daf bit: Nazir 62

As we near the end of tractate Nazir, the discussion turns to slaves. Can a slave make a nazarite vow? Yes, and not only that but, according to the mishna, the nazarite vow of a slave is more stringent than one of a woman, because a man can annul his wife's vow but cannot annul his slave's vow. If a slave's master disapproves of the slave's vow, it appears that the master's only recourse is to free the slave. (62b)

(I assume, though I couldn't confirm one way or the other in the Aramaic text, that this is talking about an eved ivri, a Jewish slave. Jewish slaves get freed eventually anyway, so this would just mean accelerating the schedule, and I would be surprised if non-Jews can (per torah) take nazarite vows. (Of course they can vow anything they like, but it wouldn't be governed by torah, I would think.)

use this power only for good

For the last several days there has been an increasingly-tedious discussion on the (SCA) kingdom mailing list about an incident involving another kingdom's monarchs and the corporation. Well, was until yesterday, when a tedious discussion of chocolate milk took over the mailing list. (The prompt for that is that the dairy farm that produced the chocolate milk sold at the Pennsic site has gone out of business.)

Lesson learned: you can't necessarily make tedious discussions go away, but you can displace them. I must remember this. Maybe I should choose a few likely topics to start discussions of, when needed.

It might be past time for me to just shut down the moderated version of the mailing list. (I run a mailing list that receives all the traffic from the open list, and I send along the subset I deem to be appropriate. Some days that's everything and some days, like today, it's 10%.) There aren't a lot of subscribers, so the moderation effort per subscriber is high, and don't most of us have procmail or gmail auto-sorting or Outlook rules or suchlike by now? The mailing list can overwhelm an inbox at times, but it doesn't need to go to the general inbox. I have a few lists that pile up until I clean them out every week or two. Is that approach common now? It takes more effort for me to moderate a message (either yea or nay) than to just delete it from a mail folder, and if most people don't care... (If I decide I'm inclined toward this I will of course bring it up with my subscribers; I'm just thinking out loud here.)