Entries tagged with science fiction

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I don't think that's how consciousness works

I recently read Corey Doctorow's novel Walkaway. It's set in a post-scarcity world where the super-rich (zota rich, or just zotas) hold their power by stomping everyone else down. There's enough to go around, but people have to work (at crap jobs for crap wages) anyway, while the zotas sit back. Some people hate this and decide to opt out by walking away and forming their own communities off the grid. The book follows some of these walkaways, as they're called. (And no, the zotas are not cool with this.)

Another theme of the book is conquering death -- that's how the characters view it. More specifically, their goal is to be able to back up a human's essence, at which point if you get killed you can be restored from backup (initially as a digital simulation, eventually into a new body). This is an attractive idea in SF and this book is hardly the first to explore it, but I always get tripped up by the same issue, including in this book.

That issue is: sure, it'd be nice if I could back up my brain so that "Monica" would never have to cease to exist, but that doesn't mean that backup is me. It would think so, of course; it would have all my memories. But from my perspective, my body dies -- I die. If I'm dead, do I really care if there's a simulation of me running out there somewhere?

This is not conquering death. At best it's mitigating it. Which makes it hard for me to relate to stories where people say "great, ditch the meat body and come back digitally or in a robot or a perfect body or whatever". Would people really do that? I find that hard to swallow.

Despite this point, I mostly enjoyed the book. There's one place where there's a jump in time that I found rather abrupt, and the story is far more dialogue-heavy than I'm used to, with a lot of philosophy in that dialogue. (In other words, large blocks of philosophy-dialogue or exposition-dialogue, as opposed to short, interactive dialogue.) But many of the characters are engaging and walkaway-land sounds like a cool place to live, when the zotas aren't trying to quash it.

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Arrival (no spoilers)

We saw Arrival this afternoon and quite enjoyed it. No spoilers in this post, though I can't make any promises about comments.

The movie is based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. Even if I hadn't heard positive things about the movie, I might well have gone out of extreme curiosity about how they would translate the story to film. The short story is a thinky, introspective tale with a decent amount of linguistics as a core part of the story. Linguistics, unlike physical sciences, doesn't translate as easily to the screen (i.e. it doesn't explode). So the movie tells a slightly different story, with some different focuses, and that's ok. It's a good, solid movie that shows us truly alien aliens, all-too-human humans, and a linguist and a physicist who take center stage in a first-contact situation. The physicist is there to try to learn their science; the linguist is there to figure out how to communicate with them when there is no shared language upon which to build. (They could have afforded to spend a few minutes less on the visual effects to introduce the aliens.)

The alien language is very cool. And it reveals one of the things that makes them alien. Learning the language entails learning some of that alien-ness, too.

The linguist, Dr. Louise Banks, is the point-of-view character through whom we see everything else. It's nice to see linguistics get some love in popular fiction. (And I also learned a thing about the Sanskrit word for war.) I wish the character had come across as strong in the movie as she did in the book; it took a while for her to find her stride. The main story is interspersed with flashes into other times in her life, and that's all I'll say about that because I promised no spoilers.

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airplane reading #3: The Three-Body Problem

The last of the books I read on our trip was The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, translated from Chinese by Ken Liu (after which it won a Hugo). I enjoyed the novel for both the science-fiction plot and the view into Chinese culture and history, and the translator did an excellent job of not just translating words but making the context accessible to western readers while still feeling Chinese. This kind of translation task is as much art as science.

The story takes place over several decades (and the novel jumps around some), starting during the Cultural Revolution. One of our point-of-view characters, Ye Wenjie, sees her physics-professor father murdered by the Red Guards and is sent to the countryside (where she is branded as subversive), but her own physics research was ground-breaking and eventually attracts the attention of a military research team. She needs protection and they need her brain, so off she goes. While working for them on the search for extra-terrestrial life she eventually finds something.

Another point-of-view character, Wang Miao, is a nanotech researcher who starts having disturbing visions. During his investigation he stumbles across a VR game called "Three Body" and begins playing it (rather obsessively). The game is set on an alien world where civilization has risen and fallen many times. This is because their star system is unstable; they have periods of stable time when they can settle, grow food, and live normally, but from time to time they are interrupted by chaotic times that pose grave danger. Each time Wang plays he is dropped into a new iteration of their development and learns a little more about this world.

You know these threads are going to come together, right?

