I had a very long and tiring week last week, but at the end of it my experiment didn't yield any useful data, bah. The weekend was fairly quiet; I spent Friday sending out job applications and not doing as much tidying as I'd intended, and the guests I'd invited for Friday night couldn't make it. Saturday I gave the sermon and led the Torah discussion as planned; they both went very well, the sermon especially. I spoke about the ways that the section about constructing the Tabernacle exemplifies building a community and valuing everyone's contribution, which I didn't think was incredibly original, but people went mad for it.

SA was there, and invited me to join her for lunch afterwards. 1:30 on a Saturday is not the best time to be looking for lunch here, because Swedish people generally eat rather earlier than that, and most of the restaurants are only open in the evening on Saturday, whereas most of the cafés are running out of food by that time. Still, we ended up at Nero (not the coffee chain!), which is sort of pretending to be a trendy bar from 80s New York, a bit pricey, but the food is really very good. SA described the place as "yang" in the way that it is all black and white and hard lines and full of motion and very crowded. Weekends they do a sort of set menu where you take a basket containing a salad, a glass of fresh orange juice, a slightly symbolic bloody mary, and two small desserts, and then a choice of American-Italian main course. It's always lovely to spend time with SA, and we talked nineteen to the dozen.

Although the weather yesterday seemed to have the promise of spring, just warm enough for wandering around the city to be pleasant, and the first snowdrops just coming out, it was all a lie, because today it's snowing again. I have to admit I'm less childishly excited about this than the last eight snowfalls this year. But still, pretty.

What else? I have a lot to do with Jewish community stuff, sorting out the services I'll be leading next weekend in Oslo, and then Pesach in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and then in April I'm planning a teaching service and a youth service. And I'm starting teaching at college next week; I can't quite believe all these commitments are looming, I thought Pesach was still far in the future.

( job hunting progress )

Also, friend_of_tofu poses a really interesting question: Who do you turn to first or most often for support?, and discusses relying on your friends, partner(s) or family and how those balance. Recommended.

I spent the weekend in Cambridge, partly socializing and partly job hunting. Apologies for not letting people know I was travelling or making arrangements; the weekend ended up so packed that I couldn't have fit anyone else in.

( take that, geography! )

While I was away, compilerbitch posted something amazing and profound. You should definitely go and read it. Seriously, if you only follow one link this month, it should be this one.

If that moves you to care about the issue, read this article about a literal Catch-22 scenario which is preventing trans folk in Oxfordshire from obtaining treatment. Thanks to oxfordgirl for pointing to that. It's a bit long, but it's very informative, and among other things it provides credible, peer-reviewed citations for the somewhat counterintuitive point that sex reassignment surgery actually works to improve quality of life for a lot of trans people, whereas counselling and psychotherapy just don't.

Then, if you are a UK citizen or resident, go and sign the petition to get this stupid situation resolved so people can access the medical care they need. I'm not always a huge fan of e-petitions, but this seems to be exactly the sort of scenario where they're most useful. It's a specific, detailed issue of local policy which needs to be changed in order to make people's lives less miserable, and can readily be changed without changing the entire constitutional philosophy of the country or spending unreasonable sums of money. And note the .gov.uk site; this is official, and people with political power actually read it, even if there is a lot of crap there too.

This essay has been linked all over the place, but I think only about a third of my flist move in circles where you'll have seen it already. It's sort of a Jewish take on Cultural Appropriation, but only sort of. I think emotionally it feels very appealing to me, and it's very beautifully written and all, but after I stopped to think about it for 30 seconds I'm not sure I agree.

I'm kind of agnostic about cultural appropriation at all. I really have no problem with the fact that Americans eat bagels with ham, or sprinkle their conversation with Yiddish words which bear little relationship to the tiny little fragments of Yiddish I picked up from my father's family. And I have no problem with people using bits of Jewish mythology in novels, even if it's garbled. But some of the stuff in nextian's post does bother me. I want to underline that she's not saying that Christianity itself is an appropriation of Judaism, she's saying that assuming that Judaism is nothing but a precursor to Christianity or talking about "Judeo-Christian society" erases the Jews who are alive today and actively engaged with our tradition. And the kind of atheism which says, the Bible is really dumb LOL! without actually having any understanding how the Bible is part of a whole religious framework is pretty rude to Christians as well as Jews, but that's another thing, and I have a pretty good idea why atheists, especially American ones, are defensive about these things.

