Blog/June 2019/Jun 21st

June 21st

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Been fighting a cold since last week, and I’m still hacking and coughing. You’re lucky you can’t hear me!

The start of the week was spent getting things ready for Esther’s triumphant return, working on my client’s needs, and fixing the bug in 8th I mentioned last week. I was, fortunately, able to accomplish all of these before collecting Esther from the airport on Tuesday.

Her return trip was much more pleasant than the one last week; this time she had an entire row to herself, and the plane landed 20 minutes early. She had a great time with Daniela et. fam., as you would expect. While she was there, our grand-daughter decided to take her first steps — which both Esther and I had predicted.

It was Esther’s (Gregorian-calendar) birthday this week, so we celebrated with a nice meal at a restaurant (thanks, Mom!). The “Happy Fish”, which we hadn’t ever been to. Nice place, good service, and pleasant music (to my astonishment).

As is usual, Esther brought back a few supplies. Not a huge quantity of things, but more in the line of things very hard to find here, in the technical realm. As a result, the day after she came back I was engaged in manly and delicate electronics repair-work. I replaced the “mag” cable for my MagSafe 2 power adapter (which wouldn’t have been a big deal, had the original not been put together with large globs of high-temperature solder). I replaced the hard-disk in my Mac Mini with an SSD. I thought that would be an easy job, since the bottom of the Mini case just pops off (and I had upgraded the RAM a year or so ago in 3 minutes). No, no; it turns out that on this particular model, you need to disassemble the machine completely in order to get to the hard-disk. So that was fun. And then, I replaced the battery in Esther’s phone – which was harder than it should have been, but not a big deal.

So I’ve got electronics-repair street-cred now.

I also had random encounters with crazed Leftists. In one particular case, on Facebook there is a group I belong to which is a “Learning Arabic for Hebrew speakers” group (that’s not the name of the group). The admin of the group posted a “Love == Love” (e.g. the “LGBTQ+ Pride” motto) in Arabic. I posted, “Great. Let’s see you say that in Gaza or the PA”. Because — let’s face facts — those two areas are extremely intolerant of “deviant behavior”. As in: they kill gays. Literally.

My post got a bunch of “likes”. But one person objected strenuously. A translated synopsis of the ensuing dialog follows:

Me:  Great, let’s see...
SJW: No, because religious Jews
Me:  What a germane response
SJW: From your profile picture, we see how much you love homos and lesbians and
     bi and trans.  Why do we have to put up with your racism in a forum for
     learning Arabic?
Me:  You see all that from my profile pic?  It’s just my face.  Or perhaps you
     mean because I’ve got a kippa, and from that you derive that I “hate” all sorts
     of people?  You’ve got some nerve.  Who’s the racist?
SJW: You’re generalizing about 5 million people whom your country is
     conquering, while religious Jews are responsible for the outrageous way homos,
     lesbians, bi, and trans people are treated.  You’re offended that I generalized
     about religious Jews? Boo-hoo.
Me:  Again: you’re a frank racist. From my picture you determined, without
     knowing me at all, what my opinions are regarding LGBT etc.  And now you
     expanded your slander to include how I behave towards Israeli and PA Arabs.
     You don’t know anything about me, donkey. It would be preferable for you to
     learn some manners and shut up when you don’t know what you’re talking about…

The “dialogue” went on for a while longer, but the man(?) was so unhinged that I resorted to blocking him, something I very rarely do. I just thought y’all might benefit from seeing what we’re dealing with on the extreme Left. This person, by the way, was an Israeli living in the Netherlands.

Interesting stuff:

• +10 to Slaviness: Russian man survives bear attack by biting off the bear’s tongue.
• National parks toss signs warning of melting glaciers after it turns out they didn’t yet melt.
• New York, in a bid to become far less competitive economically, is about to enact a far-reaching climate bill. Well, AOC managed to screw over the Amazon deal, so there may be a trend here.
• California, feeling left out, is becoming America’s first Third-World state. I think Jeremy and Daniela got some taste of that during their trip.
• According to the Bern: “a lot of people in the country would be delighted to pay more taxes”. I’ve never met any such people, but maybe Vermont is different.
• Hydrogen may not be a very good consumer-level fuel. Just sayin’.
• And Facebook is launching its own crypto-currency. Are you guys willing to trust FB with your financial security, when they can’t even secure their own website?

The weather’s been summer-standard, without extremes. So pleasant enough for standard work.

Esther’s back, الحمد لله! We’ll feast upon:
homemade ḥalla, baked chicken with potatoes, traditional cholent, various salatim, good wine, fruit, and “wafers”.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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