There are other threads; the story is neither simple nor completely linear. But it's not one of those books where you need to keep notes to track what's going on, either. And despite a character list at the beginning that made me think "many of these names are too similar", I didn't have trouble keeping track of who was who because the characters are presented with some depth.

While there are some fantastical elements (including the mechanism by which inhabitants of the other world survive chaotic times), the hard science in this book is, as far as I can tell, real. The translator provides footnotes for both scientific and cultural references, which I found helpful.

I picked up this book when it was the Tor free e-book of the month a few months back. (If you don't know about that, check it out.) There are two sequels, both of which have now been translated to English, which I look forward to reading.

Small disappointment: Wang finds out about game via a URL he sees on someone else's computer. We're given the URL. But the publishers don't seem to have claimed it and done anything interesting with it. Oh well.

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airplane reading #1: Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

I recently spent a lot of time on airplanes without an Internet connection -- a perfect time to catch up on some reading. First up: Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor.

Somebody recommended this to me but I don't now remember who. I'm very glad to have been exposed to speculative fiction from a culture not my own. (This will be a continuing, though unplanned, theme; book #2 was The Three-Body Problem.)

The story is set in Lagos, Nigeria (the author's home country). Aliens have just landed in the nearby ocean and they bring change. These aliens feel alien; they are not just humans in different skin or with different appendages like aliens sometimes are in fiction. Their motives and methods are mysterious, and I'm still not sure if they're good guys, bad guys, or...something else. I like the ambiguity.

To this American reader, Lagos feels a little alien too, and the author does a good job of conveying the feel of the city.

There are three primary characters, and a whole bunch of others, some major and many minor. The three have been chosen by the aliens for, well, something. They're an unlikely group -- a marine biologist, a soldier, and a rap singer -- who don't know each other at the start. Over the course of the book we learn their individual stories.

The storytelling jumps around, showing us vignettes involving different characters whose stories, naturally, will come to intersect. And they're not all human (or alien); the point-of-view character in the opening scene is a swordfish, and there are others later. A bat that seems to be a throw-away detail in an early scene shows up later; it's all connected. We see characters grow, change, scheme, and sometimes fall apart.

In reading the book I was challenged by one thing: the author sometimes writes characters speaking Pidgin English, and I came away from those scenes thinking I had the gist of it but hadn't gotten everything. It was also a reminder that the rest of the time these characters weren't speaking English at all, but of course the book is in English. Having the dialogue that, in the story, is the closest to English be, in written form, the farthest from English took some getting used to. I didn't notice until I got to the end of the book that there was a glossary in the back.

I enjoyed getting to know the people and the world of Lagoon.

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suspension of disbelief

It's funny the things that do and don't trigger suspension-of-disbelief problems for me. I enjoy speculative fiction -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, etc. This means accepting some basic premises -- faster-than-light travel, teleportation, magic, time travel, or whatever. I'm totally cool with all that.

I had two recent experiences with other factors in such stories.

First, last night I finally saw Looper (Netflix: last year's movies this year, which is fine with me). I enjoyed it in general (the ending moved it from "ok" to "I liked that"), but some of the implementation details gave me pause. (Everything I'm about to say is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie.) The basic idea is that "the mob" in the future sends people they want to kill back in time 30 years to have hired assassins do the deed and dispose of the bodies in the past -- easier to get away with. That's fine. But the assassins know that they aren't going to be allowed to live past that point in the future -- you get 30 years of high pay and then at some point the guy sent back is going to be you and you "close the loop" by killing him. Ok, I can work with that.

So...why does the future mob need assassins in the past? Why not just send bodies back? Or if the time-travel device only works with live people, then -- given that we've seen them land very precisely in geo-space and time -- why not send them into a live volcano? And if they need assassins, why not go back 100 years and then not have to worry about them catching up?

As I said, I enjoyed the movie -- but I couldn't help wondering about such obvious questions, which could have been addressed with a few sentences of dialogue but weren't, while at the same time accepting the time-travel premise just fine. Maybe I'm weird.

In a similar vein, I recently finished reading The Domesday Book by Connie Willis, which coincidentally also involves time-travel. In this case they're sending a historian back to the middle ages for direct observation. She's got an implanted recording device, something like a universal translator (also implanted)... and neither a homing beacon (should they need to rescue her) nor a beacon she can drop at the rendezvous point (matched up to an implanted detector). The history department has budget for a time-travel net but not homing beacons? Bummer. (I realize that this would totally mess up the plot of the book.) Also, apparently in the future they only have land-lines. I enjoyed the book (which I read because of the song (YouTube, lyrics)), but I couldn't help noticing.