(I probably shouldn't get into this, but I think the recent Cultural Appropriation stuff was mostly not about Cultural Appropriation at all, it was about actual racism. None of the main players were saying, I hate it when white people write about my non-American culture or about characters with dark skin, which was how it seemed to come across to many white readers. They were saying, I hate it when white writers use lazy and offensive stereotypes of my culture and ethnicity. Or, I hate the fact that I barely have a culture because my country and language were wrecked by colonialism.)

But yeah, reading that post I can see how easy it would be to get into a mindset of being massively offended about how my minority culture is treated by the majority culture, and constructing a certain language framework and taking it as an affront when anyone made any remark outside that framework. I don't know if that's helpful or not (cakmpls has an interesting piece arguing that getting into this sort of mindset is harmful, because it lumps together all the members of an oppressed people instead of treating them as individuals. I'm inclined to her point of view, though I wouldn't go so far as to ban the terms sexist and racist altogether.) This isn't a very accomplished post, just a statement of being in a confused emotional state.

( job hunting progress )

redbird and some friends have set up a blog to collect songs that portray healthy love. This is a fun game; I think there are more songs about breakups than about happy relationships, but even among songs that are supposed to be positive, there is a lot of sexism, stalkery possessiveness, co-dependence, deeply back-handed compliments and other such junk. So, can you think of any songs which describe a relationship you'd be willing to aspire to?

My suggestions: Nothing else matters (Metallica); Independent love song (Scarlet); Hey there Delilah (Plain White Ts); When I was a boy (Dar Williams); and If I could save time in a bottle (Jim Croce).

I'm making a playlist of some of the suggestions, but as usual it's pretty random what is available at any given moment.

Joanna schools Randall on the scientific method, and does so with great verve and humour.

(For my part, there's one person I mildly regret not kissing, and nobody I regret kissing as an individual; I have a few regrets about picking the wrong moment and circumstances for some of my kissing.)

Two reasons I love Wikipedia at the moment.

Two reasons I love my friends list at the moment.

Steampunk jewellery. I don't really buy jewellery, but I sort of want one of those watch mechanism pendants.

Also, shabbat was lovely. ( yay friends )

roz_mcclure wrote a rather gorgeous post about the differences between American dating culture and the early stages of relationships in the UK. It's just the right mix of humour and seriousness to generate some really interesting discussion, which I also recommend. doseybat followed up with poll about ways people meet partners, again giving rise to some good discussions.

( a bunch of related thoughts )

I don't have a solution, mind you. I understand that there are disadvantages to the extremely blunt approach that I prefer; "make everyone in the world more like me" is extremely unlikely to be a successful approach to any perceived social problem. But anyway. Tell me, what do you think is a good (preferably in the sense of morally good as well as in the sense of effective) way of meeting interesting people? Of getting to know them well enough to have a clear idea whether a relationship would have a good chance? Of letting them know about your feelings to find out if theirs are congruent?

(Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I'm not particularly distressed about this on a personal level; I'm quite content in my single status and therefore not having to deal directly with most of this stuff.)

...make a post, the saying goes. This has been a bit of a nothing week. So a pot-pourri update to let you guys know I'm still around:

( stuff )

Now to finish preparing my Torah reading for tomorrow...

In a good way, I hasten to add. I know nobody ever follows links, but you should really make an exception for these three posts. The clever people on my flist make excellent and important points in their posts, which are also fine examples of the best kind of blogging, really good persuasive writing.

If you follow UK politics at all, you need to read hairyears on the degeneration of the criminal justice system. Also worth reading the comments to see a very good refutation of an articulate but morally insensitive Labour politician wannabe who shows up argue that it's worth eroding the rights of suspects and increasing police powers in order to protect little old ladies from getting mugged.

rho has an excellent response to that Salon article on The T in LGBT. It's a very potent mixture of extremely convincing arguments, with some more controversial personal opinions. Even if you disagree with her conclusions you really ought to be aware of her reasoning.

Finally, siderea absolutely blew my socks off with her take-down of that awful book The Secret as well as a really fantastic explanation of the genuine psychological discipline that the book mangled in popularizing. Seriously, stop doing whatever you're doing and read her post. You will catch awesome from it.

(Me, I'm doing ok. Fighting the procrastination beast, sometimes successfully and sometimes going under. More frequent and original posts to follow soon, I hope.)

