phone and email spam

The FTC is going after telemarketers. These look like pretty much the same restrictions Pennsylvania enacted a few months ago, with higher fines and the addition of rules about abandoned calls, but they'll be on a national level if Congress approves.

That reminds me: The National Foundation for Cancer Research has joined the ranks of charities who spam (and who will therefore not get any more money from me so long as they persist in doing this). I bet they won't even acknowledge my complaint; the World Wildlife Fund and the International Fund for Animal Welfare never did either. The latter two are also sending me (via physical mail) a steady stream of stuff I wouldn't want them to spend my money on anyway, like calendars and plush toys and umbrellas and whatnot, even though it hasn't paid off for them. I've started to use their postage-paid reply envelopes to tell them to go away. (My "final notice" from WWF was three mailings ago...)

Shabbat errata

Last Friday's service included "consecration", a chance for all the students who are just starting religious school this year to be recognized. This is mostly first-graders, but there were a few older kids (people who've moved to the area? dunno). It was kind of a zoo; that many six-year-olds in one place are inherently entropic. The rabbi cut lots of corners on the service to shorten it, but it was apparently still too long for some of them. Well, I guess some nights you actually connect at the service, and some nights you just hope the screeching will stop soon. :-)

I ran into someone at the oneg who I knew as a student at CMU. While I don't have specific memories of her (only vague ones), we apparently knew lots of the same people. It was fun to compare notes. I have forgotten the last names of more of my classmates than I thought I had. Oops.

Speaking of school memories, the "goofy question" (it's an ice-breaker of sorts) Saturday morning was "what was your worst subject in school?". In elementary school that was easy for me: penmanship, hands-down. When they were sorting out rank in class in my senior year, a bunch of us were tied and they went back as far as seventh grade to try to resolve it. If they had gone to sixth grade, they would have hit the last year of penmanship and my rank in class would have been done in by an inability to write lightly enough. Whee.

He was really asking about high school or college, though, and I didn't have a clear candidate. I was pretty bad at memorization (like the names-and-dates parts of history), so I said that. It took until halfway around the circle for someone to say "gym", at which point several of us smacked our foreheads. :-) I guess gym wasn't a "real" subject to me; subjects were things that involved study, not movement (or, in my case, trying to interact with small moving objects without benefit of depth perception). Of course, being fat and uncoordinated didn't help.

The oddest things get dredged up out of my brain sometimes. :-)

This Friday the worship committee will be leading the service. I got my part in the mail a few days ago, but I gather that there is going to be some shuffling of parts. One person who has an assigned part (according to what I was sent) does not want one; her part is right after mine, so I might end up just doing both. (Which would make sense; I don't know why they split kriat shema between two people.) I do hope that there's someone vaguely in charge on Friday and that everyone gets there a few minutes early so we can figure out stuff like this. :-)