I guess it's the little things that catch my eye.

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link round-up

From Fantasy in Miniature: Check, Please, on playing a certain game with Death.

From Meirav Beale on G+: an epic tale of technology and grandparents. Excerpt: Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Fernadale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.

From Lilie Dubh on G+: The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor. Thoughtful and well worth the read. (Language is not 100% work-safe.)

From Language Log: What would Jesús do?

Lost your cell phone and don't have another phone to call from handy? Nyan Cat can help. (This came via G+ but I've lost track of who posted it.)

From Law and the Multiverse: Legal responsibility for insane robots.

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Judaism and SF

Wandering Stars is the classic compilation of SF around Jewish themes, including halachic issues that just don't arise in day-to-day life like whether space aliens can convert (and, IIRC, managing the calendar on other planets). Some of my readers might be interested in the following speculative questions that have been asked on Judaism.StackExchange:

Does the torah discuss (space) aliens?

Time travel and Judaism

If a pig was genetically modified to chew its cud would it be kosher?

(I just posted these on an old entry in response to a comment (was cleaning out spam and noticed it), but I then thought they might be of more general interest.)

Edit:

The following were contributed by Isaac Moses in a comment:

Can a robot be your rabbi? (As if we don't have enough trouble with people thinking that a website can be a rabbi.)

Does Robot = Golem?

Can a robot be your official agent? Looks like your anthology can have a whole section on robots.

If you can drive a car using only your brain, can you do that on Shabbat?

And based on another comment, I just asked: When does somebody living in space observe shabbat?

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science fiction,
tv

The Lost Room

Netflix suggested that I would enjoy The Lost Room, a six-(TV)-hour show that ran on the Sci-Fi channel a few years ago. Boy were they right!

I can't say too much about the plot without spoiling the show, which does a very good job of revealing new information at the right time and in an interesting manner. The show revolves around Detective Joe Miller, who, while investigating a robbery and suspicious deaths, comes into possession of a key to a "non-existent" hotel room. Use the key to open any lock, get transported to the lost room. Exit the room to any door you choose. Powerful, fantastical, and you can imagine the possibilities if such a key existed.

Except that Joe's eight-year-old daughter disappears into the room and vanishes. Joe's quest is to get her back. As he tries to do this he learns that there are other special objects -- and other people interested in obtaining them.

The story is well-written (though the ending felt rushed). I particularly noticed the dialogue drawing me in. The story is on the dark side -- this is not your pixie-dust-and-bright-lights magic -- but has a fair bit of levity in good places (and my favorite line in the entire show made me laugh out loud). I don't usually notice acting (though often notice its absence :-) ) but I did notice it here; Joe and the primary sometimes-friend, sometimes-antagonist were well-done and the others weren't bad. The visual style was appropriate and the room was well-done. The music did a good job of setting the mood.

I found the show very satisfying. If you like "thinky" plot-driven SF, I think you might too.

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The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect got lukewarm reviews when it was in theatres and I don't go out to see that many movies anyway, so I missed it at the time. Last night I remedied that with the DVD, and boy am I glad I did. (No spoilers in this post, but I can't vouch for comments.)

The story follows a college student, Evan, who had several blackouts as a child, almost always in stressful situations. The doctors encouraged him to keep a detailed journal in hopes of finding clues to the problem. Eventually Evan discovered that he could use the journal entries around the blackouts to go back in time and change those situations. Change, however, is not always good, as any veteran consumer of time-travel stories will assure you.

There are some scenes in this movie that were very difficult to watch. (One in particular: cruelty to animals is a major squick for me; that it was not shown on-screen was not sufficient mitigation.) But I found the story compelling and the characters generally believable as they morphed through changing situations.

The DVD offers the directors' cut and the theatrical release; without any advance knowledge I chose the former, figuring it would pick up a few deleted scenes but be basically the same. (While for books I usually prefer works that have stood the scrutiny of editors, for movies I tend to watch the story the director wanted to tell unless I know of a reason not to.) Later, when I was looking (unsuccessfully) for a detailed plot synopsis online to confirm a couple details of sequencing, I learned that the endings are very different between the two. Having seen the directors' ending and read about the one that showed in theatres, I am glad I watched the one I did. While much darker, it seems a much more powerful conclusion to the story.

