
5. Midsummer-Lammas. True-summer, with really long days, hot weather, grilling and no school. Also, mosquitoes.
6. Lammas-Autumnal Equinox. Dog days. The start of school. More mosquitoes.
7. Autumnal Equinox-Hallowe’en. The High Holidays (usually), and then Crisp Autumn days and the leaves turning.
8. Hallowe’en-Winter Solstice. Thanksgiving and the dying year. The Holiday Season, with lights and songs and such.

Well, and of course this depends on location (Gentle Readers from the Southern Hemisphere are welcome to comment about how this looks from there) and climate and so on. I’d like a Top Three from each as is willing to comment; I suspect that there will be some very popular ones and some with no supporters, but perhaps I’m wrong.

As for me, my favorite slice would be the third one, with seven placing close, and four to show. Love that Spring.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu have now made six thousand comments. Well, and that’s including my own, more than a thousand of those. 1,180 if a simple search is correct. Not that I shouldn’t count my own with y’all’s, as we are in this thing together, whatever it is.

This Tohu Bohu has been around for just a smidgeon over three thousand days, so that’s close to two comments a day for more than eight years. Some years more than others, of course. I don’t have numbers for this, but I do feel that I am writing more posts that spark no response at all, and fewer that are sparking real conversations, but there have been quite a few good threads in the last two years (since we hit the 5K mark). There was one about Robert Elsmere, and one about the way I delivered the line The house used to look so big, and one about Board Games. And Carols and Lessons and Lessons and Carols as well. The thread about Who Wrote Shakespeare was interesting as well, and featured people just showing up out of the blue, which is both fun and a trifle disorienting.

The most fun for me was the Botticelli game; I just realized that I didn’t actually state that the B I was thinking of was Princess Buttercup from The Princess Bride. The way to up those comment counts here is to get a game going—so many of y’all are Games Players. I recently came across a thing I wrote twenty years ago where I mentioned that I judge people mostly by how they play games (I think this may have been in reference to a Gentle Reader who I met at the time), and while I no longer really get the opportunity as a grupp to play parlor games with people shortly after making their acquaintance, it remains largely true that I don’t consider myself really close to anyone I don’t enjoy playing games with. Are there other games that work on blogs? The Fortunately/Unfortunately thread was fun, but couldn’t really sustain itself as a game, I suppose. The last Encore game was a disaster, and my recent attempt at lyrics fun didn’t really work. There are certainly a lot of problems for blog games, but we should be able to come up with something.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So. Your Humble Blogger has been opposed to the idea of kids watching videos in cars. Not just opposed, actually contemptuous, if you want the truth. Cars with DVD players! The heck? And yet, I cannot at this point come up with any actual arguments against it. It still seems wrong, but I can’t seem to create a logical case for it.

I should say—My Perfect Non-Reader suffers from carsickness when she reads, and although the Youngest Member does not (yet), neither is he currently reading books long enough to while away a long car ride. We do listen to stories, on occasion, and music of course, and we play The Minister’s Cat and I’m going on a picnic and I Love My Love with an A, and we have been known to have a sing-song (tho’ The Youngest Member objects strenuously to sing-songs, alas), but there are times when the car rides are dull nonetheless.

Most of our car trips are under fifteen minutes; we probably have two or four trips a month that are more than an hour long, and probably two or maybe four a year that are more than three hours long. I’m counting round-trips as two, of course, and often those two trips are in a single day—a trip of ninety minutes in the morning and a return in the evening, for instance, or sometimes a very long trip and then return four or five days later. I often experience those trips as being continuations of a single interrupted drive, so that by the middle of the return trip I am out of ideas for amusing myself and the others. There is grumpiness. It isn’t pretty.

So why not television? I mean, when the choice, for all practical purposes, is staring out the window, is there some downside to having the children look through a window at a narrative rather than a landscape? Yes, I do think that the habit of watching screens is not a good one—and the Divine knows how thoroughly Your Humble Blogger has chained himself to that habit—but I’m not sure that the habit of watching out the window is a better one. And on a longish ride (say, over ninety minutes) I don’t know that the use of electrons would really replace much in the way of conversation and game-playing. It might well be that the use of electrons for sixty minutes would refresh the car’s prisoners to the point where conversation and game-playing could be entertainment and not chore.

And yet. I have not yet resorted to the DVD player when I am in the car. Airplane trips, yes. For some reason, perhaps because the airline provides movies for grupps, the use of a DVD player to while away the children’s time on an airplane does not seem so wrong to me. Now that I think about it, though, I am not sure I have resorted to a DVD player on the plane for either child once books were an option. But then, we haven’t taken The Youngest Member on a plane since that particular switch got flipped, and even My Perfect Non-Reader has had only three such trips that I can remember.

I have begun urging my Best Reader to consider the DVD as a possibility for those rides where she is the Only Parent in the Vehicle. She is reluctant. I think I would be, too. But I’m not sure I can defend that reluctance. Can you?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger underwent a cardiac stress test this morning—don’t be alarmed, studies show I have a heart—and was struck by the peculiar sense of old-sf in the room.

I mean, there I was, hooked up by eight tiny wires to a machine the size of a football that was in turn hooked up by one thick wire to a machine the size of the Narnia wardrobe. This machine has a screen on which green lines glowed against a black background; it emits unidentifiable beeps at unpredictable intervals, and it prints off a stack of continuous perforated printer via what certainly appears to be a dot matrix printer (albeit a good one). This machine is connected to the treadmill, which is a treadmill: conveyor belt at the bottom, handle at one end, and some sort of system for inclining the belt while making a whining noise. And there is Your Humble Blogger on the treadmill, wires dangling from my chest.

Every now and then, the doctor took my blood pressure, using a cuff that inflated with a squeeze bulb, and listened to my pulse through a stethoscope of particularly timeless design. He wore a white coat over a shirt-and-tie; I wore chinos and oxfords, and had my shirt-and-tie in a satchel that could fairly be described as an attaché case. Against one wall was one of those medical scales that measures pounds and inches, using small counterweights and a sliding aluminum bar. There was a telephone; the receiver was attached to the transmitter by a coiling wire.

The aesthetic of the machines was highly reminiscent of the PET computer on which I learned Basic in or around 1979. Much of the experience seemed to smack of science fiction written or filmed within a few years of that time. People hooked up to machines! Machines that beep! And read their internal organs! Conveyor belts! Molded plastic! Eyeglasses! Beep!

If, right now, you were to write or film a scene where a fellow’s heart was being tested for possible pathology, you wouldn’t include any of that crap. Certainly he wouldn’t have wires stuck to him. He would be in a chamber of some kind, possibly submersed in gelatinous liquid; the doctor would operate the machinery from another room, possibly from another building or halfway across the world. There would be a lot of glass, and multicolored readouts with rapidly scrolling text (or text-like things), and a computerized voice giving instructions. Also, the stimulus part would be in automatic feedback with the readout part without people leaning over and pressing a sequence of buttons.

Oh, and things would go horribly awry, with shattering glass and dramatic lighting and viscera. I’m glad that didn’t happen.

Anyway, I had a couple of thoughts as I was walking on the treadmill. First of all, there is this idea that pops up now and then about medical costs, that it would be nice to be able to pay 1950s prices for 1950s medicine. I suspect that this is 1970s medicine, and that the insurers are paying more or less 1970s prices for it, and that is all Good Enough. I would guess that somewhere there is a much fancier, much more expensive, much more twenty-first century version that is reserved for people who are already identified as having cardiac pathology of some kind or another. This version is for people like me, who are just checking to make sure that they are, in fact, as OK as it seems they are. So that’s all right.

The other thing is a horrible surmise that maybe in eighty years or so there will be conventions devoted to the cheap-plastic-punk aesthetic, much the same steampunk for us. People encasing whatever truly futuristic devices they will have in the grey-green grimy plastic that indicated Computer at the time. Wearing striped neckties with checked jackets and sansabelt slacks. Eyeglasses with rims made out of black plastic that is supposed to look like horn. Rotary telephones and bench seats. Ferns.

We’ll all be dead then, of course, from the cardiopathology these machines will not pick up. Thank goodness.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I got nothing today, how about a little game of Fortunately/Unfortunately? Here’s how it works: The first sentence starts Once Upon a Time, and after that sentences alternate between beginning Unfortunately and Fortunately. The players try to make a story that makes some sort of sense, ideally coming to a satisfactory conclusion on the last Fortunately.

My house rule for a, y’know, house is strict adherence to turn order with an odd number of players. I have never played on-line Fortunately/Unfortunately before, so I’m just guessing what would be good House Rules. Let’s go with:

1. Players should not take two Us or two Fs in a row. If your last was a U, wait to chime in until we get to an F, and veesey versey.
2. Players should not take two turns in a row, unless more than six hours have passed
3. Players are strongly urged to give all characters names, if not in the sentence that introduces them, as quickly as practicable thereafter.
4. Sentences may be as long as you like, but long sentences should maintain some vaguely grammatical construction, because that’s more entertaining to me.
5. If two comments are posted more-or-less simultaneously, the faster typist’s sentence takes precedence in case of plot contradiction—but if it’s possible to include the content of both sentences in the story, that’s even better.

Ready, then?

Once Upon a Time, in a castle on a hill, Queen Isobel was sad because her three daughters, Leah, Maria and Natalia, could not sleep.

Your turn. Unfortunately …

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Willie Mays saved my life.

This is not actually true, but it’s truer than you might think. Back in high school, I had recovered from my suicidal tendencies enough to function, attend school and, y’know, not kill myself, but I was still wallowing in misery and woe. This was probably simple teenage angst to some extent, of course, which doesn’t mean it didn’t suck. But some of it was that I was still walking around suicidal, indifferent to my failure to either die or live. You know. Depressed.

And my Dad took me out of school one February day to go to an Old Timer’s Game.

Now, I grew up in the desert; we didn’t have Major League Baseball back then. We had a Pacific Coast League, the triple-A farm team of our beloved San Francisco Giants, the Phoenix Giants they were called in those days. The town had only a tenuous connection to the big-league club, with not enough fans to make it worthwhile for a local station to broadcast the games (I grew up listening to Vin Scully and the Hated Team, because that’s what was on the radio, although we could sometimes, at night, in the right weather, catch Lon Simmons or Al Michaels for a few innings. It wasn’t a Giants town, though—it was that other team’s town, as much as it was anything, but baseball ran a distant third to basketball and football (tho’ again no team locally in those days; locals seemed to mostly root for Dallas). Spring Training was in town, of course (as were the Cubs and a few others, not so many as there are now), which generated some interest, and the parent club did on occasion attempt to stir up some sort of interest, either in them or in the AAA club. This Old-Timer’s Game must have been one of those.

I have a few distinct memories. It was a beautiful day, clear and sunny and warm without being oppressively hot—the sort of day that explains why people all over the Midwest spend thousands of dollars to be in the Valley of the Sun during February—and we were sitting, as we usually did, along the third base side. Juan Marichal did his famous high kick, obviously more in fun than to get more power driving the pitch. Willie McCovey stretched out to take a throw at first. And Willie Mays (who was allowed to participate for the first time after Peter Ueberroth lifted the ban) drew a bead on a fly ball, held out his glove like a basket, and let the ball fall in.

Baseball fans have more reason than anybody to keep in mind that our memories betray us constantly. We remember very clearly a favorite player’s at-bat against, say, Steve Bedrosian in a Braves uniform, and it turns out that Bedrock had already gone to the Phillies by that time, so maybe it wasn’t him, or it was the Phillies, or it was some other player batting. Gabe Schechter has written very movingly about being the guy at the Hall of Fame that people called to ask what day such-and-such an event took place, when it never did. Last Week Mike Krukow got the details wrong talking about his own MLB debut. And Joe Posnansky writes in a magnificent essay called Willie Mays turns 80 years old today about a famous moment that he can’t find any actual record of in the box scores. So really, I am not making the claim that any of this actually happened the way I thought it did.

But in my memory, that moment when I saw Willie Mays make a basket catch—that’s the moment when I decided I wanted to live.

Willie Mays turns 80 years old today.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. There’s Your Humble Blogger, gardening. Or more accurately, there I am pulling weeds, because that’s my chosen task in the yard: I pull weeds, I work the mower now and then, and I tell my Best Reader how great everything looks and/or tastes. I grew up in the desert, you know.

Anyway, there I am, pulling weeds, and while of course most of what I am pulling is dandelion, I am also pulling lots of little seedlings from the neighboring trees. The next door house, particularly, sheds thousands of those little propellers, and some of them work their way into our fertile soil, and either I catch them as tiny beanlike sprouts or as six-inch high mini-trees. And I pull them, because I do not want any more trees in the yard, either in the garden boxes where it’s really more a matter of priorities, nor yet in the little yard itself, where space and sunshine are at a premium. And I don’t want to be raking up more of those propellers in thirty years, although I have to admit that’s not really a likelihood anyway.

What I’m getting at, though, is that this tree has managed, through the miracle of Naytchah, to propogate itself. There’s the tree over there, and here’s this seedling over here. And if I didn’t do anything about it, there would be a tree over here, likely enough, and that tree would probably last the rest of my life and more. This isn’t a mayfly I am squashing, this is a massive, decades-long project of forestation and reproduction. This is the Big Dig. And then—yank!—gone. And then—yank!—another one gone. In the heap with the dandelions and the grass cuttings, probably to go into the compost because I can’t be bothered to sort.

I don’t mean that I feel guilty or remorseful about pulling the little fuckers. I am part of the Circle of Life, the great system by which we keep the propellers from taking over the worlds and murdering us in our beds (I’m assuming they will very quickly learn to walk, like the triffids, but that given how far the little fuckers have already traveled, I wouldn’t put it past them), and although I am not unduly proud of my achievements in that regard, I am not ashamed, either. I just think there’s something frightfully piquant about something that has the potential to be bigger, live longer, and generate more descendants than slight-figured nearsighted not-quite-five-foot-eight me being yanked out of the ground and tossed in the heap by my somewhat trembly hand.

Do y’all ever think about stuff like that? Is it just because I didn’t have my headphones in?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have been thinking about the way we killed Osama bin Laden.

When I say we, I mean we nationally, of course. Nothing I personally did had any effect on that, unless my votes and the margin of victory provided for my Party had some sort of effect, which, frankly, I can’t imagine. What could Senator Blumenthal have had to do with this raid? Anyway, despite my not being personally involved, I am nationally responsible, as are most if not all of the Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu, so it bears thinking about.

First of all, of course, I have no sympathy for the dead man or for those who mourn him, frankly. Just no emotional pull there, I’m afraid. He mad possible a lot of bad, bad things, and his supporters supported those things, and if they are grieving at this time, and I’m sure they are, it doesn’t make me sad in the slightest.

I’m not sure I have any emotional response to the killing at all, really. Which seems odd. I’m not elated, I don’t feel closure or triumph or relief. Well, to some extent relief, I suppose, although mostly (if I’m interpreting my own feelings correctly, which is always chance) relief that the story is over—not relief at the end of danger but relief at the end of the irritation that we are still hunting for him and not finding him.

I think that sense that the story has changed is the big positive, here. For a long time, the story has been that Osama bin Laden murdered three thousand Americans and escaped. America for all its might and its spy satellites and its enhanced interrogation techniques could not find Public Enemy Number One. Now the story is that when America bends its will, we can be delayed but never stopped.

This is nonsense too, of course. We haven’t found Whitey Bulger. We haven’t even found Victor Manuel Gerena, a Machetero involved in the White Eagle robbery (which I have never heard of, despite living not far from its location), and he has been a fugitive for twenty-seven years—and is a member of an accredited terrorist organization that (a) has a history of murdering American servicemen and civilians, and (2) seems it ought to have extremely limited resources for hiding fugitives. We are stopped fairly frequently, and could well have been stopped by the old lunatic just clutching his chest and keeling over six years ago. Still, it’s a good story this way.

And I can’t help contrasting this to Saddam Hussein—when our boys caught Saddam Hussein, he was evidently hiding out in a bunker without running water, he had been totally cut off and such loyalists as remained were of no help to him nor he to them. Now, it was always possible that he would return a few years later and form the spearhead for a revolt of ex-Baathists, so it’s clearly a Good Thing that he was caught, but it wasn’t in any way a blow to the operation of the resistance.

Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was living in a house he had built for his comfort and security in a major urban area. Although he evidently didn’t have phone and internet access, he clearly wasn’t lacking for communication channels (as evidence the “courier” we hear so much about). And I’ve never been very clear about the extent to which the fellow was some sort of operational chief anyway. Clearly he was the head fund-raiser and was a sort of inspirational figure for recruitment and for goals and means, though, and I can’t imagine that he had much difficulty acting in that capacity from his suburban safe house. To the extent that Al Quaida was ever a substantial threat to the US, it was evidently still a threat, still with substantial resources and communication capabilities. Saddam Hussein in a gilded palace with an army at his command was a potent force; Saddam in a hidey-hole with a pistol was not. Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was a potent force, it seems to me.

And here’s where I find myself bewildered and perplexed: up until the news of his death, I assumed that Osama bin Laden was no longer a potent force. I actually would have given something like twelve-to-seven against his being alive. In my imagination, if Osama bin Laden were alive at all, he was in a situation not unlike Saddam Hussein’s when we caught him: cut off, uncomfortable, degraded. This appears not to have been true in the slightest. Presumably this was well-known amongst his supporters. That must have been very good for him and for fund-raising and recruitment for anti-American terrorism generally, and it’s a relief to know that we put an end to it, even if I didn’t have anything to be relieved from, not having known it until it was over.

I am rambling. The thing is, I don’t really have anything other than rambling. I am concerned that my country appears to be involved in assassination, but then I’m not sure it is assassination, properly speaking, and to the extent that war seems to be only sort-of a metaphor for what was going on then a military assault on the leadership is not altogether an assassination. On the other hand, does this set a precedent? That would be extremely troubling. On the other other hand, that precedent has already been set, and it doesn’t shock me that a Most Wanted was killed rather than captured—Mr. Gerena’s buddy from the White Eagle robbery, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, went down pretty much the same way, and he was an United States citizen on American soil. And we have been sending drones to blow up buildings in civilian neighborhoods to reach "high value" targets for years in this war-like-thing. So if the death doesn’t bother me as a death, and it doesn’t worry me as a precedent, why does it niggle at me? I think it must be that stuff I was rambling about. Or perhaps it’s just that after spending almost twenty years living with a boogey-man, even if it was somebody else’s boogey-man for the most part, it leaves a hole when he goes?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Just when Your Humble Blogger was thinking that it was possibly in the cards for this Tohu Bohu to come back to some sort of life, the main computer for the household went kablooey. This is a time-consuming and frustrating process, and leaves YHB in no good mood for blogging, alas.

I have, after only a few hours of work, moved from getting a completely black screen to getting a black screen with a white cursor arrow to getting a black screen with a white cursor arrow and the words Gateway: Please Wait. So that’s progress. I have also moved from the mindset where I am unsuccessfully attempting to avoid reinstalling the operating system to the mindset where I am unsuccessfully reinstalling the operating system. It’s too bad, but I will lose very little that isn’t saved elsewhere. There’s a lot that will need to be reinstalled, which will be a tedious task, and will probably also leave me in no mood for typing at the keyboard. Of course, I’m still a step or five away from doing that reinstall, but I am at least somewhat confident that I will be able to eventually get the thing running.

So. This computer catastrophe has reminded me how astonishingly computery my household is. On the one hand, we are computery because a tremendous percentage of my leisure time is spent on the computer, reading and blogging and playing and watching and listening. On the other hand, we are computery because we have, four computers in the household. I don’t mean four things-that-have-computers-in-them; I have no idea how to begin counting that (the sandwich press! the thermostat! the poetaster! wait, the what?). I mean that I have a netbook in addition to the main computer, and my Best Reader has a laptop that goes back and forth with her from home to office, and there’s the main computer that is refusing to boot up, and then there’s the old cruddy computer that isn’t attached to anything at the moment but as of the last time we needed it booted up just fine. When one computer is on the fritz, the others can pick up the slack.

It was a few years ago, actually, that I first discovered how much easier it is to fix one computer if you have another computer next to it, also attached to the internet, ideally with the same operating system (not so in this case, alas). I find it hard to believe I ever got a computer up and running in the one-machine days. As frustrating and hair-tearing a time-sink as this is shaping up to be, I have that reminder of my good fortune. So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger has been out of commission for a few days. Nothing too tragic; a minor (outpatient) surgical procedure that left me uninterested in blogging for a few days. Or much of anything else, really.

So. You know what bothers me? How easy it is to not read the New York Times. I mean, I still read the occasional article, and I am considering, in theory, paying for the subscription—they run an operation that is both very expensive and very important, and while I don’t have a lot of spare money lying around, neither am I so poor that the New York Times should consider me a charity case and allow me free access. Plus, you know, there are other ways to read the paper; on the days I am in the office, there’s a good old fashioned paper copy sitting right there at the counter. And I probably have access to the full website through the university, although I haven’t checked that (probably I should, as it is bound to come up). Still, mostly over the last week or so I have simply looked at the headlines and figured that, meh, I could live without reading that one. And that one. And that other one.

Now, to be fair, part of that is that their sports reporting doesn’t suit my needs, and during the last week or so, I have wanted to read sports reporting more than anything else. It’s the beginning of the baseball season, at last, and besides that there was the incredible drama of the Cricket World Cup. And as I was on the Guarniad anyway for their Cricket coverage, why not just read their news as well? It’s not exactly the same, but for world coverage it’s nearly as good (only nearly, to be frank, because I prefer the NYT’s focus on how-does-this-affect-the-US, which the Guarniad understandably eschews) and I have gone right off most of the NYT political reporting. Alas, I’m getting London theater news instead of New York, but since I ain’t seeing anything in either location, it turns out to be a loss I can bear.

In fact, it turns out I can live fairly comfortably without the NYT altogether. That’s a problem. It’s a problem, in part, because I don’t read the news in order to be comfortable, so I shouldn’t let myself lapse into comfort. But it’s more of a problem because I want to be a reader of the New York Times. You know, seven years ago I wrote a note about an article which quoted a conversation from late 2002 that referenced an idea of the people who read the New York Times and the people who don’t. And at that time, I mean in late 2004, I said that the stereotype of the Times-reader was breaking up, that I still held such a stereotype, but I didn’t know how long it would continue. I think it has continued. I think there is still a cultural touchstone there; the Times reader, and I still think of myself as being that sort of person. Now I am on the edge of not being a Times reader anymore.

But if I don’t read the Times, who am I? I am already bringing up children in a house without a newspaper (the Courant not being worth the proverbial its website is printed on), which is utterly incomprehensible to me. But they hear news in the car (the local NPR affiliate) and they hear my Best Reader and I talking about the news—my Perfect Non-Reader will, I think, stay unfamiliar with what newspaper writing is like for a while longer than I did, but won’t be much more ignorant of the world. But I don’t think she will grow up to think of herself as a reader of the New York Times. The question is, will she think of her father as one?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

YHB is in a particularly foul mood this morning. I would appreciate any Gentle Reader who feels like chiming in with a joke, a bit of good news, or a link to something on the internet that is likely to cheer me up. No cute animals, please; I know where to find those.

I imagine those persons in my household in real life would be even more appreciative, should Your Humble Blogger’s cloud be lifted.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

ETA: It looks like the server is as cranky as YHB; please send cheering emails, instead.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger really is aware of the world smashing into pieces. I suspect I could make this Tohu Bohu of interest again by commenting on the tininess of the pieces, or by choosing somebody to blame, or just expressing my shock and horror. Lots of things that I care deeply about—collective bargaining rights, the ability to someday visit the Holy Land, a working federal government, food that doesn’t contain radioactive particulates, public radio—are teetering on the precipice of, um, well, a precipice. The steep kind of precipice. Like at the end of The Italian Job, right? With the bus and the gold? Well I, to switch film references, am v-v-very interested to see w-w-what’s going to happen next.

On the other hand, I’m not terribly interested in writing about it all. I don’t have any particularly interesting take on any of it. In fact, I am already spending too much of my time for my own personal happiness reading about the destruction of the world I hold dear; if I were to spend additional time writing about it, I would be less happy than I am. Better (for me) to hold off some time for sinking into escapism, or to enjoy the idiot crocus. Crocus. Are there stupider life forms? I mean, seriously: Hey, guys, I bet it’s Spring already! Is it Spring? I sure hope so! What’s this white stuff? I could write about the crocus. I mean, seriously, here’s the world, going to utter shit in a mag-lev train, and there’s the crocus all purple and yellow and dumber than, er, dumber than a, dumber than…

Did I mention I haven’t been sleeping well? I’m not at my most articulate these days, and I’m busier than a one-legged goat roper at the county fair, so my level of similitic achievement is as low as a toad.

All of which is to say a couple of things: (A) if any Gentle Reader wants to take over this Tohu Bohu for an entry in order to spark a conversation about some aspect of the recent excitement, go for it, please. And (2) I am going to continue with the Sixteen Lines until I’m done, and then I hope I will write another couple of posts about the Play, and then be done with theater notes for a while and write about something else. Oh, and (iii) sorry this Tohu Bohu has been so quiet and dull lately. Better things are on their way.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger clicked the Next bookmark on my toolbar last night, and instead of going to the next item on my Google Reader list, my browser went to a page that said my account had been disabled. Actually, it went to a help page titled I’m getting a message that says ‘Sorry, your account has been disabled.’; I didn’t get the message. I’m not sure if I have been apologized to, or for what. I sent a message of inquiry using their form, but I haven’t heard back.

This morning, of course, the news is that perhaps a couple of hundred thousand accounts were disrupted by some sort of Google event. The news is about their email service, though, and I don’t have a gmail address; I just use the Reader, the Calendar and the Docs (and some other minor apps). The Reader is just an aggregator, and so if all the info is lost, all I have really lost is the list of feeds I subscribe to, which presumably I know and can reconstruct. Except, alas, that a bunch of the feeds are essentially defunct, but may at any time roar to life; the great thing about an aggregator, as far as I’m concerned, is that if a blog or site goes dormant, you will be alerted if it shudders toward wakefulness without any extra effort on your part. Subscribing to sites that update every day is nice, but just going to the site once a day would do the same thing without much extra effort. The sites that update only rarely are the ones I will have the most difficulty remembering, though, and adding to whatever aggregator I choose.

The Calendar, though, had become Your Humble Blogger’s preferred method of remembering tasks, and also (crucially) a tool for communication with my Best Reader when one or the other of us has a logistical issue of some kind. Between the two of us, we had entered quite a lot of stuff for the next month (a tricky month for logistics and tactics), and my half of it may well be permanently gone. Alas. Back to the dry-erase markers.

As for the googledocs, I was keeping my list of Books Read in 2011 there, which was clearly a mistake. Or, at least, it was a mistake not to back it up to some drive I have somewhat more control over. I had decided to keep it up in the cloud under the assumption that (a) I will not consistently remember to add to the list whilst at home, and (2) I will eventually lose my thumb drive. In fact, I need to get used to doubling the cloud and the thumb drive. I am… fairly good about backing up the contents of my main hard drive at home (to another hard drive at home, which isn’t really best practice, I know), but I am lax about backing up the portable/invisible stuff.

Well. The reason I am bothering telling you so is not to give needless and inexpert advice. I wanted to convey the oddly emotional responses to the disabling of my Google account. Because while I was aware (and, I think, said to my Best Reader before turning in) that it could well be a mistake at their site, I still reacted strongly and emotionally.

First, of course, was simple bewildered denial. Surely if I log in again, or log in at a different computer, or reboot something, it will all go back to how it was before. This works often enough to be a valuable instinct, but it didn’t work here.

