Blog/March 2009/Mar 13th

March 13th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Help feed the hungry in Israel!

This week saw the Fast of Esther, Purim and Shushan Purim. Here's a recent recap of the story in modern terms, in case you don't know it. Just in time for Purim: Egyptian imams claim the Starbucks icon represents Queen Esther. No, I didn't make that up. For next Purim you can dress up in new French fashion -- if you have the stomach.

Speaking of "if you have the stomach", who came up with chili flavored Klik? In the event you aren't familiar with it, "Klik" is a very popular Israeli candy-bar. The Great Brains in charge of product development must have been desperate for change (or very drunk), when they came up with the idea of putting hot-pepper flavoring in a chocolate bar. Sorry the link above is in Hebrew, but here's an excerpt: Chili flavor. Picante. The mix of chocolate and picante doesn't really go together. Why picante? I've heard of sweet, I grew up on bitter, but picante??? Why not salty? Sour? Rotten? Sweet and sour? Barbecue / grill flavor? ... but you should know, this is really nauseating. Yes, it is pretty bad. Save yourselves four shekels and don't give in to the search for "something new"!

And speaking of "shekels", I just have to vent a minute: there are a lot of Americans who call the national currency of Israel sheks, as in "that cost me three sheks". WRONG! The word is shekel, not shek. Would you say in America, "that soda cost me three dolls"?!? Hell no, leave our currency alone! Heaven knows our government has barely any dignity left as it is, we don't need your help.

In good news: I got the job I mentioned last week! Just found out this morning, in fact; the official offer will be tendered on Sunday (I don't know yet what the exact terms are, but I'll let you know if they were weird). Besides that, a person I did work for a number of years back asked me to do some more work, so I'm doing that as well. ברוך ה'!

In other news: a couple weeks ago I took down the vines which were climbing all over the house (five years of growth, it was a mess). So I've been cutting them into smaller chunks and disposing of them bit by bit. Finally, this week I cleared the path to the back of the house. Now we need to plant something. Esther wants mint around the outside of the house, which should help control the six-legged freaks who made their reappearance this week. Oy!

I resumed the Mishne Torah translation project this week, only to find that OpenOffice is very slow when handling extremely large files. Not only that, but I could not find a good way to do "page by page" layout (that is, English on the left page, Hebrew on the right page) in such a way that corresponding paragraphs line up properly. So I have reverted to using my old friend TeX -- or more correctly, the new and most excellent XeTeX, which does complex script layout properly and can handle UTF-8 -- so I can use vim to do the editing, and XeLaTeX for the layout. Now a question to you: if you are looking at a two-language text, what layout would you prefer:

• Facing pages, where the source and translation are on opposing pages so you see them at once when laying a book open
• Facing columns, where the source and translation are in two columns in one "row", so you can see them in an online (electronic) version with one page
• Interleaved paragraphs, where the source is in one paragraph and the translation immediately below it?

I am interested in your feedback on this, because there are pros and cons to all three layout options, and I am concerned not only with the accuracy of the text, but in the beauty and utility of the layout as well.

Anti-Semitism and useful-idiots abound this week. The quick reprise: England, Sweden, Israel, America and beyond, England again, the USA and another USA, USA again, Canada.

Would Obama have been elected if he had told the truth about his plans? Good question...

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!

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