Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:31 PM

I hadn't known it was possible, but Boopsie has come down with a case of the hiccoughs. She's been hiccupping for about 15 minutes now -- it started during a fight with the kitten (Violet) that began while Boopsie was eating.

So, what hiccup cures can work on cats? I mean, most of the ones I know of require some form of human volition: chewing on a sugar cube, holding one's breath... I tried offering her water to drink, but so far she's refused. Help urgently requested!

Okay, she just puked (or spat up) on the kitchen floor which seems to have taken care of the hiccups. Unfortunately, she just followed that up by pissing upon the bed. We just picked her up and locked her in the bathroom with the litterbox, but (a) the damage has been done (and laundry now must be (she only narrowly missed my pillow, but thankfully, she did miss)) and (b) she is not a happy cat.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:25 PM

Which means the Nutella is mine. All mine!

Yum.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:50 PM

I can vaguely understand the desire to filter internet access for children -- I don't agree, but I can sympathize.
But what excuse is there for filtering internet access for our nation's soldiers serving abroad? People who are presumably old enough to serve and fight and die for our country are being denied access to websites like:

• Victoria's Secret: Somebody in charge seems to have forgotten that women are also serving in the military. As Ginmar (a soldier serving in Iraq) points out: "I'm a girl, which means they're censoring me from looking at halfway decent underwear! Jesus Fucking Christ, if I can be trusted with a fucking weapon, can't I be trusted with a fucking thong?
• JavaJane: The Ladies Cafe, a chat board: Furthermore, websense apparently defines it as a "weapons" site, which not only makes no sense categorically, but shouldn't troops in a warzone be allowed to learn about weapons? [Nope, it's not a confusion with the military intelligence Jane's site, because that's accessible. Source: Ginmar
• Iraq Coalition Casualties and CNN: U.S. & Coalition/Casualties: According to Eric Umansky, they are blocked as "Extreme;Politics/ Religion" Again, both illogical categorization, and no discernible logical reason to deny soldiers the information, particularly about what's going on around them. [via Kevin Drum]

And our tax dollars are being spent to deny soldiers access to these sites. This is the reverse of standard library functionality, where it costs more to obtain something than not. Soldiers are getting internet access, and we're paying filtering companies to block these pages.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:25 AM

One poll calls the presidential race neck-and-neck, another gives Bush a ten-point lead. Whom to trust? Perhaps neither. Three new articles question the reliability of some of the major polls.

Jimmy Breslin explains one problem:

[T]elephone polls do not include cellular phones. There are almost 169 million cell phones being used in America today - 168,900,019 as of Sept. 15, according to the cell phone institute in Washington.
<snip>
"I don't use telephones anymore because there is no easy way to use them," John Zogby was saying yesterday. It was the 20th anniversary of the start of his polling company. <snip> "The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial," Zogby was saying. "It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong."
Zogby points out that you don't know in which area code the cell phone user lives. Nor do you know what they do. Beyond that, you miss younger people who live on cell phones. If you do a political poll on land-line phones, you miss those from 18 to 25, and there are figures all over the place that show there are 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, one in five eligible voters.
And the great page-one presidential polls don't come close to reflecting how these younger voters say they might vote. The majority of them use cell phones and nobody ever asks them anything.

And, Breslin points out, younger voters lean more towards Kerry than Bush, so polls omitting that demographic are skewed rightward.

But that's (probable) stupidity, not malice. Steve Soto has uncovered a further bias in Gallup and CBS/NYT polls. They are intentionally weighting the sample towards Republicans The sample they're choosing for their polls is out of whack with the actual voting public in the last several elections. Meanwhile, Ruy Teixeira notes that the "likely voter" measures ain't the hottest either.

Just something to keep in mind, when you hear the latest horserace results...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:24 PM

I don't know whether that's why Ashcroft prefers law enforcement to investigate the records of bookstores and libraries over weapons dealers. Or maybe he just thinks that readers are wimps and thus safer targets. At any rate, airport security arrested a woman because they considered her weighted bookmark a concealed weapon. They didn't offer her the choice to put the bookmark in checked luggage or mail it home or even confiscate it. They arrested her! What they call "airport security" is simply insane.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:25 PM

I'm in a bit of a rambly mood at the moment; this post is probably as much for myself as for any other readers, so

Warning: Excessive unexplained Judaica. If you are not Jewish, ask for explanations, because I'm not elaborating on my thoughts right now.

Well, we just tossed our sins into the pond this afternoon. Also, because services yesterday skipped the Musaf repetition of the Amidah (and didn't have services today), we didn't get our full quota of 100 shofar blasts for the holiday. So Ian brought his shofar along, and we said the blessing over the shofar and did three reps (as I call them) to complete the count. What we didn't realize when we planned this little outing was that the local schools were letting out. So we had high school students walking past and asking what we were doing, "calling the ducks?" No, but in the middle a stork landed in the pond not too far away to observe. For tashlikh we used leftover french bread we had bought for stuffing. For some reason, I've been imagining somebody cooking up a meal of sin-fed ducks and scapegoat, and I'm wondering how halachically wrong that is...

