congregational doings

Question to me this morning: people scheduled my rabbi to be in two places at once this Shabbat; can I learn three verses of this week's parsha before Saturday morning? Sadly, I suspect the answer is "no", even if I get to pick the verses. (I think sometime this year the time will come when the answer would be "yes".) This illustrates a problem we're going to need to address, though -- people get sick, after all, and we don't have people who can read nearly-cold (yet). So either we cultivate some or we admit that there might be weeks when we don't have a torah service. I wonder what other congregations do when their torah readers are suddenly unavailable. (We ended up deciding to punt this week. We'll read the portion from a chumash, without the torah service proper.)

Some members of the worship commitee saw my subversive side for the first time last night. (I thought everyone knew already. :-) ) Once a week we have a weekday service (evening). We just don't have support for every day, but this is an attempt to do something. The folks who set this up chose a night when there's often other stuff going on in the building that dove-tail with this (7:30 service and 8:00 meetings), but it hasn't worked. We rarely have a minyan. Someone lamented the fact that even board members tend not to come a little early on meeting night, even though as leaders of the congregation they really ought to do so at least occasionally (IMO).

Board meetings are preceeded by a mailing (minutes, agenda, financial statements). This mailing has a cover sheet that specifies the meeting time (among other details). So, I said, change that cover sheet: "service 7:30 chapel; business meeting 8:00 library". See how many people will just show up to the first place/time listed. :-) (I think, actually, that we are going to do this.)

cat update

Baldur had a dental cleaning on Tuesday. (Aside: I did not expect retrieval to take an hour and a half even taking into account the bad weather. Good thing I left early.) The antibiotics he needs come in liquid form; getting him to swallow a mouthfull of liquid doesn't work, but given that he never met food he didn't like, that isn't so bad. I've been mixing the liquid into some canned food.

Last night he was very uninterested in the food -- picked at it and then walked away. This is completely out of character. He was also very lethargic (yes, even for him) last night and this morning. And he seems to have had some, err, distress in his lower GI tract. So I didn't give him this morning's dose and called the vet when they opened to confirm that, yes, those symptoms are compatable with that drug. So no more Clindamycin for him right now, and we'll see how he's doing in a day or two.

Poor guy. I hope he's back to his usual only-kind-of-lethargic state soon.

LJ meta: trolls

Now that LiveJournal has eliminated invite codes, there are (apparently) more troll accounts -- people create a disposable account simply to harrass people and then move on. People who run communities are having trouble with this because it's extra administrative load to ban them, delete their comments, etc. This complaint I understand.

I gather that some people have created troll communities with provocative names and added people as members without their consent. This complaint I definitely understand, as the presumption is that you choose your communities. I would like it if being added to a community (as opposed to adding myself) generated an email challenge/response cycle, actually, like some mailing-list software does.

Some people are also upset that trolls add them as friends. They are, apparently, upset at seeing certain names on their friend-of lists. This complaint I do not understand; no one has any control over who lists you as a friend, so how could any thinking person hold it against you if someone objectionable supposedly reads your journal? I was recently added by someone I didn't recognize, and when I went to the journal to investigate I found one "this is my journal" message with about 20 comments saying "take me off your list you filthy troll". (The comments, and later the entry, have since been deleted.) Now I don't have any personal experience with this person, troll or not, and have no basis for judgement, but the reactions seem extreme to me. Besides, isn't that just what they want -- to get people worked up?

By the way, a post in news today said that they are working on breaking the "friends" notion into its two different parts, subscriptions and access control. I look forward to seeing how they do that. I wonder which parts will be public (the way friends are now). I also idly wonder about the sociological effects when people are able to designate some of their "friends" with "I actually read you" and others as "I don't follow you but I trust you with my secrets". I predict lots of angst among the high-school contingent.