Monica

<ring>

"Hello."

"Hello, this is David from the Republican National Convention. [...pleasantries...] On a scale of 1 to 5, how important would you say it is to elect Republican leadership to the White House this fall?"

"Hmm... given the way you've phrased that, I'd say about a 2."

"Thank you for your time." <click>

Yeah, I didn't think it was a real poll. :-) I'll bet they wouldn't process my response to the survey they mailed me last week either, if I bothered to fill it in and send it to them.

(To clarify, he didn't specify the Republican currently occupying that domicile, for which my response would test his ability to handle responses out of bounds.)

Guess-the-anonymous-poster update: One outstanding guess (paging aliza250), one where I had to be told (eclectic_1), all others identified. That was fun.

The stereotype is that smart people (including anyone whose job title implies serious analytical skills) don't get picked for juries, but I'm beginning to wonder. I've been called three times and picked twice, and our engineering director is currently away from work because he's on a jury. Do they just sometimes miss in the screening, or are the lawyers not really screening for this sort of thing after all?

A Texas judge has ordered that a person convicted of animal cruetly must post pictures of the animals she starved in her jail cell. Good for the judge! This is similar to the local story some months back of the hit-and-run driver who is required to carry a photo of the person he killed in his wallet during his probation. Such orders do no harm (it's hardly "cruel and unusual") and serve to put a human (or animal, in the one case) face on the damage done by these people. More, please. (And remember, we're talking about people convicted of criminal charges; I am not advocating haunting those who accidentally cause harm and don't try to hide it with such sentences.)

Do spammers really think that people still open messages with the subject line "URGENT"? Or that most of us think we even might know a sender named Brittany? Ah well; it doesn't fool the filters.

At my most recent physical my doctor called for a routine test that kicks in for women at age 40. (Am I being sufficiently delicate?) No surprises there; the surprise came when I called to schedule and the person said "oh, and no caffeine for two days before". After I moved from incoherent blubbering to actual words, I explained that this posed a difficulty and she relented. It turned out to be advice, not medical necessity. Don't scare me like that!

As I approached the polling place this morning I wondered if they'd moved it without telling me -- there was that little signage. Yeah, it's a primary, but I still thought there'd be more campaigning, especially with one hot race for US Senate.

As I was voting I heard one of the workers say "that's the first Independent of the day". I'm not actually an Independent; I'm a registered Libertarian. To them it's the same thing: disable everything except the ballot initiative. The bundle of cards from which they pulled my registration seemed to represent about 10% of all cards, based on what I saw in the bin. (No, it didn't include Republicans.) Interesting. I wonder if the set of people registered in minor parties has a higher turn-out rate than the Republicans and Democrats. I suspect that people who register in minor parties are more likely to be politically active, but I don't know where to find the data on turn-out by party.

I considered temporarily changing my registration to Republican so I could influence that hot Senate race, but decided against. It feels wrong even though it's legal, and that race may already be messed up because the Democrats were encouraging their people to do that very thing and I suspect a bunch of them did. (The incumbent is mostly a Democrat in Republican's clothing; the challenger is a more traditional Republican. The Dems want to knock the challenger out early.) Besides, I couldn't decide which is less evil.

A friend once asked me why I choose to sit out the "real election" for local mayor -- that is, the Democratic primary. (This city is something like 75% or 80% Democrat; no one else need apply for local office.) Registering as a Libertarian, in addition to matching my beliefs more closely, also helps that party get onto the ballot and onto the registration form, and ultimately I think that's more important. You can actually check "Libertarian" on the voter-registration form now (you couldn't 15 years ago), because we passed a threshold with write-ins. Now we have to maintain it. If even a few people look at that option on the form and say "hey, whazzat?" before checking Democrat or Republican, we might increase awareness that there are other options. And maybe eventually that'll mean Libertarians in local offices. (Forget the national races; win local offices first and then focus on Congress, IMO.) I'm not active with the party itself, but at least my registration helps out a little.

Oh, in case you're wondering: I didn't live here during the last mayoral primary; Mayor Murphy is not my fault. I might have actually changed party registration for that vote becuase Murphy was so clearly a destructive force even then. To paraphrase a current anti-Bush campaign: I'd rather vote for a rabid weasel than Tom Murphy.

