24: ( spoilers for tonight's episode )

West Wing: ( spoilers for last night's episode )

Knitting fun (too bad I'm not a knitter).

Clue-by-fours for loud cell-phone users (PDF) (link courtesy of goldsquare).

A response to the responses to that cheese sandwich on eBay (link courtesy of profane_stencil).

Brilliant idea I wish I'd thought of: today a coworker and I retrieved some heavy boxes. After putting her box in her trunk, she pulled out a "corner" -- two foot-long 1x4s joined edgewise at a 90-degree angle, covered in cloth and with long outside edges covered in velcro -- and stuck it onto the carpettted floor next to the box. Voila: no box sliding around the back of the car while driving home! Her sweetie made it for her.

I said before that I think it would be a mistake for West Wing to continue past the Bartlet administration. I still think they should end the show, but if they do continue it, based on what we've seen so far I would keep watching a show with Alan Alda's character as president. He hasn't lost his edge in the many years since I saw him in something new, and so far he's being written well. It probably helps that what we've seen of his politics matches me reasonably well. :-)

This rant isn't productive (in fact, it might be counter-productive), but it sure is funny (so long as you don't mind coarse language). Link from buoren.

I heard a new word this weekend, referring to certain breeds of terrier: "verminator". It made me giggle, but I knew exactly what she meant -- which, I suppose, is the purpose of language. :-)

What is it with cats and plastic, anyway? All of my cats like to lick plastic. (They don't ingest it -- just lick.) Embla likes to rub against it. Huh?

Saturday I had lunch with the Orthodox (Chabad) family we visited once before. It was a pleasant afternoon. ( Read more... )

Yesterday we got together with other members of our Pennsic camping group to make some camp furniture. We have two problems to address: we need more seating, and we need places to put the miscellaneous clutter that accumulates on the tables. So we made chests, specifically sized to work well for seating at tables. Some people actually built them Saturday; Sunday was sanding and painting. Note for future: sawdust is, or behaves like, an allergen. Oops. We had fun, and the chests are very spiffy -- comfortable to sit on and good for storage. We made two "one-seaters" and one double (it's three feet long). The double will require two people to carry, but the singles are light enough to be moved by one person.

After dinner and the departure of most of the people, Dani and I stuck around for a while to play games with Alaric. The first game we played was Vinci (I forget who publishes it). It's a neat game, though I think it plays rather differently with three players than with the max of six. You play on an abstract map of Europe, and you play a civilization with two arbitrary characteristics (such as "extra points from grasslands" or "extra points from resource spaces" or "get extra temporary soldiers at the start of each turn"). On your turn you expand/attack, then score based on your position, then pass to the next person. Units that you lose due to conquest are not replaced, so over time your ability to score decreases. When you think you've reached the point where it's no longer worthwhile, you declare that you are going into decline and get a new civilization to play on your next turn. Your tokens from the previous civilization stick around, and score, until blown away by the other players. When someone reaches a certain score threshold you complete the turn and then high score wins. I ended up with civilizations that were fairly straightforward to play, and won by a few points. I would enjoy playing this game again with more people; I think more players would force faster turnover.

After that we played Carcassonne; I'm not very good at it, but it was fun. Sometimes I think I will never get a handle on the strategy for claiming fields. We played with an expansion that included some new tiles, all of the "double or nothing" variety. For example, by default, at the end of the game, a partially-completed city still scores some points; if it contains a cathedral tile then it scores more points if complete but none at all if incomplete. I haven't played enough to know if this actually adds anything, or if it's just needless complexity. I suppose it can work well if played hostily -- that is, play a cathedral into someone else's city that you think he won't be able to complete.

This weekend we watched more of B5 season four, specifically the end of the shadow war. This seemed abrupt in the first run; it seems even more abrupt now. I assume, but don't know, that if JMS had known he had a fifth season, he would have carried this war through this season and into the fifth, and focused more on the Earth and Minbari civil wars. That would have made a much better story, I think. We were both struck by how well the end of "Into the Fire" could have worked as the end of the series -- not that that's where he would (or should) have ended it, but in terms of the storytelling, it had "major wrap-up" written all over it.

Another show where watching the DVDs reinforces a past impression is West Wing. Watching season three on DVD so soon after the broadcast of season five emphasizes just how much better the show was in the prior season. I think season four might have been weaker than season three, but five was much much weaker than anything that came before. Sad.