Then there was the terribly guilty feeling that I may have inadvertently violated the Terms of Service. Now, those terms clearly state that Google can just shut me off without proving or even suggesting fault, it wasn’t really rational to concern myself with it, but I did find myself going over everything I have linked to my Google account, and what could possibly have been in violation. Did I leave a comment somewhere that was much more obnoxious than I thought? But I almost never comment with my Google log-in. When I used the Notes in Google Reader, did I both forget to mark the note as private and somehow type something unforgivably vile? Did I post something to my Calendar that seemed innocuous to me but was capable of other interpretations? No, I don’t type pick up kids at schoolyard, I type Perfect Non-Reader at School. What else could I have done wrong?

The other fear, of course, is that Somebody has Hacked In to my account and committed unspeakably foul violations in my name. This could happen, of course, only… wouldn’t I have heard about it? Googling doesn’t reveal any new hideousness, but perhaps it’s all via email, and I’m going to be arrested for mail fraud. Or someone with a similar name has done some actual violence in the real world, and everyone will think it’s me. The emotion here,by the way, was not so my much anger at the unknown and putative violator, but anxiety lest the consequences visit themselves upon me.

No, the anger was at Google, and manifested itself specifically in fierce frustration at the lack of communication. Why won’t they send me an email? Why didn’t they alert me? Can’t they give me a chance to explain?

This anger is justifiable; Google really ought to have done a better job of letting us know what’s up. I eventually went to the Help Forum and read:

Over night we temporarily disabled access to some Gmail accounts due to a service disruption. The disables are in place to stop the account from changing whilst we make the necessary repairs.

Access to your accounts will be restored shortly. Whilst an account is disabled:

• You will be unable to sign in to any Google service.
• Mail sent to the account will bounce.
• Hosted content you own like blogs, sites, shared items in Google Reader and so on will be unavailable.

The message you see on sign-in may refer to you to Google terms of service, but this is a generic and incorrect message. You have not violated the terms of service and we’ll restore your account access as soon as we can.

You can get the latest information on this service disruption here: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

Google engineering teams are working around the clock to solve this problem. We fully understand the importance of your email and how disruptive this type of outage can be. The latest updates will be posted to the apps status dashboard linked to above.

Alas, the Apps Status Dashboard of which they speak so feelingly tells me that the only App with any issue is Mail, and that Calendar and Documents have no issues whatsowever (and Reader is not listed). So that’s not very reassuring to me, since I have no issue with Mail, and do lack access to the other apps. Still. The note does seem to hold out hope that in the fulness of time access to my account will be reenabled and that all will be unchanged from yesterday afternoon, when we were young. It’s probably false hope, but it’s hope.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger has been pseudonymous on the Internet for years and years, now. Actually, I’m only pseudo-pseudonymous—I would guess that 80% of Gentle Readers at this Tohu Bohu know my real name, and the rest could easily find it if they bothered themselves for some reason. It would not be difficult to take the stuff I am on about and put it into a search engine and come up with my name, my employer, my address, a satellite photo of my house and its valuation, pictures of my wife and kids, and probably my Social Security Number as well. Which is fine. I never intended my pseudonymity to completely insulate me from myself. My intention was, primarily, to prevent any potential employers from starting with my resume and coming up with this blog in ten seconds of research. Which may or may not still be true; if I were stalking myself I would find this Tohu Bohu pretty darned quickly. But it would be easy enough for somebody who was working with me or somebody who was considering working with me to go blithely on her merry way without being presented with my views of the politico-rhetorical landscape.

With this divide in mind, I necessarily want people who are looking, f’r’ex, for information about a punk production of Richard III to wind up here rather than at the official page for the show. Not that it would be too terribly confusing, but it would be confusing enough. I don’t think of myself as using this blog specifically as a publicity vehicle (although, of course, y’all should come see me in shows, and y’all did come to R3 in tremendously flattering numbers) (and although when the show does have a blog as a publicity vehicle, I have cross-posted from here to there as seemed appropriate) (I’ve forgotten where I was before the first parenthetical remark) (Oh yes, this Tohu Bohu and its connection to my so-called proverbial), but I do find it interesting to write about the process.

So. I put it to y’all, Gentle Readers. Would it be terribly annoying and fey to pseudonymously talk about my next show without mentioning its title? It’s an adaptation of a famous novel, arguably the Great American novel (I use arguably here in the Alex Beam sense of course); if y’all haven’t actually read it or seen a film of it (with Demi Moore, Gary Oldman and Robert Duvall—or with Meg Foster, or with Colleen Moore, or with Lillian Gish, or with Sybil Thorndike, or with Mary Martin) you probably still know the basic idea. A woman in 1650s Boston bears a child that is not her husband’s; the child’s father is a secret until one day…

I’m not altogether sure why I am so hesitant to write about it under it’s proper name. The adaptation is new, and GRs are unlikely to have read or seen it, or in fact to have access to it if they want to. Unless you can come to Greater Hartford between March 9 and March 20, that is.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, and Your Humble Blogger just discovered that the community theater where last YHB trod the proverbial is doing The Importance of Being Earnest in the Spring; the auditions for that are this weekend as well. This presents me with a dilemma. I would (I estimate) be quite likely to be cast in Earnest as either of the manservants or, possibly, as the Reverend Canon Chasuble, D.D.; I am alas, too old to play Jack, and far too old to play Algernon. Now, Merriman and Lane have some good bits, and of course Chasuble is terrific, but they are small parts, and it would mean a good deal of night driving on February roads. On the other hand, it’s a fun, fun show. And the group is a good group putting on good shows, for the most part, and I am hoping to be in Rough Crossing there in the late Spring when the weather is better. Auditioning for smaller roles in Earnest may be in the way of paying dues, hoping for one of the juicy parts later. Or it could just be hogging the stage; I don’t know.

On the other hand, the audition I have been preparing for is for a paying part that is within walking distance of my home. The show is more ambitious, more serious, more difficult… less fun, probably, but likely more satisfying. The parts I am trying out for are also small parts, but in a show where the leads are Equity, so I am curious about it. Of course, it is much less likely that I will get cast in the thing at all, because the caliber of auditioners is presumably higher. And I have auditioned for this group twice already without being cast. So there’s that.

I could audition for both of them, of course, but I suspect from the timing of things that Earnest will be settling its cast list by Wednesday or Thursday, and there’s no need for the other one to settle until later in the week. If it were the other way around—the less likely one going first, so that after they rejected me I could accept the more likely—I would just audition for both and enjoy the auditions. Probably. I really am worried about driving home after a snowstorm, though.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger commands the attention of all Gentle Readers: Things are going to be different around here!

For instance this [picks up salt shaker] will now be… here! [places salt shaker on other side of pepper shaker]

Yes, well. There will be a couple of changes to the way YHB handles this Tohu Bohu. I had kind of a rotten blogyear in 2010, as it happens, to the point where I was seriously considering packing it in. I decided to keep blogging, but some of the things that made blogging a chore, rather than a hobby, will be cut down in 2011.

I will no longer blog every book I read. I will still attempt to note down all the books I read, off-blog, and at the end of the year, I will attempt to write my Year in Books, just the way I am planning to write my Year in Books 2011 (probably not until next week, though). And I will still post the occasional Book Report, I’m sure, just as I did before I started blogging each book whether I had anything to say about it or not. My plan now is to only blog a book if I want to. So. Fewer Book Report posts in 2011. As there have been something like 750 of them in the last seven years, something more than three out of every ten posts in those years, it’s possible that there will be many fewer posts on this Tohu Bohu overall. But I am hoping that if I don’t have a list of a dozen books waiting for me to blog them, I will be more likely to (a) write an essay with some sort of substance or at least entertainment, and (2) write an essay at all.

Second, I am no longer going to look carefully at the comment spam. If the software says it’s spam, I will delete it. Up to 2011, I put a good deal of effort into trying not to delete any comments that might be real. It has grown, over time, the way it tends to do. My Gracious Host has put a more aggressive spam-killer into operation, which is nice, and now I have only a few that ask for my specific attention, whilst hundreds fall into the oubliette. It would take an hour a day or more to convince myself that there were no false positives, and that would be an hour (spread out in five minute chunks) that I would find deeply unpleasant, as I have still been unable to inure myself to the process. So I’m not going to do it anymore.

That probably won’t affect Gentle Readers at all. If you are commenting on any post in the last two weeks or so, I should see it and publish it. It’s unlikely that any of y’all will suddenly feel the urge to go back and comment on an old post, but if you do, it’s possible that I will see it and publish it, because my system knows you and likes you. It’s also possible that my spam-killer will eat it as a false positive. So, a warning: if you are commenting on an old post, please send me email letting me know, and I’ll try to save your post.

For anyone new to this Tohu Bohu—well, it’s unlikely you will happen to come across this post first, isn’t it? Well, and if you do: feel free to send an email and let me know that you are here and commenting, and I will see that your comments get published. I hope. And if you get frustrated and leave our Tohu Bohu never to darken our pixels again, well, I will be sad (although I won’t know it), but I have to think it would be worse to have a cranky blogger reluctant even to open the management page of the blog than to have a Potentially Gentle Reader turned away from a (moderately) happy blogger with a blog that contains more than gripes.

I think those are the main areas in which I am planning to change the way I do things. If y’all have any advice, or requests, or commissions, or warnings, please let me know.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger would just like to point out that the following applications are blocked from my Facebook newsfeed:

@Hearts, @Hugs, @Kisses, @Smiles, 21 questions, AppBank, Badges, Baking Life, Bejeweled Blitz, Birth Personality, Buzzeo App Creator - make your own app, Cafe Life, Café World, Causes, Collect Hearts, Color and Your Sexuality Quiz, Cow Clicker, Discover the hidden of your name, Family Feud, Farkle 2, FarmVille, Fish World, Flowers for Moms, Fly the American Flag, Foursquare, Friend of the Day!, Friendly Hearts, FrontierVille, Games, Gift Creator, Gowalla, Happy Aquarium, Happy Island, Hidden Secrets of your Name?, Horoscopes, Hugged, iHearts, Island Paradise, Karma, Kingdoms of Camelot, Kissbox, Mafia Wars Game, Magical Name Acronym Generator!, Middle Kingdom, MindJolt Games, Movies, My Year In Photos, My Year In Status, Myers-Briggs® Type Tips, PetVille, Pieces of Flair, Playing With Your Names, Quiz Monster, Quiz Planet, Quiz Whiz, Quizazz, QuizBone, School of Wizardry, Show Some Love!, Smiles, Snake, Social City, Super Farkle, SuperPoke! Pets, Texas HoldEm Poker, Tiki Resort, Top Words 2010, Travel Balloon, Treasure Isle, Vampire Wars, What Does Your Birth Date Mean?, What Your Birth Month Says About You, Working Style, World War, Your angel and devil friends today, Your Latin Name and Its Meanings, Your Luck [daily], Your Name Numerology, and YoVille.

I think that's eighty of them. Just to be clear, these are the ones that I have clicked (twice) to tell FB that I don't want any status updates generated by those applications to appear on my newsfeed.

Which means that anybody who is in that group of Facebook friends may feel free to use those applications and allow them to generate status updates: you won't be bothering me. However, should you start to use an application that is not on the above list, please consider setting the application permissions to prevent generated status updates.

Alternately, if you are using any of the above applications to generate status updates that you want YHB (or anyone else) to read, then you're doing it wrong.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

OK, here’s the sitch. Your Humble Blogger is going to be on the road from today (the 24th, in case the scheduling doohickey doesn’t work) until New Year’s Day. I hope to have scheduled a note every day just to keep this Tohu Bohu alive, and to get the Book Reports taken care of. However, I will not be able to do much spam-killing during this week, and the comment spam has been all exponential and whatnot.

About which, I am sorry. My Gracious Host had shut off comments for a while, which I am loathe to do. On the other hand, those of you that have the Tohu Bohu comment feed on an aggregator may want to shut that down for a week.

And if y’all just want to come back in the New Year, after I have had a chance to clean this place up a little bit, that is reasonable as well. Hail the new, ye lads and lasses, and stay warm.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger was on about handwork recently, and I thought I would share with y’all the results of all that work.

These are bookmarks, if it isn’t obvious, and it probably isn’t. They aren’t terribly difficult, but they look quite nice (if I say so myself); lacework of that kind is remarkable for the ration of ease to perceived difficulty. Actually, I have found that in knitting the difficult things are not particularly attractive, while the decorative things that appear difficult (cables, color changes, patterns of holes) are not particularly difficult at all. Of course, the most difficult is just doing the stuff. The discipline to complete a large project is usually beyond me, but that doesn’t show in the end. But shaping things properly, getting seams right, maintaining gauge over a large item, those things don’t really show, unless the person wears the thing for a while. Which, you know, bookmarks. Not so much.

The whole idea of knitting bookmarks as gifts, if you’ll indulge me for a bit here, came from the need to give something to my co-workers at this time of year, and my reluctance to give food. I had thought, as a part-timer, that I might escape the whole gift-giving craziness, but the first year I was the recipient of a dozen or so little kindnesses, mostly candy or cookies. Actually, there are about twenty of us in the University libraries, counting all the full-timers and such of the part-timers as have hours that overlap with mine. Once we start in on exchanging baked goods and chocolates, that’s a lot of sweets. Now, I like sweets, but still. Too many for me to eat, and too many to share with my family, particularly because they, too, are getting sweet gifts from various people.

So. I didn’t want to add to the sugar frenzy, and I do like the idea of small handmade gifts, even if they are useless. So comes November 2009, I am attempting to come up with a giftie of some kind, and my Best Reader suggests bookmarks, what with it being a library and all. An excellent idea, but then, she does tend to have good ideas. Her specific idea (which was specifically good) was to make bookmarks out of ribbon or similar cloth, with a charm or some quirky decoration. We browsed the craft store, and I was irritated by how little I liked my options, and how much I would have to spend to get anything that I wouldn’t be irritated by. Finally I threw my hands up and declared that I would knit the damned bookmarks myself.

Well. It was clear I wasn’t going to be able to do that within a month. I am not a good knitter, but I am slow. So my Best Reader, who was making sweets anyway for other gifties, made extra for me to exchange last year, and mighty tasty they were, too. If any of y’all have the chance for her chocolate truffles, do not miss the opportunity.

But—having taken up the challenge of knitting bookmarks, I reasoned to myself that if I started right away, I could easily get them done by the next seasonal gift exchange, and in fact do so mostly by knitting whilst watching movies, overseeing my children at play, or whilst passenger in a long car ride. And so it was, although by easily get them done read running in the ends on the last one on the Sixteenth of December. Which doesn’t sound bad at all, but remember that I work in an institution of higher education; once the exam period is over, we scatter to the four corners of the earth. By distributing my bookmarks today, I missed only three of my co-workers; waiting until Tuesday next would have tripled the absences. And also remember that after I finished running in the ends, I had to bathe the damned things, block them, let them dry, starch them, iron them, and then starch them and iron them again in hope they will hold something of their shape. Being bookmarks, a certain stiffness would have been nice; I settled for a limp suggestion of rectangularity. I am told that the answer is to soak them in white glue and let it dry to stiff transparency. I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

Anyway, that’s the saga. They actually came out rather well, I thought. If I hadn’t run late, I might have made another to keep, although I can’t imagine wanting to use one as a bookmark. I don’t really expect anybody to use any of them as bookmarks, honestly. We work in a library; we mark our places with scraps of paper.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, an ethical question of sorts for y’all.

I have a friend who has a disabled placard for her car; she can walk, but her joints are bad and painful, and she has chosen to minimize her walking. I have borrowed the car for the day, as I do fairly frequently. Of course, I don’t park in the spaces reserved for handicapped people, because I can walk just fine. Usually when I am borrowing the car, she is babysitting the Youngest Member, so I just park in our driveway.

Tonight, we are meeting in a public place, that is, a place with a parking lot and handicapped spaces. When she drives there, she parks in the handicapped area; the person giving her a ride will probably drop her at the door. I could, legally and legitimately, park her car in the handicapped space, and when we come out to the car, there it is. I could also, legally and legitimately, park her car in the other end of the lot, and then when we come out to the car, I could go and get it and bring it around to the door. It would be a little awkward, and might well involve blocking a bit of traffic while we are switching drivers, but still, very doable.

On the other hand, easier for me to just stash the car in the handicapped space.

What do you think? Is there a general principle involved? Or does it all depend on the weather?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

OK, quick question for Gentle Readers:

The sun has gone down, here in the Nexus of Nutmeg, and that means that Chanukah is ovah.

Now, my employer has decked our hall with boughs of pine, and cones, and ribbons, and bells, and stocking hung by the elevator shaft with care. Oh, and nutcrackers. But also with mylar dreidels and cardboard menorahs. And lights and snowmen and poinsettias and Snoopy in a Santa hat. You know. It’s festive.

As I mentioned before, Chanukah is over. Done. Forty-four candles burnt to nothing; no candles left. Tonight I will pack up the dreidels and the Woolworth’s Menorah and all the Chanukah books and crafts, and I won’t bring them out until next December. Should I suggest taking down the Chanukah decorations at my place of employment as well?

Look, everybody knows that the decorations are up as a sop to multiculturalism, so that we won’t look like we’ve forgotten that there are Jews around, even in December. We put them up when we put up the rest of the winter decorations. And most of the other decorations are winter decorations, rather than explicitly Christmas decorations; sure there’s a tree and the stockings, but the snowmen and poinsettias and snowflakes are pretty much just wintery. On the other hand, they will all come down on January Third, or at any rate sometime that first week in January rather than hanging around until February or March. So nobody is fooled.

And on one level, when I see a Winter Festivity display that still has the mylar dreidels two full weeks after Chanukah is over, I don’t feel at all that my feelings as a Jew have been taken into account. I mean, at that point they might as well just put up Purim scrolls and masks, right? The message is we don’t really know anything about Chanukah, but we’ve heard it’s the Jewish Christmas. So my inclination is to take ‘em down tonight, or over the weekend at the latest.

On the other hand, it is extra work and annoyance for those of us who do the putting up and taking down of seasonal decorations. And, at our house, we do leave our magnificent glass-and-bronze Menorah out all year round as an awbjay. It’s not like there’s something distasteful or disrespectful about a mylar dreidel on Asara B’Tevet. And next year Chanukah won’t be over until sundown on December 28th. But in 2013, Chanukah will be over for three week when they finally box up the dreidels, unless something is done to change the way we do things. Which, again, wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

So, here’s the question: For GRs who are Jewish, how do you feel about the cardboard menorahs on the post-Chanukah pre-Christmas stretch? For GRs who aren’t, how would you feel about the yidn taking their mylar dreidles and going home on the tenth?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Your Humble Blogger is thankful for a lot of stuff.

…I guess that’s about it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger spent a year as a classroom parent in a Waldorf-y School, and took to heart the rule that a grupp, when passively overseeing (that is, not in charge but there when necessary) his child playing in a group setting, must be engaged in handwork of some kind. For me, this is knitting; I am not terribly good at sewing, so if I took mending in to such a setting, I would have to focus on it to the point where I wouldn’t really be there for the kids. Also, not a whittler. There are those who might think that whittling would not be a good activity for a parent in a room of two-, three- and four-year-olds, but those people have not been indoctrinated into the particular mind-control scam that is a Waldorf School, and also may not have attempted to control such a group without making it clear that you have a sharp knife and know how to use it.

Digression: Every time I refer to the Waldorf School as a creepy mind-control scam, I feel obliged in fairness to point out that the Montessori School is a creepy mind-control scam, as are our public schools (both whole language and phonics), and home-schooling is perhaps the creepiest mind-control scam of all. Not to put too fine a point on it, education is a creepy mind-control scam, and could be a lot worse than getting kids to play with driftwood and rocks. End Digression.

So, now that the Youngest Member is three-and-a-half, he is attending group activities of one kind and another two or three times a week. And I bring my knitting. And I am the only one to bring hand work. No sewing, no mending, no crocheting or quilting or beadwork or cross-stitch or scrimshaw or naalbinding or passementerie. No, the other parents watch their kids and chat with idle hands, which of course are the devil’s proverbial.

Now, YHB isn’t writing this to condemn these parents, or to gripe about the decline of western whatsit—I mean, of course I am to some extent just venting. But I am wondering if it’s just that YHB fell under the control of the creepy mind-control scam when I was at a vulnerable point in my parenting career. Or if it’s that my own mother was always knitting, and never went anywhere without something to work on. But I have a sense that people do still knit and sew and so on. I mean, surely every household has a pile of mending. Is it considered terribly rude to bring a shirt to the library’s playtime and sew the buttons back on? I know nobody needs to hem handkerchiefs any more (thank goodness), and on the whole I think it’s a Good Thing that Young Ladies no longer are expected to be constantly embroidering tacky decorations on everything in sight. But still. People do handwork, right?

And, of course, being usually the only male parent in the room as well as the only parent doing handwork (even the historically and intrinsically masculine art of knitting), I feel particularly conspicuous. Which is all right, I am used to feeling conspicuous. I quite like it. And I can feel virtuously conspicuous when pre-schoolers peer at me industriously knitting away. If I am not actually a good role model, at least I am widening the experience base to the eventual betterment of these kids. And I should add: I have never heard a negative comment about my knitting in these kinds of situations. I’m not saying people don’t mock me, but they don’t do so in my hearing, and probably not in the hearing of the children, who are small pitchers with big ears. So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Your Humble Blogger was trying to come up with a bit of Shabbos Frivolity for this Tohu Bohu, and went on a bit of a web wander, ending in a very strange conceptual place. So I’ll try to retrace my steps a bit.

First of all, my Gracious Host linked to an It Gets Better video from The Gay and Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association. It’s a good video, although I was disappointed (for myself) that they didn’t talk about the choice of being frum and gay; with the fellows addressing the camera directly, it isn’t even clear whether they are wearing yarmulkes or not. Still, that’s my curiosity, about observance and traditionalism and the Law and so on, and the ways people find to live with those decisions.

Still, that’s my own interest, and not the interest of the people making the video. And, going back to an earlier note about the project, there’s another layer to the question of the purpose of the video. And really, when you think about it, one tremendous element of the whole thing is simply that Silence = Death. Not, at the moment, because of AIDS, but because of, well, because silence really is equal to death, in lots of ways, over lots of issues.

Y’all may know that the first Klezmatics album was called Shvaygn=Toyt, back in 1988, when being out meant something different for Lorin Sklamberg and Alicia Svigals than it does for a lot of young musicians today. In 1996, the Village Voice could quote the great Paul Morrissett asking How come nobody wants to talk to the only heterosexual Quaker in the band?; the military was not allowed to ask recruits if they were homosexual, and Ellen was just about close to being sort of out of the closet, kinda. But in 1988? Who was out? Ian McKellen wasn’t out yet.

But, of course, the idea of coming out, of being out, was a big part of the Silence=Death project and of ACT UP generally. In 1988, ACT UP held a Kiss In, more than one, actually, but there was one famous one which brought a good chunk of the city to a halt. That’s the incident behind “The Kiss”, which is one of my favorite Klezmatics tunes. So I was poking around the web looking for the footage of that music over the footage of the Kiss In, which I remembered seeing back in the early nineties somewhere. I couldn’t find it for ever so long; it turns out to be part of the documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop. You can watch the whole hour-long film here; the footage I was looking for runs from 6:19 to 7:14, more or less. There’s a lot of pretty rough stuff in the rest of the movie; I can’t say I had forgotten what the late eighties were like, but I don’t feel those memories really strongly anymore, either, most of the time.

But I was talking about my web wander, and the thing is that in looking for that footage, I came across something entirely different that uses a Klezmatics tune that (on the brilliant Jews with Horns album) shares a track with “The Kiss”. This video is a fundraiser for the Forest Hills Jewish Centre in Toronto. Specifically, they are raising money for a new building, which will replicate (in its façade, anyway) the Great Synagogue of Jaslo.

My people are from Jaslo, as it happens. My Dad’s parents were born in Jaslo and brought up in Jaslo, fled from Jaslo during the War and then returned to Jaslo after before fleeing again for good in 1930 or so. It’s possible that one of my great-grandfathers is in one of those photos in the beginning of the video. Probably not; my father’s father’s father was a modern who shaved his chin and cheeks; I believe that his father was somehow involved with the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Baron Hirsch schools. But it’s possible, particularly as there is little evidence for any of the Old Country stories in our family. There isn’t even much evidence that they were in Jaslo; their names don’t turn up on the rolls, which (given how the record-keeping was) doesn’t prove they weren’t there, but certainly doesn’t prove they were. And, alas, their names do not show up in the memorial books; we don’t have any idea at all what happened after the day my only surviving great-aunt left town. Which is a story in itself.

But I don’t know whether my great-grandfather wound up in a death camp or was killed on the streets (as most were). I don’t know if he managed to get away and survive for a time. I don’t know if any of his other children died there in Jaslo, or in Belzec or some other camp, or in Przemysl or one of the other ghettos (where some few hundred of the Jews of Jaslo where shipped), or in the woods of Warzyce, or in some peasant’s barn, or where. It’s all gone, all that family history. And the generation before, and the generation before that? Gone, gone. My grandparents were lucky, not refugees but relatively safely and serenely smuggled in across the ocean and all the borders. Still: they didn’t bring with them all the family history, the heirlooms, the books, the records. Why would they? Jaslo wasn’t going anywhere. Except, of course, it was: the Nazis were unable to sufficiently Germanify it, and pretty much destroyed the whole town in 1944.

The Great Synagogue had been down for some years, of course. There are some photographs (here and here), and now this FHJC is planning to rebuild it on Spadina Road. Now, Your Humble Blogger has been known to mock façadism. And the whole project is, to my mind, quite questionable. If I were part of that community, would I prefer to have my new center be a replica of an old building in another country, even taking into account the connections my current community has with the old one?

But today, having come across the thing by accident, not looking for Jaslo but for ACT UP, what comes across is another way in which Shvaygn=Toyt, and this project as an attempt to speak into that silence. It can’t resurrect the town. It can’t give back my family history, which is silent and dead. But it can raise a defiant finger in refusing to admit defeat. It will be defeated, ultimately, by death and silence, as everything is. But it can rage against it, can fight it. It can act up.

The connection between a bunch of angry gay troublemakers in Greenwich in 1988 and the multi-million dollar Toronto architectural project may not really be there, except today in my web wander. That connection exists only in my head. And, maybe, in yours, if you have read this far without rejecting it altogether. Max and Gianna Glassman might reject it, Larry Kramer might reject it, Lorin Sklamberg might reject it, and the guys in that video (remember the video?) might reject their connection with it, too. All totally within reason to do so. But there is still a connection, and that connection is this: Silence=Death.

And if there will still be death, and still be silence—then what? Does that mean that it does not, in fact, get better? No, it just means that it gets better at the same time that it gets worse; both are always true. Fighting for either side is ultimately doomed. But… not fighting is ultimately doomed, also. And fighters against silence and death have at least the knowledge that their (inevitable) victories are better than their (inevitable) defeats; those who stay silent lose both ways.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My Perfect Non-Reader asked to have her tzedakah money in quarters.

Temple Beth Bolshoi’s Hebrew School collects cash money from each kid each session, to be counted up, and at the end of the year given to some worthy cause. The Hebrew word tzedakah means charity (but also righteousness and justice; I prefer to think of it as justice money, myself), and they are attempting to inculcate the charitable habit in these kids. This is a Good Thing, as force of habit is just about the strongest force there is. So twice a week, I put my hand in my pocket and come up with a dollar, which I give to my daughter, which she gives to her teacher. And then a couple of weeks ago, she asked if she could have quarters instead of a bill.