I've spent this week learning how to be a better microscopist. ( microphotography )

Not a particularly major event, but something to note: Making Light posted a link to kd lang singing Hallelujah. If you haven't heard this already, you really should; it's the first time I've been motivated to find software for saving YouTube videos (though really I only want the soundtrack, the video is just of a concert at Sidney Opera House). I am a purist about that song; I care too much about Leonard Cohen's original to like most covers. And I don't generally like kd lang all that much. But this performance is seriously awesome. And then there was some discussion about Cohen covers and I found out that the Jennifer Warnes cover album Famous blue raincoat has been rereleased. And it's even on eMusic, so now I have a copy of Warnes' duet with Cohen himself, Joan of Arc, where she sings Joan and he sings the fire. rysmiel played it to me when I was in Montréal in 2005, and it is just about the most emotionally powerful song I have ever heard.

On the planning front, well. I tend to stress about travel more than is really required, and in this case I'm not nearly as pre-organized as I would like to be. However, I have booked all the travel from here to London via Finland, Estonia, Germany, Holland and briefly Belgium, and all the accommmodation I need at the stopover points. That's the important thing. I reckon once I'm in England I can be flexible and if some of my planned meetups don't work out, well, it's a pain that I don't get to see people I'd hoped to see, but at least I won't be stranded. And I haven't planned what I'm going to do in any of the cities on my whistle-stop tour of northern Europe. But if I'm only going to be in each city for between a few hours and a day and half, I think I can get away with just wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere, rather than going to specific Tourist Sites. (I have to do it all on a 64Mb camera memory, which should be an interesting discipline, as apparently they no longer make the cards that fit my camera.)

Not connected to anything else at all, but while I'm posting, have a link to the writer Catherynne M Valente's thoughtful and personal essay on porn.

I'm in that annoying stage where I don't quite have time to write about the things I want to write about. This is partly because I've been spending my free time following links around and reading other people's writing, instead of posting.

So I might as well share some of the gems. The internet is full of instant gratification, but this year I'm starting to find myself drawn to full-length, properly though out essays much more than in the past, and the fact they're online rather than in foreign newspapers I wouldn't otherwise read is just a matter of convenience.

( links with some commentary )

Hm, so much for not having time to post so I'll just put up a few links! That turned into a long essay after all. Let's see if I can harness that verbal energy into writing the review I'm working on.

So, imagine that Tefillin Barbie has children one day. (She'd have some anatomical problems, but hey, I hear they can do some wonderful things with fertility treatment these days.) And then imagine that those children want to play with teeny-tiny meta-dolls of their own. Would you believe that someone out there has already hand-knitted teeny-tiny clothes for the teeny-tiny meta-dolls? Let's not think what it would be like if the baby Barbies wanted their dollies to have little dolly tefillin as well...

Over at Making Light: LOLcatz in ur canon, pastichin ur potry. Some highlights from a long and hilarious thread:

Abi's original sonnet which started the game

Heresiarch's meta joke

Xopher's LOLhaiku

Kathryn's LOLcreation

Eric's ultra-abridged Kubla Khan

Abi again with P&P

Kathryn again with hypertext poetry

Heresiarch lives up to his handle with the LOLiad

Eris' utlra-abridged Grecian Urn

Abi's zombie kittehs

Abi's poetic commentary on the thread

Elise's paired translations (you need to read both her consecutive comments for the effect) into LOLcat and text adventure. So beautiful that they inspired me to look read the original poem, which turns out to be Edna St Vincent Millay.

nwhepcat's TS Eliot

But seriously, if you have many hours to spare, read the whole thread, it's fantastic.

I tried my hand at a couple too, and I'm putting them here mainly so that I can find them again easily in future. Read behind the cut if you want to see attempting to be witty in LOLcat verse. ( mine ) I'm really feeling I ought to write some real poetry now, if only to convince myself (and the Making Light crew if I come up with something of exceptionally high quality) that I can in fact scan when I put my mind to it.

I managed to get myself sunburnt yesterday! ( weekend summary )

I've been meaning for ages to post a link to The ecstasy of influence. It's long, 13 typescript pages, but it's worth the effort; it's a beautiful piece of writing and argumentation. I'm not entirely sure I agree, but it's a refreshing change from the usual ignorant mouthings about intellectual property popular with certain geek subcultures.