Welcome to siderea, aka Tibicen -- SCA person, early-music geek, and interesting writer. Apparently the Boston crowd sucked her into LJ. :-)

Last night my rabbi gave a class/discussion on mourning, funerals, etc. This was for the group of people who may be called on to lead shiva minyanim (services in a house of mourning), or who might help out those families in other ways. I didn't learn a lot that was new, but I think it was useful to pull all the information, and all the people who might need it, together. And we were given books, and books are never bad. :-)

I came home to find that there was no West Wing episode. I'm glad NBC ran a message on the bottom of the screen during the replacement show. But I was surprised: I can understand pre-empting a show for a baseball game that you're airing, but near as I can tell, they decided to pull West Wing because they didn't think it could compete with someone else's broadcast of the game. So did they think the Law & Order episode they showed could compete, or was it an old rerun and they were giving up on viewer share that night?

I wonder if Nielsen et al have changed the way they do ratings. In these days of TiVo and VCRs (often multiples), I can't believe they're only interested in people who watch the broadcast live. Yeah, we fast-forward through the commercials when time-shifting, but it seems like that's still better than not seeing them at all. So live is best, fast-forwarded is not worthless, and not watching the show at all is worthless.

We finished watching the second season of West Wing a couple nights ago. (Now we wait until April, if past performance is an indicator of future trends.) I'm impressed by this show, and the last episode of that season was very effective even though it used some techniques I normally consider cheesy. It was well-done, both in the writing and the direction. I hope the show doesn't go into a death spiral with Sorkin gone.

I went to services this morning at Tree of Life, where lulav and etrog were provided for pretty much everyone who wanted them. I still cannot hold a lulav, an etrog, and a siddur (prayer book) in a useful way. Fortunately, I'm starting to memorize the responses. :-)

My brother-in-law-once-removed [1] called tonight asking for computer advice. He said he was sitting in front of a dead machine, he had the Windows 98 CD in the drive, and how does he boot from that? This spawned several mental threads: (1) Define "dead". (2) Hey, aren't you a Mac snob? (3) Beats me, but I think Dani has done this. I opted for #3 and gave the phone to Dani. :-)

[1] My sister-in-law's husband. I know that English doesn't distinguish between Dani's sister and Dani's sister's husband in the "-in-law" thing, but it still feels weird to call him my brother-in-law when he's not related to either of us. I mean, if my brother-in-law is married to my sister-in-law, doesn't that sound just a bit too much like incest to you? It does to me.

This Shabbat is Sh'mini Atzeret (cue chorus of "what's that?"s -- goljerp did a good job with this here). In the Reform movement it's also Simchat Torah. In my congregation, this year, it's also the b'nei mitzvah of my rabbi's twins. And, due to unfortunate timing, it's also baronial investiture, a once-in-every-several-years occurrence in the local SCA group. I want to be able to spawn clones in the morning and sync memories at the end of the day, darnit!

I went to last-day-Pesach services yesterday and ended up walking home with my rabbi (who lives in basically the same direction). That was pleasant; we haven't "just talked" much, as opposed to having an appointment or a class or whatever. I'd like to do that more; it's a real pity that he's extremely allergic to cats, which means I can't just invite him over for dinner or something. Gotta remember to do that some night during Sukkot. :-)

I think I have a pretty good handle on the Torah portion now, and brought it in today to run by my co-worker. Oops; it appears she does two-day holidays; I had forgotten. Well, tomorrow, then.

We've been working our way through the second season of West Wing and saw the episode with the "Dr Laura" spoof a few nights ago. Many of the questions Bartlet asked were similar to those in Dear Dr. Laura, which has been circulating on the net for a while. I wonder if this is independent development or taking a good idea and spreading it farther. (It's hilarious; follow the link if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

I was kind of sad to realize that it was faster for me to find that with Google than by looking around on my hard drive, where I know I stashed a copy. Has the time come when it doesn't make sense to save copies of things any more? (Not unless it's widespread; you don't want to get hosed by the single source disappearing.) I was actually looking for a date stamp (I wanted to know if it was posted after the West Wing episode), but even so, Google came to the rescue. I distinctly remembered the part about the pleasing odor (but not unto the neighbors), which surely helped. But someone should market search engines for the home market, y'know? :-) (It's a joke. I used to work for a company that had that technology but never marketed it in the US.)