My Best Reader and I were, naturally I think, curious about this, but my Perfect Non-Reader clearly did not want to tell us what was going on, and we shrugged and complied. And again the next time, and then the next. My initial fear was that she was spending the money at the vending machine instead of donating it, but (a) I don’t really think my daughter would do that, particularly when she denied it when I asked her outright, and (2) I realized that was twentieth-century thinking, and that the vending machines must certainly take dollar bills these days. Finally I managed to winkle out of her the reason, which I found very interesting.

It seems that her teacher this year rewards the class with a tasty treat on those days when every student brings tzedakah money, and the class has responded by sharing out quarters, so that some part of the donation can come from the name of any student who has forgotten. That way, everybody gets a cookie, and all the money still goes where it is supposed to go. I don’t know who came up with this plan, but it seems to be working so far.

I’m afraid I approved the plan, after it was explained to me. It isn’t exactly honest, and the Divine knows the Perfect Non-Reader is not deprived of the occasional cookie, but on the other hand, it shows (to me) a certain admirable impulse, a communal identity, and a rather charming guile. And it’s not far from being a perfect response to their incentives. At some point, I will need to have a conversation with her about free riding, and perhaps introduce her to some game theory. On the other hand, since (a) she is getting the cookie she wants, without added cost to her or loss to the ultimate charity, and (2) both she and her father are sufficiently disorganized and foggy-headed to make it likely my Perfect Non-Reader will have her full share of receiving, rather than giving, the odd quarters, those conversations may not convince her to change her behavior. Perhaps I should restrict myself to making sure she doesn’t deceive her teacher about what’s going on—and perhaps, now that I think about it, I will give her a dollar out of my pocket and allow her to supplement with quarters out of her piggy bank, if necessary to get treats.

Mostly, I wish I knew whether my daughter participates in this harmless ruse out of her own free will, or whether she is bowing to pie pressure. I doubt she knows herself, though, so I suppose I must just resign myself to speculation.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My Gracious Host has fixed this Tohu Bohu using baling wire, duct tape, and I believe some lubricant jelly. I try not to know the details. Anyway, comments are back. Gentle Readers may commence (and have recommenced) playing Online Encore, and there may well be new Book Reports in the near future. O Joy!

So. Those who had ’em having presumably smoked ’em, stamp out those butts, cease your lolligagging and return to your irregularly scheduled programming now in progress. Or regress. Or, for an extra two bits, step this way to see the egress.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, that was bad timing. Evidently, last night the blogs hosted by My Gracious Host got hit by a more intense than usual spam attack. The server guys shut down the database, and when it came back up, Jed, who was sick, tired and spammed, and decided, very reasonably, to shut down comments on all three affected blogs.

Sigh.

Well, for the nonce, comments are off. The Online Encore game is stuck; GRs have six points so far, with one song about daffodils and two songs about lilies. And another potential song, although my memory tells me that it is laurels not lilies, which are heaped on the casket of the Unfortunate Rake—well, sometimes it is roses, and sometimes they leave that bit out altogether. Folk Music.

Anyway, stay tuned. I will attempt to alert y’all with a new post when play begins again. In the meantime, smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My initial reaction to the rather breathtaking endeavor known as It Gets Better was, well, complicated. Dan Savage is a very successful person on his own terms, and as such he makes a great role model, but that in itself makes it (to my thinking) difficult to see his video having the desired effect.

That is, if you are a gay teenager at the point of suicide—you are depressed and brutalized, you have internalized the bullying and verbal abuse and the contempt of your classmates, family, congregation, community to the point of picking up a gun or a bottle or a rope—if you are at that point, the reaction to Mr. Savage’s video would be that sure, it gets better for Dan Savage, but not for me. You may be able to see how other people could survive the hell you are going through, and see how it got better, but that only emphasizes your own weakness—and how little you deserve to survive to see it get better. Dan Savage is just somebody else that you have let down.

Not that I mean to disparage Mr. Savage, who is Doing the Right Thing, whether I expect it to actually work. And I have my own reasons for expecting a thing like that not to work.

Would it surprise any Gentle Reader to know that YHB had a column in his high school paper? Senior year, 1986-1987, I was Your Humble Columnist for the Ram Page, the newspaper of the Horrible High School Rams. I wrote about whatever struck my fancy, mostly politics (ooh, a seventeen-year-old socialist in a right-wing town, I must have been so popular) but also odds and ends of whatever came to mind. For my last column that Spring, I wrote about my suicide attempt a couple of years previous, and told my classmates that it gets better. I think I wrote it in those words, but of course my memory of that column is colored by current events; I don’t have the actual column to hand. It kicked up a tiny fuss—I think of it now as having in a sense come out, although I don’t think it was a secret before that. But I suppose it was the first time somebody had written about it in the school paper, and it was considered important and brave by the sorts of high school teachers who bother to read that sort of thing. In point of fact, I had already been accepted into college (this was it getting better) and had one foot out the door, well, a foot, a leg, an arm and shoulder, my head and most of my torso out the door by the time it was printed, so there wasn’t much bravery involved. But I did write it, because I did experience it: I felt hopeless and wanted to end it, and then, not two years later, I felt great. And teen suicide was not uncommon, you know, even back in the eighties, even for straight people, and I wanted to make sure (in my very young conception of sure-making, because sure-making is one of those things about youth) that everybody knew that it gets better.

Three months later, when I was in a dorm at Swarthmore, I heard that a young woman I knew, quite popular (I remember her as being her class president, although that is also likely a corrupt memory—I don’t even remember her name, for crying out loud) and pretty and good grades and all, killed herself the week before starting her senior year at my high school.

Of course, she had read my column, and she still died. So my reaction to Mr. Savage’s note is, well, that kids will still die.

But here’s the thing—it turns out that Mr. Savage’s note and the notes of other celebrities are just the sparks. The thing about the It Gets Better project is that there are hundreds of such videos. Hundreds. of. Videos. There’s a sixty-year-old gym teacher and there’s a baby butch in a college dorm and there’s the mayor of somewhere and there’s the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and there’s some middle-aged guy from Canada with dorky glasses and there’s a cheerful woman and her sullen wife, and there’s probably an unemployed construction worker who just got dumped by his boyfriend and he is telling you it got better. And if it gets better for him, maybe it will get better for you.

Except that really, kids will still die. I still think that if you are at the point of suicide, even this overwhelming breadth of experience is not likely to pull you through. I mean, I do like to think of some poor sap clutching the bottle of analgesics with which he plans to make his final exit, but he got a link to one of the videos and he got caught up in going from video to video, hundreds of them, until he falls asleep in front of the screen, the bottle still unopened, and in the morning, things look different (and they do tend to look different in mornings, even while he dreads getting on that bus). But I don’t, I’m afraid, believe that a lot of people at that point are getting links to those videos sent to them. Or, if they saw those videos, that they are going to lift the depression.

And yet.

I do think that somewhere somebody is seeing those videos who has not yet got to that point, who perhaps is only starting to be ostracized, or has not yet been beaten up, somewhere somebody who had a supporting community in high school but lacks one in college, some nine-year-old who finds herself doubting that the boy talk that is going around fourth grade is for her, somewhere some kid will see this stuff before it all starts. And when the bullying and teasing starts, there is the chance that somebody, somewhere will recognize that this is just the same old shit that gets worse and then gets better, and not ever get to be the person these videos are ostensibly aimed at. Which would be even better.

And, as another benefit, there’s the possibility that some heterosexual kid will see these things and not join in when the bullying starts, that some jock somewhere will see some jock somewhere saying that he was almost driven to suicide before it got better and will have second or third thoughts, that maybe somewhere somebody will be left alone on the school bus because, well, it doesn’t seem funny anymore.

Like a lot of persuasion, this sort of thing only seems to be aimed at its declared audience—and, perhaps, its declared audience is the audience least likely to be persuaded. That’s always hard for me to remember. Even harder is the idea—which I have to tell you never even occurred to me until today, twenty-odd years later, and makes the whole incident easier to hold in my memory—that even though that poor kid wasn’t saved by a column I wrote in a high school newspaper, it’s possible that somebody else was, and that by the nature of things I never heard about it. Some kid who read the thing at fourteen maybe hit the bottom at nineteen and had, in the back of his head, some thing that he read somewhere that somebody had hit bottom and then found that it gets better. You never know.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Here’s my coming out story, which I happened to tell in real life last week: at the end of my fresh year in college, I was not getting along well with my roommate, so I asked another friend of mine if he wanted to room together for sophomore year. He agreed, and we made a deal (room assignment was complicated and involved lottery numbers and, well, it’s not worth going into, but it was important to have a deal in advance). The next day, or perhaps two days later, he asked to talk to me privately. He wanted to tell me he was gay, and to give me a chance to back out of the deal. It was clearly a difficult conversation for him, and to be honest, it was an awkward conversation for me. I did not back out of the deal, and I didn’t want to back out of the deal, but it took me a moment or two to adjust to the information. I don’t think I handled the conversation very well—I wanted to be sure that he knew I wasn’t gay, and I think we both wanted it to be clear that he wasn’t attracted to me, just because I was a male—this is the part that embarrasses me in retrospect, as I had no reason to think he was attracted to me, but it seemed important at the time. Anyway.

We roomed together for two years, and were very close, and eventually fought and had trouble and became less close, but none of that had anything to do with his sexual preferences. Nor did I find that having a gay roommate caused me any trouble or grief of any kind, either in my social or romantic life. We were at a small liberal arts college that was particularly keen on inclusion and equality; things would likely have been different at a different place. But for us, and our social circle, at that time, and where we were, it turned out not to be a problem.

In fact, when my room-mate came out more publicly later in that year, and I was shown to Not Have a Problem With That, it likely made it easier for the other people who came out to me to do so. I hope so, anyway. Certainly that’s one of the things I like to mention about National Coming Out Day: every person who comes out of the closet makes it a bit easier for another person to come out, which makes it a bit easier for another person. Which makes it easier for us straight people, actually, who would like to live in a world where our friends don’t lie to us, don’t feel they have to lie to us, don’t actually have to lie to us.

I don’t have any greater point in telling the story. I mean, I do hope that somewhere there is some college roommate coming out to his or her roommate, and finding that it will be OK. We have now an odd situation in this country where a teenager may find gay-straight alliances in high school, supportive parents, and even bring a same-sex date to prom and be welcomed, but go back in a Frosh Closet on moving into a dorm. I hope not, I hope that’s a myth, but I suspect it’s true, and sad, and difficult, and painful, and occasionally deadly.

I doubt that any Gentle Readers are not gay-friendly; I know some are gay, and perhaps there are others that are keeping me in the closet for now. I want to take this Coming Out Day to thank the people who have come out to me, and to ask if I can make it easier for those who have not—easier, at any rate, than it was the first time.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So. The Days of Awe are upon us again, Gentle Readers, as seems to happen every year. Which is, I suppose, a Good Thing, considering the alternative.

On the other hand, the recurring nature of the holiday and the cyclical nature of the (lunar) calendar mean that I do kinda run out of things to say. Plus, this year I am less focused on meditative rebirth as on the Sukkah I’m going to build once all this Awe is over. Should be a big one this year, and it’s early enough that there is some chance of having dinner in it without freezing.

Well, the point is that while my fate was Written on Rosh Hashanah, it is not Sealed until Yom Kippur. And the Divine is merciful, and judges with mercy, tradition tells us that the Divine cannot forgive me for offenses against other people until the other people have forgiven me themselves. Or at least until I have asked—asked three times, actually, in case anybody does not forgive me on the first go around, presumably figuring that it was a perfunctory apology made without really thinking about the nature of the offense and its likelihood of recurring.

I have mentioned here before that I don’t think much of the general apology for that reason. I do hope that Gentle Readers will forgive me for the things that I have done and left undone that have hurt y’all in any way, and I regret doing (or not doing) those things, whatever they are. But of course not knowing what they are means that I can’t really resolve not to do them again.

That said, I really have been neglecting this blog, and I will attempt to do better. I think I have been neglecting comment threads as well, not really engaging when y’all make good points, and not acknowledging when your comments have been persuasive and changed my thinking. So I will do better on those. And I have to catch up on the ridiculous book backlog, but that’s more for myself—I doubt, somehow, that y’all have been disappointed by how few Book Reports I’ve been writing lately.

While I’m on the responsibilities of Your Humble Blogger to the Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu, let me ask: is there anything y’all would like me to focus on? I haven’t been writing politics for a good long while, mostly because I rarely feel I have anything to add to what’s already out there. But if y’all are looking for a place to discuss things, and my lack of starting posts has been inhibiting that, I’m certainly game. Or if there’s another topic or field y’all want me to head over to. I have not been opening the documents with a bunch of potential ideas lately (other than the list of books, of course), so if anyone wants to give me a bit of a push, I’m only too happy to be pushed. I really do want to make this Tohu Bohu a good place for Gentle Readers, and am even willing to put work into it, if only I weren’t so lazy…

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

This Tohu Bohu gets a lot of comment spam. Well, a lot—I don’t really know how much constitutes a lot, relative to other blogs of its circulation. But it seems like a lot to me.

The bulk of the spam falls into three categories. First are the comments that are obviously and upfront about directing people to some web site where they can consume pornography or pharmaceuticals or fancy watches that cannot be distinguished from other fancy watches by people who know nothing about fancy watches. Those are irritating and annoying, but straightforwardly so. I delete them and forget about them. There isn’t anything to think about, other than the small amount of time wasted keeping them off the blog.

The second and much larger category are the comments that appear to be from people who have happened on this Tohu Bohu and are impressed by it. Upon closer inspection, they are linking to some other site, presumably to optimize themselves to the top of search results. This is very dispiriting to YHB—My Gracious Host finds the flattering comment spam makes him feel good, but I get very depressed about all those false compliments. And even more depressed about the fact that I have trained myself to assume that any comment similar to I like your blog! is spam, and delete them all without checking. What if sometime, somebody somewhere actually does like my blog, and tries to say so, and I delete the thing without looking at it? My poor ego!

The last category are comments that appear to be comments about current events. This only started quite recently, but since I have become quite mechanical in deleting the other ones, most of my spam-killing time is spent on these. Generally, some of these refer to some Big News of the last few days—a celebrity scandal, often—and while they may be misspelled or grammatically nonstandard, they have the appearance of actual comments. I can tell that they are spam by (a) the fact that they are in response to notes that have no connection to the content of the comment, (2) the fact that they are (usually) on notes written years ago, and (3) the fact that the identical comment is submitted to different notes with different names attached. Not actually all that clever.

By the way, one of the things about having two email addresses is that often some piece of email spam that manages to come up with a sufficiently apropos subject line, so that I might be inclined to believe its disguise and open it, comes to both addies simultaneously with different sender names. That’s a bit of a giveaway, isn’t it? Actually, fairly often a bit of spam comes to the same email addy five or six times with different sender names but the same subject line. I might possibly fall for one, but I’m not going to get five emails about leaving something at my desk or cancelling lunch plans, am I? Less is definitely more, here, spammers.

Anyway. The reason I’m bothering telling you so is that in the last three or four days, this Tohu Bohu got spammed with dozens of notes about the Cordoba House, AKA the Ground Zero Mosque. As it happens, YHB, like so many fools, wrote something on the Ludicrous Kerfuffle a few weeks ago, so it wouldn’t altogether shock me to have some stranger drop by and try to set me straight about a few aspects I got wrong. However, these notes were spam; they were not written in response to my blog, were not an attempt to communicate, and were not going to be published if I could help it. Whoever put out the spam, though, did so by attempting to imitate what one might call a real blog-commenter, which meant that more than a third of the notes that came in were full of vicious and hateful bigotry. Insults directed not only at Our Only President (who is in some sense fair game, being a public figure) but at Moslems and at their religion.

Now, here’s the thing. I know that this is spam. I know that whoever typed in the note, or cut and pasted it, or caused it to be randomly chosen out of recent blog comments elsewhere by some randomizing software, I know that the spammer does not mean the insults or believe that they are true. Or care, probably. They sent notes on both sides of the issue, presumably making it look as if people were engaging each other on a topic of interest, and that the one thing that these various folk agreed on was the importance of linking to a purveyor of pornography. And, you know, I support pornography. I’m a big believer in it. I’m not offended by that part of it.

But my emotional reaction to these comments was severe. I found it deeply distasteful even to look at them enough to delete them. I can’t really justify having such a powerful negative reaction to the spam; it’s only spam, after all. And I am aware that there are—oh, shall we say ten million Americans who foolishly think that Moslems are evil, that mosques are Bad Things, and that We (vaddevah dat means) are and should be at war with Islam (vaddevah dat means, too). It’s distressing whenever I come across such people in Real Life or on the Internet, but I am not, in fact, coming across dozens of such people when I log in to this Tohu Bohu, I am just coming across comment spam. And yet, it feels as if my Tohu Bohu has been invaded by jerks and bigots.

Of course, if there’s something worse than a spammer pretending to be a bigot for the pathetic pecuniary advantage that he thinks spamming this blog will give him, it would be a politician pretending to be a bigot for the electoral advantage he thinks that will give him. Or the ratings advantage. Or book sales. But somehow I expect that, and it feels safely far away, despite the fact that these people have actual political power to make laws and change people’s lives, and potentially to result in Americans and other humans being deprived of their civil rights, their liberty, or their lives. I do get outraged by that, I really do, and I should take advantage of this Tohu Bohu to say it again. But that’s a kind of outrage that I can feel good about and even enjoy, to be perfectly frank about it. This comment spam just makes me sad and angry, and I don’t enjoy that at all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your Humble Blogger is back from a lovely week-long vacation with old college buddies and their spouses and children. Twenty-five of us in a magnificently idiosyncratic ramshackle house in Vermont. There was kite-flying, canoeing, playground trips, swimming, pedal-boating, frisbee-tossing, bubble-blowing. Cooking and dishwashing. Games, games, games: Dominion, Word-O-Rama, Clue, the Name Game, poker, Botticelli, Martian Fluxx, Dixit, Categories, Once Upon a Time, Shakespearean Charades, Guillotine. Others played bridge, Magic: The Gathering, other kinds of Fluxx, the Bean game. I’m forgetting some, I’m sure, and there were likely games that started after I went to bed (or while I was playing something else, or at the playground). And there were still, I would guess, more games brought and left unplayed than we played: I know I didn’t get to play Carcasonne or the Princes of Florence or Pandemic or Milles Bornes or Loot or Outpost or Apples to Apples, among the other ones in the big stack on the table. And I wanted to play Oh, Hell; I kept forgetting to get a gathering together.

One reason we all got along so well was that so many of us are games players. Not gamers, I’m afraid, which has a different connotation, but games players: we could be happy with Monopoly or Careers, playing The Minister’s Cat or Going on a Picnic (we did, in fact, go on a picnic and brought people with names from A through H and J, but not I, due to poor planning amongst Some People), playing Hearts or Bullshit, playing Settlers or El Caballero. While there certainly could be problems with that, as it turned out the week went very well indeed.

And now I am home again, jiggity jog, and find myself wanting to get another round of Botticelli together. I am thinking of a B.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (98)

Your Humble Blogger had another thought that was indirectly connected with that last post, but I wound up splitting into this post because I realized I hadn’t written anything about Tisha B’Av. Tisha B’Av is the memorial day for remembering the Destruction of the Temple; our Tradition tells us that both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on the ninth day of the month of Av. Whether this is historically accurate or not, Tisha B’av is a fast day for remembering the Destruction as well as many of the other most horrendous events in Jewish History. A day of Lamentations.

So the obvious connection here is in an iconic building coming down in the midst of death, the emotional devastation that goes with it, and the eventual memorialization and ritualization that happens. There’s a story that Napolean was in Paris on Tisha B’Av and heard the lamentations and grief pouring from the synagogues. He asked what had happened, and was told they were lamenting the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Taken aback, he asked when that had occurred, and was told, of course, seventeen centuries ago. The grief is ritual, and it is real, and it is transmitted through the generations by the ritual. I don’t mean to suggest that we need a 9/11 ritual observance (frankly, the destruction of the World Trade Center just wasn’t that big a deal), just thinking about the Sarah Palin Tweets and their language of stab … in the heart, too raw, too real, catastrophic after nine years.

But there is something else that occurred to me, and I’m not altogether sure how it fits in.

You see, most Reform Jews, and I would say many if not most Conservative Jews (and I am guessing almost all Reconstructionist Jews) do not observe Tisha B’Av. They don’t fast, they don’t go to shul, they don’t refrain from bathing, sex and sitting on cushions. I would guess that there are many, many Jews who don’t even know it was Tisha B’Av yesterday. I have never observed the fast, I believe; my recollection is that at Camp Ramah we observed many aspects but as children we were neither obligated nor permitted to fast.

Digression: The internet makes it easier for me to be reminded of the days I don’t generally observe. I know it is Tisha B’Av because (a) I now read a blog that helpfully reminds people of the beginning and end times of fasts, and (2) Google Calendar has a helpful Jewish Observances option. I get emails from my Synagogue that (if I read them) remind me of upcoming events as well. As recently as, oh, five years ago, I could easily forget that Shavuos was coming; now I know where we are in the Omer day to day. I don’t know if that will make Jews like me more observant, but (f’r’ex) I had a conversation over lunch with my Perfect Non-Reader about Tisha B’Av, why I wasn’t fasting, and what else we were supposed to forego that I wasn’t foregoing. Which is more than I ever had with my father on Tisha B’Av. End Digression.

Why don’t we observe Tisha B’Av? Partially because us non-observant Jews are non-observant; we don’t celebrate most of the Holidays. Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur, and Passover, and Hanukkah. That’s about it. Maybe Purim if the kids are in Hebrew School. Keep that in mind when we talk about why most American non-observant Jews don’t do this or that, as the interesting thing is when we do get into the shul to do something. And if we are going to observe another Memorial Day, it will be the Holocaust one, Yom ha-Shoah, or maybe Kristallnacht in the Autumn. Tisha B’Av is mourning for the Temples, and I for one (and without claiming to speak for anyone, I think most of us from Reform to the left feel this way) do not mourn either the Temples or Temple Judaism. We don’t want to sacrifice animals at the altar, and we don’t want anybody else to do it either. We think of the Temple period, and are taught to think of the Temple period, as a kind of adolescence of Judaism, as an unpleasant if necessary phase before we started davening and shukling like real Jews. Well, and that’s extreme—we certainly don’t think we think that way, but I think we largely do; in Hebrew School I was taught very little between, oh, the end of Deuteronomy and the beginning of the twentieth century. I see much the same at my Perfect Non-Reader’s Hebrew School.

The connection that I am trying to eventually get to is the way that modern Americans have managed to compartmentalize our thinking into religious stuff and non-religious stuff. That is, while we may find that our religious beliefs influence our political beliefs, they remain two separate spheres. This is, of course, a Good Thing in my opinion, because I am an American and my opinions are American opinions. It’s hard to remember, though, this is not the viewpoint most people throughout the world hold, and that many people not only disagree but find the viewpoint incomprehensible. Moammar Qaddafi writes in his Little Green Book about this: if your religious beliefs have political implications, then they are political beliefs, and if your political beliefs have religious implications, then they are religious beliefs. To make a law that goes against religion would be to make an unjust law, as justice is an inherently religious idea—and why would the State want to make unjust laws?

We tend to think of Al Qaeda as a religious group, that is, a group of radical religious extremists, and as a terrorist group, that is, a group that uses terror tactics and is willing to kill civilians and innocents. There’s a sort of blindness to Al Qaeda as a political group, a group that has certain political aims. While I tend to (in my Western, positivist, rhetorical way) divide these aspects up, doing so gives a misleading picture. Their political goals are religious goals; their religious goals are political goals.

The connection, then, is to both the rebellion of Bar Koziba and his followers and to Rome and its armies. The Judean revolt had a political goal (separation from the Roman Empire) and it was a religious movement. Rome had a political goal (the stability of the Empire) and was a religious movement as well. Both sides felt that allegiance to the other was blasphemy, or heathenish, anyway. Rome had a religious destiny, as did Jerusalem. The Expulsion from Jerusalem (which seems more raw to me than the Destruction of the First Temple these days, what with my having spent the last thirty months or so with the Rabbis of that era) (and because there’s such a good story—how is it possible there has never been a movie or miniseries about that war?) was a religious and a political event, and was so for both sides (albeit, obviously, more important for the little end than the big end).

As I say, my preference is that it’s better when people keep political and religious spheres separated—not that religion shouldn’t influence people’s political decisions, their votes and affiliations and policy preferences and all that stuff, just that we keep in mind that it is one thing influencing another, not all the same thing. This is because I am an American, mostly. But it’s also, I think, because I am a Jew. The Destruction of the Temple in 70, and the Expulsion that ensured that it would not be rebuilt, meant that the Jews became a Diaspora people. While the Zionists have succeeded in making a Jewish State (vaddevah dat means), I am a Diaspora Jew, and half or more of the Jews in the world are Diaspora Jews. And Diaspora Jews have always benefitted from people who were able to separate their religion from their politics. The Destruction, to me, and even more so the Expulsion (which is one of the Five Calamities observed—the Destruction of the First and Second Temples, the destruction of Betar and then the Expulsion from Jerusalem in the Revolt, and also the Report of the Twelve Spies in Numbers) are the markers that end Temple Judaism and begin Diaspora Judaism, that begin Judaism as a minority religion and culture.

So while I do try to take Tisha B’Av as a day of Lamentations—whatever one thinks about the Temples, the death toll is worth memorializing—I wind up also taking the day as a moment to cling to the new thing that was created out of that destruction. To me, a mosque at Ground Zero (not that there is such a mosque proposed) would be such a symbol, of something new and valuable coming from destruction and death. It is my hope that at some point, perhaps, most of the Moslems in the world as well as the Moslems in America and the non-Moslems in America as well as the non-Moslems throughout the world can look at a memorial observance Nine-Eleven as a memorial for death and destruction, yes, but also a symbol of a time when we began to make a separate and privileged space for politics, that is, the art of living together.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your Humble Blogger has been meaning for some time to write about liking things. That is, Facebook liking.

Gentle Readers not on Facebook may not know about liking. Or you might, as other social network sites have set-ups that are moderately similar. There is a page with information about YOU, and you are encouraged not only to put in your birthday and your relationships and your location and your highschool and your bank account numbers but also your likes. For Facebook, these are activities, interests, music, books, movies and television shows as well as pretty much anything else in the world.

Here’s the thing—when you like something, say for instance within the category of books I like scripture, it then links me with everybody else who likes scripture. Not only do my FB friends see my name on that list, everybody with their name on that list sees my name on that list, as I see theirs. When it is something as broad as liking scripture, or something as popular as liking Harry Potter, that doesn’t mean much, as with thousands of people on the list, my name is nicely lost. But fewer than a hundred people like Ferenc Molnar, for instance, and if one were to enter enough stuff that one liked that wasn’t quite superpopular, well, one could presumably find a few FB friends who liked a substantial subset of what one had typed in. Which might lead one to believe that one would like those people.

I’ll go on with that thought, but I should also mention that there are a large number of very popular things that (presumably connected with that popularity) many, many people like. Ten million FB accounts like Barack Obama, while only a hundred thousand or so like John Boehner. There’s a sense in which I want to like all my party’s people (only twenty thousand for the Speaker?) just to push their numbers up in case some so-called journalist decides once again to draw some sort of conclusion about who likes who. And then there are the small businesses—I like a couple of small businesses owned or run by friends of mine, not because I particularly like the business, but because it seemed like a painless way to encourage them. I don’t know what benefit there is to having a person like your business when it won’t drive any, you know, business to the business, but it seems that there is some benefit, I suppose, or they wouldn’t ask me to do it, right?

