Saturday

[cellio]

Shabbat was mostly pleasant. Friday night the associate rabbi led the service, and he did a good job. (The senior rabbi was leading the learners' minyan.) I am pleased at the growth I've seen in him in the last four+ years. (I'm not sure, but I think ours is his first congregation.)

Saturday afternoon, after services and lunch, Dani and I went to visit our friend Christine. (Dani knows her better than I do; I basically met her through him. Most of our joint friendships run in the other direction, so I'm pleased when Dani introduces me to someone new.) Christine bought a house earlier this year, and this was the first we'd seen it. She also has a new dog, a Corgie, who is very friendly and very energetic. Her two cats were less than thrilled with this addition to the household.

Christine has a smaller version of the same problem Dani has: too many books and not enough places to put bookcases. She may be moving some books into a large walk-in closet in her bedroom simply because there's a wall there that can support a full-size bookcase. I can sympathize!

Christine strongly recommended a TV show called "Sports Night", which we have never seen. It's written by the same person who writes "West Wing", which is a major recommendation all by itself. Apparently it's running now on Comedy Central, but we don't get that channel. She's expecting to get DVDs of the show for Christmas, so maybe we'll be able to borrow them in a couple months.

Around sunset, a headache started to form and grew stronger over the next couple hours. Sigh. I had wanted to go to the debut concert of Small Axe, lrstrobel's new band, but by the time 9pm rolled around it was pretty obvious that the bar environment plus amplified music would not work well at that time. I hope they do other Saturday-night, as opposed to Friday-night, concerts soon! So instead, I vegged alternately in front of the computer and the TV.

Pico-reviews:

Enterprise: I dislike shows that revolve around people acting stupidly, whether it's caused by drugs, radiation, or wide-ranging silliness. So I started out prejudiced against this episode, and the episode didn't do anything to rise above that. Last week's ("Communicator") was much better.

West Wing: As usual, well-written and tight. Is that part about a doctor being required (by whom?) to operate on a patient regardless of circumstances true?

Andromeda: Early in the episode, Harper said, about horror/suspense novels, that they're "not scary, just stupid". I think he pegged this episode, which was trying to be a suspense story, pretty well with that comment.

Haven't watched Twilight Zone yet.

Comments

[goljerp]

I used to like sport's night. One of the characters has a cool name. (You'll understand, perhaps, once you see it.)

[goljerp]

When I get so tired I can't put apostrophes in the right places, it is a sure sign I should go to sleep and stop posting. except I'm too tired to stop.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

blackpaladin is a pretty zealous Sports Night fan; he might know better the options for catching up with it now that it's out of production. I watched it pretty regularly and mourned the end of its short run, but am not quite as fanatic as he. It's overall somewhat lighter than West Wing; nominally a sitcom (at least, that's how the network pitched it), but with a distinct dramatic edge and deeper characters than most prime time series. You'll definitely recognize the rapid give-and-take repartee of a bunch of smart people working in a very high-pace, hectic environment that's also characteristic of West Wing.

Doctors

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

Re: the Doctor's obligation...
Doctors are bound by a strict code of ethics. It's not a legal obligation, necessarily, to not discriminate among your patients, which is to say that the doctor probably couldn't be sued in a court of law. However, a doctor could be brought before the Ethics Board of the AMA.

In this particular circumstance, the doctor had a particular ethical obligation to the patient because there was literally no other doctor available qualified to perform the operation. If there had been 5 other doctors available, there's less likelihood that it could be considered a violiation of the code of ethics.

This is, at least, my limited understanding of the issue.