Apparently I'm a mutant. All my friends complain about gaining weight during Pesach; I lost two or three pounds. I am not complaining. (And this includes the 2300-calorie day that included the first seder. That's half again my average.)

Dani and I have been working our way through the first season of "West Wing". This show is consistently good -- clever writing, characters with real depth to them, and meaty. Even "Babylon 5" wasn't as consistent (face it; it had some klunkers, though I will buy the whole thing on DVD as it becomes available), though B5's peaks might have been higher than the peaks I've seen so far on "West Wing".

Yesterday we watched the WW episode "Take This Sabbath Day", in which Bartlet struggles with the issue of capital punishment. The episode really impressed me, and it wasn't afraid to bring in religion. And hey! It got the Jewish position approximately correct! I'm not used to that. (I'm not used to people pointing out the correct translation of "lo tirtzach", usually and incorrectly rendered as "thou shalt not kill".)

Watching Bartlet struggle to weigh his personal opposition to the death penalty against the rule of law and separation of powers was fascinating. Should he overrule the Supreme Court and issue a stay in a federal case? Or should he let the court system work? I'm so used to television shows taking the simplistic, happily-ever-after answer that it's refreshing to see one actually dig into an issue. (Granted, I don't watch much TV any more, and it's possible the landscape has changed, though commercials for other shows don't inspire much confidence.)

There was one improbable plot development (that the defense counsel could, on a Friday night, influence Toby's rabbi's sermon Saturday morning), but I'm willing to grant that literary license. It's still a good story.

We are back from Toronto. (I haven't begun to catch up on my friends yet.) The trip was mostly pleasant; I always enjoy spending time with Dani's sister (Debby) and many of his other relatives. Debby is especially nice and considerate; she asked me up front about restrictions for Shabbat and Yom Tov (the holiday, Pesach day) and also about food during Pesach, and she made sure that she wasn't going to put me in any awkward positions. She even went out and bought special kosher-for-Pesach food that she wouldn't normally have bought. She remembered pretty much all of the details, which is pretty impressive for someone who is not herself observant. Extremely considerate and impressive, especially as my own husband, who lives with observance, seems unable to keep certain basics straight such as that I won't go out to a restaurant on Shabbat. (Yes, this came up while we were there. Sigh.)

The first seder was with Dani's father's family -- actually, this time, hosted by one of Dani's father's wife's kids (follow that?). Dani's father and wife are still in Florida; this is the first time they've not been in Toronto for Pesach since I started going there. The theme of this family's seder always seems to be "let's race through this and eat", which I find disappointing. (We don't even do the second half.)

The second seder was hosted by Dani's mother and was smaller (her, us, Debby's family, and two friends). Dani led the seder, though "leading" in this case is about herding cats, as we always go around the table reading the haggadah. I guess he got to pick which songs we sang. It was fun (and the aforementioned friends are neat people), though the family's home-brew haggadah leaves out a lot of parts that I probably would have inserted myself if I were leading (like all the brachot!).

I guess between the two I got one more-or-less complete seder. It's not ideal, but shalom bayit and all that...

The people from the first seder usually go off to watch hockey playoffs after dinner, but this year it's too early for that. They taped "West Wing" and we were there when the people still remaining decided to watch the show. I had never seen it before, but it was good! Cleverly written, and fun. I'll have to check it out. (I'd heard of the show, but somehow had the idea that it was a medical show -- west wing of a hospital. It's actually about the (ficticious) president of the US and his staff.)

Friday Debby wanted to go to a crafts festival, and I don't accept the second day of holidays [1], so we went along. Saw some neat stuff, though I didn't buy anything. I almost bought a very nifty stained-glass nightlight for the bathroom, and if I had remembered in time that Canadian dollars are much smaller than US dollars I actually would have bought it, but I spaced on the price and thought it was too high. Oh well.

Saturday night after Shabbat we went to see a new play called "Belle", about two ex-slaves in the Reconstructionist era. It was very episodic and somewhat lacking an overall plot. Debby and Tucker (who go to a lot of new plays) said that's the trend these days. I don't care for it, personally.

[1] One-day holidays are extended to two days outside of Israel because of calendar uncertainty. I hold (as do pretty much all Reform and many Conservative Jews) that now, in the 21st century when we know precisely when the new moon is, we do not have this uncertainty and thus do not need the extra day.