So… onward! Upward! Who knows what biographical turn might galvanize this blog back into action again? Middle age awaits!

I’m also redesigning the main site with WordPress to make it prettier and shinier as well. You know, in my Copious Free Time.

For professional and expert users, however, there are some things that could be improved. First, afaik Google Book’s metadata is a total mess. Doesn’t it WorldCat have an api? Since my main goal was to alphabetize my books and keep track of them, super-detailed metadata was not that important, but I have a feeling that this app could easily be improved if the developers found cleaner catalogs to consult. Or maybe its not.

Secondly, and more importantly, is exporting your data. The app features a super-convenient option to export your data in SQL or CSV formats, but few of these formats are supported by standard bibliography software. As a result, getting your data out of the app and into Sente, Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, BibDesk, or even EndNote can be a pain. Even more important than getting clean metadata, then, is producing an ability to export records in bibtex format, which iirc is more or less the defacto standard these days.

Overall, this is a great app by a great developer that is undoubtedly one of the best (if not the best) of its kind. I very highly recommend it — and with just a few more tweaks it will have all of the ridiculously specialized features that niche users like me clamor for!

I’ve organized my drosh for today around two song lyrics. I’ll tell you about the second one later. The first is from one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, who says in one of his songs: “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Reading this parshah, right at the tail end of the torah, I feel very much that we are very much being given the small print: “inhaling fumes may cause vomiting, do not remove this tag unless owner, Improper use of dye may cause bleaching, try on a small, unseen sample first”

More seriously, though, this parshah poses a dilemma for us: its phrasing suggests that we follow God’s law for instrumental reasons: Do what I say, and you will be rewarded, disobey and you will be punished. Read literally, this parshah suggests that Judaism is ultimatly a back room deal, three of my quids for two of your quo. I suspect most of us find this troubling, for at least three reasons. First, because it reminds us that a part of our religion that did (and does) see worshipping God in these illiberal terms. Second, it implies that we should stop being Jewish if we found a more efficient means of achieving prosperity, and thirdly because, well, I’m sure we all realize there a lot easier things to do than Judaism. How can we understand a parshah that seems to so cheapen our faith? How can we recover the image of God as someone or something we love, respect, and stand in awe of, rather than someone who pays us an allowance when we do our chores?

One possible answer came to me recently when I met a family friend for lunch. She was raised an observant household, but stopped practicing as an adult, married an atheist. Then she had a daughter and bang! she found herself wanting to give her daughter some sort of Jewish upbringing. But how? Her folks were thousands of miles away on the mainland, and her husband was hostile to religion. Over poke we mulled over the question: if you could only do one or two things to raise a child Jewish, just something to give them enough of an anchor in our tradition that they could use later on in life, what would it be?

Here’s what I came up with: making shabbos and hearing people leiyn torah. I’ve thought it over, of course — turning small, impressionable children into observant jews is something that has been on my mind a lot lately for reasons that are currently drooling off on the stage right side of the congregation. When my wife and I first had our children, everyone at sof encouraged us to bring the kids to shul, no matter how old they were. They did it with great warmth. Well, to be honest, they did it with great force, really, is the term I’d use. This was a problem for us because we were totally exhausted and looking for someone to tell us it was ok to skip shul and take the day off. As a result we had conversations like this:

“You should feel free to come to shul. We won’t be bothered. I used to sit in the back and nurse my kid. In fact I gave birth, took a shower, and then proceeded directly to high holiday services, where I sang hineini and did the yom kippur amidah completely from memory.”

“Well, we’re really tired right now, we’re not sure we’re up for a whole service”

“You know you don’t have to sit in the sanctuary. Maybe you could just bring the kids and sit in the child care room”

“Maybe. We’re really tired though. Really tired.”

“You could always just drive up to sof and sit in the parking lot for a little bit — you know, just so the kids could look at the shul for a while.”

“My kids can’t see anything that’s more than a milk bottle’s length away from them.”

“Well why not just sit in your car in the driveway of your house with the engine turned off and think about shul for a while then?”

This is what we were up against: the incotrovertible fact that being Jewish is doing Jewish.

Being Jewish is doing jewish. Most people — I mean Christians — think of Judaism as a legalistic religion, a hide bound and inflexible carrying out of meaningless and incomprehensible rituals in a dead language, etc. etc. They say this about us to make them feel better about their supposedly more emotionally immediate and flexible faith. That is why they skip parshah like Ki Tavo: they think it’s the fine print, the perfect example of Jewish legalism and a punitive, Mosaic god. But we Jews know, as Jonathan Sacks so wonderfully put it, that ritual is to the soul what exercise is to the body. And that is why my second song lyric is from Ice Cube’s superb first solo album, 1990s “Amerikka’s Most Wanted”. On that album, Ice Cube argues that the inevitability of the future lethal violence that he will unleash against his enemies is “not a threat but a promise/I’m as crazy as they come see/ momma didn’t love me.” He then goes on to describe his nine millimeter pistol. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that we see ki tavo not as a threat, but a promise, an empirical statement about human flourishing and how it happens.

