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https://memuarist.com/ru/members/509.htm

Местами довольно нудно, особенно про Сорбонну, где все употребляют героин да кокаин (30-е).

"Сельвинского послали в армейскую газету за то, что выступил с защитой символистов."

"Веселое беспечное население Одессы недовольно приходом советских войск: при румынах — частная торговля, было полно товаров, а какая мануфактура! Евреев они, правда, расстреляли, но сделали это под нажимом немца, а сами никому зла не желали.

"В Москве идет с успехом «Мадемуазель Нитуш». Еще модны собольи пелерины. Под Новый год творилось безумие — всем хотелось встречать: елки и жратва. Видимо, люди соскучились по «хорошей жизни», а война так далеко. "

"Фаня рассказала о себе. Она жила в Дубровицах. Их вывели из гетто (где они все, от мала до велика, вязали теплые вещи для германской армии) на площадь, на которой стояли пулеметы. Отец крикнул: «Бежим!», — но мать от ужаса не могла сдвинуться, а обе сестры Фани повисли на ней. Фаня мчалась за отцом через какие-то огороды до самого леса. Спасшихся оказалось несколько человек. Отец отвел девочку на хутор к знакомому сапожнику, который покупал у него кожу. Отец Фани был кошерным мясником. Два его сына, как полагается в еврейской семье, учились в городе, в Ровно. Их судьба неизвестна, но мне кажется, что их нет в живых. Отец ее был убит бендеровцами."

"За это время взяли Париж. Взяли сами французы. У нас замалчивают. Илья поет «Марсельезу»."

"Во мне есть еврейское свойство — находить, что все плохо."

Там много всякого. Но училась она в Сорбонне.

Strasbourg cathedral

Oct. 4th, 2025 09:44 am
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[personal profile] cmcmck
It's reckoned to be one of the finest on the world.

You firsr see the west front from down a narrow Street and yes, it was supposed to have two spires but one never got built! It was at one time the tallest building in the world.



More pics! )


Philosophical Questions: Money

Oct. 4th, 2025 03:01 am
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

Should tax payers have the option to explicitly say what they don’t want their tax dollars spent on?

Read more... )


Today's Cooking

Oct. 3rd, 2025 10:44 pm
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
I made apple cider caramel sauce to put over vanilla ice cream.  :D 

Gaming

Oct. 3rd, 2025 08:34 pm
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
In new heist video game, players return museum artifacts stolen from African countries

Set in the late 21st century, the game follows Nomali, a fast-thinking, acrobatic leader who assembles a crew of ordinary citizens-turned-thieves.

Their mission: to reclaim 70 real-life African artifacts from Western institutions and return them to their rightful homelands.



I am amused. :D And there are so many other cultures that could design similar games to retrieve their own artifacts.  See, this is what we get from diverse game developers: new game plots instead of rehashes.
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Posted by jwz

Today I dropped DNA Lounge Membership Card Nine Nine Nine in the mail! Who will be our lucky one thousand? We're gonna need another digit.

We currently have 472 active members, but new sign-ups have slowed to a trickle. It's a pretty good deal, you know. And it also helps us out a lot. Tell your friends!

Today is the last day when you can vote for us in Best of the Bay, so if you haven't done that yet, please do! Voting for us is helpful for the business and we appreciate it.

We're getting Halloween started this weekend with Dark Sparkle, After Life, and our screening of The Lost Boys...

You gotta come to Lost Boys, it's going to be "hella rad". I added karaoke subtitles to the musical bits so you can sing along with Cry Little Sister and other hits. Vampire costume contest!

Sunset, 10/3/25

Oct. 3rd, 2025 11:10 pm
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Posted by John Scalzi

It’s been a while since I’ve put one of these up here, so, here you go. It’s a doozy. I hope you have a fabulous weekend.

— JS

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Posted by John Kovalic

This or any DORK TOWER strip is now available as a signed, high-quality print, from just $25!  CLICK HERE to find out more!

HEY! Want to help keep DORK TOWER going? Then consider joining the DORK TOWER Patreon and ENLIST IN THE ARMY OF DORKNESS TODAY! (We have COOKIES!) (And SWAG!) (And GRATITUDE!)

Friday Five

Oct. 3rd, 2025 04:23 pm
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This set of questions comes from [community profile] thefridayfive community...

Read more... )

Enervator

Oct. 3rd, 2025 07:23 pm
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I saw a few full-throated defenses of Tilly Norwood, a kind of cybergolem designed to supplant human actors. It's from Particle6, a company nobody had ever heard of before a week ago, utilizing their DeepFame engine - a name I assure you I did not make up. I haven't seen an article about Tilly Norwood that didn't include the note that there were already suitors lined up to utilize their tech, which there is no proof of, and no way to prove it. SAG-AFTRA would fuck anybody who even attempted to use this in a production directly up their ass.

Yom Kippur

Oct. 3rd, 2025 04:07 pm
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[personal profile] cellio

Yes. More like this, please.

Today is busy, building the sukkah and preparing for Shabbat, so brief notes will have to suffice for now.

