(no subject)

querldox brought up an interesting question in his livejournal, here.. I had a response to a small part of it, which I'm reposting here.

And I'm still trying to figure out why there hasn't been a second attack of some sort on American soil.

Well, let's consider some possibilities:

1. There have been attempts, but competent law-enforcement/security/whatever has stopped them.

This is such an annoying hypothesis, because it's non-falsifiable. I mean, presumably, Bush knows if this is false, but he won't say. Virtually nobody else can know if this is false. If it's true, then there are people who know it's true -- the people planning them, the people directly stopping them -- but if it's false, it's impossible to determine that fact.

2. We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here.

According to this hypothesis, people hostile to the United States would rather take their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan than in the United States. I have trouble believing this one, as people have managed to attack England, Spain, Jakarta, Bali, and so forth. But, perhaps the United States is genuinely far enough away from the rest of the world, in some practical sense, that it just isn't worth attacking here when you could attack somewhere else. But that seems . . . foolish somehow.

3. There's no point in attacking us, because we're already doing to ourselves every single bit of damage that terrorist action is supposed to provoke a country into doing.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but this is the one I like.

Tending bar on Saturday night

Friday, I tended bar for an event at MIT; tending bar at the Sloan Center is always weird, because they've got the weirdest system of inventory management and alcohol setup: bartender's choice. Every other place I've ever worked, the event planner and the event holder jointly choose what will be served at the bar; at MIT Sloan Center, if there's a full bar, the rule is just "Go into the liquor closet and grab what you think people will want, and keep track of it." I guess it's pretty fun, but it's weird. Oh, and they lack some things that I consider basics, like Jack Daniels. They won't buy the stuff -- their bourbon is Wild Turkey. No idea why.

Anyway, on to Saturday night. It was a bat mitzvah, but not through Bruce. I like to think that, had Bruce been in charge, it wouldn't have been like that.

Here's a copy of the email I sent to the Temple:

I was one of the people working at [REDACTED]'s bat mitzvah celebration this past Saturday.

It was an example of the kinds of excesses that I had heard about in the past, but had never seen at any bar or bat mitzvah celebration.

Booze luges are inappropriate at a bat mitzvah celebration, and, indeed, at a Temple except possibly during Purim.

And go-go dancers are significantly beyond the pale.

Several of us who were working the event were shocked and dismayed at the event. While the dancers were perfectly nice people, this was not an event at which they should have been working.

If the [REDACTED] family did not have a basic comprehension of what constitutes appropriate behavior, as, evidently, they did not, I believe that the rest of the community should have taken action and not allowed such a shonda. Several of the people working were Jewish, and, although they did not make us ashamed to be Jewish, the [REDACTED]s certainly made us ashamed that they
were Jewish. We found ourselves having to explain repeatedly to our co-workers that they were not typical examples of Judaism.

While a celebration of a bat mitzvah should be a simcha, this party was something else entirely.

Such an event reflects badly not only on their family, not only on your community as a whole, but would have reflected badly on the entire am Yisrael, had those of us who are Jewish not explained how abberant the [REDACTED]s' actions were.

If anyone at the Temple, including the [REDACTED]s, would like to contact me to communicate further about this, this email address is usually the best way, but I am also available by telephone at [REDACTED].

Thank you for your time;

- Ian Osmond

There were other examples of excess, as well, of course, but those weren't worth getting into in an email. And, really, the the bat mitzvah's best friends reading a three-page poem they'd written about how much of a slut she was, that wasn't really the family's fault.

I just walked outside

I often don't leave the house for days at a time, but I just walked outside to get something from the car.

It's autumn. I walked outside and it smelled like autumn.

The first day of the year that smells like autumn doesn't just smell like autumn, it smells like every autumn. You smell that, and you don't just smell now, you smell the autumn of every year of your life, past and future. And possibly every autumn before you were born, and after you die, too.

Whenever the seasons change, you get that. Four times a year, you can smell time.

First day of Hebrew School!

So, after getting home from tending bar at 2:30, and talking to Lis for another hour and a half about what my day had been like, and how the party she'd gone to had been, I finally fell asleep at 4:00, and got up three hours later, at 7:00, to go to work for the first day of Hebrew School of the year.

Larry Rich is my co-teacher this year -- I think this is the first year that I've had a co-teacher more experienced than I am. Two of his sons are madrichim (assistant teachers) at the school, and he's basically the main Hebrew teacher of the school. Beth's two sons are in my class this year -- they're identical twins, but fortunately, one of them has a mole under his lip, so I can tell them apart. They're, of course, totally different personalities.

So, as always, they are putting grades together in order to get reasonable numbers of people per class. This means that I get to teach students from BOTH of the groups of kids that I taught before. So I'm truly happy about this class. If you remember me posting cool things about any of my students from any year before last year, I've got that student again this year.

What else? Mark, the other teacher who plays guitar, is back again this year, which is awesome, because it's more fun to lead singing together than by myself. Not that it's not fun to lead it on my own, but it's more fun with the two of us.

We did Hebrew review in the first half of the class. All of the students stated that they knew no Hebrew, and had forgotten the Hebrew they didn't know over the summer, which we allowed was reasonable and expected. And they stated that they couldn't write cursive. They then went on to write the Hebrew alphabet in cursive, which, of course, they had totally forgotten how to do, but somehow still could.

If these kids actually knew that they knew what they knew, Larry and I would have very little to do in class.

In the second half of class, I started teaching History. I started off, as I planned to do, talking about "what is history and why do we study it", and went on to "when does Jewish history start?"

A lot of what we talked about I posted to tbbhistoryclass, which is the discussion LJ community I set up for the class. Feel free to read along, if you like. It's primarily for my students, but feel free to pop in to correct information I get wrong, and so forth.

So that was most of it, really. I'm so looking forward to this year!