parsha bit: V'zot Ha-brachah

This week we conclude the reading of torah with the death of Moshe. The talmud asks how Moshe could have written the words "Moshe died there". Rabbi Yehudah said that Moshe wrote until this point and Yehoshua wrote the final words. Rabbi Shimon disagreed, saying "can we imagine the scroll of the law being incomplete when Moshe said 'take this book of the law'?" Rather, he says, until this point the Holy One Blessed Be He dictated and Moshe repeated and wrote, and for the final words He dictated and Moshe wrote with tears in his eyes. (Baba Batra 15a)

Anchor Bay Entertainment: class act

When I got that suspicious DVD, I sent email to the publisher (Anchor Bay Entertainment) asking about their packaging. They responded yesterday (by which time I'd resolved things with the seller), saying roughly "sounds like a bootleg; mind telling us where you got it?". I responded that it was an Amazon Marketplace seller who said he was unaware the disc was a bootleg, and that he'd given me a full refund and I'd destroyed the disc. They wrote back this morning, thanked me for my dilligence, and said they'd send me a new copy of the DVD. That was unexpected!

I'm not out any money at this point (just a little delayed gratification, and if that mattered I'd have tried to buy locally), so I'm certainly not entitled to anything. (Arguably the seller is; he's the one who got taken.) However, they seem to be offering me a freebie because I chased it down and took the disc out of circulation, not because I'm out any money, so I said sure. :-)

In a world filled with manufacturers who say things like "if you're dissatisfied with this 20-pound bag of flour, send the unused portion to us for a full refund", I really didn't expect a free DVD when the problem was completely beyond the publisher's control. Sure, it's probably good PR (I posted about it, right?), but it's still a lot more than I expected.

short takes

(The web interface is being wacky. If you saw a mis-formmatted post from me -- I didn't do it. Let's try again.)

Domain names to avoid, from dagonell.

This conversation is funny in that oddly-familiar way (from xiphias).

Quote of the day from dglenn: "The country is run by extremists, because moderates have shit to do." --John Stewart, on The Daily Show. (Meta: I tried to email this to myself and the filter at work blocked due to profanity.)

Last night Dani was explaining the cult of Eye of Argon, an astonishingly-bad SF story, to a friend. Naturally there is a Wikipedia entry. Dani called my attention to the following comment about the author from there: "a malaprop genius, a McGonagall of prose with an eerie gift for choosing the wrong word and then misapplying it".

The new furnace has a display with buttons and a numeric read-out... and no user documentation (but lots of installation documentation). How odd. Fortunately, furnaces usually don't require a lot of user intervention: turn on in October and off in April (or whenever, adjusted for your locale).

Well, we had a few good sukkah nights before rain and cold ended that. And note to future self: the week of Sukkot has the longest morning (weekday) services of the year; anything you can do to expedite (without rushing) will be looked upon with favor by the congregation.

a small thought as Simchat Torah approaches

This weekend we'll read the end of the torah and then go right into the beginning again. As I noted in this morning's parsha bit, there is a rabbinic interpretation that Moshe wrote the whole torah (dictated by God), including the part that talks about his death, and that he cried while doing this. Moshe had complete knowledge of what was to come and was powerless to change it. That sort of knowledge is not generally considered to be a blessing. If we understand that this writing occurred while Moshe was on Har Sinai, then he lived with this knowledge for 40 years. (I'm not advocating that interpretation, just speculating about what it implies.)

After reading this ending that Moshe knew and couldn't avoid, we then go straight into B'reishit where we read about the first humans, Adam and Chava. They had no knowledge whatsoever at first; they were completely free of the burdens that come from knowing. But that, too, was not ideal; they ate from the tree and they had to eat from it in order to become thinking, functioning human beings.

The torah ends with perfect knowledge and begins with total lack of knowledge (when it comes to people). Neither is a desirable state and neither is sustained. (No one other than Moshe ever got that level of privilege.) The contrast struck me as interesting in a hard-to-articulate way. Perhaps a lesson is that while we should strive for more knowledge (especially certain types), we shouldn't wish for a complete understanding even if such were achievable. There are lines we ought not cross at both ends of the knowledge spectrum.