But going back to the like of movies or celebrities or novels or whatnot.

When I was a teenager, high school and college mostly, I did a lot of connecting with people over shared fondness for particular actors, movies, comics, books or whatnot. My friends liked Gilbert and Sullivan, and Monty Python, and Devo, and Elvis Costello, and P.G. Wodehouse, and Doctor Who and the Lord of the Rings. I wore my fondness for those things like badges on my lapels, and often wore badges on my lapels indicating my fondness for the things I liked. They were a large part of my identity. I found it alternately constricting and enlivening. Many good friendships started through conversations about shared love for a particular songwriter or playwright, and (being college students) we discussed our shared passions in depth, enlightening each other with theories about the Greatness of the Great.

Then, when various bonds had been forged, came the discovery that such-and-such a person didn’t love Star Wars or Sunday in the Park with George or the Violent Femmes or Red Harvest. Or (and I was self-centered enough that I don’t really remember the details of this, but it did happen) I felt I let down my friends by not liking Eugene O’Neill or Judy Collins or Ursula K. LeGuin. I became defensive about some of my tastes and closeted about others (one of those things about The College Experience is that one can openly proclaim fondness for pornography and shamefacedly keep romance novels as a guilty pleasure) (not that I, personally, read romance novels, you understand—I’m just mentioning it as an example), and made mix tapes and forced books on people and generally took fandom all too seriously.

Lately, in my middle age, I find that I don’t identify myself so strongly with my likes. I still have them (as Gentle Readers will be aware), but I don’t care so much about sharing them. In particular, I no longer expect my friendships to be centered around a bond of shared passion for a particular subsection of art or entertainment; I rather expect that if I like someone, and we have the opportunity to become friends, we will over time find those things that we both enjoy, as well as those things one of us is passionate about and the other just cannot see at all.

Is this because my extra couple of decades have meant an accumulation of Things I Like to the point where there are enough of them that I can’t easily identify myself the whole list, nor is it pleasurable to identify myself by some small subset of them? Or is it because my experience over that time has reminded me that my close friends and I will like different things, now and then?

My Gracious Host (I suppose I could link to his FB page, where his friends can see a hundred things he likes. Your Humble Blogger likes some of those things, but not all of them. In fact, over the years, most of the stuff we have recommended to each other has been an utter bomb. Nowadays, we don’t recommend things to each other (mostly), but we read each others blog notes and wonder— how is it that someone I like, and more than that, someone whose views on movies and books and music I find interesting to read and discuss, so consistently likes such crap and doesn’t like the good stuff? How can this be?

The answer, of course, lies in the point that I perhaps have made before: the differences between people (one to another) make the world interesting and fun.

So. All of that is off the point, which (if I remember clearly) was pretty much this: I don’t like things on Facebook mostly because I don’t really care if my Facebook friends think of me as liking Eileen Atkins or Jim’s Big Ego—really, if the only way you would know that I like them is to look at my profile page, then you don’t need to associate me with those things. But if you want to know what I like, you know, ask, and I won’t be shy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger plays a lot of videogames on the computer. I don’t write about them much, partly because I am embarrassed about how often I play videogames on the computer, and partly because I figure that the kind of videogames I play are not terribly interesting to talk about. Although I do think about them a lot. Overthink them. There is, presumably, a limit to the tactics available in any given one-button game.

One game I have been playing a lot over the last year is Little Master Cricket. Little Master Cricket is a simple swing-and-hit game: your batsman can’t move his feet, and you use the mouse (or trackpad) (or finger, I suppose; it’s available for the whatsitphone) to drag his body around by the wrists in order to swing. You score runs depending on where you hit the ball; near the ground for one run, higher up for two, higher yet for four, even higher for six, and then if you hit it too high, you are out. Or if you fail to protect the wicket, of course. Anyway, on each ball, you can get from one to six runs or be out (or leave the ball on the field, because of some odd and entertaining aspects of the game that I won’t go in to here).

Those are runs, by the way; your score is your total runs multiplied by your strike rate; that is, if you score N runs off K balls, your score is N * (N/K), rounded to a whole number. The game helpfully keeps track of your strike rate as you go, only not actually all that helpfully, because there are some odd bits of hinkiness that go along with the strike rate, mostly that of course your last ball will add zero runs while still counting as a ball, which brings down your strike rate and thus your score quite a bit. F’r’ex, if you hit five sixes and then are out on the sixth ball, your strike rate is five and your score is 150.

Generally, though, I ignore the score and go for runs. That isn’t quite true—I like to get a score over a hundred, so I aim for that, and if I make it (which I often do), I try to get a hundred runs. Getting a hundred runs (or a century) is a Big Deal in cricket. And while of course Little Master Cricket is nothing like cricket (even less like cricket than my other videogame, the one that taught me the rules at least, which this one doesn’t), I think I have learned more of an appreciation for a century by aiming for it in my little videogame.

See, even ignoring the strike rate multiplier for the score, the strike rate is still important. While theoretically, I could block every ball and get a hundred runs in a hundred and four balls, in practice I would miss one eventually, or the wonky virtual physics would get me out, in either case long before I picked up a hundred. Hm. Let me try it… yes, I was out for seven on one off the handle. Second try I had more than a dozen balls lying inert on the field before an incoming bounced off one of them and over my avatar’s head. And the third try I got to a dozen or so before getting out. So, no, as I suspected the purely defensive game is not an easy way to a hundred runs.

Of course, a very aggressive game is not an easy way to a hundred, either. Taking a big swing at every ball is a good way to make quite outs for a handful of runs (although a decent way to get to a score of a hundred in a short time, if you don’t mind making some quite outs along the way). Even a deliberate attempt to put every ball squarely in the four is hard to accomplish, and at least for me leads to trying to dig out a ball coming in low and lift it, and if I get too much wrist into it, it’ll pop up for an easy out.

No, the way to get a hundred runs is to watch each ball as it comes in, judge its potential, and then try to block it, smash it for six, or line it out for four based on that judgment. You have to decide quickly, as the ball is coming in, and you have to act on that judgment immediately, holding back for a big swing or setting up to block or whatever is called for at the moment. You can’t go in to each ball with a prepared and prejudged plan; you have to react to the ball as it comes in.

And yet, I can’t go in to each ball without a prepared and prejudged plan; I can’t just react to the ball as it comes in. I don’t have time. And when I say I am going for runs, what I really mean is that I am trying to maximize my chances to get a hundred, which isn’t quite the same thing. A score of 102 makes me much, much happier than a score of 98, while a score of 98 doesn’t actually make me happier than a score of 94. The ton line may be arbitrary, but that’s where it is, and that’s what I am aiming for. Which means that I tend to keep an eye on the score, and adjust my aggressiveness accordingly. But which way? If I get to around 75 runs, it’s too early to start blocking and making my way by ones and twos, because something bad will happen within fifteen balls, right? But can I really risk my score by trying to swat a couple of sixes? If I do, and I’m just about up to ninety, then it’s time to block—but if I block my way to 97 in another six balls and then pop one up to end it, I’ll be kicking my virtual self all virtual day. With just one more four, I could have had my century!

All of which, of course, is on a computer, sliding my mouse around with only my children to watch. For actual cricketers, facing actual bowlers who are varying their speed and angle and spin by volition, rather than randomly, and who also face changes in the light, the wind, the heat, and who are getting physically tired from running between the wickets, with thousands of fans watching them and rooting for or against them, and who have to keep their minds on the outcome of the match, not just their own statistics (but making centuries, rather than eighties, will have a huge effect on their careers and opportunities and finances)— I’m not saying that I know what it’s like. I’m just saying that I have a little bit better of a grasp, I think, on some of the aspects of it, to make it seem even more impressive than it seemed before.

So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Your Humble Blogger is back from a week on the road.

Um, yeah. That’s pretty much it. I’m back from a week on the road.

Yep. I’m back, all right. You can tell, because, well, here I am. Not on the road. Back.

Oh, hell, I got nuthin’. And I have six hundred items on my aggregator just sitting there waiting for me. This could be a while.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can I just rant for a minute? Would that be OK? You don’t even have to really listen, just nod and smile and think of something else.

Your Humble Blogger really hates the use of the word disinterested to mean unconcerned or apathetic. That is, it bugs me when people use the word where YHB would use the word uninterested; there is a distinction between them that gets right on my stickler nerve.

This is particularly bad for me because the Youngest Member has been once again keen on listening to They Might Be Giants: Here Come the ABCs!, and one of my favorite songs from that set is E Eats Everything, which contains the line “ D is just disinterested/In anything you’ve got”. Gets right up my proverbial, it does, and prevents me from thoroughly enjoying a terrific song. Then I noticed the word (used correctly by my lights) in the bit I typed in from The Dresser, which reminded me that Lowell Weicker had called my State’s Governor disinterested in a speech I read about in a Hartford Courant article.

Digression: I think I actually read the longer on-line version of this story, but in both cases, the headline is that Former Gov. calls Current Gov. “disinterested”, but the body of the text does not include any such quote from the former Gov. This seems very, very strange to me. Does it seem strange to you? I was eventually able to find some video in which Mr. Weicker refers to “Republican Governors who are either corrupt or disinterested”, which given the meaning of the word as YHB uses it, should pretty much cover everybody, right? But yes, I think it is clear that he is referring to the only Governor Connecticut has at the moment, and that he means she is apathetic or unconcerned, rather than free of conflict. Still, it seems very strange to me to put the word in the headline and not include any aspect of the context in the body of the story at all. End Digression.

Now, I haven’t looked up the history of the word, and I suspect that the distinction for which I am a stickler for is something made up in the Stickler Period of grammar, possibly by William Strunk himself, or by Henry Fowler, or perhaps Stephen Fry. I have had to give up my mockery or literally, when presented with the evidence that (a) it is doing the same job as really, and (2) the use of literally as an intensifier is hundreds of years old, and therefore has more right to exist than I have right to deny it. I suspect that the use of disinterested to mean uninterested is hundreds of years old as well, and no doubt there are plenty of examples that would, if I considered them carefully, persuade me that my carping on disinterested is inconsistent and wrong. I don’t want to be thus persuaded. I want to keep getting angry about this one.

This isn’t like begs the question, where I continue to maintain that the use of the phrase to mean provoke the question, as it most commonly is used now, is just wrong, and I am willing to argue it out. No, this is one where I am unwilling to argue it out, because I would lose, and I don’t want to lose. So I generally keep my mouth shut about it.

Does this seem unreasonable? As a former stickler turned descriptivist, I often feel that I am missing the righteous anger of the peevologist. There is something rather magnificent about being shocked by the slovenly habits of so-called educated people these days.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Oh, YHB is not well at all. Not at all. My ears are infected.

Not, as you might think, by bad but catchy music, stuck in my head after repeated listenings in coffee shops or at the compulsion of the Youngest Member. No, my ears are infected in the other sense, that they are filled with pus and bacteria.

So, I am probably not capable of sustained concentration on anything, not when some jerk keeps sneaking up and jabbing an ice pick in the side of my head like that. No clever post today, folks.

In the meantime, award-winning journalist David S. Bernstein asks which Muppet would make the best Supreme Court nominee. His suggestion of Sam the Eagle would undoubtedly sail through Congress, but who is going to vote against Sweetums? But YHB throws this Tohu Bohu’s support behind Lew Zealand, who revealed a terrific legal mind when he said You gotta have sole. Or if you can’t get sole, use halibut. Y’all’s nominations to be discussed in comments.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

So. Last night was the traditional pizza-with-extra-treyf on paper plates, and today the switching of the dishes. After gathering together all the remaining unwashed Passover dishes (including my Best Reader doing the important task of going through the fridge for bowls containing leftovers), rinsing them, and flinging them into the dishwasher, it was clear that there simply weren't enough dishes to justify running the dishwasher. Even after grabbing any of the year-round dishes that could be said to need a wash, the thing was mostly empty.

In fact, the sum total came to seven dishes and seven pieces of silverware from the Passover set. This is what I get for catching up yesterday after lunch.

Well, and what I'm saying is: even after it becoming very clear that there was no way I was going to run the dishwasher, and that it made no sense to postpone actually packing the passover dishes until after dinner tonight off the regular ones, it still took me ten minutes to talk myself into just washing the damn dishes by hand. I mean! Washing dishes by hand, like some sort of wild animal in the wilderness. Isn't that just declaring defeat?

I'm not kidding, though. Ten minutes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posting will be infrequent for a week or so here on this Tohu Bohu, for reasons which are well and good for me, and nothing really to do with the blog. Opening Night at Punk R3 went very well, and the second night went badly, but not too badly. I feel sure that most of the largish crowd on Friday went away well disposed to telling people they would have a good time coming to our show, and most of the smallish crowd on Saturday probably did not, judging as best I can from their reactions. But then, you can’t really tell. Audiences are bastards and cannot be trusted under the best of circumstances. Ten more.

So that’s that, and the other great big thing going on of course is the usual confluence of Passover and Holy Week; the best argument against mixed marriage between a Jew and a Christian turns out to be not the difficulty of raising the children in one or another faith, nor latent anti-Semitism and anti-clericalism, nor yet the possibility of war between the US and Israel, but simply the logistics of the spring. Added to that, there are three major household activities that are demanding near-immediate attention (the welcome arrival of houseguests, the conclusion of the Girl Scout Cookie accounting for the year, and the delivery of a cubic fuckload of dirt for our garden), and well, let me just say this: posting will be infrequent for a week or so here on this Tohu Bohu.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

And so February ends, and March comes in like a lion. Seems to happen almost every year.

February wasn’t a bad month for this Tohu Bohu, looking at it, with more than a post a day, many of them notes of some substance rather than brief jokes or simple links. 46 comments on the month, which seems to be about the expected level of comments if I don’t have a particularly good guessing game going on. Note to self: Guessing games generate comments! At least with my Gentle Readers.

I mention this because I didn’t write an anniversary post, when my anniversary came around in the middle of the month sometime. Seven years and still going. Whoo.

Oh, and I’m a bit down about the blogging thing, at the moment, because—well, this is probably as pathetic as it can be, but it’s like this: two fellows I grew up with have gotten into this blogging thing in a big way. Now, I have been blogging for more than seven years, now, and (a) it has been at least six years since I decided I didn’t want to be an A-list blogger, and (2) both of those fellows are blogging stuff that they have, you know, degrees in, spend their working lives doing, and are actual experts in. So I shouldn’t be downhearted about the fact that they are both hugely successful at the form. Right? And I am pleased about their success—really, I am. And I truly do not want to become one of those bloggers with tens of thousands of readers, whose every mistake is fodder for widespread abuse and invective, even if the mistakes were not actually mine but someone else’s.

In fact, as this Tohu Bohu has settled into its two or three dozen Gentle Readers, it has become more personal and less political, more musing and less amusing, more what it is and less what it isn’t. There’s no real reason why the A-List would come calling here, or would stay here if it did, or would make me happy if it did stay. And yet…

Really, though, Your Humble Blogger is just being cranky and unhumble. I put a lot of effort into this thing I say, as I walk the streets of Blogtown muttering to myself, seven years, two thousand three hundred and seventy-seven notes, and what have I got to show for it?

This is because crankiness makes it hard to see what it is that a person really does have to show for it. It doesn’t diminish what I actually have, just makes it a bit difficult to see.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So. Here it is the last day of the year, and there are two problems: (1) I have a bunch of Book Reports to do, and (B) I don’t know what they are. You see, I left the little thumb drive at my desk when I left the office a week ago, and the list was in a file on that drive. Silly of me? Yes. But there it is.

I do, as it happens, have enough memory to come up with a list of five or so unreported books. So I could spend the afternoon whipping through them. On the other hand, I am in a lovely house on a lovely day with some lovely family, and I may have better things to do. And the reports would, I hope, be better if I wait and spend some time on them. So I think I’m going to put them off, and then backdate them to today, so when I do my End of the Year List, I have the rightish numbers.

That’s more or less a warning that things will be slow here for a few days, and then look like they weren’t. As well as a general wish for a Happy New Year.

And while I’m thinking about Happy New Years, I have to ask if anybody else feels sort of, well, guilty about having had quite a good year and quite a good decade? I mean, yes, in the Big Picture, this was a nasty decade for a variety of reasons, and the year has been absolutely brutal in a bunch of ways, but very little of that affected my comfort and pleasure, except that I read about it and groused about it, and frankly enjoyed doing it, much of the time. In my life, I had two lovely children, lived in some interesting and pleasant places, read a lot of good books, ate a lot of good food, listened to very good music, had wonderful conversations with wonderful people, got to do theater again and had a lot of fun doing it, created this Tohu Bohu, bought a house in which I live quite comfortably, and just basically had a really good decade.

I wasn’t drafted to fight in the horrible wars, and almost nobody I know has had to fight in them or die in them. I distantly know a few people who were killed or hurt or bereaved by the destruction of the World Trade Center, but the terrorism thing had a very small direct effect on my personal life, as did the Katrina thing, climate change, the Bush administration, the financial collapse, etc, etc, etc.

In point of actual fact, I am one of those affluent, well-educated, middle-class, comfortable white suburbanites who is insulated from a lot of terrible things in the world (so long as they don’t actually happen on my block or to my immediate family). You know? Maybe you are, too. And it’s good for me to remember that, now and then. But when I read about the lousiness of the year and of the decade, I feel like I have to add that of course, for me personally it was pretty cushy. And I feel sheepish about that, as if not only should I have done more out of my own comfort to ameliorate the misery of others (which is certainly true) but also it would have helped, somehow, had I not escaped misery myself (which is not). Still, there it is. I hope the next decade will be as good for everybody else as this last one has been for me.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Almost ten years ago now, at a party in Ess Eff, while my Best Reader is off getting some more of those noshy things, and I’m trying to pretend that I know more than two of the people there:

YHB: Hey.

YHB2K: Happy New Year!

YHB: Yeah. Happy New Year. Recognize me?

YHB2K: Um, didn’t we work together at the…

YHB: No, I’m you from ten years in the future.

YHB2K: Wow. Really?

YHB: Really.

YHB2K: Only ten years? Shame about the hair.

YHB: Shut up.

YHB2K: Could be worse, I suppose.

YHB: Look, I am visiting from ten years in your future, through the magic of Fiction, to write a note for my blog.

YHB2K: Your what?

YHB: That’s not important. There’s a meme where you get to ask me three questions about the next ten years.

YHB2K: A what?

YHB: A meme!

YHB2K: Sorry, it’s really loud in here!

YHB: No, it turns out your hearing is going!

YHB2K: What?

YHB: You have a banana in your ear!

YHB2K: What?

YHB: I said you have a banana in your ear!

YHB2K: I can’t hear you, I have a banana in my ear! [they both laugh far too much]

YHB2K: Seriously, what?

YHB: Look, you get to ask me three questions about the next ten years.

YHB2K: Are there rules?

YHB: Of course there are rules.

YHB2K: Of course there are rules.

YHB: Rule Number One!

YHB2K: Which I will call Rule Number One!

YHB: No asking really personal stuff.

YHB2K: Why not? Because it will cause a paradox and, like, destroy the entire space-time continuum?

YHB: No, but I’m writing under a pseudonym, and personal stuff would totally ruin it. YHB2K: Oh. Well, that’s too bad. Are you getting paid?

YHB: Is that one of your questions?

YHB2K: No, but are you?

YHB: No.

YHB2K: Then what are you doing it for?

YHB: Shut up.

YHB2K: No you shut up.

YHB: No, me shut up, but ten years ago.

YHB2K: Ooh.

YHB: Hah!

YHB2K: Jerk.

YHB: Rule Number B!

YHB2K: You mean Rule Number Two.

YHB: What?

YHB2K: The last one was One, so this one should be Two, not B.

YHB: It’s a bit.

YHB2K: What?

YHB: Look, do you want to hear the rules?

YHB2K: Fine. Rule Number B!

YHB: No asking stuff that like who won the World Series or what stocks go up and down and shit.

YHB2K: Would that cause a paradox?

YHB: No, but there wouldn’t be much point. You’re going to forget pretty much this whole conversation.

YHB2K: Why? Do you have some sort of forgeterry flashlight like Tommy Lee Jones? Or is it the power of the space-time continuum preventing a paradox?

YHB: No, you’re just really, really drunk.

YHB2K: Oh, yeah. I forgot.

YHB: Plus, how would that be entertaining for people reading this? They could look that stuff up. If they cared.

YHB2K: So this is just about entertaining people reading your whateveritis?

YHB: Yeah.

YHB2K: I’m supposed to be your dancing monkey?

YHB: Pretty much.

YHB2K: Ook ook! Oook ook!

YHB: Do you want to ask the questions or not?

YHB2K: Can’t ask my future self questions, because I’m too busy dancing like a monkey! Oook oook!

YHB: Hey—do you know what really would cause a paradox and destroy the space-time continuum?

YHB2K: What?

YHB: If you were to bite me!

YHB2K: Well, I’d better not do that, then.

YHB: No, probably not.

YHB2K: Because otherwise…

YHB: Yeah. You could bite me.

YHB2K: A tragic loss for us all.

YHB: Rule Number Gamma!

YHB2K: This is a stupid bit.

YHB: Really? I like it.

YHB2K: No, I don’t.

YHB: Yeah, but you will.

YHB2K: I’ll also look like that.

YHB: Shut up. Rule Number Gamma!

YHB2K: Yes?

YHB: Can I have a glass of that bubbly?

YHB2K: Is that the rule?

YHB: No.

YHB2K: Will it rip a hole in the space-time continuum?

YHB: What the hell are you drinking? No, it won’t rip a hole in the space-time continuum.

YHB2K: Fine.

YHB: Rule Number Gamma! Um.

YHB2K: There aren’t really any more rules, are there?

YHB: No.

YHB2K: Fine. I get three questions? From 1999 me to 2009 me?

YHB: Yes.

YHB2K: For the purpose of entertaining some people in 2009?

YHB: Yes.

YHB2K: You suck.

YHB: Shut up.

YHB2K: No, you should do it the other way. You should ask questions about 2019, right? And then go ahead and answer them. That would be fun. This is stupid.

YHB: But I don’t have a 2019 me.

YHB2K: You will. I will. We will. Whatever.

YHB: Good point.

YHB2K: I know. I’m clever that way.

YHB: You’re drunk that way.

YHB2K: Yeah, but in the morning, I’ll be sober. And you, my friend, will still be. Um.

YHB: You?

YHB2K: Shut up.

YHB: All right, as long as I’m here, do you want to ask your questions?

YHB2K: Sure. Um, Question A: Are there going to be any more good Elvis Costello albums?

YHB: Yes.

YHB2K: OK, good. Um, where am I living?

YHB: I guess that counts. Connecticut. Greater Hartford.

YHB2K: Seriously?

YHB: Yes.

YHB2K: Do I like it?

YHB: Yeah. It’s real nice, actually.

YHB2K: Hunh.

YHB: No, it is.

YHB2K: OK.

YHB: You get another question.

YHB2K: OK, this isn’t about the World Series, but—I’m just curious, does anybody break Hank Aaron’s record?

YHB2K: Yeah.

YHB: Junior Griffey?

YHB: No, actually, it’s Barry Bonds.

YHB2K: Seriously?

YHB: Yeah. He bulks up, hits 73 to break the single-season, and finishes with 762.

YHB2K: Really?

YHB: As a Giant. Stays with the Giants.

YHB2K: That. is. so. cool.

YHB: Um.

YHB2K: No, really? This is going to be a great decade.

YHB: I have to go now.

YHB2K: Happy New Year, me! Happy New Year.

YHB: And to all a good night.

So, here’s the game: Ask your ten-year-future self three questions about the upcoming decade (the teenies, until we come up with a better name). No rules for you, but don’t waste any asking for stock tips. Then, all your friends answer them for you in the comments before New Year’s Eve 2009. Then, on or shortly before New Year’s Eve 2019, come back and award points for closest answer! Extra points for everyone who is still alive!

Here are mine:

1. Which countries will I visit in the teenies?
2. What produce shortage will I complain about most?
3. Which song from my youth will be covered by a popular artist and be on the radio all the time to irritate me?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger was a Beginning Reader once, believe it or not as you like, and just at the right time for Hop on Pop, the simplest Seuss for youngest use. In due time, the book was purchased for my Perfect Non-Reader, and is being enjoyed by the Youngest Member (who loves to shout No, Pat, No! Don’t sit on that! as loud as loud can be). This note is not about how wonderful that book is, but about how…interesting written English is.

You see, for many years, YHB’s mother would say, when the subject of HoP came up, which was quite often, in fact, as she is now a grandmother of six, that what she always appreciated about the book was that all the words could be sounded out by the letters, with the exception of night and fight. I accepted that this was the case during my years as an uncle-but-not-yet-father, so I was surprised to notice, when reading the book over and over and over and over again to my Perfect Non-Reader, back in the early part of the noughties, that it was false. Right at the very beginning, after pup and cup, comes house and mouse, with their silent e. Not that I should properly hold my mother to an observation made from memory and all, but there it is. And the silent e is more common than the silent gh, but it is still silent, and not amenable to sounding out.

We’re talking, by the way, about the big boldface words at the top of the pages. For those who do not have a copy to hand, a page will have two or three such words, a sentence using them, and an illustration. The sentences, of course, have some tricky words, but as one is teaching a child to read by the endorsed combination of phonics and whole word recognition, the point is that one can sound out the headwords as a key to the page. Right? And most of them (there are 68 of them, at a quick count) are easy to sound out, but there are four which are not.

Except that I was reading the book to the Youngest Member today, and noticed that there were th words, too. Now, it’s not that I think that the phonics system can’t handle th combinations (or sh or ch, for that matter), but it falls into the category with silent e and silent gh, requiring more than just a simple letter-to-sound correspondence. And I had not noticed it at all. I had been reading the thing with the idea of that letter-to-sound correspondence in my mind, noticed the mouse/house problem, and totally failed to spot the th issue. In about a million times through the book. Including the page that has the words tree and three in big bold letters, one right under the other.

And then, when I sat down to write this note, and went through to count the boldface words and look at them carefully, and went through them again to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, that’s when I noticed that walk and talk each has a silent l. How many times have I looked at those words, specifically thinking about the letter-to-sound correspondence, and not had an alarm go off?

Perhaps this is just me, and the way I think of things. I learned to read very young, and mostly the whole language way, which (at least in my case and my vague sense of what people say about it) makes for lazy readers who just recognize words rather than read them, if you know what I mean. Perhaps somebody who learned under a stricter phonics method would have spotted the lot of them immediately. Perhaps somebody who battled dyslexia would have spotted them immediately. But I couldn’t. And I’m not absolutely certain that there aren’t more still that I haven’t missed.

By the way—yes, I know that vowels throw off that whole letter-to-sound combination thing. Is the second e in see silent? And there are song and long, with that ng issue. And the ck in snack and black. And if you count Mr. and Mrs. as headwords, then you really are up the proverbial without a whatnot. But I’m not counting them, and ck doesn’t have a silent letter any more than the ll in ball. So there.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Fairly often I am at the circulation desk taking care of a student when that student’s buddy comes up behind them and thwacks them one.

To give you a sense of things: as you enter the library, the circ desk is to your right, perpendicular to the door. Thus, when facing the desk, people are entering behind you and to your right. The café is directly behind you, and the stairs to the bulk of the stacks come down behind you as well. So it is easy for someone to sneak up on you, all unbeknownst, like. Also, most of our students are ‘college age’, between 17 and 22, say. A great age for thwacking your buddies in the back of the head, or on the shoulder, or kicking them in the seat of the pants.

