Aside from doing the laundry...

[avram]

It’s my sad duty to report that one of our glasses, one of the small cobalt blue ones, took its own life today, leaping to its death from counter-height in an attempt to escape the overcrowded milchig dish drainer.

I’ve been having thoughts along the lines of If God had meant us to keep kosher, he’d have given us more counter-space and more cabinets. I suppose one obvious counter to that would be to argue that God didn’t give the Jews more than a tiny sliver of a country to live in, and they’ve been making pretty good use of that, greening the negev and all, but that could lead to a strained analogy with Israelis and Palestinians taking on the parts of milchig and fleishig dishware, and suicide treyfing missions, and we would all be the poorer for it.

In further news, I’ve discovered an important difference between the NY and Brooklyn Public Library websites: While the BPL implements catalog search through a mundane, ordinary HTML search form, the NYPL (presumably having more money to throw at the task) has had built for it an actual Java applet interface, which offers many benefits that the HTML form lacks, most of which I can only speculate about, because of the two I did experience:

• The several minutes I spent waiting for the applet to manifest in my browser window gave me an opportunity to rest my wrists and fingers with hand exercises, while with an HTML form I’d have spent that time in carpal-tunnel-damaging clicking, typing, and other activities that come with actually hunting down the information I’m looking for.
• The fact that the loading Java applet seized total control of my web browser gave me another opportunity to run the perl script I wrote that cleans up my web browser’s cache after a crash or (in this case) forced quit.

The NYPL site does offer a telnet-based search option (thoughtfully hiding the login info behind yet another hyperlink) which eventually told me that the NYPL doesn’t have the books I’m looking for either. Oh well.

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

You're an even weirder political philosopher than I am.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Some years ago I was on a mailing list about writing, and in a thread about "what WP do you use" one person said how lovely Word was on a 486, because you typed the sentence, then there was this wonderful reflective pause before it showed up onscreen, to let you consider if it was the sentence you had wanted before you re-read it. She didn't mean it in an ironic way either.

[sdelmonte]

Re: dishes - From a strictly biblical POV, the laws about meat and dairy are limited "don't cook a calf in its mother's milk." So maybe God didn't intend this. But after 3,000 years, it's grown to be a habit. :)

Besides, a Jew ideally needs eight sets of dishes: meat, dairy, pareve, and treyf, and then duplicated for Passover.

Re: NYPL online - I can't load either the java app or the telnet app at work, so I cannot check the catalogue from the office, which is when I'm usually thinking about it. Happily, the nearby branch in five minutes away from work. But there's not reason for them to use java.

Still, NYPL beats the Queens library, as the NYPL has: 1) a by-phone renewal method that anyone can use, while you have to register at your branch library to use the Queens renewal line; 2) has a method of reserving bok electronically when Queens does not; and 3) has much better holdings and much, much better librarians.

suicide treyfing missions

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

When I was in grad school, two friends and I co-wrote our homage to The Brave Little Toaster, about the tribulations and triumph of a blender, Sookey. She spends some time in Israel, breaks down, is remade in the US in a sinister Salvation Army shop; in her new home, she is deemd *milchig* and someone uses her for meat and doesn't say--so she commits suicide, short circuiting rather than cause her lovely new family to eat treyf.