For a more topical essay, I strongly recommend misia's response to the recent paedophilia / fandom kerfuffle. It's interesting that the comments to that sane and balanced essay contain an example of exactly the kind of thing she's complaining about: at least one commentator berates her for being insufficiently outraged about paedophilia and all but calls her a child rapist, simply because she mentioned the topic. It does seem a shame that this climate makes it impossible for Misia to write her book on statutory rape and age of consent, but for now at least we get a highly articulate and thoughtful article.

You all know how gnimmel wins the internets, right? Well, now she wins even more!

I am speechless with admiration. Seriously, if you follow only one link this month, that second post of hers should be it. It's the distilled essence of brilliant blogging, in colourful cartoon form.

I have had a crush on Gnimmel's brain since I met her at a party in 99, and listened to her off-the-cuff exposition of Kabbalah (which beat most rabbis I've heard on the subject hands down) and why Adam Kadmon doesn't map onto a manifestation of a god in a Pagan, polytheistic context.

I was going to post about other stuff but Gnimmel's brilliance has dazzled it out of my brain.

pir_anha said something really cool about gender and mystery and stereotyping and conformity recently. Even though it's personal opinion rather than a statement of fact, I think it's a really good summary of what is wrong with a lot of received ideas about romance and how gender plays into that.

And on the subject of how a lot of journalism is based on stereotyping assumptions, The Gimp Parade linked to an article about media portrayals of disability that really struck a chord with me. There are definitely worse ways of talking about disability than the type that article discusses, but it's a very good example of how one type of basically well-intentioned journalism can be annoying.

---

Today has been more or less: ( a conspiracy of irritations )

To catch up on the weekend, while I'm at it: on Friday evening we went out as a group for a Chinese meal. It was a perfectly pleasant evening, and my new jacket got an outing, and was much admired. But the restaurant, New Peking City in Östermalm, contrived to make it impossible to eat within even my lax standards of kosher observance. Other than that, the shabbat service was fun and I spent most of the rest of the weekend pottering around and unwinding. I managed to get a convincing win at CivII on the King level, and I'm trying to pretend I'm not proud of that.

So Yom Kippur was ok. Even good in some aspects. ( notes )

I'd better sleep now or I'll continue to be a wreck tomorrow. I hope everyone who fasted today had a nicer time of it than I did, and that everyone who kept the festival gets all sorts of good conclusions and good writing and all that.

Just to add some content that's not babbling about religion, people should go and read lavendersparkle's essay about feminism and abortion. I like what she has to say, even though I'm not a big fan of claiming that stuff is caused by patriarchy. Am I crazy enough to expand my own thoughts on such a contentious topic? Not sure; I'll decide after I've had some sleep.

It's Rosh HaShana (Jewish New Year) tomorrow evening. Spiritually, I'm barely paying attention, practically I'm in chaos. I have to finish a grant application by, um, several hours ago. I have spent the last week and a half fretting about it rather than actually making progress. And the fretting has got in the way of doing any housework, any real communication with my people, or any logistics. Gah. I got through a whole Oxford degree without letting an essay crisis get to this point; what has happened to my willpower?!

Tomorrow I'm supposed to be going to an all-day conference, then going to the service for the start of RH, then somehow or other meeting up with ploni_bat_ploni to go to Chabad for a meal. The arrangements for meeting up are kind of vague, partly because of the aforementioned fretting instead of doing logistics, partly because ploni_bat_ploni is willing to pray with Chabad who are after all hosting her, and I'm really not. I'm going to get up as early as I can bear and blitz the last bit of the application. But I suspect I'm not going to make it to much of the conference, and that's really annoying. And I'm not sure what kind of a state I'll be in by the time I've done application, half of a brain-stretching conference (I hope!), service, meal and being polite to strangers and probably going on really late into the night, on 6 hours' sleep.

My watch is broken. I have left things at work that I really rather need today and tomorrow (the power adapter for the work laptop. My notebook, including the directions I wrote down for getting myself to the conference.) I am sleep deprived and about to make it worse. Lots of this stuff is my fault, which really doesn't make me feel any better.

On the positive side, though, people are playing online charades, which is amusing me no end.

Happy New Year to my Jewish friends, and happy random date in the middle of September to everyone else.

Both our internal information people and the local press are getting very excited because some Karolinska people have made some pretty good progress towards developing a test that will predict dementia 20 years ahead. [Press release, with links to the original article] It's cool science, no doubt about it, but I can't help wondering, would you want to take a test at the age of 50 that might predict that you had a high chance of being senile by the time you were 70? I guess it's the same problem as with any predictive medical testing: in the absence of a cure or even sensible prevention, what's the point of knowing?