My usual reaction to this is a Librarian’s Glare, second level, followed after the departure of the kids by quietly smiling to myself about the whole nature of homosociality. Except that sometimes it isn’t homosocial. Sometimes it is heterosocial. And my emotional reaction to that is very different.

Just to be clear, I am talking about a fellow giving a reasonably firm but not vicious punch in the shoulder, slap up the back of the head, or hip block to a young woman who doesn’t see him coming. Today (my inspiration for the post) it was actually a kick to the seat of the pants. Not a bruising blow, but not a nudge. What used to be called a love tap, back when spousal abuse was considered sweet.

In today’s case, the young woman responded with affectionate eye-rolling; she kissed him shortly after. I responded with a Class One Librarian’s Glare (with eyebrow raised to the full third level), and with this post.

I don’t mean to be all whatsit, but seriously, no young woman should allow herself to be treated with that kind of rough affection in public. That should not be tolerated in our library. It should make the practitioner of the kick (or slap or punch) an immediate social pariah. Not because the young woman is being harmed, and only somewhat because I suspect that a fellow who routinely kicks his girlfriend’s ass in affection will have difficulty restraining himself in anger, and not only because for the love of Mike she had no way of knowing it was you and if she had responded by instinctively grabbing the book off the counter and decking you with it she would have been well within her whatsit, but because that kind of roughhouse is bad, bad, bad for women everywhere, for the women sitting in the café, in the entrance, on the stairs, or working behind my counter who have to watch it. What are the odds, at any point, that there is a woman within view who has been the recipient of abuse from a family member, romantic partner or other boy friend? Fifty-fifty? More? From the numbers and demographics, I would guess closer to two-to-one.

And yet, I never say anything. I glare, and I shake my head, and I go back to my desk and type. Because in the world as it is, my saying something would be wildly inappropriate (and might lead to my being fired, depending on what I said and how I said it), and would not be welcomed by the student who was kicked, and furthermore as there is no overwhelming social norm backing me up, wouldn’t do much good, anyway. Sigh.

And another thing that makes me uncomfortable about the whole thing—I assume that when a young man thwacks another young man at the desk that they are not romantic partners. I do think that homosocial thwackage is a part of our social norms, and although I wouldn’t encourage a son of mine to adopt that kind of thing, I wouldn’t ground him for a week if I saw him do it. I see third-graders behaving that way in the schoolyard all the time, and I give them only two levels of eyebrow. If I saw a son of mine thwack a girl, especially from behind, it would be Groundhog Day for him, if you know what I mean. Is this sexist? In a way, I think so, but I also (being sexist in that way) think that the world being the world, abuse of women by men being so much more prevalent than any of the other combinations (as heinous as those are), a man thwacking a woman in public has a devastating symbolic weight. A man thwacking a man does not. I feel justified in making this distinction, and yet it nags at me, when I contemplate what my (outward) reaction should be to a thwack at the desk.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

So. Your Humble Blogger is forty years old. Y’all know what that’s like, right? Born at the end of the sixties, a boy of the seventies, eighties teenager. A different world from now.

And I grew up without Christmas, not being Christian, so my perception of things is very different, I expect, but it seems to me that when I was a kid, Thanksgiving and Christmas were in different seasons. Thanksgiving was the last of the Autumn holidays; Christmas was the first Winter holiday. It’s true that Christmas shopping started the day after Thanksgiving—Santa Claus arrived at the end of the Macy’s Day parade, of course, and the next day in our shopping malls. So I am probably exaggerating things in my memory. Still, that’s how I remember them: there was a Thanksgiving time, and then a Christmas time.

Also, I think I went to school on the day after Thanksgiving, at least some years. I could be wrong. I don’t remember planning or doing anything for that day, or shopping for that matter, as a kid. But then, would I remember anything like that? I don’t know. But I don’t.

I also don’t really know what it’s like to be a kid these days, see above. But it seems to me that it must be hard for a kid, a ten-year-old or an eight-year-old, to have this great big four-day-weekend for Thanksgiving, already half a month into the Christmas season, and then go back to school on Monday and realize that there are four more weeks of school, no breaks or holidays, and no presents, either. It must be a very long month.

Of course, Hanukkah is early this year, so our kids have that to look forward to. But not all the kids get to light candles and eat chocolate coins to make the time go by.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It is traditional, on the fourth Thursday in November, for blogs of this kind to post a maudlin essay about what the bloggist is thankful for.

Um. You know, stuff.

My Best Reader, of course, and my Perfect Non-Reader, and the Youngest Member who still cannot read, although he can fool you what with having memorized The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza and Big Max and Danny and the Dinosaur. And other family members, immediate and in law, small and large, in this world or the next.

My astonishing level of comfort, and the country that makes it possible. And the moment in time—I’m grateful for the twenty-first century. The ability to cushion myself, with money and friends and stuff, from a lot of bad things.

Did I mention my friends? Gentle Readers, y’all count for that. I am thankful for you. I thank you.

The Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense, which I listened to today. I am thankful for that. I should send them a note.

Do you know what else? That thing where grapes ferment, under the right conditions, and make wine. I like wine. It’s kind of odd, when you think about it, that fermentation exists. If it didn’t exist, and you wrote it into a specfic world (there’s this chemical change which happens, which makes ordinary fruit juice become intoxicating when it rots, and it also changes the taste to make it more complex, and, um, you have whole industries of growing fruit just to rot it in just the right way) it wouldn’t be very plausible.

I am also thankful for how implausible the real world is, in so many ways.

The Internet. The personal computer. Telephone lines. The postal service, particularly—do you ever think about the idea that there might not have been one? At all? But there is. Well, done Ben Franklin. Thank you.

You remember that I’m thankful for the fermentation thing? I’m not so thankful for the tobacco curing thing, but I am very thankful that in twenty-first century America I only rarely go places where I come out stinking of tobacco. When I was a kid, thirty years ago, I must have had that cigarette stench on my clothes and in my hair all the time. We all must have. It was everywhere. Not so much today, so thanks for that.

I’ll add thanks that the email that I got yesterday from the President of the United States of America, mentioning the Thanksgiving observance, wasn’t irritating to get. It wasn’t hugely inspiring, although it was nice in places (I particularly liked the mention of people who have to work on Thanksgiving because it’s their job and they don’t have any choice, and that’s another thing I’m thankful for, that my job isn’t like that and I have the freedom to avoid work that is like that) and rather sweet in its overall tone, but (a) we have a President who doesn’t get up my nose just by being President, (2) we have a President who is capable of putting his name over more than three sentences without offending me in the text itself, and (iii) I got an email from the President of the United States of America. Seriously, I know it wasn’t personal, but that’s pretty swell.

I’m thankful that the Avot is around, and the whole Scripture, all of it. I probably won’t write about it on Saturday, but you never know, I might. It’s a free weekend, for the most part, and I am very thankful for that.

And for tea. Did I mention tea? In with the whole fermentation thing, and tobacco curing, there’s this plant, a tree really, the leaves of which, when dried and fermented and dried and steeped in hot water, well, you don’t believe any of this, do you? But you drink coffee.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger should probably stop calling them Book Reports. Book Notes? That seems kinda cutesy-cutesy to me. Book log, I suppose.

Somehow, this Tohu Bohu has floated to the top of searches for book report and certain titles. This has lead on at least three occasions, twice this week, to odd little comments on my blog asking where the actual book report is. I assume that these comments are from young persons who are tasked with writing a book report and are looking for assistance, or possibly for somebody else to do the work for them. Alas, I cannot help these people. Or at least, I won’t help them, and certainly what I write in this blog isn’t going to help them at all. Of the two newest seekers, one found a four-sentence note that just counts up the Dick Francis novels by tally, and one found a note (also found by someone else last Spring) that describes the subject as more like Charlotte’s Web than Treasure Island. I don’t know how a sixth-grader would make use of that.

Our Library is not the only person to use this phrase, but it’s something that we use as part of our introduction to internet research: on the Internet, nobody is in charge. I can post my Book Reports, and they will be utterly worthless to you, and there is nobody to complain to. I mean, you can complain to me, in the comments, but what do I care? I’m the one who is posting them. I won’t care. You can complain to Google that their search engine isn’t helping you, but (a) they really don’t care, either, and (2) they will point out that with just a little more work, you can get what you want and not what you don’t want. But you have to be in charge, because nobody is in charge. I am perfectly capable of writing a straight-faced Book Report that is utterly false in every particular (note: Alfred Nobel was not, actually, a hideously deformed monster who kept little boys in a cage to fatten them up for the stew) and ha ha on you, seeker after proper book reports.

No, dissatisfaction with my Book Reports among the non-GR populace does not lead me to rethink the whole Book Report thing I do the way I do. There are a handful of reasons I do Book Reports at all, and do them the way I do them, and assistance for elementary school students is not high on that list. It does, however, make me think about my comment-moderation practice.

My policy, as I have (I think) posted here before, is that I will happily delete and filter for spam, which I have some difficulty defining but the bulk of which I have no difficulty recognizing. I reserve the right to delete and/or edit for offensive content, but (a) I promise to indicate that I am doing so, and (2) I have not actually done so as yet. I don’t want to, either. My preference is to have more comments than fewer, and to have a wider spread than a narrower.

And, in general, I feel that I need some reason to delete a comment that is more than my dislike for it. I do refuse to be used as a tool for other people to make money by influencing search engine, and I don’t mind deleting messages that are gibberish, machine-generated, or pure advertising from outside the group. But attempts at communication, well, those I don’t want to delete.

On the other hand, there is no benefit to Grs, or to me, in having a comment that simply says where is the book report at the end of one of my notes. I don’t expect the commenter to come back and find out my thinking on the topic; perhaps I am wrong in that, but it’s hard for me to imagine the thinking that would bring the poor saps back to this Tohu Bohu. So responding directly in the comment thread seems to be like talking into a disconnected telephone. It just makes me feel foolish. And leaving the comment unanswered also seems foolish; the individual entries are, at least to my eyes, diminished by that line at the end. Not that those entries were so much before the diminishmentosity, which I suppose makes it worse, from my point of view. Those notes served their purpose, and I wouldn’t have gone back to them, if it weren’t for the kids and their lousy search skillz, and going back to them hasn’t been a matter of pride (there are posts of mine I’m proud of, you know, but the Book Reports are mostly filler), which affects my attitude.

And then there’s the whole thing about the audience for the blog in general, a matter on which YHB is still ambivalent. On the one hand, I am actually quite pleased that this Tohu Bohu shows up on the front page of some searches with some fairly common words. On the other hand, you know, ambivalent. I want the kids off my lawn, unless they are good kids, who are welcome to play ball on my lawn and can use my lawn darts (the safe kind). I gripe about the sparsity of comments, but then I get comments and gripe about the quality of them. With each of these notes, I worry whether I will get more of them. And worrying? takes away from the fun of the whole blogging thing.

And, in fact, if I thought that deleting them would lead to less worrying about them, I would probably just delete them. But I can’t decide that without worrying about it a lot more.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

OK, so y’all know that I am a circulation clerk at an academic library, right? As such, part of my job—most of my job, really—is supervising college kids who are working five or eight hours a week for pocket money. This is fine; it’s easy work, and I’m pretty good at it. The job is, essentially, being a visible grown-up. There’s a good deal of training and manual-writing, which I can do, and a fair amount of basic circ-work, checking in and out and shelving and so on, but mostly, I am making sure that the young persons show up and do what they are supposed to do. Yes? And provide a grown-up presence in the library, in case that is necessary.

The grown-up presence is really my job. All I have to do, most of the time, is walk around, wear a necktie, and have gray in my hair. The student workers will not be as inclined to chat with their friends and romantic interests if I am nearby, or to slang each other, or ignore the desk. I rarely have to ask them to stop doing something inappropriate; I do my work by just being there. I am Uncle Supervisor. This is excellent work for me, because I do not secretly want to be twenty again, or to join in the lives of the students. I don’t listen to their music or watch their television shows (which aren’t usually on television); I don’t dress like them or speak like them, and I don’t have a facebook account.

I also don’t make the hiring and firing decisions, which is nice for me. The people who do make those decisions consult with me, and I am carefully noncommittal. I have, on a couple of occasions, confirmed that a student will not be missed; I have much more rarely stood up for a student who I think is potentially a good worker. The person who does the hiring prefers, on the whole, to hire women than men, I think on the reasonable grounds that college-age women are more likely to be steady and responsible than college-age men. I think this is true in general for our university’s students, but fails to take into account that a young woman in her sophomore year is likely to remain at her level of maturity for another year, while a young fellow is fairly likely to learn about buckling down right about then, even after a freshman year of slack. But my point here (and I’m slowly getting to it) is that while I am the supervisor on shift, I am not the Head of Department; the big decisions and the discipline are done elsewhere, with minor input from me and the other supervisors. I am in between.

This all means that I am friendly with the students without being friends with them. They know a little about my life (that I am married and have children, that I act in community theater) and I know a little about theirs (where they are from, their field of study), and perhaps we discuss books or art, but I don’t, for instance, know about their romantic lives, or their fights with roommates, or their finances. Oh, sometimes I wind up finding out about some of that, against my will, but on the whole, I keep my nose out of their business. Yes? Clear? Now the tricky bit.

We have a student, let’s call her, oh, you think of a name. Rachel. How about Rachel? We don’t have a Rachel at present. OK, we have a student worker who we’re calling Rachel, who seems to be fairly bright, helpful, pleasant, prompt, all that good stuff. No problems, as far as I know. Our working hours overlap only a little bit; most of her hours she has a different supervisor, but I do see her at least briefly twice a week, and then of course on occasion in the library when she isn’t working for us but for her profs. I have had a few conversations with her, but I would say I know her even more distantly than many of the other student workers. And I certainly have no complaints about her work, which I haven’t seen, for the most part.

I have a complaint about her clothing.

And I should say—I don’t even have a complaint about her clothing, as such. I mean, I am not complaining.

Rachel has a large and well-formed bosom. I have seen pretty much all of it at this point, and I do have to say I’m impressed. It’s not, you know, astonishing. Her breasts are not the biggest of all our student workers; I would guess Rachel has a C-cup, and we have a couple of workers in the double-D region. And all of the young women wear clothes I consider inappropriately revealing. Another of our workers, let’s call her Joan, has an absolutely tremendous bosom, real enter-the-room-before-she-does figure, and about a yard of décolletage most days, and if I were her father, I would prefer she wear high-necked stuff, but she doesn’t, and that’s her business. But Rachel’s outfits show a difference in degree that I think is a difference in kind. This is less like peeking and more like being flashed.

You know about cleavage—there’s the cleavage that is a vertical line, and there’s the cleavage that’s more of a V, and there’s the cleavage which is actually two lines? Where you can see the skin between the breasts? Sometimes women with small breasts have that, but for a C-cup, it usually requires either very good undergarments or really remarkable breasts. Or low gravity, I would guess. Anyway, what I’m saying, with Rachel, there’s the skin between the breasts, the underside of the breasts, and part of the nipple.

Now, when I say, above, that being Old Guy on Duty is excellent work for me, the one thing that I do worry about in that capacity is that I am the kind of Old Guy who likes to look down the shirts of young women. I attempt to do so discreetly. I mean, in addition to our workers, there are the students and faculty; the job does require a fair amount of people handing me books over a counter, which is a terrible temptation for a very susceptible circulation clerk. I am rather afraid of developing a reputation as a Creepy Old Guy, rather than an Avuncular Old Guy, and I hope I have avoided that so far. I am also afraid of actually being a Creepy Old Guy, in the sense that I don’t want to creep these young women out. Partially because of ego of my own, and partially (I insist) that I really do believe that everybody has a right to a workplace that doesn’t creep them out. I hope that my safely-married status is comforting; I am the most married man in the world, as people who get to know me quickly figure out. I haven’t made a pass at a woman other than my Best Reader since I was a college kid myself, working at the circulation desk. I don’t want to do anything with these young women other than look at them on occasion, to the extent that I can do so without creeping them out.

All of which is to admit that I do look down the shirts of my inappropriately-dressed underlings, but I don’t stare open-mouthed, drool running down my chin. I look our employees in the eye when I speak to them, and I don’t make up tasks for them that involve a lot of bending at the waist. You know? I am creepy, but I try to keep it within bounds.

With Rachel, however,it is extremely difficult not to stare. In fact, I wind up staying further away from her, looking away when talking to her, and generally trying like hell not to look down her shirt, because I don’t think I can do it discreetly. While, of course, thinking about it and, particularly when she enters the library, taking a quick look.

Now. On the one hand, I do think it’s her business; she is neither so stupid or so nearsided that she is unaware that she is showing off, and I actually support her in her right to so choose. On the other, I think it’s a minor mistake—I doubt she realizes that it’s not just the hunky guys in her classes but the creepy middle-aged staff and faculty who are getting an eyeful of skin. Perhaps she does, and either (a) she thinks it’s a fair tradeoff, or (2) she likes showing off to creepy middle-aged people. I have no idea.

The difficulty for me is that as her supervisor, I feel that it would be a good idea if someone told her that she shouldn’t flaunt her bosom quite so much whilst working. Or at least if someone made it clear that it might very well make other people uncomfortable, and that it would be better to use some discretion herself in the interests of workplace amity and so on. But I don’t want to tell her myself. I can’t imagine that conversation going well at all. (Rachel, if I could just have a moment of your time, I just wanted to say I’ve been looking down your shirt, and—) Nor, honestly, do I feel like a conversation between YHB and the other supervisory staff would be enjoyable and free from awkwardness. (Can you tell Rachel to cover her damned tits already?) I think, in point of fact, that any such conversation would be likelier to increase the difficulty of the workplace rather than decrease it.

And, just to embarrass myself further (we’re all friends here, right? We didn’t leave the window open, did we?) I am not altogether sure that want the final resolution of the matter to be that Rachel dresses more sensibly. I mean, yes, it would make things easier for me, but then, you know, in a few semesters she’ll be gone, and I will have an amusing memory, and in the meantime, she really does have a great rack. But when the person who makes the schedule starts asking about next semester, I don’t exactly know how to say I’d like to have Rachel arrive just as I am leaving, please, so I can get one good look without having to deal with the consequences.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger has started doing crosswords again. I go through phases with crosswords: I go years without the slightest urge to do one, and then I start doing them every day, or maybe two or three a day, for a few weeks, and then I’m all done for another few years. This time is different; I added the goofy NYT crossword widget to my Google page, which gives me only one puzzle a week, and that’s all I’m doing.

I have never been particularly good at crosswords. I mean, by good-at-crosswords standards. I know the general standard is by NYT day-of-the-week, with Monday being easiest and Saturday hardest (if I am remembering correctly); crossword solvers can describe themselves as being Thursday-level or Wednesday-level, depending on which day they have to really start thinking about the puzzle rather than just filling in the little boxes. The ones the NYT is making available vary in difficulty, and they give the date of publication, so I could figure out the day of the week, but I don’t. Generally, though, I find them moderately time-consuming. I can’t just whip through them, but neither do I generally leave anything blank, or at any rate, not more than a square or two.

What I wanted to write about, though, was the odd thing that happens with puzzles, that I experience with crosswords because those are the ones I do, but I understand is a general phenomenon. I get stuck, I walk away from the puzzle, and then I come back the next day and find a bunch of stuff that seems really easy, and I can’t figure out why I was stuck. I’m not talking about the thing where you get two or three clues you didn’t get before, and that gives you a long one, and then you’ve broken the back of the puzzle. No, I’m talking about the ones you were staring at, had no idea about, and then without getting any new letters, the answers suddenly become obvious.

You all have this, right? About crosswords, or sodoko, or rebussess’s, or videogames, or coding, or carpentry, or whatever you work on. It’s so common that I don’t think I’ve ever really questioned it before. Of course, if you are trying to work something out, and you are stuck, you walk away from it for a while, and then come back with fresh eyes. Everyone knows that.

But… why? Why would that work? I mean, the synapses aren’t, you know, actually wearing grooves in the wrong places in the brain. That’s a metaphor. There’s no evolutionary benefit to humans developing an inability to solve crossword puzzles on one go, but an ability to get inspiration on a second look. The brain isn’t a magic eight-ball that needs shaking up to get a good chance at a positive answer, or a deck of cards that has to be shuffled to prevent the patterns from the previous deal affecting the next one. You aren’t actually changing the brain, physically, at all. Right? You are just walking away and coming back.

I don’t mean to in any way denigrate the experience, or the brain for that matter. It’s really cool that I can think about other things and then come back to a problem and have a chance at improving my thinking about it. It just seems—well, if you were designing human brain function, Gentle Reader, is that the sort of feature you would select?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So my Perfect Non-Reader, now being a big third-grade kid, has progressed to the next level of Hebrew School. They are finally teaching her the aleph-bet with some seriousness, and they are teaching her the liturgical structure of the service, and they are brainwashing her with Zionism.

They gave her, in that first week of classes, a very odd thing: it’s a page out of For the Sake of Zion: Pride and Strength Through Knowledge, by Tuvia Book. This is a work specifically and explicitly devoted to indoctrinating passion for Zion. And it’s aimed at high-school students and college kids. From the press release:

Once Jewish students leave the protective bubble of school, home or intimate social group and enter the “real world” of a mixed college campus, sometimes hostile to Jews and Zionism, they often find themselves uncomfortable, on the defensive and unable to speak about Israel in partbecause they lack the passion for Zion.

In order to respond effectively with a sense of self-respect and to be proactive, students need a sense of commitment and pride, as well as knowledge and tools.

The sheet they gave the kids is a list of statements, and a space to respond whether the reader agrees or disagrees (on an A-E scale, oddly enough). I’m going to type in the whole thing, because—well, because I find it interesting and a trifle disturbing.

• The Jews are a nation like the French or the Germans.
• The Jews are a religious group like Muslims or Christians.
• All Jews should live in Israel.
• Jewish life in the Diaspora is vital to the continuation of the Jewish people.
• Jewish life in the Diaspora can never be fully safe or satisfying.
• Self-determination is the basic right of all peoples.
• The Jewish claim for national independence is based on Divine promise as recorded in the Torah.
• The Jewish people have an absolute and singular right to the Land of Israel as their national homeland.
• The Land of Israel is the national homeland of both the Jewish and the Palestinian Arab people.
• The State of Israel should be a model of Western liberal democracy.
• The Torah is the national constitution of the Jewish people and should be the national constitution of the State of Israel.
• The State of Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people.
• The State of Israel belongs to the citizens of the State.
• Israel is primarily a refuge for Jews fleeing oppression and a response to anti-Semitism.
• Israel is primarily a creative expression of the Jewish people’s will to be an independent community.
• All citizens of the State of Israel, regardless of religion or national-cultural identity, should share the same rights and privileges.
• Zionism demands personal fulfillment through Aliyah.
• Any support of Israel is Zionism.
• Zionism does not end with Aliyah, but continues through personal work to create a better society in Israel.
• A person living in Israel has to serve in the IDF to be considered a Zionist.

Well, now. As a conversation-kicker for grupps, or perhaps even more so for college kids, there’s a lot there. I could probably write a note about each of those twenty items (or more accurately, I could begin the project and then peter out after eight or so, despite having plenty to say about the rest). If we all (Gentle Readers and myself) just did the A-E response that the worksheet calls for would generate a wide range of responses. Giving it to a bunch of eight-year-old kids— My Perfect Non-Reader has an immense vocabulary, and I think is able to more or less understand the sentences and what they mean. Or, I should say, what they mean on the simplest level; I don’t claim to fully understand what Self-determination is the basic right of all peoples means, or what national independence means, or personal fulfillment or Western liberal democracy, for that matter. These are not well-defined terms. That doesn’t mean that they have no meaning, or that they can’t be used to communicate effectively, just that there is a limit to the extent that I am willing to say that I understand them. But that limit is very different from the limit experienced by an eight-year-old, who may or may not know what, for instance, the word refuge means. My Perfect Non-Reader does know that word, and its relation to refugee, because her parents are that way.

So I think her trouble is the greater one, close to the one that I have with the list. On the other hand, I have had lots of these conversations before. I have some experience with the tricky parts. It’s fairly easy for me to say it’s more complicated than that to pretty much anybody. I’m thinking not so much for an eight-year-old in class.

And then there’s this: I am an anti-Zionist myself, in the sense that I think Zionism was an error, although I have no solution to offer myself. Certainly I don’t think that immediate abolition of the State of Israel is a good solution, but given a range of solutions, I would rather work toward a future without a Jewish State, if that could be done without making things worse for lots of individual people. It’s hard to see how that would happen. So in terms of practical policy preferences, I am probably in line with, oh, J Street, despite their “support [for] Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland”. I desire security for Jews, both in the Holy Land and elsewhere, but I do not in principle support the State’s desire for security as the Jewish homeland. But then here I’m reminded of the book-dialogue between Michael Lerner and Cornel West, when they are talking about Zionism, and it turns out that neither of them believe in the nation-state as such, so of course the whole concept of Zionism is suspect. I, too, have trouble with the idea of the nation-state, and that puts me in the corner with the guys with the funny haircuts who make trouble, but has almost nothing to do with anything practical.

But practically speaking, I am a Diaspora Jew. I identify myself as a Diaspora Jew, and I practice Diaspora Judaism. When we discuss Jewish matters (which happens fairly often around the house, as you can guess), I respond as a Diaspora Jew. And as an American. And that rubs off. My Perfect Non-Reader filled out this page as a Diaspora Jew, and as an anti-Zionist, to boot. I suspect that she was one of the few people to strongly disagree with the absolute and singular right stuff and give a shrug of a C to The State of Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people. Not that I would fill the paper out exactly the way she did, but on the whole, she wrote a paper as YHB’s daughter.

And that worries me. Not, in this instance, because I am worried about my own indoctrination, pace Akabya b. Mahaleel. But because I think it will be difficult and unpleasant for her to hold such unpopular views. Because she will be torn between loyalty to her Old Dad, who she loves (thank the Divine, although I embarrass her so) and respect for her teacher and the respect of her classmates. This is not like growing up a Yankee fan’s son in Boston. This is like that kid whose dad sued to have the Pledge of Allegiance returned to its original secular text.

I grew up in a New York Liberal Jewish household in a Southwestern town. My dad remains an old Trotskyite, at heart. When the Soviet Union fell apart, I was in college, and at that point I heard echoed in my community his response that this was the best possible news for advancing socialism. But when I was in high school and we read Animal Farm, I caused a major ruckus by making a similar point about Marx and Stalin. And that was high school. When I was Brynnen’s age, more or less, Jimmy Carter was running for President, and I was aware that our household was an Democratic island in a sea of Republicans. I heard dozens of Jimmy Carter jokes from my classmates. Not that I cared, particularly, about politics at the time. And I associated the political thing with the religious thing; we were supposed to be outsiders, after all.

Now I live in a town with seven synagogues. The local A&P put out a huge display of round challah right by the entrance last week, together with raisins, apricots, figs and those sticky nut-honey things that the Sephardim eat. And on the right day, too. The schools are closed on Monday for the Yom, not particularly out of sensitivity but out of logistical necessity, with so many students and teachers out. Being a Jew is not being an outsider in this town, and I am reminded almost every week of how different that is from my own childhood.

