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20 Dec 2005 — Narnia…

We’ve been very very good parents, so our children let us go out a date last week, and we saw the Narnia movie.

Jen has already posted her own review. My disorganized comments:

• What strikes me the most about this movie is the emphasis placed on how Peter belittled Edmund, and the clear implication that Peter is partly responsible for Edmund’s decision to go over to the Dark Side use the Ring of Power cooperate with the White Witch. In the book, by contrast, the narrator describes Edmund as “spiteful” without reference to any psychological cause; sibling rivalry is mentioned later in the book, but it seems to play a much less significant role. (To be fair, Edmund is not exactly an autonomous moral agent in the book, either, seeing as how the Witch spiked his Turkish Delight with crystal meth.) If this is how the screenwriters reinterpret Edmund Pevensie, I shudder to imagine what they’ll do with Eustace Clarence Scrubb.
• In the Witch’s first encounter with Edmund, Tilda Swinton did an excellent job portraying someone who is used to ruling through fear, but just once needs to get her way through charm. The rest of the acting is… well… good enough for the characters being portrayed, who have about as much depth as wading pools.
• Not that I have a vested interest, but I have trouble seeing Narnia as a vehicle to convert the under-18 masses to Christianity. If I understand correctly, a Christian evangelist is supposed to convince you that because Jesus died for your sins, you should change your attitudes and behavior (the details of the desired change depend on which Christian denomination you’re talking to). But in this movie, there’s no “because”. Since the children are aliens to this “Old Magic” that prescribed Edmund’s blood-guilt in the first place, it doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the corresponding lectures from Paul of Tarsus. There’s no analog of the Sermon on the Mount or any other scene in which Aslan is telling his followers how they should be acting. Peter, Susan, and Lucy, who revered Aslan as soon as they heard his name, don’t seem to have a different emotional relationship with him after his resurrection. You certainly don’t see anyone suggesting that just as Aslan saved Edmund from the punishment rightfully due to him, a good Narnian should offer the Witch’s underlings parole rather than death.

P.S.: Speaking of the Narnia series, Andrew Rilstone has an interesting essay defending Lewis’s much-commented-on portrayal of Susan in The Last Battle.

12 Dec 2005 — ¡Huevón!

Whenever I read a story like this, I suspect the problem started when some Anglo authority figure learned to his surprise that “chinga tu madre” is not Spanish for “yes, boss”.

via Kevin Drum

12 Dec 2005 — Giving new meaning to the phrase “family jewels”

Do you think the old custom of using the wedding-night bedsheet to attest to a bride’s virginity (cf. Deuteronomy 22:13–19*) is kind of, umm, tacky?

It could be worse.

Start by explaining the “covenant” part of the equation. Begin with, “Sue, thank you for this evening. It is one we both will always treasure. I want to commemorate this day and our covenant with this.” Then open the jewelry box and let the gold do the talking for just a moment. Then say, “This locket is handmade from precious metal – just the way God made you. This locket and what it stands for is the sentinel of your heart. Here’s why: from this day forward you will wear this locket as often as you wish. It will send the statement that you are waiting for your husband. It is more than that though, Sue. It has a lock on it. It can only be opened with this key. I will guard the key until your wedding. On that day, I will present the key to my little girl’s heart to your husband. He will take the key and open the locket, the only one ever to do so.”

This is why we need sex education in the public schools. Sue is going to walk away from that conversation thinking that babies are made through open-heart surgery.

via Lawyers, Guns and Money

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*Best. Aufruf. Parsha. EVAR.

09 Dec 2005 — Just because it’s “faith-based” doesn’t mean it’s based on your faith

When Joseph Hanas was pled guilty to marijuana possession, the judge placed him in a special rehab program, run by a Pentecostal church. The Detroit News tells what happened next:

Hanas said the program did not offer drug treatment or counseling, nor did it have any organized program other than reading the Bible and attending Pentecostal services.

He said his rosary and prayer book was taken from him and his religion was denounced as “witchcraft.” Hanas said he was told his only chance of avoiding prison and a felony record was to convert to the Pentecostal faith.

Hanas is suing to have his conviction set aside, and the ACLU is helping him out.

Since the plaintiff is a Catholic who is protesting a state-funded coercive conversion to a Protestant faith—they used to fight wars over this kind of thing—you might think that the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, “the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization”, would take an interest. Let’s see what the most recent stories on their news page are:

• Virgin Mary Defiled on “South Park”
• Lands’ End Resolves Christmas Dispute
• No Christmas Trees Allowed
• Christmas Panic Hits Florida Atlantic Univ.
• Lands’ End Neuters Christmas
• World AIDS Day and the Catholic Church
• Jews Say It’s OK to Celebrate Christmas

People of faith who feel confined by the “wall of separation” between church and state should contemplate this case, and recall the warning in the voice of Sir Thomas More, patron saint of lawyers, in A Man for All Seasons:

This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man’s laws not God’s, and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.

via Sisyphus Shrugged and Lawyers, Guns, and Money

08 Dec 2005 — It just ain’t normal

After close examination of a schema for one of our company’s internal databases, I was moved to call it “an abomination unto Codd”.