Recommended, with the caveats about some troubling themes. Not for kids.

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science fiction,
tv

Jeremiah season 2 (finally!)

Several years ago I learned about the TV show Jeremiah, which was written (and produced, at least in part) by JMS (of B5 fame). The story is a post-apocalypse drama that moves from surviving to rebuilding, with the challenges you would expect along the way, and the slowly-revealed backstory of how that apocalypse came to be in the first place. (Ok, more slowly revealed in the script than in my brain, but that's ok.) I didn't get the relevant channel back when the show aired, but the first season eventually came out on DVD so I got to see that. The second season, however, continued to elude me.

When I got a Netflix membership a few months ago I noticed that while there were no DVDs, the second season was available for streaming. I figured that one way or another I was going to have a Roku box by now to watch streaming video on the TV (watching TV on the computer kind of sucks), so I waited. The Roku box (do they have a generic term for "Roku box" to protect their trademark?) was ready to go on Sunday, so I moved a few things around in my streaming queue before settling down to break it in. That's when I noticed what I'm pretty sure was an annotation that could only be a few days old: Jeremiah would be available for streaming only until the end of December 2009.

Well. Deep breath. Two days (yesterday and tomorrow) were already fully booked and parts of Monday and today were, but I figured I could still both watch and enjoy watching the season, and I couldn't figure out any useful way to capture that stream for later viewing with tools already on hand, so off I went.

I just finished watching it and I am highly satisfied. The second season was cut short (with enough warning that they could react), so -- like the fourth season of B5 -- it was rushed in places that really could have benefited from more time to tell the story, but it worked well anyway and I'm not sure that extra time would have been spent in the best places anyway. This was compressed but it worked; that's no small feat.

Apparently there was talk of a third season (yes, despite the handling of the second), but I'm glad it didn't happen. I enjoyed this show, but it ended in a very good place, leaving us to imagine how the rest plays out without showing it to us. Showing it to us would have weakened the story, in my opinion. Unless the next season was going to jump forward a few years, I'm having trouble imagining how it wouldn't have been a let-down.

Tonight, Wikipedia informs me that a DVD release of the second season is finally planned (US only) -- probably the reason the streaming is going away. That's good news; I wonder what brought it on. (It's going to be "manufacture on demand" and I'm not sure what that means about quality or packaging; we'll have to wait and see.)

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science fiction

plug: Duplicate (novella)

I read an early draft of Alex Feinman's novella "Duplicate" and found it compelling. It's now available for sale, either as a print book or an e-book. I'm looking forward to getting my (print) copy.

Mining in space has taken off. This is expensive and dangerous. But not to fear -- if you get mortally wounded in an accident in space, you just crawl into your Dupli-Pod where your brain is downloaded and later you'll be re-constituted. Nothing could go wrong with that, right? Right. And surely the corporation funding these expeditions will spare no expense to make sure everything's in top working order before sending people out, right? I think you know the answer to that.

To say more would spoil the story, so you should go read it yourself.

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science fiction,
tv

FlashForward

I've been enjoying FlashForward, a new TV show this season. The premise: one day in October everyone in the world blacks out for two minutes and change. (Lots of people die during this time in accidents.) During the blackout people saw visions of the future -- the same specific date in April for everyone. Some of those futures were disturbing, leaving people with the question "what do I do now?". The show follows a core group of characters, including several FBI agents who are investigating the phenomenon because one of them had a vision of him doing so, raising questions of causality that I hope will be taken up as the show progresses.

Not everyone saw flashes, and the common belief is that those people didn't see their futures because they would be dead before that date in April. One of our POV characters is in this situation. Another saw something that "could not be true" -- he saw someone known to be dead. Another claims to have seen someone who didn't have a flash (so presumed to be dead).

I had my suspicions, and tonight's episode backs me up. ( spoilers )

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random bits

I used to occasionally have a problem with an overnight power outage killing the alarm clock and causing me to oversleep, but I've more recently realized that having a UPS or three means never having to fear that again. :-) (Fortunately, today's power outage came after we were up, not in the middle of the night, and only lasted about five minutes. I was just about ready to interrupt my morning grooming to shut down computers when the need went away.)

In the "interesting if true, and interesting anyway" department: earlier this week I learned that the folks who handle disposal of sensitive documents for my company are blind. (Well, not the truck driver.) If I understand correctly, the local blind association arranges this, as sort of an extra guarantee or something. Who'd'a thought?