And yet, it seems, I am bringing my daughter into an outsider status of her own. I am, how do you say, conflicted about this. I am proud of her and worried about her. I feel guilty for having put her in this position, and I feel good about having protected her against the indoctrination I disagree with. I am frustrated by the whole weight of history that has made it seem almost reasonable for my shul to indoctrinate the kids in their school in Zionism, even while I think it’s a wrong-headed idea. And I want, in the words of the press release for that book, for my Perfect Non-Reader to respond effectively with a sense of self-respect and to be proactive, drawing on a sense of commitment and pride, as well as knowledge and tools. Only, I think I want her to do it in 5777, not this year.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So Your Humble Blogger was washing dishes, as happens not infrequently, and as a not infrequent mental accompaniment to the dishwashing, was composing a possible note for this Tohu Bohu. It was a Days of Awe note, full of that combination of insight and whimsy—well, anyway. I had come to that part of the bit where I list the Seven Deadly sins, and I was preparing to slip in a reference to the great Woody Allen Vodka Ad bit and sneak in the Seven Dwarfs instead.

Or, rather, do that other bit I do, where I start out with the Disney Canonical Seven Dwarfs and end up off track a bit. It’s surprising how often I get a chance to do it, although of course the ability and willingness to rattle off the names of the Seven Dwarves does tend to skew conversations into paths that give one the opportunity to show off such an ability, just as, I imagine, people who do not know the first ten digits of pi rarely find themselves in conversations where one might be able to slip those numerals in to great effect.

Anyway, as I say, what I actually do is not name the Seven Dwarfs but (and this is a tone of voice thing, so you have to imagine YHB doing it deadpan and with total confidence) instead list off Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sleazy, Jumpy and Mike. It’s the Mike that amuses me so. I mean, the rhythm of the actual last three (Sneezy, Bashful and Doc) is so great, and Mike is (to my ears) just the right distance from Doc—not so close that you think it’s correct, and not so far off that it makes no sense. And I love the idea that everybody gets a descriptive name and one guy is just named Mike. Or that somebody (notionally YHB) really believes that one of them is called Mike.

Actually, the whole thing started when I lived in Ess Eff and I had a good friend who worked for a law firm (cum lobbying firm) I referred to as Thelen, Marrin, Johnson, Bridges, Sleazy, Jumpy and Mike. All those trochees. They are now just Thelen LLP, presumably because after all the mergers they blew the trochee thing, being at that point Thelen, Marrin, Johnson, Bridges, Reid, Priest, Berlack, Israels, Liberman, Pinsent and Masons. Which is a trifle unwieldy, and you can see why they went with the short version. The short, unfunny version. Not that law firms really need to think about maximizing the hilarity potential of their corporate identity.

But the hilarity potential of misnaming the Seven Dwarfs is clearly something that does require serious thought here in this Tohu Bohu. Because, frankly, I am not altogether satisfied. For one thing, I have long thought that substituting sleazy for sneezy is a bit obvious, a bit adolescent. Not unfunny, and I think it is important for the first not-quite-correct name to be very close, which that does accomplish. But better can be achieved, I think. Perhaps with incongruity: something like Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Jumpy, Lefty and Mike. Or going further afield: Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Lefty, One-Eye and Mike. I do like the idea of one of the dwarfs being called One-Eye, as a reference to an obscure David Edgar play called Ball Boys I am very fond of, and the combination of Lefty and One-Eye to me sounds very English-thug, which is a good combination with Disney Dwarfs, but then Mike is no longer funny, being neither a Dwarf of a Goon. Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Lefty, One-Eye and Spike? Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Lefty, One-Eye and Jock? Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Lefty, One-Eye and Brick? Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Duffy, Solly and MacClanahan?

Yes, this is the sort of thing Your Humble Blogger spends a lot of time thinking about.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Your Humble Blogger wrote a page analysing the manner in which Left Blogovia became dominated, largely, by people who are passionate in their opposition to the Republican Party (quite rightly in my view) and deeply suspicious of the Democratic Party for being pro-business and “moderate” without being very far to the left of center on the actual substance of policy. It was a very dull post. I didn’t finish it.

Yes, I’ve been a lousy blogger lately. Sorry about that. Lost the mojo, somehow.

I will try to recover, but it will likely be slow. Well, and we’re off-book next week, so I should be working on my lines, anyway.

In the meantime, if anybody wants an unused Digression on the way support for single-payer health insurance is the hobby-horse of cranks of the left, while opposition to single-payer unemployment insurance is not even audible amongst the hard-core anti-government tea-dumpers on the Right, it is available. And may yet turn up in a note in the next few weeks. Reuse, recycle, repurpose, retrain, relax, relent, research, remark, ricola. Repeat.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A book called Edible Estates : attack on the front lawn crossed YHB’s path yesterday. Last night I ate some extraordinarily tasty squash, grown in our back yard and grilled by our next-door neighbor. And this morning I went out and mowed the lawn in two hundred degree heat (with five hundred percent humidity). All of which got me to thinking about this idea of getting rid of the grass and devoting the whole of our (tiny) yard to vegetables and flowers.

Not, you understand, that I am actually planning on doing anything about it. The yard, and particularly the gardens, are my Best Reader’s territory. I grew up in the desert. I lend a hand, here and there, but I don’t make the decisions. At the moment, we have a few small beds for veggies, and the rest is lawn.

Regular Labor:

• Lawn: Mowing, dandelion-pulling, nettle-pulling
• Veggies: weeding, harvesting, watering

Annual Labor:

• Lawn: Not a lot.
• Veggies: Purchasing new plants/seeds and soil, planting, mulching

Money:

• Lawn: occasional mower sharpening or repair.
• Veggies: Large initial expense for plants, but then reduced expense for veggies at the store.

You know, for kids!:

• Lawn: running, jumping, playing catch, kicking a ball around
• Veggies: education, nutrition

It’s all about YHB:

• Lawn: I grew up with a lawn, even in the desert. It seems natural.
• Veggies: Yum, plus it’s fun to watch them grow.

I should also note that where the regular labor of a lawn can be replaced with money outlay, that’s less true of the regular labor of a veggie garden, until either the Perfect Non-Reader or a neighborhood kid can be given that those tasks. At the moment, with our lives how they are, we don’t want to spend money on the outdoors, but as we get older, our interest in avoiding the trowel or mower may increase. Also, the nearest public park/playground is far enough away that a parent would have to go with children for quite a few years yet; it’s walking distance, but across major streets.

What do y’all do, those of you who have control over an outdoor patch near where you live?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Five Thousand Comments!

That’s three zeroes, preceded by a five. That’s a lot of comments. I mean, for some guy with a blog. There were probably five thousand comments over on the McCovey Chronicles in one evening a couple of weeks ago. Atrios probably gets five thousand comments on a slow afternoon. I’ve got them slowly over twenty-three hundred days. And I wrote a lot of them myself. I don’t know how many; a simple search seems to break the whole system down. Phooey. Anyway, although five thousand is a good round number, it’s a bit misleading, as (a) there are at least half-a-dozen comments included in there that are double posts or spam and should be removed, and (2) there may have been some proper comments inadvertently deleted along the line. So although I was considering setting off bells when that five thousandth comment came in, and then decorating that special comment with colors and stars and the dancing baby animated gif, on second thought, not so much. In fact, I wound up waiting for another dozen comments or so before writing this up.

Because although the Comment Milestone is terrific, and it actually means a lot to YHB (far more than it should, probably, but then I’ve been watching the counter tick over for hundreds of comments now, and then there was the whole business where it spent a week going over 5,000 with spam and then going back down under when I deleted the spam, which, I can tell you, added so much to the experience), I decided some years ago that I didn’t want to go for quantity, what with the quality being so good. And I have to admit, for some reason we all had time, back in those days, for good long comment conversations, such as the Conservative Tenets series, particularly Eight and Ten or the thread on More Notes from Union Meetings.

Oh, while I’m at it, here are a few other threads that make me happy: Not very zippy, after all, President Bush Reaffirms Resolve to War on Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and The death business. Or How could anyone… (aka the New Strunk and White’s), What Voters Want or Mais Non, Mais Non (doot-doo de-doot doo). Or Understanding, validating, disagreeing. Or Haftorah Bo.

And I really should do more quizzes and contests, because Hint: Not the Hippopatamus wound up with a really interesting thread, and I vastly enjoyed Online Encore. They do require some work on my part, though.

Well, anyway. The point is just that I am very grateful to you, Gentle Readers all, for all the comments over the years. Thank you.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had gone through a chunk of time where my spam filters weren’t working at all, and I was able to get them working, so for the last several weeks, it was catching spam and not putting it on the web. And when I did get a bunch, I could spot the cues and tell the filter to stop any more of them, and it worked, and that was a Good Thing. My Gracious Host, Jed, helped with that, and it was working, and I was happy, happy, happy.

And then… these comments have been coming in with, as far as I can tell, random combinations of letters (and not long strings, either) as the email, URL and content. They are not from the same IP address, and they do not have any links within the body of the spam. There are no words or recognizable (and repeated) word-like things to alert a filter. And they have been coming more or less every five minutes for several days. If I am off-line for a while, and I often am, I come back to discover dozens of comments that have been published and are not only crudding up the Tohu Bohu but are bloating my aggregator—and your aggregator, too, if you are clever enough to be subscribed to the comment feed. It makes me cranky, so cranky. And I don’t like being cranky.

And, er, I am exaggerating a bit. I mean, it’s been three days, and a total of two hundred or so spam comments. A lot, and in my aggregator I get less than a hundred proper items a day, so adding another fifty spam items makes my aggregator useless as an aggregator, but not every five minutes, which would be, over forty-eight hours, let me see, twelve eights is sixteen and eighty, and four twelves is forty eight, which is, don’t tell me, carry the one, fifty and fourteen, a hundred and twelve, it would be five hundred and sixty-sumpin’ spam comments, when in fact, I had only a third of that. Not that much, really.

But still making me cranky.

So what I’ve done, for the moment, is put a hold on all incoming comments. So when you post, it’ll go to that famous moderation cue, and I will make it visible just as soon as I can distinguish it from the spam. Which should be easy, unless you are posting random combinations of letters. In which case, curse you (shakes fist)!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Where were you, Gentle Reader, ten years ago today?

Most of you were helping me get married.

Well, many of you. I don’t know how many Gentle Readers there actually are, but of those who comment, now and then, I’m pretty sure more than half were in that room. Not that I remember it, but my Best Reader and I were looking at the pictures this morning, and there you were. You seem to have been having a good time.

So do I. Although, as I say, I don’t remember much of it. We lit a candle for unity and snuffed out our individual lives; I remember that. I remember that it was raining, and then it wasn’t, and then it was again; we moved the reception inside and seemed to continue having a good time. My Best Reader was beautiful; I remember that, but it was nice to see it in the photographs. And y’all were young. So young.

For those of you who weren’t there at the time, well, I’m sorry you missed it. We had funeral parlor fans printed up, for people to wave; they weren’t needed for the heat, in the event, but people amused themselves with them anyway. There were children running around, evidently; they seem very small in the photographs, almost unrecognizable from the big kids I know. The cake was pretty, and also tasty to the best of my recollection, and it’s too bad that Sweet Daddy Bakery (in lovely Wayne, PA) is no longer around. And there were lots and lots and lots of roses.

The thing about this moment, ten years (give or take an hour) from signing the ketubah and being pronounced man and wife by a nice old Marryin’ Sam, is that for all it’s a magnificent anniversary, well worth remembering, celebrating and commemorating, it is just a moment. It did, for a long time, divide our lives together into before the wedding and after the wedding. One of those pivots, it looked like, a major landmark, when Everything Changes. Now, having spent some time this morning looking at the photos, and some more time, since the box was open, looking at some other photos, it looks less like that. Oh, it’s a Big Deal, don’t get me wrong. But it’s possible for me to look at a photo of my Best Reader and not know whether it was from Before or After the wedding. Or, particularly, care. We have had ten good years of marriage. Before that, we had eight good years of cohabitation, and before that four good years of friendship.

And the moment, thinking about it, that Everything Changed (or rather, one of them, since the most Changy of the moments was when we bumped up a generation and started being parents)— the moment that Everything Changed was not the moment that we exchanged promises and become husband and wife, in the eyes of the state, our family and friends, and (one hopes) the Divine, but some earlier moment when we realized that we wanted to make those promises. And fulfill them. Which, thank the Divine, we are still working on.

Then why this mawkish and unusually personal blog note? Because, Gentle Reader, while that earlier moment may have been the real moment when Everything Changed, it was not the moment for publicly commemorating that change. That was ten years ago, more or less now. I think; I don’t really remember. But there are pictures.

And then, this moment is another moment for that public commemoration. And, just as ten years ago, it required a room full of family and friends to properly do the job, I was thinking that this morning it requires you, Gentle Reader, whether you were there at the time or not, to make this a commemoration of that moment when we exchanged the vows, of the earlier moment when we chose to do so, and of all the time since that we’ve been working at them.

And of all the time ahead for working at them some more. We still, my Best Reader and I, propose marriage to each other. Probably three or four times a week. Sometimes, and don’t tell anyone this, we dance, in the kitchen, while the kids are wrecking the living room.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

My Gracious Host’s recent post about Worry, hope, and jinxing things gives me a spur to write about my own combination of optimism and pessimism. That isn’t exactly what the post is about, but I have been known to go off on my own tangents before.

You know the half-glass of water? It’s difficult for me to describe myself as either an optimist or a pessimist; I tend to say that the glass is half-empty, but that it’s probably potable water, good to drink. You know? My usual formula is that I tend to think that the worst will happen, but that it won’t turn out to be so bad, after all. My recent travel experience makes a story worth telling about that attitude.

We were changing planes in Chicago.

No, at Midway, but still. Southwest, the mad scramble for seats, but we had A group tickets. For those who haven’t done the Southwest thing, they don’t have assigned seating, but ticketholders can go on-line twenty-fours before departure time and get a group assignment. Group A boards first, then Group B, and so on. Within each group, there are numbers, so the holder of A-15 will in theory board fifteenth of all, and it’s better to have B-5 than B-41. Your chances of getting the seat you want, or if you are traveling in a group the seat configuration you want, are dependent on getting a good assignment and on the people in front of you wanting different seats. And, of course, if you don’t show up in time to board with the A group, having an A assignment is worth bupkess.

Well, if that’s all clear, then follow me further: we are connecting at Midway with a short layover of, say, forty-five minutes. The plane we were on is twenty minutes late boarding, and then backed up on the runway, so it becomes clear that we are likely to be something like an hour late coming in to Chicago. I become convinced, absolutely convinced, that we will miss our plane. Because, you know, we are going to arrive in Chicago after the scheduled departure time. So. We’ll miss our plane. Pessimism.

On the other hand, I figured there would be another plane to Hartford that night, or if not, then they would put us up at a hotel for free for a night. Either way, not really a problem. I mean, an annoyance, but nobody was meeting us, and it was on the way back, so it wasn’t cutting into our visiting time. So I was pessimistic about catching our plane, but optimistic about our evening and night.

Then I said to my Best Reader, you know, says I, the worst thing would be to get to the airport with two minutes to get to the other gate, have to race through the airport and then find it all filled up so we wouldn’t get seats together. Meaning, Gentle Reader, to put in perspective the annoyance of missing the plane entirely. I expected the evening to contain a moderately unpleasant discussion with an overworked gate agent, an hour and a half to kill in the airport, and then a late flight home. Not so bad. Optimism.

Of course, what happened was that the Hartford-bound airplane was also delayed, so our plane pulled into the gate with two minutes to get to the other gate, and we had to race through the airport and then find the plane was all filled up so there were no seats together. There were ten or so middle seats empty; all the aisle and window seats were taken. Some nice chap gave up an aisle seat so that my Best Reader could sit with the Youngest Member; YHB sat behind my Perfect Non-Reader across the aisle. And it was fine.

Of course, in a situation like that, there is no way that the luggage made it from one plane to another like that, right? I said as much, on the plane, and then again whilst waiting at the baggage carousel. Pessimist, me. On the other hand, we were on our way home, and there wasn’t anything in our checked luggage that we desperately needed overnight. In fact, it would be slightly more convenient to have the bags fail to show up and then have the airline drive them to the house the next day. Or the day after. I mean, there’s the whole filling out forms, I would guess, and a conversation with an overworked agent, but on the other hand I wouldn’t have to schlepp the bags to the car.

I’m not sure whether it counts as optimism or pessimism. I mean, an optimist would believe that the bags would be on the plane, that we’d catch our plane, that we’ll stop global warming, that we’ll stay out of a major Depression, that we’ll have good weather on the night of the School Fair. A pessimist would believe that the bags were permanently lost, that we’d be stranded in Chicago, that global warming will lead to hundreds of refugees from drowned cities fighting over a diminished supply of food, that by next winter the frozen bodies of the homeless will be stacked up like unaffordable cordwood, and that the School Fair will be miserable whether it rains or not. I tend to think that our bags will come home to us wagging their tails behind them, that there will be another flight home or else a reasonably comfortable hotel room, that some particularly clever people will find a way to house the refugees and feed them, sparking not violence but fascinating new cultural friction, and that the millions of jobless and homeless will find fulfilling work, productive and creative and lasting. And so on.

Any attempt to reconcile this fence-straddling attitude with my attitude toward John Henry will be doomed to failure. But the failure won’t be that bad…

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I had meant to respond, ages ago, to a question Matt H. asked in the comments to a note almost a month ago. Since I never did respond, rather than just ignoring it, I’ll put it up here in a new note, particularly as I don’t have any real inspiration for writing just now, and don’t feel like doing another damned Book Report.

What is it that makes you in favor (apparently) of abolishing tenure, where I’m leery of it; and I want term limits for Senators, which concept you (V) previously have expressed the leer thereof?

First of all, I’m going to do the web thing where I dismiss the question: The current situation with Senators, which can roughly be described as renewable six-year contracts with the understanding that almost all the incumbents will be renewed in their positions, is what I would imagine replacing the current tenure system, if the tenure system were to be replaced. I would be against limiting the professor to a particular number of renewals at a particular institution; I would be against granting Senators life appointments. So there’s that. And besides that, I wouldn’t describe myself as in favor of abolishing tenure so much as strongly ambivalent about tenure; if I could snap my fingers and make that policy change, I don’t know that I would do it. And I am less leery about term limits than I was; if I could snap my fingers and institute a, say, four-term limit for the Senate, I don’t know that I wouldn’t. Although I would prefer to use that finger-snapping business as leverage for other changes that I think are more valuable, but that’s where the leer comes in, right?

But I don’t think Matt was getting at the specific differences in circumstances and policies. I think he’s looking at our instincts when it comes to job protection, democracy, conservativism (in the sense of preserving What Is), and the levels of leeriness in suggesting changes. Essentially, we both look at the tenure situation and see positives and negatives, and he is leery of change where I am willing to chance it; we both look at the Senate and see positives and negatives, and I am leery of change where he is willing to chance it. It’s not risk-aversion, it’s not the conservative temperament, and I’d be willing to suggest that it isn’t really the policy differences in the matter (much as I would be willing to argue that I am correct in both of my positions). So what is it?

Partially, of course, it’s that my Best Reader is at the moment Junior Faculty. Y’all know the joke about the scholar that has a heart attack and dies at the very moment the hood is placed over his head conferring the Ph.D.? At the gate of the Afterlife, he is told that while of course had he continued in his academic career, he would have been dispatched to the Bad Place, but since he expired just at the moment, they weren’t sure what to do with him. Eventually, he is told that he will have to choose his ultimate destination. Choose? he asks. I mean, isn’t it obvious? No, he is told, he should visit both and see which he prefers. So up he goes on a visitor’s pass, and it’s very nice. Harps, hosannahs, haloes. You know, nice. Not real exciting, but nice. And then he goes to the other place, again on a visitor’s pass, and you know what? It’s wonderful. It’s like the ultimate college, and the library? It has everything, everything ever written and a lot of stuff that was never published, and even more, there are all the great scholars and academicians, from his own advisor’s advisor’s advisor all the way back to Plato, and all the stuff they’ve been working on since passing to the other side. And they all sit around and talk about the work. And they are interested in his work, too, and have suggestions for collaboration and for resources he could use, and all of these conversations are over the most fantastic meal he’s ever had, eating and drinking and the life of the mind and when he is back at the gate turning in his visitor’s pass, he says I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d like to go to Hell, please. Well, there’s this, like, ultimate thunderclap, and blam-blam-blam there’s our deceased young friend in Hell, with torment, unspeakable torment, and flames, and ice, and demons jeering at him, and the howls of damned souls, and all of that, and he cries out in agony, he cries out Where is the library? Where is the meat and drink? Where are my colleagues? This is not what I was shown! and the voice that answers him says that was the interview, fool. Now you are junior faculty.

Which, you know, funny. But.

I’m saying that the problems with faculty tenure are connected to problems in my own daily life. I’m actually experiencing them. So, naturally, when I’m totting up costs and benefits, and weighting factors and risks and whatnot, I’m naturally going to weight those factors that I’ve seen with my eyes more heavily. Too heavily? Probably. Hard to tell, of course. How could I tell how heavily to weight the misery and waste of publish-or-perish? I see the people (not by Best Reader, so far) who have gone into the decision and come out busted, the university losing a good teacher (in at least four of the cases I personally know about, although to be fair, I don’t know that they are good teachers by any sort of objective metric, if such a thing exists) and the neighborhood losing a neighbor as the tenure-denied family packs up to go elsewhere, and all that. And did I mention selling the house? And in many of those cases, it seems to me that the problem is tenure, that the departments would, on the whole, be happy for the junior faculty member to keep teaching and going to committee meetings and all, but for tenure, well, they just don’t have the stuff for that.

Whereas, you know, the stuff about the Senate and term limits, while I do see the problems in theory, in practice there are very few bills that I am aware of as passing or not passing because of term limits, or cases where the bill that passes is significantly worse because of the lack of term limits. Is that because I’m just not paying attention? Or because I’m not working on the Hill, or married to somebody who is working on the Hill, with a bunch of other college buddies and siblings and other friends and acquaintances on the Hill as well. Or because the problem is trickier and more insidious, because the real problem is the committee chairs and their seniority-driven power to set the agendas, so that it rarely comes down to a vote and an old retrograde Senator who has rested on incumbency for a decade to publicly screw his constituents in that vote. Sure, all of that.

So I can make all the logical arguments in the world, and furthermore I can believe all of those arguments, and ever further all of those arguments can be right but that’s not why Matt and I have different instincts on these cases. Why is that other thing.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So. The Youngest Member, when queried this morning about his breakfast wishes, announced that he wanted cookies, ice cream, cake, cupcake, and a chocolate milkshake. We, his parents, explained to him that those were desserts, and that they were not breakfast foods. Nobody eats cake for breakfast we told him, and then a few minutes later, in the kitchen, I appended to my Best Reader except doughnuts, of course. She agreed. Doughnuts, clearly an allowable breakfast food. Sure, it’s a treat, still, it’s nothing at all like having a piece of cake for breakfast, right?

Although, as my Best Reader pointed out, coffee cake was also potentially an allowable breakfast food. Not just corn muffins and bran muffins and blueberry muffins, but chocolate chip muffins are allowable as well, as are (again, as special treats) those chocolate muffins. Totally different from cake.

Also, danish. And pain au chocolat. And pancakes, with syrup, and possibly with chocolate chips. Also Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, of course, and Honey Grahams, but not under any circumstances Graham crackers. Bread and honey, approved for breakfast. Honey cake, not approved for breakfast.

Apple danish, by the way, perfectly fine for breakfast. Apple strudel, OK. Apple pie, no. Pumpkin pie only allowable for breakfast in the state of Vermont.

Also, milkshakes must have some coffee in them. Right? Or am I wrong here?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Anyway, I feel I should eventually write something about something that isn’t connected to Lois McMaster Bujold. Not yet, though. Maybe tomorrow’s Pirke Avot session will manage to avoid a connection.

I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody that I am ambivalent about the whole issue of audience in blogging. I think the issue of audience is very important for me and my writing of any kind: who am I aiming for, how will that audience know it’s for them, how is that audience likely to interpret what I’m saying (and more importantly how I’m saying it), what response do I want from that audience, who am I likely to offend, how much do I care…

This usually works very well for me when I am writing instruction manuals and memos, although it does mean that I take a lot longer to do it than people expect me to. Ah, well. And when I’m writing a play (more accurately, when I wrote the play), I am both writing for actors, who I know pretty well, and for audiences, who perplex me. Even when I’m in them. But for that experience, I was fortunate to have my own personal dramaturge, and I let her stand in for my audience, and that worked for me.

When writing for this Tohu Bohu, however, I am (I said this before) ambivalent. Much of the time, I rely on my image of the Gentle Reader, who has been reading for some time (years, probably) and comments now and then, knows what I’m on about, is knowledgeable about the world and its wife, and is likely to give me the benefit of the doubt. Some combination of Chris Cobb (who is an old college buddy) and Matt Hulan (who I’ve not yet met). There are perhaps two dozen of y’all, and I am comfortable with you. I long ago decided that I didn’t want an a-list blog with hundreds of thousands of readers, not only because I am too lazy to do the work to get there, but because then something blog-related would occur to make me unhappy every damned day. The way things are now, only rarely does anything cause me any blog-related stress, and when it does, it’s usually a miscommunication of some kind and is cleared up quickly.

However.

As a blog, it is open to the whole world. I try to keep in mind, as I write, that anybody could come and read, and that when I say anybody I do mean anybody, including any specific person. Ricky DiPietro could read a note here. Dick Cheney could read a note here. Evan Schnittman could read a note here. Whatever I say about those people is possibly being said directly to their faces. And that’s… intimidating.

Now, of course, most of the time, YHB can say whatever I want about somebody, and that person will not read it, and neither will their children, their spouse, their ex-lover, their mother, etc. And when I do a hatchet job, I generally do so on somebody who is sufficiently public that I feel my own attack will be lost amongst the far harsher attacks being leveled in other locations. And I have to say that I didn’t really think that Neal Asher had visited this Tohu Bohu, and I wasn’t at all sure that A. Lee Martinez had visited this Tohu Bohu, but at this point it’s pretty much certain that Lois McMaster Bujold visited. I mean, seriously. At what point of fame does the need to egogoogle fade? I do it every week or two, myself, but then I’m not famous at all, and this is only the third time that somebody I don’t know as a Gentle Reader has mentioned anything I’ve said. And, understand, I’m not mocking Ms. Bujold, or Mr. Asher, or Ms/Mr Martinez (I assumed masculinity or at least maleness, way back then, but that was based on nuthin’). Do you know how, when you’re a kid, you think that there’s some point of gruppness that indicates completion, but as you age you start to realize that you don’t get a grupp card on some birthday that indicates completion? You never really know if you’re complete until it’s over? I suppose fame is somewhat like that—Ms. Bujold knows that somebody is talking about her, somewhere, every moment of every day, the whole world around, but still… I was hoping the world wasn’t like that, somehow.

Anyway.

The point is not so much the famous people who I discuss here, fairly or unfairly, because even if it never occurred to me ever that Ms. Bujold would ever read anything I’d put into this Tohu Bohu, I do try to keep in mind that it is possible, and that famous people are still people, and ethical concerns come into play. That was made clear to me at one point when I read a thread at the old Baseball Primer about Barry Bonds and had a sudden horrific vision of his son reading it.

No, the point is that whilst I am writing for my Gentle Readers, and am (intermittently) able to keep in mind that any individual read could wind up here, I am utterly unable to keep in mind that a mass of people could wind up here. I don’t write for a mass of people. I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be the guy who put up the video of his baby’s laughing fit and had millions and millions of visitors, day after day for years. The idea of a sudden invasion by barbarian hordes scares the shit out of me.

And yet.

There’s no question that the arrival of dance (prone to laughter) at just the right moment was a terrific thing for this Tohu Bohu and for me. And Cat Faber is certainly welcome (any friend of Jed’s is a proverbial, here). And when the Online Encore game brought me fauxlore, that was wonderful. And Matt Hulan himself, and Dan P, both of whom have become pillars of our little, um, what is it that pillars are of? Porticos? Anyway, in actual experience, the introduction of new Gentle Readers to this Tohu Bohu has been a Good Thing, and the expansion from my Old College Buddies to a slightly wider circle has brought with it a lot of great conversation, as well as a wider range of actual experiences, which have served to set me straight on a bunch of things. All good.