Wow, it's 72 degrees in Pittsburgh today!

I love it: http://www.godhatesshrimp.com. "Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, all these are an abomination before the Lord, just as gays are an abomination. Why stop at protesting gay marriage? Bring all of God's law unto the heathens and the sodomites." Thank you bodnej.

On a more somber note, Chernobyl, 18 years later -- a photo tour. Link courtesy of bhakti.

Livejournal is currently running a poll on whether to allow people to hide individual people on the "friend of" list on the user-info page. (Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about; the fact that someone reads my journal says nothing about my relationship to him. And you can hide the entire list if you like.) I just noticed that one suggestion that has been made many times in the past, most recently in the context of this poll, has been implemented, though. Go look at your info page; it no longer says "friend of", but the more accurate "read/trusted by". Interesting. They have not yet made the corresponding change, replacing "friends" with "reads/trusts". And I don't know where thing stand with splitting those ideas into two separate lists, which was talked about a couple months ago. (I imagine the UI, and switch-over, will be a bit of a challenge.)

I still owe some interviews (on both sides of the desk, so to speak); I'll get to them after Shabbat and Purim. I haven't forgotten about you.

We're having about a dozen people over for Purim lunch on Sunday. It should be fun. I went to the liquor store a few nights ago to stock up. (I don't actually anticipate that anyone is really going to get completely rip-roaring drunk; I don't think I'll run out of anything. But I want to offer variety, so I now have an assortment of wine, hard liquor, and what one friend calls "girly drinks", aka cordials.) Oh, and we're having some food too. :-) (I'm making brisket, wings, fish, and assorted side dishes.)

For the last few days there has been a story in the news about a baby that was born with two heads (twins gone wrong). Or, more precisely, about the surgery that was being done to remove one of them. Some of the reported facts got me to wondering about something.

The second head had brain activity. (I understood it to be activity independent of the other brain.) The additional head had eyes, a mouth, and other features that moved and apparently reacted to environment. If the head remained it was certainly going to become a serious hardship for the child, both physically and mentally. It was not clear to me that its presence was directly life-threatening.

So, the doctors removed an entity that was developed enough to have a working brain and body parts, which was infringing on a host entity through no fault of its own, to preserve the health but not necessarily the life of said host.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with that decision. But I wonder how those who are anti-abortion see it. I did not hear of any protests outside the hospital, and I would be somewhat surprised if a significant number of anti-abortion folks actually objected to this surgery. You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted to object to this, I think.

But I wonder about the reasoning. What are the salient differences between this case and abortion that make the former acceptable and the latter not? Is it just that a suffering child tugs on the heart-strings more than a suffering adult? Or is there a real difference? The analogous abortion case would seem to be an unintended, risky pregnancy resulting in a fetus with a serious not-immediately-fatal defect, like Down's. While many anti-abortion people make exceptions for cases like that, many others do not. They're the ones I'm curious about.

I am pleased to see that the Massachusetts supreme court has ruled that same-sex marriages are legal. 'Bout time someone does. IMO, so long as states are going to assert a vested interest in marriages, they must use civil, not religious, definitions. Any religion is of course free to declare that a union is not a legal marriage for their purposes; that happens already.

Giant Microbes -- plushie toys for your favorite maladies, from the common cold to Ebola. Perfect for your Valentine's Day needs; surely this beats adopted cockroaches. Plushie link courtesy of browngirl.

Ur-ine Control, a urinal turned videogame controller, from those wackos at MIT (I say that with the utmost respect, of course). Link courtesy of the_never.

A good analysis of the current economic doings in Pittsburgh by tangerinpenguin. My favorite part: "[The mayor's] track record for recognizing when he's a part of Playa Politics only in the same sense that Frosted Choco-Bombs are part of this complete breakfast, unfortunately, bodes poorly."

I didn't watch the superbowl (not even the commercials), but apparently one of the anti-smoking ads has a real web site: Shards O Glass Freeze-Pops. As jducoeur said, this shows dedication to a nasty satire. (The ad is there, too, for those who missed it like I did.)

Today in talmud study: some not-very-satisfying, but interesting, attempts at the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people and vice-versa. I'll write it up later. (This is a reminder to myself. And I know I also owe an interview and a set of questions.)

