Jews Got Guns!

Well this is different. Jews for the Preservation
of Firearms Ownership is inevitably going to look somewhat hysterical to those of us who think that guns are mostly a danger to those who carry them and their loved ones. But there are lots of excellent topics here. Examples: carrying guns on the Sabbath? Some reminders about how badly Jews in the Warsaw ghetto needed guns are here. And you'll find the usual extreme readings of the second amendment as well.

How do you feel when your tefillin are borrowed?

How do you feel when your tefillin are borrowed? I've just arrived at Shachrit, they don't seem to be anywhere and it's a pretty sure bet some visitor, or some regular who forgot his, has borrowed mine. And they borrowed mine because there isn't any extra pair left for me. I can smile and say "You're welcome" at the end of services, but meanwhile there's nothing much to think about except, "Why was I late????"

When not to blog:

Last Shabbat I listened to one of the leaders of a Chavurah minyan explaining to members how she was going to keep them abreast of schedules and events by Email. Afterwards I pointed out to her that if she made a blog, she could arrange that each entry was emailed to her list, but in addition, all of her information would be permanently available online. “In other words,” she said, “the members can go to my web site to see what’s going on.” I agreed.
“I don’t want that!” she said. “I want people to feel that if they want to know what’s going on, they have to come to services.” She could tell that I was a computer-oriented sort of person, so it was with difficulty that she realized she had convinced me she was right.

One of the many reasons I want to write a novel:

I want to write a novel with a character named Morris Ayin. We won’t know much about Morris, but the other characters will see him coming and going, and it will always look like he’s doing something wrong. Eventually we’ll learn that he’s really an okay guy, just lacking a little commonsense about how to act properly.

XXX = ?

I had the pleasure last Shabbat of davening at a place where they post the current three-digit page number, using a rack with large numbered cards. Well, not an unalloyed pleasure – I was using an alternative prayer book, and had to keep resisting the impulse to turn to the “current” page. But that’s not important now. What interests me is this: when the service is over, what number should be left on the cards? Usually the last number just stays there (probably the Sabbath psalm) but why not change the last number to: 613!

Hebrew on the Palm.

I’m a Palm PDA person. My previous (OS3) pda had full Hebrew support. When Palm brought out OS5, I got a Tungsten, a fine PDA except that for some reason OS5 made it very hard to support Hebrew. Eventually - after many many moons – two companies cracked full OS 5 support. It’s expensive, and reasonably so since a lot of work went into developing it. But I’m lucky, on my Tungsten I settled for half a loaf, and got it free.
I use a free document reader called HebDoc. It reads Hebrew palm docs like the ones you can find at Moadon. The company I got it from, Lionscribe, now gives away LionDoc. They also offer partial OS5 Hebrew support for $30, but I think you can use LionDoc without it. I find their unpointed high-resolution Hebrew fonts to be excellent..
Full OS5 Hebrew support is available (just recently) from Penticon for $65 (including an onscreen Hebrew keyboard), or in a $40 read-only form. The PILOC people have been offering full OS5 hebrew support for many months, $60.
I bought Penticon fonts for OS3 after trying them out. They had an interesting way of terminating the trial period: the Hebrew text started reading backwards.
And that’s the Palm Hebrew support I’m aware of. Comments, please?

Spelling Equality.

On Shabbat, right after Shochen Ad, the short verses beginning “B’fi yesahrim tithallal” form an acrostic, spelling Yitzchak in the middle words. The last words of these verses can be rearranged (as they ARE in, for example, Nusach Ari, and in the Birnbaum High Holidays Siddur) to Spell Rivka as well. (Begin “B’fi yesahrim titRomam”.) If you feel that you believe in as much equality of the sexes as your flavor of Judaism will allow, perhaps you should pray this double acrostic.

Not Quite?

One of the drawbacks of working for a newspaper is that you will – regretfully – think of headlines the paper can never print. At the New York Times last night, I’m sure employees were joking themselves to death about headlines they couldn’t put on the first page, such as:

Arafat Not Quite Dead!

I’M trying to save time and avoid sin…

How about if I wear a button with the caption “Everything I say is Bli Neder.”