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01:25 pm
debka_notion
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Another Shabbos
Shabbos dinner this week was due to be at Steve's place. However, I got a call asking if I could for sure join them at the same place for davening, as the location we were eating was possibly being changed. So off I went to a Reconstructionist minyan (which caused someone who came both there and to Kedem in the morning to presume that I was an RRC student at first). I think it was the first time I was at a formally Reconstructionist davening, and it was far less different than I was expecting it might be, although I got quite thrown by their having the alternate passage for the second paragraph of Shema First (so I presumed that the regular one wasn't there at all, took out my own siddur, said Shema, and then looked through and Ta Da, there it was after all. I found the alternate one an interesting selection- all "if you obey G-d, everything will be hunky-dory" in the place of "if you don't obey G-d, things will be really Bad", which really is no different in terms of accepting the notion of reward and punishment, which is what I thought they had trouble with- please feel free to correct me, I'm not too well up on Reconstructionist theology- it just sounds less unpleasant.). Dinner eventually was indeed in a different location, but meant that a friend who wasn't feeling so wonderful got to have a meal with friends rather than being on her own, as she wasn't quite feeling up to walking all the way to someone else's place. Also, it was no farther from my apartment than Steve's place would have been. So it seemed like an "everyone wins" sort of situation. It was a nice meal, just 4 of us. I made two sorts of bread, as one was new to me- I made french bread, which came out quite well. That's one I'm going to certainly want to do again. The other was a normal whole wheat with honey thing that I basically just threw together.
Davening in the morning was fairly quiet- a smaller crowd than usual, as this was a week when the "we sing everything and daven all day long" minyan was meeting. Sometime I'll have to try it, as I can like that sort of thing when I set myself in the right mood for it. However I found a spot for lunch courtesy of [Bad username: hotshot2000"] so lunch was starting at a normal sort of time, so I stuck to the usual this time. Perhaps next month. (Also interesting and odd to consider is one of my classmate's perspective that said minyan is a cult of personality, and he objects to such things. I see the problem, but also feel like maybe it isn't the end o the world to take advantage of it if it actually fills a useful spiritual niche.) Lunch was quite pleasant- mostly folks I didn't know, but nice people, and there were a couple of other Brandeis graduates there (one whom I knew, one whom I didn't), so our corner of the table spent a good while telling various Brandeis-related stories. After lunch I headed for home, took a wrong turn (or well, veered the wrong way), and ended up getting guided towards home by a bunch of kids whom I asked for directions. So all's well that ends well...
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12:17 am
lordameth
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News from Japan, re: Google Books
Glad I translated it word for word. In the process, I discovered I'd misinterpreted the entire article first time through.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the outcome is. Here's hoping that Google can successfully continue to expand its scanning and its digital library, since Japan (and the universities and other institutions within it, since of course Japan is not a single actor) seems extremely slow, if not outright resistant, to making documents available online. Accessing Japanese sources - even those in English, like Acta Asiatica - is a bitch and a half, given that none of them are included in JSTOR or other standard journal article databases, and since Japanese databases like CiNii are not included in our universities' subscriptions. And such. Right?
And, since the Asahi is bound to remove this article soon, without maintaining any online archive:
グーグル訴訟で新和解案 英米文化圏の作品に限定
2009年11月14日16時32分
【ニューヨーク＝田中光】デジタル化した書籍の全文検索サービス「グーグルブックス」をめぐる集団訴訟で、グーグルや米出版協会などの訴訟当事者は１３日、新たな和解案をニューヨークの連邦地裁に提出した。対象を、米国の連邦著作権登録局に登録されている作品か、英国、カナダ、オーストラリアで出版された作品に限定することなどを柱にしている。これで日本への影響は当面、なくなったとみられる。
当初の和解案では当事者の参加の意思にかかわらず、世界中の著作権者が含まれていたため、欧州や日本など各国政府から反発の声があがっていた。
A New Settlement Proposal in Google Lawsuit: Limited to Works in the Anglosphere
(New York) In a class action lawsuit surrounding "Google Books", a full-text search service for digitized books, Google, the American Publishing Association, and other concerned parties presented to the US District Court in New York a new proposal for a settlement on the 13th. The proposal centers on setting a limit [of what is covered by the lawsuit] to only those books registered with the US Copyright Bureau, or only those published in the UK, Canada, and Australia. Thus, it would seem that there would cease to be any effect upon Japan [of the outcome of the lawsuit].
Already, regardless of the intentions of the concerned party in presenting this proposal, in order to incorporate all the world's copyright holders, the governments of Japan and many countries in Europe have raised their voices in opposition.