In the last several days the amount of spam I receive seems to have decreased, from about 100 messages a day to about 50-60. I wonder who I should thank. Or is it just seasonal, with the end of the month being more popular than the beginning of the month?

Friday night I met Malcolm Dalglish. Neat! (His neice was being bat mitzvah this Shabbat at my synagogue.) Malcolm Dalglish is a very good hammer-dulcimer player, one of several whose recordings I listened to a lot when I was starting to play. I've never seen him in concert and had completely lost track of him, and then my rabbi happened to mention his name in passing at services and my ears perked up. So I tried not to be a fangirl. :-)

Speaking of music, what is the shared musical property that many Yiddish songs have? This is probably really "many songs from such-and-such time and location", but I don't know the genre. But there's something -- a mode, a melobdic pattern, a chord structure, or something -- that allowed me to correctly predict that the song the cantor was about to sing would be in Yiddish, based only on the piano intro. And the song really did sound like the Yiddish songs Dani's mother likes to listen to (those are probably mostly from Russia), though it was not one I recognized. I just lack the sample size to put my finger on what that similarity is. (I don't actually like a lot of this music, so my curiosity will not be satisfied by accumulating a large sample size. :-) )

Saturday morning's ice-breaker question was interesting (though we were trying to keep answers short due to time). Every morning we thank God for making us free. (Orthodox Jews thank God for making us not slaves, instead.) So, looking ahead to 2004, are we more looking forward to "freedom to" or "freedom from" something? (Naming the something was optional.)

I live a pretty privileged life. I have plenty to eat and wear; I have a good job; I have a comfortable home; I have good friends and family; there is nothing that I truly need but lack. So my thoughts turned immediately to "freedom to". Nothing specific came to mind, actually -- I hope to pretty much keep doing the things I've been doing. I have no major changes queued up.

There is one area of concern, though; I hope for freedom from the big-brother government that things like the Patriot act enable. (Were you paying attention? Did you notice that many provisions of Patriot II are now law, and that the FBI can now secretly snoop on you through your bank, credit-card company, stock broker, and even jeweler? What's next, monitoring grocery purchases?) I think our civil liberties are probably at their greatest risk since the McCarthy era. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to say something yesterday; it might have gotten a few more people thinking about it.

Good heavens. I can have 50 userpics now?!

I led a shiva minyan tonight (my second time). Gauging people's level of comfort with Hebrew continues to challenge me, but we did ok. I need to learn Eil Malei Rachamim -- the prayer in which we specifically name the deceased -- in Hebrew. The combination of unfamiliar text and the navigational hazards of a paragraph set up to support masculine and feminine options meant I wasn't about to try. (I will probably, eventually, make myself two complete versions, one for each gender. That would be much easier for me.)

Sunday dinner was just four of us this week; Mike is in Italy (lucky guy!) and none of the other usual suspects made it. We spent some time D&D-geeking. :-)

The order of seasons seems to have gotten shuffled locally. Not that I object to 70-degree days in November; it's just a little peculiar. And I was able to get the sukkah down Sunday after music practice.

Tomorrow is our company's annual retreat. I'm always ambivalent about these, and I wonder if this is the best timing given a major deadline coming up soon, but oh well. It'll probably be a long day (after which I have to go vote), because they never stagger these with respect to rush hour so we get it on both ends. I'd actually be fine with either shift; I could show up at 7am once a year if it meant shorter drives. Fortunately, I was able to hitch a ride with someone. (There's no way I'm driving some of the roads involved after dark.)

Political compass (I've seen this before but it's been a while):

Economic Left/Right: 1.75
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.62

They include a graph showing (their assessment of) the placement of assorted political figures. They show no one in my quadrant. Sniff. (An earlier example shows Friedman -- presumably Milton -- in my quadrant, but not especially close to me.)

Alabama isn't the only place with controversies over judicial monuments to the 10 commandments; there's a local case of this too. But ours doesn't weigh 2.5 tons; it's just a plaque and thus easy to miss in the political and media circus.

An article in yesterday's paper described what happened when a reporter stood near the courthouse and asked random people to list the commandments. The average hit rate was three. I do wonder, and the article didn't discuss this, how they handled different interpretations of this list. We don't all draw the lines in the same places. Jews and I think some Protestants say there's one commandment against coveting, for example, not two like the Roman Catholics say.