Shortly before dinner Erev Rosh Hashanah, I rediscovered my copy of Eat and be satisfied, a history of Jewish food. I wished I had thought of it in time to post some of the comments on Rosh Hashanah cuisine to the blog, but I didn't and it feels too late now. Maybe next year (or for other holidays). I did end up reading the three sections (during the Talmudic era, Sephardic customs, and medieval Ashkenazic) aloud to Ian between courses.

But to make up for that omission, I'll share a different excerpt about an important contribution Jews made to culinary history:

[C]hocolate making became an important Jewish industry in Amsterdam in the 1660s, when Venezuelan cacao was imported into Holland, and the Jews laid the foundation for the famous Dutch chocolate industry. The Sephardim spread the secrets of chocolate making into France, particularly into Bayonne and Bordeaux, while by the eighteenth century there were Jewish chocolate makers in England. Further, the Jews of the Levant had a predilection for drinking coffee, and nowhere more so than in Egypt, where it was known as the "Jews' Drink." Not surprisingly, the Jews played an active role in spreading the habit of drinking coffee into western Europe. In 1650, ". . . Jacob, a Jew opened a Coffee House in the Parish of St. Peter in the East, Oxon; and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank," wrote Anthony Wood. This was the first reference to the use of coffee in England, while there was a further reference by Wood to Cirques Jobson, a Jew born near Mount Lebanon, who also ran a coffeehouse at Oxford and who may be identical to the person called Jacob but who may have been someone else. In the second half of the seventeenth century a number of Levantines, particularly Armenians, started opening coffee shops in Paris, but some such as Joseph, a Levantine, and Etienne of Aleppo may have been Jewish. In ur century Jews transferred the typical Viennese coffeehouse to the streets of many cities, including London and New York.

I hope it's not a bad omen for the year that the pomegranate we bought looked to have gone bad. There were enough good seeds to eat and say the blessings over, but it made me slightly uneasy in a superstitious way.

I still have the same gripe about the Conservative machzor as I have every year. And I have finally had enough. During services I started thinking about buying an Artscroll machzor to bring along solely for the silent Amidahs. Well, looking at their website (I thought they disabled it on holidays and shabbos, but somebody must've forgotten to turn the site off) I just discovered that Artscroll makes an Interlinear Machzor (they're also now doing interlinear benchers!) and hopefully one of the shops in Brookline has them in stock so I can get one before Yom Kippur. The interlinear series is a really cool and clever design, and I also love Artscroll's commentary in general.

I need to construct a tallis clip. I have for a while. I've looked at the commercial tallis-clips, but they all feel overpriced, and none have the look or feel that I want, so it's probably best for me to design my own. The problem is, I have little artistic talent :/ So while it's on my mind, I'm going to use this space to free-associate what exactly I want...

And that's all I can think of at the present time.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:30 PM

Political cats. Be sure to read the comments.

While watching the kittens' rivalry in our apartment a few nights back, I realized that Chez Goth could, with very little modification, be reworked into Chez Cat. Readers unfamiliar with the original games can probably skip the rest of the post, but really, what goals do cats have beyond slack and shiny objects?

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:30 PM

That's amusing, I was checking referrers via SiteMeter, and discovered I got a hit from a Google search on "potato kugel and Rosh Hashonah". I checked to see what said viewer might be reading and came upon menus from my last two Rosh Hashonahs, both spent with my family:

---

2002:

Probably the best way to describe Rosh Hashonah is as follows:

Friday night, six people at my parents: chicken soup with rice and soup nuts, gravlax, olive salad, tongue in raisin sauce, sesame soy chicken, mixed vegetables, sweet potato crunch, apricot honey rice, honey cake and citrus salad.

Saturday afternoon, fourteen people at my grandparents: gefilte fish, chopped liver, chicken soup with kreplach, veal cutlets, pot roast, potato kugel, honeyed carrots, with various cakes and pastries for dessert.

Sunday afternoon, a dozen people at my parents: sauteed green peppers, chicken soup, olive salad, veal brisket with stuffing, tongue in raisin sauce, sesame soy chicken, green beans, sweet potato crunch, honey cake and citrus salad.

---

2003:

Menus for the weekend:

• Friday night at my parents': 9 people: gravlax, chicken soup, veal (brisket, strip steak & ribs), 2 kinds of chicken, sweet potato crunch, rice & apricot dish, garlic green peppers, green beans. Dessert included tortoni, mocha torte and honey cake
• Saturday afternoon at my grandparents': 14 people: chopped liver, gefilte fish, chicken soup with knaidlach, roast beef, potato kugel, stuffed cabbage, baby carrots in honey; assorted cakes for dessert
• Sunday afternoon at my parents': 12 people, similar menu to Friday night

---

This year, due to interference from a big blowhard named Ivan, we didn't get to go to Florida. Mom played hardball, trying to lure us with tales of veal and other scrumptious dishes, but by that time we had already cancelled our flight.

