Blog/December 2020/Dec 18th
From RonWareWiki
< Blog | December 2020
| Dec 18th | Comments or questions? Click here! |
Well, ḥanukkah’s over now! We had a pretty good week, all told; hope you did too!
Every year, I say to myself, “let’s try and find good sufganyot”. A “sufganya” is a kind of filled doughnut typically eaten during ḥanukkah in Israel. They’re everywhere, all the bakeries have them. Despite their near universal presence, most of them are — not to put too fine a point on it — nearly inedible. Either the dough is tasteless or too thick or there’s almost no filling. Most of the time there’s almost no filling. It’s rather depressing, in fact. This year we made two attempts and both failed rather severely. HANUKKAH FAIL!
Of course, the holiday isn’t actually about eating doughnuts, nor is it about “light and joy” as Kamala Harris awkwardly explains for reasons known only to her. It’s primarily a celebration of the military victory of Torah-keeping Jews over the Hellenistic assimilationist Jews and the Seleucid Greek overlords. There’s also the miracle of the day’s worth of ritually pure oil lasting for eight days (hence the holiday’s eight day duration, and the lighting of candles). So sure, “light” does play a part, but there was a lot of blood as well. Not a “happy-happy-joy-joy” holiday, despite its press in the West. Certainly no parallels to the Other Major Holiday of the season, regardless of what Hallmark has to say about it.
Various tidbits:
- With all the controversy surrounding the call for Jill Biden to drop her insistence on always being referred to as “Dr Biden”, it’s worth taking a look at her doctoral dissertation. Now, I’m no PhD or Dr or anything, but that is one unbelievably poorly-written paper. Had I written it in high-school, I would have been lucky to have been given a “C”. Draw your own conclusions.
- The Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” has lots of people excited. But it has a glaring flaw, in that no woman has ever managed to win a chess championship at that level. Also, as an Israeli friend of mine says, “the series is poison” — whatever that means.
- Author Roald Dahl was well known to be an antisemite. His family recently apologized for his antisemitism. I wonder why they should apologize? He was the antisemite, not them. Should we all apologize for whatever evils our ancestors may have done? Well yes, according to the Established Truth of Today.
- A Michigan judge allowed the release of a forensic audit report on the Dominion voting equipment, and it provides strong evidence of systematic election fraud. Will that make any difference? Not likely, but it will certainly bolster the opinions of those who hold the Biden win was illegitimate.
- On a sad note: someone I knew and worked with years ago just died. He was younger than I am. Now I’m feeling more my age…
We initiated our year-end sale on 8th this week. Hopefully it will be as successful as in years past, but 2020 and all that. We’ll see.
I’m adding some simple “OOP” facilities to 8th. The idea being that while 8th isn’t object-oriented, since there have been a number of requests for OOP over the years, it will now have some OOP-ability. The implementation is actually quite simple, and patterned somewhat after Javascript’s notions.
Today, Sarah and Yarin (and a couple of Sarah’s friends) will be coming over to celebrate her birthday. In preparation, I baked a load of bagels and sourdough to enliven the event. Esther baked apple pie (per Sarah’s request), and in a few hours the festivities should commence. May she (and we!) only have joyous occasions to celebrate!
The weather was cool this week, and rainy a few days. It’s supposed to stay cold but dry for the weekend and into the coming week.
This shabbat our menu consist of:
homemade ḥalla,
sweet-potato soup,
meatloaf,
roast chicken,
various salatim,
and apple pie.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
| Top: Blog | Prev: Dec 11th | Next: Dec 25th |