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12:00 pm
bassist
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/56651115/715778) [Link] |
Why We Fight
Calvin and Susie argue.
“Jesus fucking Christ, dude! I’m sick of this shit! I don’t want to be in a semantical argument right now!”
“You mean semantic, not semantical,” I stated matter-of-factly.
It was that little statement that defined the difference between us. It was that little statement that would continue to crop up at the most inopportune times over the following months.
“Really?” Leath angrily whined. “Seriously? Fuck you.”
—
For the record, the Merriam-Webster dictionary lists “semantical” as a proper variation of “semantic.” Every online dictionary redirects to “semantic,” but they also cite the American Heritage and Random House dictionaries as saying it’s a proper variation. Why anyone would want to tack on two extra letter and an extra syllable to an already lengthy and specifically used word, I have no clue, but it is technically correct.
SIDE NOTE: When growing up, the word “technically” appeared with a new usage in the common lexicon. Traditionally, it’s defined as “pertaining to a technique, art or skill.” This, of course, is not how it’s used. I, and many of my friends, use technically to mean that one can argue the veracity of the statement on some level, but it’s not true on all levels. Technically is often used as the opposite of actually. For example, I can technically get a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 for free, but because it’s illegally downloaded, it doesn’t actually work that way. My dad gibes me about this usage since he’s been trained in a technical field (architecture), and I’ve taken to rolling my eyes. After all, there’s no appropriate synonym that so succinctly encapsulates that usage.
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Worldwide Ace.
You can comment here or there.
Tags: philosophy
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08:40 am
debka_notion
[Link] |
In Which We Lack a Peeler
We don't actually yet have a fruit and vegetable peeler in the apartment, and I of course forgot this fact when I set out to make apple crisp. So A. my roommate got a call saying "can you get a peeler while you're out" (and she did), and B. I peeled the apples with a knife. It's not something that I'm good at- but I got substantially better by the end... And now we have a peeler.
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11:21 pm
debka_notion
[Link] |
Together and Alone
Yesterday after school, I walked home with the roommate I've seen less of. (She then had an unfortunate encounter with a soy sauce bottle which leapt out of the fridge when she opened it and fell on the floor, managing to break and splatter pretty much Everywhere in the process. We spent rather a while cleaning soy sauce off the floor, wall, fridge door, inside of the fridge and even the inside of the freezer, which had been closed at the time. Then she went off to clean the soy sauce off of herself...) But then she left to spend time with her sister, and I had the apartment to myself for quite a while. It was funny- I think it was the longest I've been home alone since we moved in, potentially. I did some homework, but not all that much, and finished a doily I'd been working on, and started another. (There's a blanket that I'm going to do too, but I realized that I don't actually have thread to sew it together- it's just two big pieces of cloth that I'll sew together, and then I'll add a few things- flowers perhaps, to give me an excuse to sew the thing together in the middle in a few places, so that it stays in a one-to-one relationship between the two different fabrics... So, sometime soon I purchase thread so I can do that- that way when it gets cold, I'll have something to wrap-up with in the living room.)
In other cheerful news, I was about to decide to make shabbat dinner, and had written an invitation and everything, when just before I would have hit send, I got an invitation to a friend's place for said meal. Given that she was one of the prospective guests, I scrapped the email and decided to go to her. I'm not sure whether I'll instead make lunch or just wait until next week to host a meal. I guess it rather depends what I'm doing for shul and who else is doing what, and I'm not so good at figuring such things out... It's one of the downsides of seeing a significantly different crowd during the week than I do on Shabbat... I really should actually start implementing some of the ways I've thought of to see other folks during the week. (Not that I dislike my classmates, I've actually been enjoying spending more time with them, it's just- they're not my only friends...)
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02:04 pm
bassist
[Link] |
A Spoonful of Sugar
A spoonful of sugar.
Taken from the BBC’s Good Foods Glossary.
The best advice I ever received came from a fictional umbrella-toting nanny.
“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” she sang.
The irony is that taking this piece of advice at face value, it’s often wrong. Most liquid medicines are already sweetened these days, so extra sugar makes it sickly sweet. If you’re talking Castor oil as a punishment or Ipecac to induce vomiting, adding sweetener kind of defeats the purpose, though you’ll certainly still vomit. A spoonful of sugar makes it that much harder to swallow a pill, and putting it in your IV is just silly. A spoonful of sugar is a bad idea when the treatment is topical, and while the fetish lover you’re sleeping with may like it in your enema, you probably won’t.
—
I’m going to die.
To a certain extent I already knew that. It’s not a new prognosis, but rather the ultimate endgame to my existence. I don’t know when it’ll happen or how; at least not right now. Yet it is an absolute.