08 Dec 2005 — פריצות לשם שמים

And Reuters spake unto the Internet, saying:

A German Protestant youth group has put together a 2006 calendar with 12 staged photos depicting erotic scenes from the Bible, including a bare-breasted Delilah cutting Samson’s hair and a nude Eve offering an apple….

Anne Rohmer, 21, poses on a doorstep in garters and stockings as the prostitute Rahab, who is mentioned in both New and Old Testaments. “We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people,” she told Reuters.

“Anyway, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude.”

(Well, there is Paul’s remark in 1 Corinthians 11:5–15 about women covering their hair. But even among Christian fundamentalists who keep their bodies covered below the neckline, not very many people take this instruction literally.)

This looks like the perfect Christmas present for your favorite televangelist. Maybe send it bundled with a copy of The Harlot by the Side of the Road.

via Unqualified Offerings

30 Nov 2005 — God bless us, every one, with a clue

Rabbi [sic] Aryeh Spero, envisioning a dystopian future America in which saying “Christmas” is outlawed:

“Some of the people who stood up against the ACLU,” I continued, “were called Conservatives. In those days, you weren’t welcomed in ‘progressive’ circles if you were a Conservative. You didn’t get those high-paying jobs in the media, Hollywood, or in the University. In fact, if they knew you were Conservative, you could even lose your job—and, if you wanted to keep your job, you had to undergo diversity training at Sensitivity Sessions and mouth the appropriate platitudes and apologies, even against your own conscience.”

The Associated Press, describing the present America:

A University of Kansas religion professor apologized for an e-mail that referred to religious conservatives as “fundies” and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a “nice slap in their big fat face.”

In a written apology Monday, Paul Mirecki, chairman of the university’s Religious Studies Department, said he would teach the planned class “as a serious academic subject and in an manner that respects all points of view.”

The department faculty approved the course Monday but changed its title. The course, originally called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and other Religious Mythologies,” will instead be called “Intelligent Design and Creationism.”

The backlash against religion-neutral holiday greetings simply astounds me. Contrast: During the spring, I don’t see random strangers wishing me a happy Passover, or asking my child what present he’s hoping to get in exchange for the afikoman. Despite this inattention, two-thirds of Jews attend Passover sedarim. But if you suggest that it’s not appropriate to say “Merry Christmas” to your heathen customers, the wingnuts whine about the Atheist Inquisition coming to town. Of course, if the wingnuts weren’t gnashing their teeth over this imagined insult to their faith, they might notice that God’s Own Party lost interest in some of their particular concerns (Federal Marriage Amendment? What’s that?) as soon as it was safely re-elected, or that some of God’s Own Politicians need to review Deuteronomy 16:19.

P.S.: No, Virginia, it really is not appropriate to say “Merry Christmas” to someone who will not be celebrating it, and I don’t care how many other Jews tell you it’s OK. It’s like being introduced to someone named “Michael” and calling him “Mike”, without bothering to find out if he actually uses that nickname. It’s like assuming that every pregnant woman you meet would just love to hear your advice about what she should be eating and drinking.

Spero column via Pharyngula

30 Nov 2005 — פריצות!

I know I’m just projecting the values of my own community of religious fanatics (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) onto a community of people who are fanatics about a completely different religion, but I can’t look at pictures like this without thinking “If you’re so religious, shouldn’t you be covering your elbows? Not to mention your midriff?”

(See also Matthew 6:6. Ahem.)

15 Nov 2005 — We say it every week, but do we know what it means?

The Kiddush for Friday night contains the sentence “כי הוא יום תחילה למקראי קודש זכר ליציאת מצריים”. Artscroll translates this as “For that day is the prologue to the holy convocations, a memorial of the Exodus from Egypt”.

I hear you scratching your head and saying, “What does Shabbat have to do with the Exodus?” Fortunately, according to the Artscroll footnote, Nachmanides had the same question, and he explained that Shabbat, representing God’s creation, is “the backdrop of the Exodus”, God’s demonstration of His ability to intervene in nature.

However, the Nevarech bentscher translates the same sentence as “a day preceding even those sacred occasions commemorating the departure from Egypt”, which moots the whole question. All the translator did to reach that interpretation is to rearrange the parse tree a little bit—treating זכר ליציאת מצריים as a modifier to מקראי קודש rather than to יום. And I don’t see anything in the phrasing or the punctuation to prove that one of these parse trees is better than the other. (Lojban enthusiasts, please take note.) This is somewhat forced, since מקראי קודש is plural and זכר ליציאת מצריים is singular. Maybe the translators know a loophole in the grammar that I don’t; can you treat the מקראי as some sort of collective that takes a singular modifier?

But every other Kiddush translation I’ve seen interprets the sentence the way Artscroll does. So if the Nevarech translation is consistent with the Hebrew text and makes more sense, why don’t any other translators parse it that way?

11 Nov 2005 — Suicidal machismo on Internet time

If the Russian roulette is too slow-moving for your taste, perhaps you’d like to play Bosnian roulette. All you need is a grenade and a death wish.

via arib

09 Nov 2005 — Don’t tell my rabbi

I learned a new word today: onomastics, the study of proper names.

