A fistful of bullet points

[avram]

• MetaFilter has a thread on Moleskine notebooks, which seem to be catching on among us paper fetishists. I love my small Moleskine sketchpad. It has a cover tough enough to stand up to life in my back pocket, an elastic band to keep my pen from slipping in and munging the pages, a bookmark to mark where I left off, a handy pouch in the back cover, and opens out flat so I can scan my sketches. And the paper’s thick enough to cope with light watercolor washes.
• Rumor has it that Apple’s planning to release a pro-level word processor with 100% import-export compatibility with MS Word. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• One recent ex-Missourian is in for an unpleasant surprise.
• I can’t figure out this Gawker piece about Australian Ugg boots. These things don’t look ugly to me. In fact, they look simple, functional, and comfortable. If they sold as cheap over here as they do downunda (about $30) I’d probably buy a pair. They don’t look like something I’d expect a svelte supermodel to wear, but that’s not my primary aesthetic criterion.
• Just when you think you’ve seen all the surprises the Net has to offer, it tosses up something like Hasidic Gentiles. Thanks, Teresa.

Comments

In all fairness...

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

(I suspect you're uninterested in religious ramblings, but since you brought it up, I'm going to use your space to comment ;-)

IMHO, anyone self-identifying as "Hasidic Gentiles" is going a bit far, yes -- but the Noachide/B'nai Noach (http://www.rb.org.il/noahide/directory/essay1.htm) movement in general is not such a wacko thing. It's basically deriving from Judaism something that it does not in general attempt to teach: what it is that the rest of the world is supposed to do with themselves.

Judaism is premised on the ideas that (a) there's a real, universal God who wants particular things universally, but also that (b) Jews are designed, if you will, to be one nation among many; the point is not to get everyone on Earth to be Jews (unlike, say, Islam and Christianity). Yet for people who come to believe that Judaism is right about these things, the only satisfying religious option has been to actually become Jewish. B'nai Noach is an attempt to put "Judaism for Gentiles" into practice. I think it's cool. And speaking as someone who did convert (btw): if I'd had it available as an option, I would probably have explored it fairly intensively before deciding whether I really needed to be a Jew myself. Not that I'm complaining, mind you :-)

Re: In all fairness...

[avram]

Well, there's the thing. It seems a bit odd for someone to become convinced of the rightness of Judaism strongly enough to want to identify as "Hasidic" and go to the trouble of learning Hebrew and not want to go all the way and convert.