So often I hear about people running for religion when they know they’re going to die. Their proverbial spoonful of sugar is the thought that there’s something more, that their friends and loved ones await them. Heaven, reincarnation, and every variation on the immortal soul are all likely pipe dreams.
Really, though, it’s just a fancy way of saying they seek hope.
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Worldwide Ace.
You can comment here or there.
Tags: philosophy
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02:24 pm
debka_notion
[Link] |
In Which I Make Pizza
Having acquired the pizza recipe that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zodiacmg , Steve, and Steve have used in the past, which I'd had and appreciated, I made pizza for the first time tonight. It was something I'd told both roommates about and intended to be for all three of us. One roommate ended up going elsewhere rather than home tonight (I presume either to her sister's or to another classmate's to do work), so it was just two of us. However, the pizza came out pretty well, especially given that I do not yet have a cookie sheet (I tried to find one at two places on Friday and neither had a cookie sheet, so I guess I'll try at the shuk on Wednesday), and that I was using regular tomato sauce. Perhaps next time I'll invite some other friends to share the pizza, since at least this time we have enough to bring for lunch tomorrow too, which should be a nice change from the yoghurt plus other leftovers that has been my most usual lunch lately.
Before that, the school day was an interesting one. Hebrew class had me more frustrated with our teacher than usual, so I spoke to our administrative type about it, and he's said that he'll have a word with the teacher with our hopes for more work on speaking, and less pointless competition. I'm very frustrated by the class- I feel like it's on a level well below what I've done in the past, and with expectations that cause me to do less well than I could, because that's all that's asked for. It makes me crazy.
Halakha was an interesting mix of useful and interesting information combined with statements that drove me off the wall. It's supposed to be a halakha le'maase class (practical Jewish law), but our teacher places his emphasis in a way that I find very foreign to the notion of practical halakha, and then tries to apply it. Understanding what the relevant Talmudic passages originally meant is very nice, and can even be a factor in your interpretation of the later law- but they oughtn't be the factor that causes you to disregard hundreds of years worth of later tradition. It is occasionally infuriating. Today had a few of those moments- although not all, and I did learn some very interesting things in the midst of it all.
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11:52 am
debka_notion
[Link] |
Another Israeli First
We had our first yeshiva solicitors today. My roommate turned them away neatly with the comment that we learn in yeshiva ourselves, thank you. I thought it was very efficiently and practically done.
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11:16 am
bassist
[Link] |
Coincidentally
I woke up this morning feeling glum, much like during the waning seconds of the tail end of my final lacrosse game in high school, where I stared from the sidelines as our team lost well aware that it was completely beyond my ability to do anything about it. It wasn’t an oppressive glumness, but a light and malleable one punctuated by a slight distaste for Zoe, who had spent the wee hours of the morn pawing at me as I attempted to hide from the world beneath my comforter. I rolled out of bed, accidentally and haphazardly flinging Zoe off the bed, and I was immediately chill in the cool morning air that had leaked into my room over the course of the night.
My ankle cracked loudly with each step as I traversed our dim stairwell and emerged in our living room. I thought it was just a sprain, but two plus weeks later I can’t help but posit that something worse may have happened, like the time I got clotheslined by the parallel bars and may have broken my nose but went back to play with just a band-aid and a thirst for more tag—I’ll never know if I broke my nose as it’s long since healed.
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Worldwide Ace.
You can comment here or there.
Tags: random
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09:51 am
debka_notion
[Link] |
Sibling!
After not managing to catch each other over the last few days, and not even quite managing to try to catch each other the first few weeks that I was here, my sister and I finally found each other on Skype this morning (well, this morning for me, last night for her...). We didn't get to talk long, since I had to get ready for the day, and she was hitting bedtime (ahh, time zone difference, how I loath thee), but she told me that she saw the chuppah, and really likes it. (Since it's for her wedding and I basically didn't consult with her on it at all, this is a very good thing.) We talked a bit about Israel and dancing and such things, but mostly it was just really nice to talk to her, regardless of the topic.
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09:18 am
debka_notion
[Link] |
This Is Just Too Absurd To Keep To Myself
I received the following from a Jewish dating site's email list (I used said site for a little while, a couple years ago, and never quite managed to get off their email list). I found it absurd on a series of levels, and thought it was too hilarious (at least as something speaking to me) not to share. First off, I find the notion of paying someone to pray for you to be a little off-kilter. Secondly, What makes the 8th day of Chanukah so special? They come up with a reason, and attribute it to someone, or rather, to his book, but it's the first I've ever heard of it. I don't think that I'm that poorly educated. Thirdly, I think that right now, I can support Talmud Torah in Jerusalem by doing an extra chazara on my gemara for class just as easily as sending these folks money. Fourth, it just rubs me wrong, somehow.