So, this year Ian's cooking and it'll just be the two of us (although we invited his parents, they already had other plans).

What's cooking so far... We've got three kinds of honey, homemade sweet challah, chicken soup with rice & kreplach, veal roast and stuffing, green beans and spaetzele, and for dessert: pomegranate and a honey cake from my mother's recipe. We bought a cactus pair to say Shehechianu over. You can read Ian's journal for further details. No potato kugel this time: we forgot about it when menu planning, but he'll make it some other time, I'm sure (maybe we carboload for Yom Kippur?)

The meal as a whole may not be as elaborate, but the house doesn't smell any less delicious.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:30 PM

Well, it took me long enough, but my Worldcon wrapup is finally available and online. I put it on a separate page to avoid cluttering up people's aggregators -- it totals about 47,000 words. Yes, it's long-winded, but it was also a long con.

I wrote it thematically, rather than chronologically, so to make it easier to jump to the topic you want, here's a quick TOC:

Worldcon wrapup:

Panels People Masquerade Art Show Dealers' room Autographs Freebies Miscellany Conclusion

Panels: Ask Dr. Mike Looking Backward: the 20th Century Plot and Pace The Future of the Future Doorstops: Truly Enormous Books and Series Great Clichés in SF and Fantasy Alternate History Challenge Match Elizabethan English as a Second Language

Panels (cont'd): SLOFs: Who and Why? Beyond Sex Jewish Time-Based Mitzvoth in a Lunar Colony Curses! How to Create Fictionalized Characters from Historical Figures Alternate Holocausts How Do You Know When You're Dead?

Enjoy! Comments and links always welcome!

And if you (or I) sign off for the day before getting any further, L'Shana Tova!

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:45 PM

I appear to be in a chatty mood today, with lotsa little links.

Since font geeks and typeface aficionados are apparently coming out of the woodwork this week, I thought I'd share an oldie I first posted at the beginning of the year:

Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black. It's a Flash movie giving the (surprisingly fascinating) history of a font, filmed in the style of VH1's Behind the Music.

Quite enjoyable.

Also, a blogger currently serving in Iraq recently posted a very funny list of personal guidelines so she won't get court martialed while her captain is on leave. (#20: "It's not nice to salute the brand-new lieutenants first thing in the morning when they have coffee in their right hands.")

I don't want to risk getting hir in trouble by posting the link, in case superior officers notice, so instead I'll just share another oldie: The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army.

Added later: Well, other bloggers have identified the list-creator, so here's the link: it's Ginmar's.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:09 PM

Now which candidate is actually actively creating jobs?

Earlier this week, I read with sorrow and bitterness of a woman who lost her job for having a Kerry/Edwards sticker on her car. For those who haven't heard the story, here's how her hometown press reported it:

Gobbell gave this account:
"We were going back to work from break, and my manager told me that Phil said to remove the sticker off my car or I was fired," she said. "I told him that Phil couldn't tell me who to vote for. He said, 'Go tell him.' "
She went to Gaddis' office, knocked on the door and entered on his orders.
"Phil and another man who works there were there," she said. "I asked him if he said to remove the sticker and he said, 'Yes, I did.' I told him he couldn't tell me who to vote for. When I told him that, he told me, 'I own this place.' I told him he still couldn't tell me who to vote for."
Gobbell said Gaddis told her to "get out of here."
"I asked him if I was fired and he told me he was thinking about it," she said. "I said, 'Well, am I fired?' He hollered and said, 'Get out of here and shut the door.' "
She said her manager was standing in another room and she asked him if that meant for her to go back to work or go home. The manager told her to go back to work, but he came back a few minutes later and said, " 'I reckon you're fired. You could either work for him or John Kerry,' " Gobbell said.

Oh, and later in the article, it says the employer regularly put pro-Bush messages in the employees' paychecks.

I hadn't bothered blogging this, because it just made me sad for the state of the country. But, it looks like there's a happy ending. Slate reports:

[L]ate this afternoon, Kerry himself phoned Gobbell. "He was telling me how proud he was that I stood up," Gobbell told me. "He'd read the part where Phil said I could either work for him or work for John Kerry. He said, 'you let him know you're working for me as of today.' I was just so shocked."

So, at least one candidate in this rate is gaining a reputation for creating jobs rather than costing them. I could post links to the overall unemployment rate or to the small scale of the people fired from their jobs for the audacity of being opponents trying to see the President (here's one case, and I know I've blogged about others).

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:45 PM

I love my husband. I'm just sayin'.
[The house smells of chicken soup; the challah dough is finally rising; he's making a honey cake right now, and we just bought a cactus pear to say a shehechianu over. Life is good.]