Monica

My mother-in-law's seder has some singing, but mostly in Yiddish. This year (finally) I seem to have earned enough points with the family; I asked if we could add some Hebrew songs, offering to do the work (compiling and copying), and she said (via Dani) to bring a few. Yay. I'm going to make one double-sided sheet (including sheet music for some), on the theory that there's no sense wasting paper and this way there's a choice. Tiny steps... (At this seder I enjoy spending time with the people and I dislike the haggadah. At my father-in-law's seder, the haggadah is fine but the people aren't interested in doing most of it.)

At work we're about to get some expansion space, and they just published the new seating chart. People were given the option to stay put or take their chances. One of our neighborhoods (oh, did I mention that we have designated neighborhoods? that turns out to be fun, actually) is unpopular due to the way the space is set up. Every person there save one moved out. No one moved in. So the seating chart shows Beth amidst a sea of numbered spaces. There was some talk today of renaming the neighborhood; an early proposal was something like "Beth's Fiefdom" but I suspect that the latest will stick: "Bethlehem". If it weren't so close to Pesach I'd bring her a loaf of bread. :-) ("Bethlehem" is an anglicization of "Beit Lechem", which is literally "house of bread".)

San Francisco is about to ban plastic bags from grocery stores, saying that this will cut down on 1400 tons annually sent to landfills. I wonder how they came up with that figure. Do they catalog the landfills? Are they simply assuming that all bags produced go to landfills and wouldn't otherwise? Have they considered that some of those bags are recycled and, when not available freely, will just be replaced by other plastic bags in landfills? For example, I use them when scooping out the litter box, dog owners use them for a similar purpose on walks, and I know people who use them in bathroom trash cans instead of buying small bags for that purpose. I am not (in this entry) arguing against the policy; I'm merely questioning their data analysis. How do they know how much, if any, reduction there will be in landfills?

This article on Roth IRAs (link from patrissimo) seems to suggest that a simple money-laundering exercise lets one bypass the restrictions on using Roth IRAs. How odd. If that's true, it would be a way for people in higher income brackets to hedge their bets, which seems counter to the intent of the Roth. (Traditional IRAs are tax-free on the way in and subject to income tax on the way out, which makes sense if you think you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire. If you don't trust that tax rates won't go up, though, a Roth IRA is insurance -- you pay the income tax on the way in and nothing when it comes out.)

I'm pretty disgusted with Congress right now. There's a reason we have consitutional guarantees of pesky little things like due process. I hope the pre-election ploy backfires.

This map provides a pretty nifty visualization of 5000 years' worth of conquest of the middle east. (Link from goldsquare.)

On lighter notes...

I was delighted today to learn about TweakUI from a coworker. (Google for it with your version of Windows to get to the right page.) This tool supports a bunch of UI modifications that I haven't explored yet; the one that got me to download and install it is "focus follows mouse", which users of X-Windows may remember. Sometimes there's not enough screen real-estate and I just want to type a command into that mostly-buried shell; why should I have to bring it to the top first? The surprising thing is that this was published by Microsoft (though they say very clearly that it is not supported). I guess there are developers at Microsoft who don't agree with the standard-issue UI. :-)

Some things are Deeply Wrong. As evidence, I offer the can of cat food labelled thus: "white meat chicken Florentine in a delicate sauce with garden veggies". I don't know what's more disturbing: that someone brought that to market, or that Erik loved it. (No, I didn't buy this; it was a free sample.)

About a week ago I got a form letter from one of my senators responding to my letter to him on the Darfur situation. The problem is that I had sent no such letter. But I've written to all of my representatives several times, so I assumed it was just a data-entry error and I got someone else's letter by mistake.

Friday I got a similar letter from my other senator. I hadn't written to him about Darfur either. So now I'm wondering whether some over-eager group out there has decided to send as many letters as possible, using whatever names and addresses they can get their hands on. It's one thing to mount a letter-writing campaign by getting other people to participate; that's completely legitimate. Fraud, however, is not.

The letters my represenatives send are always vague enough that you can't reconstruct the position of the original letter from them. Now in this case it's pretty safe to predict; I don't know of too many people writing to their senators saying "hey, we should join in on trouncing those people!" or the like. My guess is that 99% of the letters my representatives get on the subject of Darfur boil down to "make it stop".

But what if, instead, I'd gotten an unexpected letter thanking me for my comments on the Alito nomination? I would have no idea which tally had been fraudulently incremented, pro or con, and no way to correct that tiny bit of the record.

So while the specific situation is mostly harmless, I'm disturbed by the incident anyway because of what it could have been. Elected representatives don't read the letters we send, but they do pay some attention to the tallies their staffs keep of how much correspondence is coming in on each side of key issues, and I feel like I've been a victim of vote fraud with no audit options.

It's not the same as election-vote fraud perpetrated by governments, but, if I'm right about what happened, it's still a fraudelent interference with the process of governing, and it's one that cannot be chased down.

First the serious one (from unspace): a conscious woman on life support, who happened to be poor and non-white, was removed from a respirator against her will, which is legal in Texas due to a law that Bush signed. Where were the outraged statements from the White House and Congress this time?