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02:14 pm
debka_notion
[Link] |
"Getting to Know You..."
I found myself musing about how I get to know people. Not how I meet them- that's either obvious or random enough. But the actual process of going from "hmm, I think this is a person whose company I will appreciate" to "this is a person I am getting to know" to "this is someone I actually know". Sometimes it happens so fast that I don't really notice it, especially people I meet at intense sorts of programs, or where we have enough friends in common that I've heard about them before, and things just sort of fall into place. But other times, it seems to stretch out for so long that I spend months and months being friends with someone without feeling like I actually know who they are, or metaphorically where they live. The first time that happened that I was aware of it (not the first time that it has happened of course) was my first year in NYC, where I started having friends I saw pretty much only on the weekend, and mostly on Shabbat, and here were these people I was very fond of (and still am, I certainly don't mean to imply that that aspect of things is only in the past) but whom I didn't know particularly well at all for quite a while. I found it quite disconcerting.
Some of that is happening here as well, which is hardly a surprise, since I'm with my classmates with a few additions during the week, and see other friends much less often. I'd like to see them more- I'll have to find ways to work that into my schedule, as we can manage it. In the meantime, I'm often left with this sense where I am assembling my image of someone sort of by cutting-and-pasting aspects of my perception of them into a mental image by using who else they remind me of in different ways. So one new friend reminds me a bit of noam_rion , and a bit of my talmud chevruta from last year, and a bit of a friend from youth orchestra from high school, etc, etc. As I fill in more of who Steve reminds me of, he/she becomes more and more him/herself, until I can drop all the "reminds me of x"s. It's a little bit more nuanced than just labeling character traits, at least. But of course, like any crutch, it's overly vague and can still lead me wrong. It gets frustrating, and I get impatient, sometimes. However, it sure beats not meeting and getting to know people.
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01:17 am
debka_notion
[Link] |
In Which It Rains
Yesterday, it was predicted to start raining about half an hour after our last class ended. Class got out a bit late, and we (both roommates and I) decided to try rushing home on foot. Well, it started raining less than 10 minutes into our walk, and started to pour almost precisely at 5:00, when it was predicted to. It was the most accurate forecast I've ever been told about. So we took the bus home, much to one roommate's distress. There was something rather humorous about it. Managing the whole mental map of "we really, really want rain" while also wanting it to be reasonably dry when I'm walking to and from school is a funny balance to try to keep, for me. The suddenness of the seasonal change also just sort of hit like a load of bricks- no gradual transitions... (I know this is completely obvious to those of you also in Israel, but for everyone else, and because this is, after all, my journal...)
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12:43 am
debka_notion
[Link] |
In Which There Is A Lot of Food in Our Fridge
I spent a good chunk of Friday in the kitchen, as I had a rather substantially sized (for me) Shabbat lunch here- the first time that I have hosted a meal here (roommate 1 had a meal a couple weeks ago, and the other hosted a small dinner which I attended Friday night, but this was My first). The guests included a college friend, a JTS friend, hotshot2000 , both roommates, the guest who was staying with us through one of said roommates, a friend I met here through zodiacmg , and a young man I met Wednesday night who needed a place for Shabbos lunch. Somehow this wildly random crowd managed to have what seemed like quite a nice time, and there was sufficient food to go around- and also to leave us with a significant amount of leftovers for the week, which I am quite pleased about. Lunch was primarily salads and then dessert, following my usual inability to think in terms of a main dish, but plates were full, and things went well. After we finished eating, a good number of folks adjourned to play games in the living room, and I and another friend hung out and talked, and someone else managed to nap on our couch, just a yard or two away from the folks with the game. The shabbos nap is a very powerful thing, that way.
After Shabbat, I walked over to another friend's house and watched the first Harry Potter movie in Hebrew with a delightful mix of people, talked for a while afterwards, and then walked home and even had company for much of my walk. It meant that I got home rather later than I perhaps should have before the first day of school for the week, but oh well- tonight I will hopefully call home and then go to bed early.
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10:12 pm
bassist
[Link] |
Happy Halloween from the Jack-O-Bear
It’s been a tradition in my family to make a Jack-O-Bear for Halloween. Though they haven’t done it every year, my parents once again rose to the task this year. I had hoped to help my Dad carve it before I left Boston this week, but it seems to have been completed in excellent fashion despite my lackadaisical efforts.
Happy Halloween!
Originally published at Worldwide Ace.
You can comment here or there.
Tags: random
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