imaginary family values presents
yesh omrim
a blog that reclines to the left
Summary page 5 of 36
Warning: This has been migrated from an earlier blog server. Links, images, and styles from postings before 2018 may be funky.
- 19 Jul 2010 — Sorry, Bibi
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The Nine Days are an appropriate time for Jews to repent, and it is appropriate for me to repent for being too cynical about the Israeli political process. I had assumed that the Israeli government is so independent of the Diaspora1 that complaints from liberal American Jews could not possibly block MK Rotem’s proposed conversion bill. I was wrong. חטאתי.
- 19 Jul 2010 — Cool new renewable-energy idea of the month
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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a one-megawatt power plant!
- 09 Jul 2010 — The workers’ flag is bluest blue
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According to a recent poll [PDF] with a three-point margin of error:
- 09 Jul 2010 — Married white man, creative, seeks sadist
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As I mentioned a while back, I am getting back into SF-writing after a long absence. I have a story written and and almost (I hope) submission-worthy, but I would like to get feedback from some more people before actually sending it out. So I am willing to let you read “The Blessed Ones”, this 11,500-word story of mine, if you would only repay me with a thorough and ruthless critique. Everything is fair game: plot, characters, world-building, science, sex/race/class issues, etc.
- 06 Jul 2010 — IMPORTANT BUSINESS PROPOSAL — BUY THIS BOOK
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Every once in a while my kids get a book about Africa from the library, and invariably, it reinforces the image of the continent as one massive wildlife preserve with the occasional village. You’d never know from these books that, for example, Lagos and Kinshasa are among the largest cities in the world.
- 05 Jul 2010 — My fellow American religious fanatics
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Living in Israel for eight months, even as a student in an almost-entirely English-speaking environment, made me feel very American.1 One of the features of Israeli political culture that caught my eye was that in Israel, the state serves to allocate privileges and duties among groups, and not just among individuals.
- 02 Jul 2010 — An unpatriotic thought
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If it weren’t for those trouble-makers in 1776, my fireworks and barbecue would be three days earlier.
- 01 Jul 2010 — PSA: How to recognize that someone is drowning
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The Instinctive Drowning Response… does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening.
- 15 Jun 2010 — Getting the point
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The Seven-Year-Old had been spooked by a book he had been reading in his bed, and I was looking for something to distract him from his fears. I picked up Sally Miller Gerhart’s Wanderground, flipped through it, and then thought better of offering it to him.
- 16 May 2010 — Writer’s trance
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After a long long hiatus, I am using some of my Copious Free Time for writing science fiction. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes that I saw in a certain Internet imbroglio last year, I am also trying to give myself a better multicultural education, and one of the first books that came to hand was called, natch, Multi-Cultural Literacy. In one essay from that book—“Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink”, by Gloria Anzaldúa—there is this passage:
- 16 May 2010 — Missing the point
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Scene: A father is reading And Tango Makes Three to his three-year-old son.
- 05 May 2010 — Unprophetable art
- 02 May 2010 — You have nothing to loose but your bowels
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It appears that in honor of May Day, a major aqueduct of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has gone on strike.
- 29 Apr 2010 — Shorter Steve Jobs
- 27 Apr 2010 — The e-postman always pings twice
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My wife called me at work this morning to report that she hadn’t gotten any email, not even in her might-be-spam folder. “I’ll fix it”, I said, remembering some odd “temporary failure in name resolution” messages I had received from some scripts running on the server (the virtual machine which serves this here site, and which also handles mail to ropine.com) the previous day. So I restarted the network on the server and figured that would be the end of it.