Quite aside from the legal and social issues surrounding these public displays, I find myself wondering where all the emphasis on these ten commandments really comes from. It's my impression that Christians focus on this a lot more than Jews do. Jews focus on the revelation at Sinai, of which this list is a part, but we have 613 commandments (and all the derivatives), so these ten aren't anything like a complete list. Yes, there are talmudic arguments that say that the 613 reduce to these ten, but some of the contortions are, um, challenging.

But Christians have more commandments than just these ten, too. After all, the ten commandments don't include anything that Jesus added, and at least "do unto others..." and "love your neighbor" are every bit as important as honoring parents.

So do we all just like neat, tidy lists with nice round numbers, or what? Why have these few verses been pulled out of scripture and given elevated importance?

Aside: At Shavuot we read the revelation at Sinai. In some congregations it's customary to stand for the ten commandments. In others, it is custom specifically not to stand for them, because that elevates them above the rest of the Torah.

SelectSmart (link from insomnia) is a matchmaker between your political views and the current set of presidential candidates. Interesting idea; I'd say the implementation is so-so thus far. According to them I have 100% match with the Libertarian candidate (no real surprise there, though in reality it's more like 90%); next on their list was Pat Buchanan at 61%, which is a definite "no" for me. (And let me just throw in a "yuck!" toward a couple other folks in my top 10, shall we? Sharpton?! Jackson?! Give me a break.)

I think the big problem with the test as currently configured is that they don't adequately distinguish between "opposed to X" and "don't care about X". Each question has a high/medium/low setting for how much you care about that category of issues (e.g. taxes), but when a question is a group of positions (check all that apply), the absence of a check doesn't tell you whether the person filling out the survey doesn't care or is opposed to the position. So, for example, I didn't check "Law enforcement agencies should be granted greater discretion to read mail and email, tap phones, and conduct random searches"; I'm betting from some of the rankings I got that the test incorrectly interpreted that as "doesn't care".

( full results )
I see that they have the notion of negative ratings, though given that I consider some of the people on this list to be antithesis to what I believe -- and they didn't score negatively -- I'm not sure how to interpret that.

The Republicans in Congress are trying to pass a bill (which Bush has said he will sign into law) giving "person" status to a fetus independent of its mother. They're using the Peterson case as justification. This is so wrong. ( Read more... )

The evil melding-of-church-and-state bill passed the House. Bah. Yes, it doesn't really mean anything on its face; it's just a resolution for the president to say some words to endorse religion, and he does that on his own all the time anyway. But it's still offensive coming from Congress. I don't want to live in a theocracy, even if I got to choose the theology.

I got an auto-response from my representative yesterday saying, basically, thanks for the email and expect a paper letter in several weeks. He voted for it, so I'll probably get some patronizing piece of drivel about how in these tough times we all need to unite and do God's will or some such. Sadly, an elected Democrat from Pittsburgh need not fear reprisal at the polls. (How did your rep vote?)

Speaking of government, I should really get around to ordering a copy of my birth certificate. Maybe even getting a passport, just so I'll have it. I can probably make off with my parents' copy of the former to help with the Pesach trip to Canada in a few weeks. I've never had my ID challenged at the border, but times are different now and I'm travelling with a non-citizen who was born in the middle east.

Speaking of Pesach (sort of), frozen gefilte fish is much better than the stuff that comes in jars. I'm never going back.

Speaking of religion (ok, the transitions are getting weak): For those who were interested in the "conversion reruns" journal, see shira_reruns. It'll get off to a slow start (I didn't write as much at the beginning), with the pace picking up in June.

Apropos of nothing (hey, I can tell when transitions are a lost cause), I had a very pleasnt lunch with a friend and past co-worker yesterday. It's way too easy to lose track of people when you no longer see them on a daily basis. He also found this journal, which intrigues me because it's not googlable. Not that I mind, of course; I was just surprised.

I've advanced another hole on my belt, and many of my pants now require a belt. Woo hoo. But Pesach is going to be bad for this, isn't it? I guess I should work on keeping matzah consumption down; being dense, it's probably even worse than pita for calorie/benefit tradeoffs.