Signal boost: it looks like someone's testing stolen credit-card numbers on a large scale. Check your statement for microtransactions; they're testing the cards with ~20-cent transactions to verify that they're good before hammering them. Link from

jducoeur.

A few days ago my copy of I Remember the Future by

mabfan arrived. Yay! I'll have some nice reading for Shabbat.

Oldest LOLcat? Link from

siderea.

My doctor confirmed that I should be taking calcium supplements now to (with luck) fend off problems later. Where can I find calcium tablets that are sized for, y'know, normal people and not horses? Most bottles in stores don't even include pictures on the label, so it's hit or miss. The oblong ones I have are scored for cutting widthwise, but I need them to be narrower, not necessarily shorter, and my attempts to do that have all ended badly. What do other women of a certain age do?

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interviewed by talvinamarich

( religion, musical instruments, operating systems, misc )

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link round-up

Humor:

This Frazz strip rings true. :-)

Quote of the day, by gnomi: "The simple carbohydrate asks, 'What's this?' To him you should explain about all the starches that are chametz, but not the afikomen."

Ten Principles of Economics, Translated includes this gem and many others: "Microeconomists are wrong about specific things; macroeconomists are wrong in general". (link from osewalrus.)

These greeting cards are a little off the beaten path. One of my minions sent me one of these a while ago, but I'd forgotten about the site until jducoeur pointed it out.

His and hers diary entries is heavily stereotyped, but funny.

Not humor:

When your tech tells you something is a Bad Idea by siderea is important for everyone who hires consultants, broadly speaking.

mabfan's SF story collection, I Remember the Future, will be coming out in September. I've read several of the stories in the collection and look forward to reading the rest.

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His Dark Materials

After I saw the movie The Golden Compass I added the trilogy to my reading stack. I finished them a couple weeks ago but didn't get around to writing about it before now. Terse impression: rich worlds and characters I wanted to follow; the first two and a half books hung together reasonably well, but the last half of the last book went off into la-la land, which affected my enjoyment of the whole. Spoilers follow.

( Read more... )

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random bits

I've mentioned before that my synagogue maintains a freezer of donated, cooked food to have on hand for houses of mourning, families where someone's sick, and similar acute cases of need. I think this is a great idea; if you're cooking anyway you can cook a little more to donate and help someone out. Yesterday I got email from the person who monitors this saying they're low on meat and pareve dishes, so tonight I'm roasting an oven-full of chicken to take over (less one meal's worth for ourselves this week), and tomorrow night I will make some vegetarian soup. I love being able to help in this way.

Speaking of soups, recently Dani and I were at a restaurant where I had a really fabulous butternut-squash soup. This one was dairy (I detected cream), and I couldn't identify all the spices. Web-surfing has led me to some promising recipes; I'm open to specific suggestions. I have now procured one butternut squash with which to experiment.

I'm about 40% of the way through the second book of His Dark Materials. I am pretty sure I know what the deal was with Grummon (the explorer Asriel went off in search of). So either I'm right or the author is being clever and has something up his sleeve. It feels pretty darn obvious, so I'm not ruling out the latter. (No, please don't tell me; I'll know on my own soon.)

The local SCA choir is singing at an event this weekend. I think we sounded really good at Monday's practice; I'm looking forward to the performance. We'll also be doing one piece jointly with our instrumental group, which is nifty. We haven't done that in years.

Jericho returns for a short second season (half-season?) next week. I really liked this show, so I'm glad to see it unharmed by the writers' strike. Whether it is harmed by its network is yet to be seen. (They cancelled it and then responded to a fan campaign.)

Assorted links (most sources lost, sorry):

Baby dos and don'ts. That the site is not in English really doesn't matter.

Surfing cat. It's not entirely clear to me that this is the cat's idea.

Joel on Software recommends Tripit for keeping track of the assorted confirmation numbers involved in travelling. Sounds useful especially for us infrequent travellers who don't have the routine down already.

Bruce Schneier on security versus privacy. Too many people think it's a zero-sum game; it's not.

Bookmarking (haven't finished reading yet): Rands in Repose on preparing presentations. It's odd: in most contexts public speaking is, ahem, not my strong suit. Really not my strong suit, even in fields I know very well. I get nervous and fumbly-mouthed. The exception? While I'm not as skilled at the mechanics yet as I'd like to be, giving sermons or divrei torah does not make me nervous.

