miscellaneous

[cellio]

Shavuot was good. More about that later.

One of the other people on that cantors'/etc list turns out to be worship chair at her own congregation and a year ahead of me in the Sh'liach K'hilah program. It's been interesting to compare notes with her, and she's given me some good information about the SK program. Last year's class was 17 people, she said; this year's is bigger, though she doesn't know how big. So it sounds like a fairly intimate experience, which I like.

She also warned me that the air conditioning in the classrooms is set for "arctic", and there is no internet access in the dorm but there is in the library. That's managable.

I got an information packet from the program in the mail a couple days ago, including a class schedule. Sounds like good stuff. I will assume that the word "chugim", which appears daily, corresponds to "SIG" or "BOF" -- subgroups on specialized topics. (I can imagine four ways to spell "chug" in Hebrew, and I'm too lazy to try them all in the dictionary.)

My professional world is getting a little bit smaller: two past coworkers will be joining my company soon. Nifty.

I heard an ad today from Subway for "low-fat" and "Atkins-friendly" sandwiches. I presume this represents union, not intersection. I'm not sure what the options are for fulfilling both criteria in a sandwich/salad context. My dentist, in whose office I heard this, didn't know either.

A man is suing the Atkins people for his heart problems, saying he needed angioplasty to clear his arteries -- and is asking for $15,000. Usually these suits ask for a heck of a lot more than that; it makes me wonder what the figure is based on.

I've been needing a new pair of non-casual shoes for a while. ("Non-casual": shoes you can wear with skirts, like for Shabbat.) I went to the higher-end store in Squirrel Hill a while back and ended up buying something I ought not have (I went looking for flats and let the clerk talk me into a slight heel). Today I noticed a PayLess in the same mall as my dentist's office, and I believe I've solved my problem for $12.99. I know what I'm doing in the future... (I try to support independent businesses over chains when I can, but they've got to work with me here.)

I watched the season finale of Enterprise. I thought they had promised a complete story in one season. Technically they might have, but I'll bet they address this ending next season...

Off to the annual congregational meeting and, technically, the end of my board tenure.

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

Enterprise
So do we know which race that red eyed creature at the end belonged to?

[cellio]

Drakh? :-) (Err, maybe not.)

I don't know if we're supposed to recognize them. I don't, but I didn't follow the original series so I didn't recognize the Andorians when they first showed up either. Any other Trek fans want to speak up here?

And, now that we're down in comments where spoilers are a little less invasive, let me just say: why must it always be Nazis? It sometimes seems like every alternate-history story out there showing a negative future has the Nazis win WW2. Are they just going for the near-automatic squick factor? Do they think not enough people would recognize Stalin, or $fanatic-middle-eastern-terrorist, or whatever? (I assume that unknown-to-the-viewer bad guys are just Not Done.) No, at the moment I can't name a pile of other examples; it just seems like I've seen this particular alternate-history theme a bunch of times before. I crave originality. :-)

[geekosaur]

Automatic squick factor, I think. Certainly the original series did it --- but it also did Rome, and the Cold War from several different angles(%), and racism(&), and a bunch of others. It's a pity that later Star Trek often seems to lack much of the vision that showed in so many of the original episodes.

---

[%] Aside from the excessively blatant "Yangs versus Komms" episode, there was the one where the Klingons were secretly arming one side in a local war on some backwater planet and Kirk ended up arming the other side similarly to balance things out.

[&] Excessive, like the previously mentioned "Yangs vs. Komms". The aliens were half black and half white... and divided based on which half was which. And the dialog was almost a send-up of racism, except that the episode kept taking itself so seriously. While the original series often had vision, it also often had times when it merely moralized with a spiked club.