Judaism has strange, unintended consequences. Food taboos are an example. What sort of loving deity could deny us bacon? Why these hukkim? A well-meaing non-jewish friend of mine asked me this once. Exasperated to be asked this yet again, replied: “because everytime I go to a restaurant and look up at the menu, I know who I am. When was the last time something happened that made you say: I know who I am?”

I know who I am. There are two things to say about this. First, I can’t be a very classy guy if the only kind of restaurant I go to is the kind where the menu is directly above the head of the person waiting to take my order. Second, Judaism as a way of life is engineered to promote human flourishing. It rewards us and leads to prosperity — not because if we study torah God sends an angel to tell our boss to give us a raise, but because — wait for it — charity, good deeds and lovingkindess are good, but the study of torah is equal to them all because it leads to them all. And not because of God has the power to shape the universe, but because we do.

God’s self-limiting love for Israel (as Rabbi Hartmann puts it): That is why I suggested to my friend that her daughter listen to people chanting torah, and why you all suggested I sit in the drive way and think about shul. I mean how crazy is chanting torah? You’re siting there reading something without vowels or cantillation marks to a room full of people who can double-check all the mistakes you make. It’s the one person without the parshah who has to read it to everyone else! I mean just to get out alive you’ve got to keep a tikkun in your house to learn the trope. And then to really understand the trope you’ve got to understand the grammar, and then after you finally learn some Hebrew you’ve got to read what the torah actually says and I mean by the time you’ve done that the damn thing is basically engraved on your heart and…. hey… wait a sec…

I think it must be hard — or at least tiring — for God to have to explain things to people. I mean, she’s God. And we are not. I have trouble explaining to my students how language forms the horizon of a hermeneutic phenomenology, and she get stuck answering questions like “so you ordered the universe how?” I imagine God saying “Well it’s kinda…. I mean, it’s complicated, but… basically, well I separated the earth from the sky. I mean, that’s not really right, but well, and then I guess you could say, basically, I was over the waters, like hovering I guess you could call it…” The end of the torah, like the beginning, is God levelling with us — talking turkey, the straight dope — telling us the truth, even though we may not be ready to understand it.

In his essay “Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve it” Rabbi Sacks asks what anchors Jewish identity. Not ethnicity, he says, since we’re now from all over. Not a love of Jewish culture, since lots of people (including nonjews) love jewish culture. Cultural connoissieurship is different from memebrship in an am. No, he says, what makes us Jewish is ultimately a religious commitment — and there’s no way around that. I think Sacks is just now figuring out what God tells us in this parshah — that judaism is a way of life which is designed to be good, even if at times we don’t understand why. Its to our credit, and God’s, that we get a chance to hear — and try to understand — an explanation.

Shabbat Shalom.

Think about it: after two years with a Roku box we are simply running out of things to watch on Netflix streaming — and particularly quality TV shows, which are our standard fare these days. No other flat-rate service can provide them, especially not the pathetic Hulu Plus, which not only makes you pay money to watch commercials, but basically takes a whole tranche of content and makes sure it’s not available to anyone with a dedicated content streaming device. I mean really.

Basically there is a doughnut hole in content offerings these days: a great, viable streaming option offered by Netflix with limited selection but great pricing; and ridiculously over-priced on-demand offerings from Apple, Amazon, and whatnot, which offer even greater selection and convenience, but which are just ridiculous overpriced when compared to every other way of watching television.

It might just be us — we were relatively early adopters of Netflix, have pretty strange tastes (read: only watch the documentaries our friends were in) and have been watching for a while. The cabinet is starting to look a little bare. But look: we watch basically two hours of TV a night after the kids go to sleep, which is like US$120 a night if you were to buy it off of your Roku at the cheapest prices going in the on-demand market. At that price, why not just pay for cable?

In the long run, it’s not clear to me that cheap flat rate services will win over premium-priced on-delivery — especially once Big Content gets its confidence back up in the new digital marketplace. At the moment, it looks like the right choice for us is yesterday’s media.