And yet.

If you are new here, then, please don’t feel unwanted, and please be a bit patient if I seem defensive or hostile. I am ambivalent about the whole issue of audience in blogging.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Presumably, after all this time, Your Humble Blogger would have a whole slew of notes just sitting here waiting to be posted. Yeah, right. I utterly failed to spend five off-line days jonesing for this Tohu Bohu. When I got back on-line, my aggregator had five fucking hundred items waiting for me, and it took me another two days to get through them. And then there were rehearsals for Enchanted April, and starting to get my lines into my head. It's actually surprisingly easy to get used to not blogging…

Still, here it is a week and then some from my last post, and I'm finally typing in something to prepare for that magic moment when my Gracious Host tells me that I can once more log in to this blog. Which, presumably, has already happened by the time you read this. So there.

But the point of this pointless note is for me to remark to myself in semi-public about the things I could conceivably blog, so that I will create some pressure for myself to actually blog, thus getting myself back into the habit.

There's the long-delayed analysis of Our Only President's Inaugural Address. There's the next verse of Pirke Avot. There's some observations about baseball and steroids, which would probably be better left alone. There's something about higher education, I suppose, and the library. What else… I should catch up on my Book Reports, of course, but I'm actually not too far behind on them. Oh, yes, my Coraline experience. That'll do to go on with, yes?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Hunh. One thing about the new update is that I more frequently see the Big Stats on this Tohu Bohu. This includes a great little box on my end that is headed Most Popular Entries that simply says beneath it There are no popular entries. I love that box. I’m thinking of adding a box beneath it that says Prick and beneath it You’re a prick.

Anyway, one of the things it shows me is how many total posts there are in this Tohu Bohu. And as of right now, there are two thousand posts. Well, right now when YHB is typing. When I post this one, there will presumably be two thousand and one. I’m rather unpleasantly proud of this Tohu Bohu, along with a simultaneous feeling that it should be much better than it is, somehow. In the sixty-three weeks since I wrote a milestones note for my fifteen hundredth, I seem to have averaged eight notes a week, which seems like a lot. I’ve done a lot of Scriptural analysis since then, including a series on the Haftorah readings for the week that I rather enjoyed and the Pirke Avot series that is getting off to a good start. I have written a lot about theater, and enjoyed it. I don’t have a simple way to get statistics on categories, which is just as well, since they aren’t meaningful categories anyway. But it seems clear from glancing at it that much of my writing over the last year or so has been (a) Book Reports, (2) Scripture Reports, and (iii) Theater Production Reports, with a smattering of politics and music. That’s not how I expected this blog to look, but then, if I had any confidence in what I expected for this blog, I wouldn’t have called it a Tohu Bohu, would I? And then perhaps when I’m looking back at notes 4500-5000, it’ll look altogether different.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I feel I owe the Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu an apology. Not only because it’s sucked so badly over the last month or so. That’s happened before, and will undoubtedly happen again. I hope it has a stretch of not-sucking at some point, but I suppose that’s in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, what I really want to apologize for is the state of the blog. First, those of you who are using an aggregator of some kind have presumably been seeing a lot of spam comments, many of which are not safe for work, in the sense that they are explicit porn. Sorry about that. I hope none of you have got in trouble on that account. I have been (1) slow to delete them and (b) bad at preventing them, because I suck, and my attention has largely been elsewhere.

Also, I have been meaning to spend time on the layout of the front page of the blog, and on the layout of the individual main pages, and I just haven’t. Sorry. I know that there are some busted links, and there’s some odd stuff up at the top, but fixing that sort of things is not terribly fun, and requires a stretch of uninterrupted computer time, and when I get a stretch of uninterrupted computer time, I have other things to do that are more fun. I hope things aren’t too bad.

And then the whole household got the Winter Vomiting. Not good, and tending to diminish both the uninterrupted computer time and YHB’s willingness to do things that are difficult and not terrible fun. We’re all better now (touch wood). So there’s at least a chance that I’ll put in the effort soon.

As for the actual content, well, there’s a chance that I will pay attention a bit more to the world at large, and that my thinking will improve as well. I’ll try.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So Your Humble Blogger is feeling pretty pleased with himself at present. Why? Because my purchases at the beginning of the winter have turned out to be useful. I was pretty sure the sidewalk scraper would come in handy, although I hoped it wouldn’t. But I also bought a third snow shovel, with an all-metal lightweight blade, and it turns out that the blade of the shovel is so thin that you can slide it right under that horrible sheet of ice and shove it along, breaking up the sheet into billions of pieces that (if my understanding of physics is correct) will melt faster than the sheet. Well, we’ll see. But so far it worked like I thought it would.

I grew up in the desert. I shoveled snow for the first time when I was twenty-glob, I think. I have never shoveled snow with my parents or grandparents, or with my older siblings. I assume that shoveling out the driveway is one of those things that has a correct way, which is how you do it, and a wide variety of heretical and wrong ways, such as how everybody else does it. I don’t mean the mechanics of shoveling without doing lasting damage to your back, although, you know, ow. I mean whether you start down by the street or up by the garage. Do you shovel across the driveway or along it? Do you wait to shovel until the snow has stopped (or as late as you can before a car needs to come in or out) or do you go out as soon as it becomes clear that you’ll need to shovel? And what about the salt? I don’t mean to suggest that there are absolutely correct answers to these, just that I suspect that people grow up with a Way of doing it, and that’s the only Way that makes sense, and I’m just making it up as I go along.

But there’s a question of driveway-shoveling ettiquette that I would like to consult Gentle Readers’ ideas about (Virginians, Californians and Texans are excused, although of course if you have relevant experience, please share). I live in the sort of close-in suburb that has house quite close to each other; our driveway runs along the property line, although I have to admit I’m not sure where the precise line is. As I shovel, I am heaping snow from my driveway onto their property. Not all of it, and of course it’s just landing on the snow that is already there, but still: our snow, their yard. It seems inevitable, and I don’t worry about it much.

At the end of the driveway, though, there is a massive amount of snow (piled up by the plow in rock-hard ridges) to be cleared, and there’s the sidewalk as well, which limits the available area for snowmountain. I know in Greater Boston, the habit is to make giant ice mountains in the street; we have enough space to make that unnecessary, and it’s a Bad Thing, so we don’t do it. Instead we make moderately large ice ridges over the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, and (as that is limited), moderately large ice mountains at the corners of the driveway. And it’s much easier in terms of backbreaking labor for me to make one of those moderately large ice mountains on the far corner of our driveway, that is, on the neighbor’s lawn.

Is this incredibly rude? The only real effect is that after a day or two of warmish weather, the green lawn is revealed except for a mound of dirty grey at the corner. I have one such mound, and my neighbors have two (the one I make and the one they make by their driveway, which is on the far side of their house). Then the whole thing gets covered in snow again.

Now, my current neighbors are cool and laid-back, and grew up without substantial snow themselves, and I’m not worried at the moment about offending them. We haven’t discussed the matter, but I’m pretty sure if they were upset, they wouldn’t have cleared the sidewalk in front of our house on New Year’s Day when we were away. Which was incredibly nice of them. I scraped the ice off their sidewalk this afternoon, since I was all pleased with myself about how well my tools were working, as opposed to last year when I broke a shovel during the ice storm, and hurt my back as well. But I’m curious about the snow shoveling etiquette as a general matter, and how people learn it. Or is it just in the northern blood?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It’s the New Year, Gentle Readers, and I’ve got a handful of notes I’m planning to write. One about the employee-employer agreement, one about the designated Cabinet of Our Elected President, and the Year in Books. I also have a Book Report to catch up on (only one so far), there’s another note to write about Bound, and I missed a week on the Pirke Avot and would like to catch up on that, possibly today. I’m hoping that today will be a good day for writing.

On the other hand, if I were to have a few hours on the computer without constant interruption, I should fiddle with the templates of this blog. It will take some concentration, as my instincts for this css/mt business do not appear to line up with how it actually works. Yesterday I attempted to have visited links appear in a different color than unvisited links, and it took away my serifs. For about an hour. Then they came back, wagging their…well, they are tails, aren’t they?

Anyway, the point of this note is just to give Gentle Readers a chance to tell YHB what might improve this Tohu Bohu in terms of the fiddly bits, rather than the writing. The Potential Notes are gone, for now; I don’t know if I’ll bother bringing them back, as I wasn’t doing anything with them. I could put the latest comment widget and the search box on the side of the individual entry page. Oh, and I’m probably getting rid of the pop-up comment screen, and making the comment link go to the comment section of the individual entry page. Is there anything else? Bigger type? Smaller? Less clutter? More clutter? Polls? Your wish is my, well, topic for consideration.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gentle Readers, forgive this blog its technical problems. My Gracious Host has updated the software, and we all know what that means. The midnight oil lasts for eight days, and at the end of it, I still gripe at him about the flaws of the software (about which he can do nothing, of course). I know the comment links aren’t working just yet, and commenting may be hinky too, for a while. Don’t worry, we’ll be back up and running in the New Year. It’s also possible that things will be Improved! from your end in some way that I’m rather vague about at present; I can already see that things will be Improved! from my end, and it will give you a warm glow just to know that, I’m sure.

In the meantime, please send copies of error messages to Vardibidian blah blah, you know the drill. And smoke ’em if you got em.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger is hoping to get a couple more Book Reports done, and we are within inches of having a full set of Cabinet Nominees for me to appreciate, but none of that is going to get a note written tonight. Sorry, Gents. This week’s notes were far too long, and now I can’t get back in the typing mood. Plus, there is much to do around here away from the keyboard. So.

So. I’ll just mention, that if anybody had told me, oh, eight years ago, that the fellow who was going to be Our Only President for the next two terms—two terms!—would be in a country we had invaded and occupied, and some crazed local journalist would fling his shoes at the President of the United States in anger and contempt, and that much of the world would (a) react with sympathy for the shoe-flinger, and (2) immediately believe the unconfirmed and biased report that the shoe-flinger had been severely beaten in prison after being dragged away, well… I didn’t like the guy, and I remember thinking that he would be a lousy President, but that it probably wouldn’t be all that bad, certainly not worse than Ronald Reagan.

And if you told me that not only would our standing around the world be so low, but that a good portion (possibly most) of the population of this country would react with sympathy and would believe that report… and that I would react that way as well…

Look, he’s the President of the United States, and as I’ve been saying, he’s the only one we’ve got (for a while yet, anyway). I should take the insult to the President at least somewhat as an insult to this nation (which it was), and should bridle at the idea that people should fling shoes at the President. And I do bridle at it. Don’t fling shoes at the President, people! Just don’t do it! No more!

Whew. I managed to work myself up to it. It wasn’t easy, though.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Your Humble Blogger is down to two wisdom teeth. The oral surgeon pointed out that the teeth don’t hold up to a cost-benefit analysis: you still have to brush them and floss them and maintain them, but they don’t really help you chew. This may be true, but the marginal cost of maintaining the teeth (assuming you are brushing the ones next to them anyway) seems pretty small, while the cost of removing them seems pretty big. Not just the monetary cost, which has got to be a big chunk of the premium money on top of a hefty co-payment, but the cost in time and agita. We needed a babysitter for the time I was in surgery, and then more babysitting for the rest of the day, since I was not really capable of looking after children, or other responsible tasks such as wiping drool off my chin. Still, thirty hours or so later, I’m back to what we laughingly refer to as normal, with the added excitement of trying to restrain myself from playing around with my tongue and the sutures.

It’s like that thing where you tie a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue. Only a lot less sexy.

Anyway, what with houseguests, Thanksgiving, and oral surgery, I’m afraid the blog has been on the back proverbial for a week or more. Which is probably fine; I wrote 41 entries in November and 41 in October, which I think is a two-month record. And both months topped a hundred comments, which makes YHB very happy, particularly after whinging so much about the summer.

As for December, well, I’m expecting to continue the Pirke Avot series, and there’s the imperative to catch up with Book Reports by New Year’s Eve, so that in January I can write my Year in Books. I’m not sure if I’ll continue my Music Mondays; I like the idea of them, even if the actual notes haven’t been up to that idea. And in January, I’m hoping for a few posts on a theatrical topic that I am not ready to start just yet. And I imagine things will come to me.

Still, if there is anything any Gentle Reader would like me to rant about or comment on, sock it to me.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Happy Thanksgiving, all you Gentle Readers in the You Ess of Eh! Your Humble Blogger had a very traditional Thanksgiving involving lots of Turkey, a stroll in the chilly late-Autumn air and a long afternoon nap. I did not watch or play football, which is just as well, really.

I know it’s been a quiet week here at the old Tohu Bohu. The thing about a library server going down is that it’s a lot of work when it goes down, but even more work when it comes back up. Combining that with some very lovely and welcome houseguests, a festive meal that requires the candying of yams, and a bad case of Blogger’s Back, and, well, it’s been a quiet week at the old Tohu Bohu.

One thing that’s become a Thanksgiving tradition is the list of Things for which one is Thankful For. I enjoy reading those sorts of lists—heck, that tradition itself is a fair thing for which to be thankful for—but I’m not going to indulge in one here. Much, much, much. Let it all go without saying.

I will either be back tomorrow with (most likely) a series of Book Reports (I am behind again) or I will back on Saturday with Pirke Avot. In the meantime, enjoy whatever Thanksgiving traditions you enjoy, or if you happen to be somewhere that celebrates its Thanksgiving in October or some other time of year, enjoy not doing whatever Thanksgiving traditions you dislike.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Youngest Member loves an ermine. It’s a stuffie toy, made by the Fuzzy Town people, white and cute with a little black tip to the tail. The tail is important. Well, ermine tails are important; it’s how you know they are ermines. This particular ermine tail is important because the Youngest Member cannot function as a toddler without frequently inserting the tip of the tail into his ear. Also, daily repetitions of an exercise involving holding the ermine tail between the big toe and the next toe and pulling with all one’s strength appears to be an important part of his regimen. In all, a tail of no mean value.

The tail has been surgically re-attached twice.

So far.

The cloth is fraying. The next time the tail goes, it will take inventive and creative measures, and frankly, there are limits.

Your Humble Blogger being, as parents of toddlers tend to be, not overscrupulous in matters of deception and dishonesty, I had developed a Plan to purchase a second ermine, identical to the first in every respect, except that instead of containing the diamonds being old, filthy, ragged and worn-out, it would be clean and new. Briefly.

OK, we were willing to buy two new ones.

Only they don’t make ’em like that any more.

As a result, the Youngest Member will learn at a tender age that material objects are all ephemera. Look on my plush toys, ye mighty, and despair! I am sure that he will learn to love his inevitably tailless ermine, just as many of us loved our stuffies to bits when we were children, and then they acquired the power of nostalgia to take the place of their missing tails, eyes or fuzz.

A few weeks back, Abi Sutherland over at Making Light wrote about a few of my favorite things, starting a thread of people talking about those things that are “most precious to you”. The thread is interesting in a variety of ways (as many at that location are), and I thought to myself at the time I wonder what objects in my life are precious to me. Perhaps I would write a blog entry about it, someday. I made a note. I thought about it.

I had a lot of difficulty coming up with, say, a Top Five. Part of that is that I can’t decide on the criteria. Are they the things I would save in a fire? The things I get the most joy out of? The things that I have invested the most sentiment in? The irreplaceable things? One of my most precious possessions is a coffee mug that actually is a replacement for the one that broke. Since the preciousness (OK, in two senses) is connected to the story behind the mug, and the story behind the replacement of the mug is also a good and precious story, it’s possible that the replacement mug is actually more precious to me than the matching original.

Another possible answer is a sweater my mother knitted for me to my design. I wear it every three or four days all through the winter. It’s gray with a dark blue honeycomb pattern across the torso. It’s a nice sweater, and my mother made it for me, and I will be sad when it develops a hole that I can’t fix. But most of the time, when I wear it, it’s just a nice gray sweater; I don’t derive more joy out of it than the really comfy storebought one that is my other gray favorite.

I have a lot of books, including a few first editions and a few signed by the authors. I value them, I like having them, I take a sort of pride in them, but if somehow the idea of them being destroyed or lost is one I can face with equanimity. If I lost both our copies of Leave it to Psmith (mine and my Best Reader’s), I would go out and buy another. My mother’s old aleph-bet? The dictionary my mother gave me when I went to college because I was not eligible to get the dictionary given by the local chapter of the Seven Sisters Alumnae to those attending their almae materae? I like having them, but I wouldn’t put them on that list.

What about my tools, things that I use all the time? My laptop computer is swell, but it’s also running Windows Vista, so I would have to admit that I curse it far more than I praise it. And frankly, it’s not all that shiny. I have an mp3 player that, you know, plays mp3s, and I like that it does that, but I would happily trade it in for a better one. My Best Reader has an iPod, which is shiny and kinda cool, but I would happily trade that in for a better one. I like our Prius, but again, I would happily trade it in for a newer one. We have a few Good Knives, which I am glad of when I want to cut things, but if we didn’t have Good Knives, I would cut things with Crappy Knives and grunt and move on.

OK, my pens. For now, I am using three pens, mostly: my grandfather’s Pelikan, which is marvelously easy to fill but has a teeny tiny nib that I don’t much like; my trusty but cheap Osmiroid, for which I cannot find a cartridge converter that I like, since I dropped the last one down the drain whilst attempting to clean it; and a speedball nib (C-4) in a Koh-I-Noor holder for dipping. Each of these has annoying aspects, although I do enjoy using each of them. I would probably miss any of them, were I to (f’r’ex) drop them down the drain whilst attempting to clean them.

Last category that comes to mind is momentos. Snapshots of me in various plays. Awards that I won for doing various things at various times. Correspondence—there we are getting close. I have several boxes of letters and postcards, and the contents of those boxes would grieve me greatly to miss. They are almost certainly my most precious possessions. On the other hand, I keep them in those boxes, rarely take them out and look at them, and other than vaguely wanting to keep them intact, I have little use for them, either practical or spiritual. I get little joy from them, on a day-to-day basis.

In fact, there isn’t anything I get joy from near as much as the Youngest Member gets from that beat-up crusty ermine. Sometimes, after he has had one of his screaming fits, we present him with the ermine, and the screaming stops, the tip of the tail goes into his ear, and the anger almost visibly eases from him. At night, he may be resistant to the whole idea of going to bed, but once we pick him up and start singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and put the ermine in his arms, he is reconciled and snuggles in.

I have no object I love like that. I couldn’t love an object like that. It’s a toddler thing. And I suspect that’s why I can’t make my list of five precious possessions. If I didn’t have the Youngest Member and his example of what love for an inanimate object really looks like, I would probably just list off five things—the mug, the box of correspondence, my grandfather’s pen, my mother-of-pearl cufflinks, and the little fortune-cookie slip that reads give a kiss to the person sitting next to you that I keep meaning to slight-of-hand in at a Chinese restaurant—and not worry much about the criteria or the implications. As it is, though, I can’t do that.

And maybe, the right answer is that my most precious possession are those two new clean ermines with strong stitching on their tails. The one’s we can’t buy, because they stopped making them.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A question occurs to me today on which I would like to survey my Gentle Readers (and their friends and associates and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts). On a day when you feel lousy, but have to go to work anyway—let me clarify and stipulate a bit here. By work, I’m essentially thinking about a day in public that you can’t easily get out of, whether it is paid work or attending classes or the church rummage sale that you volunteered for or whatever. And by lousy, let’s say something like the migraine, or a toothache, or I suppose menstrual cramps. Let’s take contagion out of it, because this isn’t about when to call in sick and go back to bed, but the kind of thing that you know is going to make you miserable all the day long, without preventing you from actually fulfilling your responsibility.

So. On a day like that, do you (1) crawl into whatever clothes are near the bed and comfortable and meet minimum requirements, putting as little of your miniscule supply of energy into the process as you can get away with, or (B) put on that special shirt (or dress or whatever) and put extra effort into your morning grooming, figuring that you need the extra energy over the day that you will get from knowing you look bitchen?

I’m wondering if this is a highly gendered thing, statistically, what with women growing up with more faith in the power of clothing, or whether it isn’t, because it has more to do with optimism and pessimism and so on. Or whether women are more likely to conserve energy, as on the whole they must have far more days like this than men do.

Your Humble Blogger is of the second set, the ones who dress up to ease the pain. But then, that doesn’t stop it from being highly gendered the other way, as I could just be an outlier (this charge of effeminacy is new to me, he said, arching his eyebrow). What’s your strategy?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So. I happened to pick up this interminable list of food questions from fauxklore’s lj, and I wound up answering all of them. The thing is, I am not in any way a foodie. I suspect that the list of questions is more interesting for somebody who thinks about food more often (and more variously); to the extent that mine is interesting at all, it is interesting because my answers are so boring. If you know what I mean. Because I don’t cook very often, or very well, or eat at a variety of restaurants, my answers to these questions highlight the paucity of my gustatory imagination. Which, I hope, makes them worth reading.

1. What’s the last thing you ate? A brownie. One of my co-workers brought in brownies and I had to be polite, didn’t I?
2. What’s your favorite cheese? Gouda. It’s gouda and it’s gouda for you!
3. What’s your favorite fish? I like salmon a lot. I’ve had wonderful swordfish, and that was probably the best fish dish I’ve had, but salmon is very likely to be tasty.
4. What’s your favorite fruit? Apple.
5. When, if ever, did you start liking olives? If I remember correctly, it was just about the time that hell froze over.
6. When, if ever, did you start liking beer? I don’t like beer. I did start drinking cider when I was in England and looking for something to drink in a pub, and I discovered that I really like cider, so I drink a lot of that. This summer, late in the summer, I drank a lot of that lemonade-flavored beer as well.
7. When, if ever, did you start liking shellfish? I don’t remember not liking shrimp, but I ate it only very rarely growing up. I discovered that I like scallops around, oh, 1994 or 1995 or so? I had lobster for the first time around then as well, and discovered that I liked it OK, although it wasn’t worth the effort.
8. What was the best thing your parent/s used to make? My mother’s famous candied yams. I have the recipe (not really a recipe, more of an instruction manual) and it’s my bring-along dish for festive occasions.
9. What’s the native specialty of your home town? Phoenix, Arizona? Specialty dish? Er, um. I know! Cactus jelly!
10. What’s your comfort food? Potato chips. Although it is probably worth mentioning that the absence of tea means the absence of comfort, so to that extent, the answer is tea.
11. What’s your favorite type of chocolate? Probably good hot chocolate, very rich.
12. How do you like your steak? Cut from a lamb or a pig.
13. How do you like your burger? My Best Reader combines ground meats, including lamb and turkey and pork, in some mystic combination, with breadcrumbs and spices and egg and whatnot. So good. But of course they need to be well-cooked.
14. How do you like your eggs? In a sandwich: English muffin, egg and sausage. Or swimming-pool eggs, where you fry the egg in the hole in a slice of bread. Either way, they have to be over hard (or at least fairly hard) or it doesn’t work.
15. How do you like your potatoes? Sliced very thin and fried crispy. Or mushed into a slurry with salt and whatever the hell else is in a Pringle and molded into that Pringle shape.
16. How do you take your coffee? Right over to my Best Reader.
17. How do you take your tea? Often.
18. What’s your favorite mug? The mug I drink from the most often is a lightweight grey travel mug. It used to have a logo on it from an educational institution that employed me, but the shield has worn off and the lettering has nearly worn off. It now says EDY RNM. I also have two mugs that I drink from at home (alternately, not simultaneously) that were a gift from my father-in-law from Las Vegas New York. But my favorite mug is the mug I got from the Alumni Office of my alma mater that has the school logo and the words ‘I was mugged by the Alumni Office’. But there’s a story there.
19. What’s your cookie of choice? Chocolate chip. Medium size, medium soft. No nuts. Second choice would be a really chewy molasses cookie.
20. What’s your ideal breakfast? A great big cup of really good hot tea. An excellent newspaper. My Best Reader (not to eat, to converse with). Probably an egg sandwich, with sausage or bacon.
21. What’s your ideal sandwich? Now I’m thinking about an egg sandwich, and it sounds pretty darn good to me. With really crisp bacon? Mmm. Other than that, good maple ham and provolone and brown mustard on ciabatta, pressed hot.
22. What’s your ideal pizza (topping and base)? Thick crust (Sicilian), sweet garlicky sauce, lots of cheese, pepperoni. But I’m happy with a plain cheese pizza.
23. What’s your ideal pie (sweet or savory)? Apple. Just out of curiosity, would Boston Cream Pie count in this category, or is it a cake?
24. What’s your ideal salad? Chicken Caesar, with lots of parmesan shavings and small crunchy croutons.
25. What food do you always like to have in the fridge? Cold cuts and baby carrots. Also, I keep water chilled in the fridge.
26. What food do you always like to have in the freezer? Ice cream, frozen veggies, sausage of some kind (hot dog, kielbasa, breakfast sausage, chicken-apple), bad frozen pizza.
27. What food do you always like to have in the cupboard? Noodles, tomato sauce, potato chips. Also wine, but that’s a different cupboard.
28. What spices can you not live without? I could probably live without the whole rack, if I had to. But if I don’t have oregano, pepper and garlic, it’s hard for me to cook with the rest of the rack.
29. What sauces can you not live without? Is mustard a sauce? What about honey? Otherwise, if there were no barbecue sauce in the world, I would be all sad and stuff.
30. Where do you buy most of your food? Well, my Best Reader buys most of our food, mostly at the nearest supermarket, a Shaw’s. That’s probably where I buy more food than anywhere else, although I also shop at the corner market (called Hall’s Market), the A&P, a kosher market and the CostCo.
31. How often do you go food shopping? Probably between us we make a stop three times a week. Maybe more.
32. What’s the most you’ve spent on a single food item? I have no idea. We did buy one of those Box O’Meat deals this summer, but that’s not a single food item. A leg of lamb?
33. What’s the most expensive piece of kitchen equipment you own? Not counting the range and the fridge? We have one of those sandwich presses; that’s probably the most expensive. We have some lovely knives that would probably be expensive, but we didn’t pay for them.
34. What’s the last piece of equipment you bought for your kitchen? A fine mesh strainer. And there’s a story there, too.
35. What piece of kitchen equipment could you not live without? Well, if I didn’t have a refrigerator, it would be pretty tough. Other than that, there’s no single thing that I can think of in the absence of which I couldn’t make do with something else. Even a teapot.
36. How many times a week/month do you cook from raw ingredients? It depends on what is meant, here, but I’m going to say three times a week. I’m counting lunches and breakfasts and I’m counting some things as cooking from raw ingredients that probably shouldn’t count. My Best Reader, on the other hand, cooks from raw ingredients at least half-a-dozen times a week by any definition, and probably a dozen by mine. Not counting baking.
37. What’s the last thing you cooked from raw ingredients? This is a good example of what I was talking about. I made tortilla pizza with store-bought tortillas and a tomato sauce my Best Reader made with store-bought sausage and a can of tomato sauce and a jar of pre-minced garlic and some other stuff. Is that cooking from raw ingredients? Probably not. If you don’t count that, I made a fry-up recently with potato, egg, cheese and ham. You don’t count that, either? Man, you are tough.
38. What’s your favorite thing to make for yourself? You know that fry-up thing? That’s probably it. In terms of enjoying the making part.
39. What meats have you eaten besides cow, pig, chicken and turkey?
Lamb, venison, goat, alligator, buffalo, rattlesnake. Fowls: definitely duck and goose, and ostrich and I’m pretty sure I’ve had game bird, although I can’t remember what: quail or squab or something.
40. What’s the last time you ate something that had fallen on the floor? 11:40 am.
41. What’s the last time you ate something you’d picked in the wild? Does a commercial apple orchard count as the wild? If not, I may never have eaten anything picked in the wild. I don’t particularly like berries, which are the only things I remember being with people picking wild and eating. I have sipped honeysuckle from the vine, though.
42. Place the following cuisines in order of preference (greatest to least): Indian, Chinese, Italian, Thai, French, sushi. Although I get a yen for Chinese the most often of those, but I like Indian more when I do eat it.
43. Place the following boozes in order of preference (greatest to least): Vodka, rum, brandy, whiskey, gin, tequila. This is mostly based on one or two tastes. I don’t drink strong liquor straight, and I don’t drink mixed drinks very often, either. I may not have had any of those boozes (not counting things cooked with them) in a year or more.
44. Place the following flavors in order of preference (greatest to least): Garlic, lime, ginger, basil, aniseed. The middle three are close enough together that I could put them in any order.
45. Place the following fruits in order of preference (greatest to least): Apple, orange, banana, pineapple, watermelon, cherry. A big drop-off after pineapple.
46. Bread and spread: Just bread and spread? Hm. Crusty Italian and butter. Although a baguette and gouda would be better, if you are big-category in spreads.
47. What’s your fast food restaurant of choice, and what do you usually order? First would be a local pizza joint, two slices of pepperoni. If I can’t locate one, or the local pizza is inedible, a Quizno’s chicken sandwich.
48. What are three of the best dining-out experiences you’ve had?OK, here is the difference between me and a foodie. My best dining-out experiences have been about the conversation and the company, not the food. I’ve eaten good food, I’ve eaten things that made me say wow this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten, but I don’t have any memory of it after a few months. So. Three great dining-out experiences. A few years ago, on (or nearly on) my Best Reader’s birthday, we ate in a little restaurant in Boston’s North End called l’Osteria. There was soup with tortellini, and I believe I had a citrusy chicken dish of some kind, and we chatted and had a lovely time, and then went to the New Garden to watch the Beanpot finals. That’s one. Another could be eating at Goat Hill Pizza with my Best Reader and two other Gentle Readers (long before there was a Tohu Bohu) at a sort of all-you-can-eat night where it was a sort of pizza dim sum experience, and we ate so much we staggered back to the bus to ride home in replete silence. Although generally I think a great dining-out experience shouldn’t involve so much regret afterward. And a third one could be—can I count the time we bought an éclair the size of my fucking head from a cart in Camden Town? Or how’s this for what YHB is really like: one of my best dining-out experiences was the first time that the guys at Pinocchio’s saw me come in the door on a busy day, I held up two fingers, and when I got to the front of the line two slices of pepperoni were on the counter waiting.
49. What’s your choice of tipple at the end of a long day? Port wine.
50. Favorite cookbook/s? I don’t have one. I’m very fond of the stuff my Best Reader makes out of the Wooden Spoon Bread Book, though.
51. Got any favorite food blogs? No. I did read Sarahparah’s Cook and Nifty Wench blog for a while, but I guess it’s defunct, now.
52. What’s the next thing you’ll eat? Does tea count? No? Then I don’t know. I mean, I could make it easy by declaring that I will eat a piece of chocolate, and then doing it, but that doesn’t seem right. No, my Best Reader is preparing some sort of dinner, thank goodness, and I have no idea whatsoever what it might be. If I had to guess… fish?