I pass this on too late for voters in half the primaries in the country, but even so, there's a general election coming, so:

jducoeur nails what's really important in choosing a candidate. (PA doesn't vote until late April. It's possible we won't actually be irrelevant this time, but we'll see how today turns out.)

George Bush v Mohammed ibn Tugluq by David Director Friedman, on whom the law binds.

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welcome to the galaxy-wide web

A long time ago, I published a set of instructions for building a yurt (aka ger), the Mongolian temporary dwelling. I had built one for SCA use, building on knowledge from others, and collected what I'd learned as the next contribution. I'm sure there've been plenty of works since then that should have deprecated my little article, but it's floating around out there so I get inquiries from time to time.

The letter from the middle-school class in Myanmar asking if I thought using bamboo would work was the most unusual query I'd gotten until the one from the fellow in Scotland considering a housing change who wanted to know if it would stand up to force-11 winds. But tonight I got something even better.

This was a request for permission to adapt my article. You see (the writer says), in Star Wars there's this (race? nation?) called the Mandalorians, who have many parallels to the Mongols, and he wants to publish a manual for building a vheh'yaim, which is something like a yurt.

The sender's web site refers to a Second Life Mandalorian community. (Also something called Star Wars Galaxies, which I infer is another online community. And also Wookiepedia, but the obvious URLs don't turn anything up.) I wonder if there are also Star Wars re-enactors who actually build stuff the way the SCA and Klingon and Civ War folks do.

The world-wide web: it's not just for Earth any more. :-)

(I said yes, and in the time it took me to compose this entry he wrote back to say that it's theoretical now, but he won't be surprised if that changes.)

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interviewed by tigerbright

Receiving these questions reminded me that I owed questions to a couple people. I've posted some for you on that entry; if you didn't receive the email, let me know.

( fruit, books, music )

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random bits: SF story, gospel of Judas, family visit, Pesach, Hebrew

Dan Simmons recently published this story on his web site. It's part SF, part commentary on current events, part dystopia, but I enjoyed reading it. (I did see half of the ending revelation coming somewhat early; I don't know if that was intentional.)

I had not heard of the lost gospel of Judas until I saw the news stories a few days ago. I haven't seen the text itself, of course (only what's quoted in the news), but it sounds like it makes an argument that I made for years with teachers in the church I grew up in: if Jesus's execution and resurrection were required for redemption to happen, then wasn't it necessary for Judas to betray Jesus and for the Romans to kill him? Why get mad at either in that case? (It makes sense to get mad at the Romans for their cruelty, but that's different.) By the same logic, those who blame the Jews for killing Jesus miss this point. I'm pretty sure this was one of those questions that generated a note home from Sunday school.

My parents stopped by for a visit today. They brought a loaf of fresh, home-made bread. I'm so glad this visit didn't happen next weekend, during Pesach. :-) (It's a small-enough loaf that we'll finish it before Wednesday.) We haven't seen them in a little while, so it was nice to visit. They report that my neice, who is in Italy for the semester, is a little homesick, but she's also taking the time to explore the country so it doesn't sound all bad. She did ask a friend who was coming to visit to bring her some peanut butter. Who knew that you can't find peanut butter in Florence?

Pesach prep is mostly under control. I've cleared out most of the chametz that I'll be selling (except what we need for the next couple days), and tomorrow the cleaning fairy comes to scrub the kitchen, and then I can bring up the other dishes and stuff. I'm really fortunate to have a large-enough kitchen (not that it's large, but it's large enough) that I can stuff all the current dishes, pans, etc into certain cabinets and then just close them up for the week. Much easier than shlepping it all to the basement.

I have a transliterated haggadah published by Artscroll that I will never use. (I don't need the transliteration and I have other Artscroll haggadot for the core content.) If any of my friends could make use of this, let me know. It won't arrive in time for this year, but you'd have it for the future (maybe even second night this year, depending on the speed of the postal service). Note that as with all transliterations published by Artscroll, it's Ashkenazi pronunciation.

For the last several months, during torah study, my rabbi has been explaining more of the grammar in the Hebrew. (Mostly basic stuff, but more than he used to.) More recently, he's been prefixing some of these comments by addressing me. This week he asked "does anyone other than Monica know...?". We haven't actually had a Hebrew lesson together, but I guess I'm making progress that's visible to him. Nifty -- though I'm a little boggled that he might consider me the most knowledgable of the people in the group, as there are at least two who (I think) know way more than I do.