short takes

[cellio]

Good heavens. I can have 50 userpics now?!

I led a shiva minyan tonight (my second time). Gauging people's level of comfort with Hebrew continues to challenge me, but we did ok. I need to learn Eil Malei Rachamim -- the prayer in which we specifically name the deceased -- in Hebrew. The combination of unfamiliar text and the navigational hazards of a paragraph set up to support masculine and feminine options meant I wasn't about to try. (I will probably, eventually, make myself two complete versions, one for each gender. That would be much easier for me.)

Sunday dinner was just four of us this week; Mike is in Italy (lucky guy!) and none of the other usual suspects made it. We spent some time D&D-geeking. :-)

The order of seasons seems to have gotten shuffled locally. Not that I object to 70-degree days in November; it's just a little peculiar. And I was able to get the sukkah down Sunday after music practice.

Tomorrow is our company's annual retreat. I'm always ambivalent about these, and I wonder if this is the best timing given a major deadline coming up soon, but oh well. It'll probably be a long day (after which I have to go vote), because they never stagger these with respect to rush hour so we get it on both ends. I'd actually be fine with either shift; I could show up at 7am once a year if it meant shorter drives. Fortunately, I was able to hitch a ride with someone. (There's no way I'm driving some of the roads involved after dark.)

Political compass (I've seen this before but it's been a while):

Economic Left/Right: 1.75
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.62

They include a graph showing (their assessment of) the placement of assorted political figures. They show no one in my quadrant. Sniff. (An earlier example shows Friedman -- presumably Milton -- in my quadrant, but not especially close to me.)

Comments

[kayre]

The combination of unfamiliar text and the navigational hazards of a paragraph set up to support masculine and feminine options meant I wasn't about to try. (I will probably, eventually, make myself two complete versions, one for each gender. That would be much easier for me.)

This reminds me a bit of listening as my congregation attempts to navigate the baptism rubric when we baptize only one child-- it's written in the plural, since group baptisms are the more common (and preferred) practice.

[goljerp]

A related skill is that of rendering gender specific God language non-gender specific on the fly. Some bits are easy: turn "He" into "God", "His" into "God's", "King" into "Ruler", "Lord" into, well, the hebrew word for "Lord"... the problem comes during some passages which have pronouns which don't refer to God. (There's one bit where there's a section of male pronouns which refer to God, then a reference to Jacob, then a "his" which refers to Jacob - always tricky. Of course, I don't remember exactly where this is now.)

[kayre]

There's a passage in the gospel of John where the words "he" and "his" refer to three different people-- and in Greek, sorting out which is which is very difficult. Some 'literal' English translations render it exactly that way, rather than clearing up the confusion.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

No one really seems to be in my region of the scale either. Funny how I can't seem to find any politicians that I like.