Since my job involves maintaining and improving massive lists of proper names (the names of geographic locations, and the names of things that might get confused with geographic locations), I guess I’m a professional onomast.

06 Nov 2005 — I have this great idea for a story…

So there’s this engineer turned patent lawyer, a devotee of Ayn Rand who “occasionally dabble[s] in fiction”. Realizing that he has no talent for telling stories, he concludes that his true genius is for coming up with plot lines for stories that other people can tell.

Copyright law, the system that has satisfied other literary creators for the past few centuries, would not give this brilliant young man his just reward. Even if he copyrighted a story with one of his brilliant plots, someone else with mere storytelling talent could write another book with essentially the same plot, change enough details to avoid violating the copyright, and walk off with millions.

Fortunately, our hero has a solution: patent his plot! Applying his crackerjack legal talents, he writes an essay arguing that patentable plots is a logical application of recent precedents in American patent law. Furthermore, he argues, if such patents are granted, the change in the law “will spur an array of never-seen-before, never-experienced-before, intellectually inspiring forms of entertainment”, perhaps involving novel combinations of genetically engineered bacteria, one-click commerce, and a pony.

(OK, at this point, I’m having trouble figuring out how to get my readers to suspend their disbelief, even for a parody like this. A patentable process is supposed to be not only original and non-obvious, but useful. Even if you think software patents are a blight on the American legal system, it’s hard to deny that, say, public-key encryption [US Patent 4,405,829] is useful. But how is a patent examiner supposed to distinguish a useful plot from a non-useful one?)

Putting his application fees where is mouth is, our hero applies for a patent on “A process of relaying a story having a timeline and a unique plot involving characters comprises: indicating a character’s desire at a first time in the timeline for at least one of the following: a) to remain asleep or unconscious until a particular event occurs; and b) to forget or be substantially unable to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time until a particular event occurs; indicating the character’s substantial inability at a time after the occurrence of the particular event to recall substantially all events during the time period from the first time to the occurrence of the particular event; and indicating that during the time period the character was an active participant in a plurality of events.”

(If you have trouble substantially recalling the sentence you just read, don’t worry. I’ll rewrite it in the next draft.)

I’m not yet sure how this story should end. The options I can think of so far are:

1. The patent is denied, and the applicant spends the next few decades ranting about the unfairness of it all on Usenet.
2. The patent is granted, but our protagonist can’t find anyone interested in licensing it. He finally hires a ghostwriter to embody his patented plot in a novel, and has the novel published by a vanity press. It sells about fifty copies.
3. The patent is granted, and the industry takes notice. Within two years, every Hollywood studio and New York publishing house boasts about the size of its patent portfolio. Within five years, American cultural production has ground to a screeching halt; like the Wright brothers, everyone is too busy angling for the best licensing deal, or tying up their competitors with litigation, to actually publish a new book or distribute a new movie. Americans resort to bootleg films from India.

Can anyone help me out here? I’ll credit you as a co-inventorauthor.

via Groklaw and Slashdot

06 Nov 2005 — Down by by-law

I’m on a committee to revise our synagogue by-laws. We have been asked to pay special attention to the procedure for hiring a rabbi, since our current by-laws say very little about what to do, but the whole document is up for amendment.

If you, Gentle Reader, belong to a synagogue (other than, ahem, mine) and can point me to a copy of its by-laws, I would appreciate it. If your shul is sufficiently down with Robert’s Rules to have standing rules of order or other by-law-like regulations, I’d like to see those, too. And if you have enough experience with lay synagogue administration to have some insights into what works and what doesn’t in a set of by-laws, that would be really useful.

(If you do belong to my shul, you’re probably blinking and saying to yourself, “By-laws? We’re organized enough to have by-laws?”)

adTHANKSvance.

04 Nov 2005 — Frontiers of food technology

First there was the nicotine patch, then there was nicotine gum, and now… nicotine beer. It’s being produced by a German company; the authors of the Reinheitsgebot must be spinning in their graves.

If this product makes it easier for nicotine addicts to tolerate no-smoking-in-restaurants laws, I suppose it’s a Good Thing. But what’s next? Tobacco Flakes breakfast cereal?

02 Nov 2005 — Wanted: The Gerald Ford Amendment

Mark Kleiman and the Anonymous Liberal are asking Democrats to insist on a no-pardons pledge from President Bush. They don’t go far enough. What, after all, is a pledge from this President worth?

We need some spiny jellyfish to introduce a constitutional amendment, something like this:

Section 1

The President may not grant any pardon until the offender to be pardoned has been sentenced by a court of law for the particular offense to be pardoned.

Section 2

The President may not, without the consent of the Congress, grant any pardon for a crime committed while the offender, a co-conspirator of the offender, or an accessory of the offender was an employee or officer of the executive branch.

Section 3

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 4

This article shall take effect immediately upon its ratification.

Let the Republicans try to explain to their constituents why passing this amendment would not be in the best interests of the country. Please.

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