I wrote most of this yesterday afternoon; the next thing I ate turned out to be the aforementioned lamburgers, some very grainy whole grain grain grain bread (which was technically the first thing I ate, as I had a bite after the blessing), some squash and a very tasty carrot dish with butter, brown sugar and ginger. And a glass of wine. So I should append to this note about me not being a foodie that I eat very well indeed, actually.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a few hours now, it’ll be Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year. May you all be inscribed in the Book of Life, Gentle Readers, for a good year, and a healthy year, and a sweet year. We could use one, couldn’t we?

It’s just beginning to be autumn here in central Connecticut. The trees are mostly green in my leafy town, so the dozen or so that have begun to show fall colors stand out. One on Prospect with a lot of red, one on Arnoldale all orange, and the ones over by the athletic center are all yellow. Mostly, though, it’s green, green, green—but not for long.

The days are getting shorter, too. We’ve passed the equinox; we passed below twelve hours of daylight last week. By Hallowe’en it’ll be down to ten and a half hours or so, and then we’ll be back on standard time and the sun will be down at quarter to five. The workday is still ending in daylight, but not for long.

Perhaps that’s why this Rosh Hashanah feels to YHB more like the winding up of the old year than the opening of the new one. The image that we play with for this holiday of the Book of Life (on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed) doesn’t usually deal with last year’s volume. We’re getting to the last few words, I imagine, of whatever was written for us this last year. Was it a sweet year? A healthy year?

We do, traditionally, look back on the year, for the purpose of arguing our case before the Heavenly Judge, and we run around apologizing to everybody for whatever harms we may have occasioned, for our sins to each other of omission and commission. We forgive each other, more or less sincerely, hoping to be forgiven ourselves, more or less sincerely. That whole human forgiveness thing has to come first, before Divine forgiveness, both in traditional rabbinic teaching and modern psychological understanding. But that backwards look is largely unconnected to the Book. We don’t submit a subpoena to have the Book admitted in evidence. Perhaps because we feel it wouldn’t on the whole do our cause much good.

Anyway.

Gentle Readers, I do hope you forgive me for my various failings, both as Vardibidian and (as many of you know me) in the Real World.

I suppose this would be a good holiday season to talk about the traditional Mishnaic financial structure, under which it is absolutely forbidden to charge interest on loans, and similarly forbidden to lend money (or lease real property) for longer than seven years. Such rules, even if routinely broken as we can assume them to be, would clearly have prevented the modern world entirely, not just its sudden dissolution this month.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

According to Presidential Proclamation and in accordance with the law, today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day and the start of Constitution Week, the one week out of fifty-two where our government abides by the restrictions of the Constitution.

No, that’s not right.

What should YHB and y’all do to celebrate the Constitution today? This Tohu Bohu is not legally obligated to hold an educational program, since we aren’t currently receiving federal funds. And once again, Sen. Byrd, making Constitution Day mandatory is missing the point badly, badly.

We could sing the Preamble. That’s always nice. I did my Top Five provisions a few years ago, and I don’t know that they’ve changed in the interim. Gentle Readers in the Bay State can enjoy the results of yesterday’s primary elections; there was a lovely sticker-shock victory for Carl Sciortino and Dianne Wilkerson appears to have lost her primary, which I find shocking. Elections have consequences, which is good to keep in mind, right?

Or we could promote the general welfare. The thing is, without a formal declaration of war, there’s no rank higher than general available, and even in wartime, a general can only be promoted to a different kind of general.

Maybe I’ll just go find a busker and give him my James Madison dollar.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and August was a lousy month for this Tohu Bohu, wasn’t it? I wrote 34 entries, if I counted correctly, and y’all contributed only 26 comments (plus nine of YHB’s comments in response). That’s a low for comments, at least for the last couple of years. I blame myself. And Matt Hulan.

Anyway, my show now being over (I will have at least one more post about the show, probably today or tomorrow), and the year having started (the academic year, that is, the one that dominates my life and I’m guessing the lives of several of y’all), and the campaign having at last begun for realsies (huzzah), I am hoping for more active conversation here.

Although I’m low on inspiration. So. I’m opening up this Tohu Bohu for y’all to give me ideas on what to write about, that y’all will converse about. The election? Presidential and Legislative? More about music? More about the library? Hungarian jokes? Rants about items in the daily news?

OK, to get y’all used to commenting again, here’s a direct question for you: Do you read lefty blogs? Specifically, do you read (a) Eschaton, (2) Talking Point Memo (looking at the front/headlines), (iii) TAPped? I have been assuming that any of y’all who have any interest in politics read those blogs, and so not commenting on things that are covered there, unless I strongly disagree with what appears to be the agreed take by those commenters. Should that be my continuing policy? Or should I pass along observations I agree with, to expose y’all to the highlights of Left Blogovia?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

So. This past weekend, Your Humble Blogger completed the run of Pygmalion and had a birthday. Closing night was the eve of what I’ve come to think of as my first thirty-ninth birthday. This confluence (and, um, some alcoholic intake) led me to brood over endings and passings. I’m not going to be doing another show with that gang, and I’m not going to be in my mid-thirties anymore, either.

The gang are pretty terrific. This is my third show with the same director and stage manager, and four castmates have joined me in all three of them, another one in two of the three. All good people. And the actors who I met for this show were good people, too; they were the sort of people I would want to be in three shows with. And it’s possible, if unlikely, that I will be in a show with one of them again someday, or even two. But not more than that. I am not driving sixty miles to rehearsals again; that was crazy.

Before doing those three shows, I had stopped doing theater for about ten years. I left college with the idea of becoming a professional actor; I soon discovered that I didn’t actually want to be a professional actor. I still enjoyed theater, though, and for a few years, I did shows at the community theater level. I found that level frustrating. Many people who do community theater are more interested in socializing with their friends in the group than in working on a show, which infuriated YHB, who still attempted to maintain a professional attitude (vaddevah I thought dat meant). The production values were often terrible, not only because of a shoestring budget but because nobody cared about the lights, or the sound, or the stage management. I didn’t have a whole lot of fun.

When I walked in to auditions for The Man Who Came to Dinner, I had determined that I wouldn’t make myself angry about professionalism. If I had a good time, and we put on a decent show, that would be fine. In fact, we put on a terrific show, and although the cast wasn’t in the least professional, we had a good time and worked hard. So I did another show, with most of the same people, and it was great. Since I was a lead this time, it was more work for me, but enjoyable work, and we had a terrific time and put on a good show in the end. Then I moved from Western Connecticut to Greater Hartford, and welcomed the Youngest Member, and took another couple of years off theater. And then our director told me she was doing Pygmalion, and my Best Reader said that technically, it wasn’t actually impossible. And once again, I worked hard and had a good time, and the show was good. But I also spent three hours a day in the car, and I missed dinner with my family four days a week for two months, not to mention the kids’ bedtime, and my Best Reader lost two months of work on her book because she was single-parenting while I was driving. So that won’t happen again.

I keep coming back to the definition of middle-age that I came across recently: it’s the time of life when people stop thinking about the future in terms of what they will be able to do, and start thinking about the future in terms of what they won’t be able to do. There’s youth, of course, when every year or two there’s some new thing you are admitted to: middle-school, movies on your own, driving, dating, voting, draft age, credit cards, car rental, drinking, sex, a real job, your own apartment, marriage, home ownership, promotion, parenthood. At thirty-five, you are qualified to be President of the United States, and that’s the last one until you start getting discounts. Your Humble Blogger is thirty-nine at last; there's the house, the children, a job, my Best Reader’s career. I’ve got a wonderful life; I am clam-happy. And middle-aged.

Do I want to go and visit family across the country? I can do that, thank the Divine, as long as I budget for it, and arrange it so that the Perfect Non-Reader doesn’t miss too much school. And of course I can’t just crash on somebody’s sofa anymore, because of my back (and my knee), so I need to either stay with somebody who has a guest room or take a hotel room, and there has to be enough room for the Perfect Non-Reader, and somewhere for the Youngest Member, too, and if we all share a room, nobody’s going to get much sleep, and you know? The hell with it.

That’s what I mean by middle-aged. It’s not chronological, it’s a combination of life’s circumstances and frame of mind. And I’m in it.

The important thing is to remember that I am in the middle-aged frame of mind because I've got so many wonderful things. I don’t want to be eighteen anymore, or twenty-three or even thirty. I want to have what I’ve got: a family, a home town, a settled life, immovables, habits, comforts. That’s not a bad thing.

And while the knee hurts a lot, and the back is always vulnerable, and the extra forehead limits my choice of hairstyle, the stamina is just about where it should be at this point, I’m still at the point where the physical plant problems are an inconvenience, rather than a barrier or a burden, something to keep in mind rather than something that can’t be ignored. So that’s all right, d’y’see?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

OK, here’s an odd question: Joshua Keating over at FP Passport notes that “this election now features both a Hawaiian and an Alaskan”. I know it’s considered a good thing for a Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate to have two or even three home states, but is it a good thing for us regular joes?

I have voted as a resident of five states. Sequentially, yes. I grew up in Arizona, and voted absentee as an Arizona resident during my college years in Pennsylvania. After college, I lived for three years in California, then for ten in Massachusetts, then a year and a half in Virginia, and now I’ve been in Connecticut for three years. Is that right? Three years? Well, anyway. I still think of myself as an Arizonan, and I think of myself as a Nutmegger now as well, but although I do still feel a connection to Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts and Virginia, I certainly don’t think of them as home states.

Do any of you think of yourselves as having two home states? Or three?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Your Humble Blogger watched almost all of last cycle’s Democratic Convention, and blogged a lot of it, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I particularly enjoyed blogging the not-ready-for-prime-time stuff. And I would enjoy watching and blogging again this year: this evening will be a dozen or so Representatives with whom I am mostly unfamiliar, the Attorney General of Illinois, Sen. Klobuchar, some union folk, eventually Sens. Harkin and McCaskill, and of course Michelle Obama. And I will watch some of it, I hope. But not much.

Part of that is simply the time zone thing. Today’s action starts at three in the afternoon, Mountain Time, which is five in Connecticut, not a good hour for focusing on the live stream . The two or three hours that follow are also bad; I could have the stream on, but I will be eating dinner with my family (a very important thing, which I have missed far too often this summer), and then playing with my children and getting them to bed. I can’t say I know for sure when Ms. Obama will speak, but the schedule calls for her to be the last speech, likely at around ten o’clock our time. I may watch, or I may turn in early; I am still catching up on lost sleep from being in a show.

Anyway, I will probably make the odd comment or two, but I’m afraid that for full convention blogging you will have to look elsewhere. Or do it yourself! I’ll open this Tohu Bohu to guest posts on the convention, or you can comment on these posts. Help a brother out, Gentle Readers.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at the OUP blog, which is a strange thing, they feature some advice for insomniacs from Overcoming Insomnia, by Jack D. Edinger and Colleen E. Carney. Now, YHB is an insomniac, and some of the advice seems like it might be worth trying, but I had to point out this bit.

While in bed, you should avoid doing things that you do when you are awake. Do not read, watch TV, eat, study, use the phone, or do other things that require you to be awake while you are in bed. …Sexual activity is the only exception to this rule.

Hunh? I mean, yes, I get the concept that if you comfortably read in bed (or watch TV, or write in your journal) then it is harder to tell your body that you’re in bed damn it, and that it is time to sleep. I understand that, and even if I’m a bit skeptical, I see why it makes sense as advice. But if you are training your insomnia that BED=SLEEP, then why make the exception for sex? I mean, surely if you, for instance, said that the only two things you do in bed are read and sleep, then, well, the light’s off, and your body is largely shutting down and relaxing, and even if your mind is in the mood to read, well, as I say, I understand the advice, but hell! If the only two things you do in the bed are sleep and WHOOOOOHOOO, then isn’t your body going to get a bit confused? I mean, I would be. Frankly, if you are going to make an exception for sex, then you may as well order pizza and put on tap shoes, because BED doesn’t equal SLEEP anymore.

In fact, reading the advice, I would be inclined to think that for an insomniac (and it should be clear that this advice is for insomniacs only) the advice to keep a bed that is only for sleeping, and to take your sexual activity to another bed (or wherever) would be more persuasive. Yes, yes, sexual activity can make a fellow sleepy, but I’m guessing most insomniacs will try that method long before they start buying clinical workbooks. When you get to the book-buying stage, you are willing to try keeping another bed for screwing. Winston Churchill (it is said) would change beds when he couldn’t sleep, and in the morning he was sober and she was still ugly. Or something.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Your Humble Blogger spent the weekend at a wedding and the surrounding events. The people getting married are Gentle Readers (and occasional commenters) at this Tohu Bohu; one overlapped with me at college and is therefore an Old College Buddy within the meaning of the act, while the other is a year younger and does not so qualify, although she and I (and my Best Reader) have several subjects of interest in common, things like, oh, Scripture, heresies and how to beat college students without leaving external marks. I am fond of these two, and it’s always nice for me when people of whom I am fond marry each other, making for happiness that increases by squares. Well, some people would call us all squares, but that’s neither here nor there.

Much of the weekend was spent with Old College Buddies and their spouses, some of whom are also Old College Buddies. There was also a large contingent of what one might call Younger College Buddies, that is, persons who went to college with people who went to college with people who went to college with YHB. Our social set has (or at least has had) some mechanisms for strengthening such links; there were people there from the class of seventy-cough and from the class of ought-sneeze. Well, and the early one is an outlier, but there were multiple representatives from the class of eighty-wheeze. And, not coincidentally, I suspect that at one point the majority of Gentle Readers here were in one room.

While YHB spent much of the weekend enjoying thinking about the Wedding (which was lovely and moving) and much of the weekend chasing after the Youngest Member (who was lovely and moving rather quickly), much of the weekend was also spent thinking about an Old High School Buddy who died earlier this week. This is a woman with whom I spent many happy hours in the High School theater world, and those of you who have done that know how pleasant such friendships can be. I have not seen her in twenty years and more, and will not now see her until the endtime, if ever. There is no longer a chance to catch up. This week I found out that she has three children and a loving husband; she won’t know how my life turned out, where I find my happiness.

It was a deliberate choice I made, after high school, cutting myself off from the friends I had made. I left town to go to college elsewhere, and felt that I would be happier, perhaps that I would be more free, severing those ties. And, frankly, keeping them was hard work, and to me hard work is something I prefer to leave to other people, who are so much better at it. So my Old High School buddies—the ones I ate lunch with five times a week, the ones I played cards with in Physics class, the ones I led at speech tournaments, the ones I rehearsed with and played with, the ones I bullshitted with and the ones I sang tipsy songs with, the one I went to Prom with and the one I asked to marry me, the one whose car had no air conditioning and the one who drove like a maniac, the one who was terrific with a pool cue and the one who could tap dance, the one I carried over my shoulder and the one I fell over on—were part of my past and not my present, and I have no idea what happened to any of them, except one that was particularly dogged about staying in touch.

Well, and another, who happens to have a blog, but we went to different high schools, so we are not technically Old High School Buddies. From good old Washington High School, home of the Rams, it’s just one fellow, and we average one telephone call a year.

Which is all fine. I have regrets about the decision, but I don’t know that it was the wrong one at the time, nor do I fool myself that the other decision, the one to keep in touch with some or most of the old gang, would have been without emotional cost. If I did try to fool myself that way, I would be reminded by events like this past weekend, where I am thrown back in to contact with people I know, or used to know, in social situations much like those we used to enjoy. And I like these people—let me be clear about this, I do like these people, without exception, my Old College Buddies, this is not a case where we are socializing now because of that connection but didn’t like each other at college or anything like that—and enjoy their company, and yet it is very difficult. It takes me a long time, some hours at least, before I can ease back into the old rhythms of conversation, and it takes me even longer to ease into new rhythms of new conversations.

Those are the ones that I really fully enjoyed. People talking about their current lives, their current thoughts and concerns and pleasures, the universes they perceive and how all of those universes match and how they don’t. Much of that was “talking shop”, the various academics talking about their departments and their students, because many of us who were impressionable at the same time were impressed in the same way, so many of us went down that long and winding road. And then, those of us with children (not as many as one might imagine) spent time talking about the universe those of us with children inhabit, with its dangers and frustrations and delights. But as I come home to central Connecticut, what seems to be sticking with me is not the facts or views of those people but just the sudden, almost revealed knowledge that I like these people, that they are not just of my past but of my present, and that they can be part of my future as well, not as I say without the cost of a good bit of awkwardness, even of hard work (dare I say it), but to the advantage of a stronger and deeper sense of myself.

And, eventually, when one of us is again struck down, suddenly or slowly, perhaps with a sense of grief unencumbered (or less encumbered) by that alienation from my own past.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger, as there is no particular reason for Gentle Readers to know, is a man with a moustache.

—Darling, there’s a man at the door with a moustache.
—Tell him I’ve already got one.
Boom Boom

I started growing a moustache as soon as I could, or in truth a few months sooner. I never looked forward to shaving; I looked forward to not shaving. Sadly, the beard thing never happened. In addition to coming in patchy, a moustache suits my face, a beard does not. I did grow a goatee—an echt goatee, not one of those imperials that are called goatees these days (although as a descriptivist, I am obliged to concede that since nobody other than YHB has worn what I would call a goatee in decades, and since the word is actually used by actual English speakers to refer to any beard (with or without a moustache) that doesn’t connect to the sidewhiskers, communication requires that the things called goatees are goatees, curse them all)—where was I? Oh, yes, I grew a goatee for a few months, for comic effect, but as it neither looked particularly good nor improved my morning ablutions, I gave up and shaved it off. My beard comes in dark and impressive down my throat, which is exactly where it should not be.

But the purpose of this note is not to gripe about my facial-hair situation, except to the extent that its purpose is to gripe about my facial-hair situation, as will be seen. You see, I am a man with a moustache. I like having a moustache, I think of myself as having a moustache, and for twenty years or so, the only times I have shaved my upper lip have been for the stage. As I shaved my upper lip on Friday morning.

The first set of publicity photos are set for Wednesday, so there was a terminus for the moustache, and my experience is that it is wise to give the raw skin a few days sunlight and air before starting with the greasepaint. Well, pancake. Nobody actually uses greasepaint anymore. And spirit gum; my mad Hrungarian has whiskers, as Shaw requires. Not the fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers I think would be perfect for him, but I really don’t have time to deal with fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers as I make the eight-minute change to Rich Alfie. Particularly as our Dear Director is trying to pick up the pace everywhere, so I may have only a seven-minute change…

It’s Whiskers that’s the problem. Alfie could have a moustache, but Whiskers must have a moustache, and therefore Alfie must not have a moustache, for the purposes of differentiating the two. And as it’s difficult for an actor with a moustache to play a character without a moustache (at least on stage), YHB must shave the lip for six weeks or so. Which is all right. Of all the inconveniences I have inflicted on myself to be in this show, the shaving ranks very low. Even counting washing out the washbasin.

However, it has been dispiriting how few people have noticed the change. My Best Reader noticed, of course, as did (eventually) a G.R. who was houseguest at the time. My Perfect Non-Reader when prodded, felt sure that I had shaved it off the previous day or even earlier. Co-workers failed to notice, or at least to comment, although many of my co-workers won’t see me until Monday. I had lengthy conversations with four of my Perfect Non-Reader’s friends’ parents, and short ones with two more, and none of them seemed to notice. Of the couple next door, the fellow gave me the business about it but his wife did not (although that doesn’t mean he noticed first). It seems in the mirror to be a radical change in appearance. If it isn’t, if it’s not something that people notice is missing, then maybe YHB is not, after all, a man with a moustache, just a man who happens to have a moustache?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I should presumably be writing a nice Fourth-of-July note to put into the hopper for tomorrow, but I don’t have any ideas at the moment. If some idea strikes me, I may be able to post, but it will be a bit of a hassle, and it will be easy to post on Saturday (Chukat, Judges 11:1−33), so I probably will wait, and that whatever the idea is, it will have fled.

I could also write up a State of the Blog post, such as I used to do, month to month, but my notes are in a little thumb drive which I think is in the pocket of the waistcoat I was wearing yesterday. I hope that’s where it is. I could go through the trouble again of finding out that I had thirty-odd posts in June and ninety-odd comments, which is up five from May but down from thirty-glob posts in June of 2007. Or something. Frankly, that would be a hassle, too.

Is this a theme of hassle-avoidance? Perhaps it is. I have plenty of hassle in my life at present. Good hassle, but then this Tohu Bohu is good hassle, and it’s still hassle. At least I’m not behind on my Book Reports anymore, until I finish the one I’m nearly done with now.

Well, anyway. Have a happy Fourth of July. I hope you all, Gentle Readers, have just the right amount of hassle—not so little that you are absent from your family, friends and hobbies, but not so much that you are with them only to gripe and grouse. Enjoy the Independence of America.

Oh, and I’ll pass along an observation from a citizen of South Africa, resident in this country the last few years, who adores the Fourth of July. She points out that South Africa does not have any great national celebration day, splitting its national holidays between Reconciliation Day, Human Rights Day, Freedom Day and other such stupid (to use her word) holidays, most of which aren’t really celebrated by all the various ethnic, language and political groups. Which makes sense: the days largely commemorate the victory of one group over another within the country. In this nation of ours, the Fourth of July commemorates our Declaration of Independence, and aside from any resident Englishmen (or Welshmen, I suppose, if they feel that way about it) it wasn’t a victory over anybody here. Which may be nice to think about, as you watch the rockets’ red glare, and the cherry bombs, bursting, in air.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The final question Matt Hulan asked in his interview was this:

You analyze faith, and more specifically the literature of the faith of your fathers, more than most people I know. Have you any ambition to become a rabbi? Have you ever had such an ambition?

Short answer: No. Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooo!

OK, proper answer: I like to spend time reading and discussing Scripture. If being a rabbi meant that people would pay me to sit around and read and discuss Scripture, I would be tempted. There are other parts of the job I would be willing to take on as well; I would happily write and deliver sermons (although not ones that would suit the congregation at any shul big enough to pay a rabbi), and would be willing to lead services, both by overseeing the contributions of congregants and by standing up on the bimah myself. The amount of fund-raising a rabbi has to do would be unpleasant for me, but I suspect it’s unpleasant for nearly all rabbis. Still, it’s starting to look less appealing as a job. Then there’s the administration of the congregation, the synagogue, the school. Sitting on committees. Finding volunteers. And then there are the pastoral duties: visiting the sick, comforting the perplexed, advising the cranky. No, not a job I would enjoy. And the hours suck, too.

There’s another thing, which is probably the most interesting, at least from the point of view of anyone who isn’t fascinated by my own taste in working conditions. I’m not a very observant Jew. I like to attend services. I love to study Scripture. I want to keep learning about how different Jews adopt and adapt different practices. But I don’t keep the commandments. Many of them I don’t keep because I don’t believe that keeping them is important to my relationships with the Divine and with my fellow Jews. I eat pork. I eat shellfish. I mix milk and meat. I mix wool and cotton. I am married to an Episcopalian, and I think that’s a Good Thing. I regularly violate certain sexual prohibitions, and I think that’s a Good Thing, too. Most Jews in America also violate dietary and sexual prohibitions, and many of them also believe that those dietary and sexual prohibitions are better broken, but—they want their rabbis to appear to follow them, and to publicly endorse them. Furthermore, there are a lot of such restrictions that I’m a bit ambivalent about, and people don’t want ambivalent rabbis. There are a lot of things that I would vaguely like to do (pray daily with t’fillin, for instance), that frankly, I can’t be arsed to, and people don’t want rabbis who are too lazy to pray. Which is quite right; I myself don’t want a rabbi as lazy as I am. Particularly not if it’s me.

So, no. I’ve never given any serious thought to becoming a rabbi. If I had more of a facility with languages, I’d consider learning Hebrew and then perhaps taking some classes, either at a Rabbinical school or (more likely) at a local university. I wouldn’t consider it very seriously, though; I’m a terrible student, and my desire to avoid taking classes is great. If I do go back to taking classes, it will be for something that will get me a job I want to have and keep and actually perform, not something that would utterly fail to get me a job which, if I were to somehow get it, would make me and my employers miserable.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)