I think it's the timescale that bothers me, in part; I don't have the same objection to, say, cervical smears which tell me whether I might be at risk for cancer in the coming few years. That allows me to do something about it in terms of possibly readjusting my life plans. But I can't plan on the basis of some terrible thing that might happen in 20 years' time; I'd just have to live with the knowledge that this was likely to happen to me, which I don't think would be good psychologically.

It's true that almost everybody expects to be mortal (the exceptions are a few religious people and a few quasi-religious geeks who think the Singularity is going to cure death). So you always have to run your life on the basis that you have a few decades at best and possibly even less. But I'd still rather not know the probable time and manner of my demise more than a few years in advance, I think.

In non-morbid news: Stockholm is full of magicians and flamboyantly gay people with rainbow banners at the moment. I find this very cool, it's a bit like living in the Paul Gallico novel The man who was magic.

There's lots of stressful stuff going on LJ at the moment, both in terms of difficult conversations shading into drama, and people posting about stress in their non-LJ lives. Someone posted the following in a community I belong to, and really, a sexy actor reading a sexy Shakespeare sonnet is something that needs to be propagated further. (I guess there might be some Kinsey 0 guys around who don't understand the appeal of Alan Rickman, but a good actor reading Shakespeare is worth something even so.)

Mmmmmm (Requires Flash, but it's one of the few sites that are worth it. And it's technically work-safe if you can get away with playing sound, since Shakespeare is generally exempt from the usual standards of what counts as erotic.)

j4, you might want to pay attention to this bit, if you're not too distracted by Alan Rickman. While I'm posting links, I was searching on my blog's tagline to find out where this journal is linked, and Google came up with some random badgers as a potentially relevant site. And how can anyone resist random badgers?

I don't usually squee over the latest Medical Breakthrough because that sort of thing is always horribly over-hyped. There's an element of that going on here, but in this case I'd say even the proof of concept is cool.

Wow!

While it's true that this kind of thing is on my radar because of personal interest, this technology is not at all likely to be helpful for Screwy. It's just very, very cool that they've got something like this to work.

I don't have much content right now. But in the couple of months I have been here I've made mental notes of several very cool posts and discussions that I didn't have time to join in with. Mental notes don't persist forever, and besides, some of you guys who don't necessarily know eachother might appreciate some of these, so I'm going to post a list.

ploni_bat_ploni has an interesting post about the status of women in Orthodox Judaism. It's pretty technical stuff, but some of you at least, naomichana, kassrachel among others, are interested in technical discussions about details of Jewish law and practice. Worth reading the discussion, too; hatam_soferet makes some really fascinating observations in the discussion thread.

pir_anha was thinky and fascinating on the subject of listening and racism. Again, some of the discussion is really chewy.

pir_anha was riffing on a huge kerfuffle that is going on at the edges of my blogdar about cultural appropriation; misia has one of her usual really impressive posts on the topic

papersky on lying. Her post is vaguely connected to the msscribe controversy, which is another of those big talking points I'm only peripherally aware of. But it covers a lot of ground and is fascinating in its own right.

cakmpls asks some good questions about intimacy and gets some quite thought-provoking answers. She is also discussing the lying / false identity issue in quite a lot of depth, so if you're interested in that several of her recent entries are worth checking out.

I wrote a really dumb post, probably the post I'm least proud of in the three years I've been on LJ. But to my startlement, my terrible post prompted some really good responses, both in the comments there from adrian_turtle and redbird and this post on feminism and violence from pir_anha. redbird has been throwing out some really interesting preliminary ideas about feminism and gender essentialism, but she says they're not ready for public consumption yet so I'm not linking. But I wanted to mention that I'm grateful for the discussion and for the ways she's making me think.

That lot should keep you going until I have something interesting to report! And all the people I've linked have generally cool journals anyway, so if you're looking for new people to read and new perspectives, consider them recommended.

Author: Louis de Bernières

Details: (c) Louis de Bernières 2004; Pub Secker & Warburg 2004; ISBN 0-436-20549-1

Verdict: Birds without wings has moments, but is rambly and preachy more of the time than it's successful.

Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

How it came into my hands: Libary.

( detailed review )

hatam_soferet makes the point a lot better in about 200 words. Please read her post if you are Jewish, and read it if you consider yourself a moral person. In fact, even if you read nothing else on LJ all month, read that post. Thank you, hatam_soferet.