The goal and format The Sake Handbook is a good idea — this is no coffee table book of beautiful pictures of sake bottles. Instead it introduces the reader to sake through the brewing process, explaining a welter of names and methods slowly and logically as it takes you through the production process. Subsequent chapters take you through Japanese tasting terms, different kinds of sake, drinking vessels, and so forth. These chapters successfully keep the reader from entering Overwhelm Mode by repeatedly defining Japanese terms when used (a glossary is also included, which is good). The prose is clear, although it also seems repetitive and padded — I’m not sure if the author was trying to lengthen this already-short book, or simply an attempt to make the volume welcoming to readers. Often, however, it just makes it hard to find information. The chapter on Ginjoshu, for instance, doesn’t actually explain what Ginjoshu is until you are a page and seven paragraphs in to it. Sometimes authors write forgetting how little their readers know compared to them — it seems like this might be the case here, where long digressions and reflections get in the way of serious information. If anything, much of the text could be reduced to helpful tables and charts which would orient the reader to topics like brewing method, taste terms, and so forth.

It get worse. Some of the chapters of this book are downright unhelpful. The section on ‘collecting sake labels’ is not actually about collecting sake labels but a discussion of the most common kanji characters that appear on sake labels. Readers searching for tips on getting labels off bottles, descriptions of how collectors organize their collections, etc. will have to look elsewhere. The chapter on sake bars in Japan and wholesalers in the US — 37 pages — will not be of use to most readers. Perhaps the intended audience is anglophone expats in Japan? At any rate for those of us in the rest of the world this section is of little use — the list of wholesalers in my state is already out of date. Honestly: who needs a phonebook when you have Google?

The most egregious problem with the book is the main section: the 100 pages of recommended sake to try. This section consists of pictures of sake labels and one paragraph reviews of the sake in question. This is the expert, value-added core of the book — it could be used as a guide for first-timers looking to try different sakes, or to read about sakes they have tried at a restaurant or bar. Unfortunately, the sakes are organized by the geographical region of their brewery, from north to south. It’s ridiculous. This essentially means it is impossible to browse the list on the basis of any of the criteria a reader would actually use: alphabetical listings of brands, types of sake, flavors, suggested lists of sakes for tastings, and so forth. The index does list brands, so the book is not a total waste, but it is certainly a disappointment.

Let’s face it: compared to the relatively well-written Wikipedia page on sake and the many brewery website out there, Gauntner’s book falls short. If you are not good at using the Internet and want to learn more about sake, it will do the job. But at base the book’s value proposition falls short: despite assertions to the contrary, you can beat free — but in order to do so you need to curate information better than this. A useful book, but I have to admit I’m a little disappointed that I bought it.

The Dungeon Saga has been compared to a lot of other games, but is best conceived as a cross between Puzzle Quest and Dungeon Raid. You character advances across a very basic map and fights individual monsters like Puzzle Quest, but the battles are done using a match-3 mechanic like Dungeon Raid’s. Leveling, climbing up skill trees, and buying equipment all follow the Dungeon Raid mechanic. Derivative? Yes. But a lot of fun to play.

The game is attractive and gameplay requires thinking a step ahead. Anyone will enjoy the game, but it also has the depth necessary to keep the attention of ‘serious casual’ players. There are some missteps — after a while the music gets annoying, but you cannot turn it off without also turning off the sound effects. It would be nice to know how much gold you have when battling monsters, but this data isn’t available in the game display. You cannot read the description of skill higher up the skills tree unless you are ready to unlock them, which makes it hard to plan your progress. Not this this matters, since customization choices are pretty limited.

The biggest issue with the game is balance: like Puzzle Quest, you play against monsters, but like Dungeon Raid you earn gold and experience by matching them off the board. This fact, combined with how incredibly easy the first six levels are, mean that you spend most of the early game grinding gold and experience.

The Dungeon Saga lacks the depth and polish of a classic like Swords and Poker, but the mechanics feel less tacked-on than those in the latest version of Dungeon Raid, and the interface is iOS native, unlike Puzzle Quest. If you’re looking for an entrée into the genre, or just a light experience, this would be a good title to pick up on sale.

“Yes, that’s a guinea pig…sometimes they live in labs… they’re good models for the third trimester…”

I’m still never going to give Facebook more data than I absolutely need to in order to communicate with my friends. But I recently reread the Amazon and iTunes TOS and I see that both now give themselves a nonexclusive license to your work, rather than just taking your copyright (as it use to iirc). I can live with that.

So In My Copious Free Time I might be able to squeeze out a recommendation or two… maybe… that’s the plan anyway…

No wait!

If Felix Guattari and Roy Wagner had an arm wrestling match, who would win? That’s a better question.