Also from unspace: JMS is compiling books of his B5 scripts for sale. It appears that they'll have extra commentary and stuff. I didn't explore far enough to find prices, but I assume they're up there.

And now some lighter stuff:

Compiled religious wisdom from aliza250 (short) should appeal to the geeks reading this.

grouchyoldcoot's struggle with a Christmas tree made me laugh out loud for several minutes.

County property taxes are currently the subject of a fracas. The county executive wants to cap increases in assessments at 4%, because school districts aren't allowed to gain more than 5% a year and if they do, they have to lower the tax rate to compensate. This cap sounds like a win for the taxpayer at first glance, but actually, what it means is that under-assessed properties will remain under-assessed while everyone else picks up the difference. Accurate assessments and the resulting changes in millage rates are more fair, and the current scheme might violate the state constitution. (Fairer still, of course, is to not tax property, or savings. If you have to tax something, taxing consumption (sales tax) seems fairer, with exemptions for food, heat, etc. But don't penalize people for trying to save for the retirement no one else will provide.) But the part I like is that when approving this plan, the council mandated that tax bills would show whether you gained or lost from this scheme. So at least they have to tell us. :-) (Well, that said, how many homeowners see their tax bills? They go to the mortgage company.)

According to CNN, a CA prosecutor and judge conspired to keep Jews off capital juries because "no Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber". I find this curious. Yes, I know a lot of liberal Jews who are anti-capital-punishment, but that's because they're liberal, not because they get it from their religion. Lots of non-Jews are anti-capital-punishment, too. I actually wonder what the proportions supporting capital punishment are in the four groups represented by these two divisions: Jews and Christians, and religious versus non-religious. (Non-religious, in this case, means identifying with the religion but not doing much of anything about it, like the bagels-and-lox Jews and Christmas-and-Easter Christians.) I suspect that religious Jews are the most likely to suppor the death penalty.

Finally, Terry Schiavo. The situation is tragic, but I don't see how it's any business of the federal government to intervene in a specific case. If you have an issue with the way the state courts are structured, address that (if you can, constitutionally -- which I doubt). But you don't get to pick and choose interventions like that. So purely on legal-purity grounds, I hope this current effort fails. On non-legal-purity grounds, I feel awful for everyone involved but it's a sucky way to live and if she did express an opinion on that, her family needs to honor it. And this should serve as a wake-up call for everyone to put these things in writing; she was only 26 when she was struck down. I had a living will by then; do you now?

Our garage-door opener has been flaky for years and finally gave up the ghost this week. This morning I called Sears in search of a replacement. So I got out the phone book to look up their number.

They listed direct-dial numbers for a bazillion departments, none of which obviously said "garage-door openers go here" to me, and a general number. I called the latter. There was no "talk to a human" option, but there was an exciting automated system that was ready to serve me. Or something.

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Short takes:

Real Live Preacher recommended the "Velveteen Rabbi" weblog, so I took a look. I found this post about the liberal/conservative divide in Judaism to be interesting. The weblog is syndicated on LJ as velveteenrabbi.

While I'm not comfortable with Bush's nominee for attorney general, my opinion of the guy just went up a notch. Some folks are mad at him because he didn't elevate his own opinions over the law. Gonzale s said in a 2001 interview: "The question is, what is the law, what is the precedent, what is binding in rendering your decision. Sometimes, interpreting a statute, you may have to uphold a statute that you may find personally offensive. But as a judge, that's your job." Wow, someone in a position of authority who gets it! Now, if I could just be more confident that his ears hear what his mouth is saying...

A couple days ago, Senator Orrin Hatch said that he favors developing software that would remotely destroy computers on which pirated music was downloaded. This attitude is frightening from any senator, but especially from the chair of the Judiciary Committee. I assume everyone knows that part by now.

I wonder if the senator would consider it appropriate to broaden this a bit to, say, destroy computers running unlicensed software. Like, say, his own web site.

Check out this list of top 100 April Fool's pranks (link courtesy of a coworker). I'm glad to see kremvax on the list; that was fun.

I saw a news item this afternoon that a plane is currently being quarantined in California because some passengers showed symptoms of SARS. If I were a healthy passenger on that plane, I'd be pretty irked at my heightened exposure. I hope they can separate the sick from the healthy quickly, before some idiot on the plane breaks out the duct tape.

Yesterday I got a phone call (on the answering machine) from someone saying "good job" on my letter in the paper. Not that I write letters to papers often, but that's still never happened to me before.

CompUSA called yesterday to say that the fan in my machine is dead and the motherboard probably is too, so they're going to replace both. ( Read more... )

I've been vaguely meaning to write about intermarriage for several weeks now, and independently the topic formed in the comments here. But I haven't had time to write my own thoughts on the subject yet.

A coworker and I had approximately the following exchange this afternoon:

Her: Is there a Jewish holiday that corresponds to Easter?

Me: Well, Easter sort of corresponds to Passover, kind of. According to tradition, the Christian last supper was a Passover seder.

Her: (blink)

Me: Is that what you wanted to know?

Her: I meant dates.

Me: Oh. Yes, most years they're within a few days of each other. Sometimes they're a month apart. (pause) This is more than you wanted to know, isn't it?