I had no length expectations for Kol Nidrei. Ran about 2.5 hours, including a speech from the synagogue president which is pretty common. Before the service started, someone from the congregation played the Kol Nidrei melody on a violin; I recognized the styling and ornaments from the much longer version Temple Sinai does on cello and piano. Shorter and before the service was nice. I assume there is a "thing" about people expecting to hear the Kol Nidrei melody on bowed strings, but I don't know more than that. I thought it was just a Reform thing (Sinai and Rodef both do it during the service).

The essays in this year's seasonal book from Hadar were helpful, and fit nicely in that block of time between getting home and going to sleep.

Being able to spend the entire day in synagogue makes a big difference to me. I'm glad my new synagogue doesn't have a long stretch of down-time mid-afternoon like some do. We had classes and discussions -- optional and small, as most people left, but we didn't have to. Nice.

Morning service was somewhere around 5 hours (I didn't notice exactly), not including Avodah and Eleh Ezkarah which followed after a short break (5 minutes? 10?). For Avodah the rabbi interjected a lot of teaching, and he really encouraged people to try the prostration which was done by the people (not just the kohanim) when this was an actual service in the temple. He taught us how to do it and was very encouraging, so I tried it and am glad I did.

After, I was chatting with someone else who had tried it for the first time, and said that I came from a Reform background and had not expected to connect with the Avodah service until that year during lockdown when my synagogue was closed and I went to an Orthodox synagogue. "But," I said, "there was a song I'd heard a week before that also helped set the stage" and she immediately said "Yishai Ribo". Yes. So we chatted about that for a bit while waiting for classes to start.

For the afternoon haftarah reading (the book of Jonah) they had about a dozen teenagers chanting it, taking it in turns. It's great to see that many teens who are interested.

Hineni is in exactly the spot where it makes sense. (Contrast with my Reform experiences.)

Most of the service leaders were lay people who were very good -- strong voices and able to lead singing, mindful of what they were saying, evoked kavanah. Afterwards someone who knows I'm a new member asked me what I thought about having lay leaders instead of the rabbis (this also happens on Shabbat) and I said this is a positive thing and while our rabbis are great (I've seen both of them lead; they are), it's important to empower other qualified leaders too. Most of the Reform world seems to not agree with that perspective, which might be why the person asked.

By the time we got to the Amidah in Mincha I was ready to be done with the many-times-repeated Vidui sections. I didn't want to not be thinking about wrongs; rather, I wanted to be thinking about different wrongs after going through these ones so many times already. We human beings are very creative, alas, and since some things on the standard list do not resonate for me, it feels like I could be spending that time reflecting on things that do and that aren't on the list. (I ended up just focusing on the ones that seemed more directly to be areas for improvement.) For next year, perhaps I'll look for alternate lists to being with me for when the standard list is no longer sparking the thoughts it was designed to.

This is a placeholder for something I meant to talk about in my Rosh Hashana post too: differences between the individual and public Amidah, public is not just for listening but also has congregational singing parts, and I think Reform threw the baby out with the bath water, realized the tub was empty, and filled it up with other stuff instead of getting some of this goodness back. I will try to come back to this soon.

Birdfeeding

Oct. 3rd, 2025 02:19 pm
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly sunny and sweltering.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 10/3/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 10/3/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 10/3/25 -- I watered the old picnic table and new picnic table.

I heard a squirrel chattering but didn't see it.

As it is almost suppertime, I am done for the night.

Review: TooHot

Oct. 3rd, 2025 02:55 pm
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[personal profile] jducoeur

Having just finished the leftovers, a few conclusions about TooHot, a new restaurant in Harvard Square:

  • Far as I can tell, it is seriously authentic Szechuan, not something one often comes across in these parts.
  • As a consequence, the name of the restaurant is accurate. The waiter asked whether I wanted it "mild", and I said no, I like spicy, so "medium" maybe? As I suspected, "medium" is somewhere near the top of my spice tolerance: this place really likes its peppers.
  • It's already impressively popular (after being open just a few months), especially with people who are actually Chinese (based on glancing at the crowd) -- at 6pm on a Tuesday, they had to think about whether they could seat three people without reservations.
  • The specialties of the house are also pretty authentic.
  • Authentic Szechuan apparently involves a lot of frog.
  • Frog mostly tastes like chicken, except with a lot more bones.
  • So many bones.
  • Too many bones.

So overall: excellent restaurant, especially if you like spicy food. But I think the frog dishes may be more effort than I'm willing to put in.

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[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/154: I Who Have Never Known Men — Jacqueline Harpman (translated by Ros Schwarz)
I ... have no memories of my own childhood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human. [loc. 1546]

We first encounter the nameless narrator near the end of her solitary life, determined that her story will not die when she does. Gradually we discover her history: that her first memories are from an underground prison where she, and thirty-nine adult women, were held captive for years. She can't recall anything from before the prison, and none of the women can tell her much: just screams, flames, a stampede...Read more... )

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Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Etymology humor will continue until morale improves.


Today's News:

Frequently Asked Question

Oct. 3rd, 2025 03:57 pm
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Posted by Unknown


1:  It used to be said that the three most famous fictional characters in the English speaking world were Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Superman. 

I propose an experiment. Go out of your front door, and walk to the Post Office or to your local Burger King. And do a headcount. How many children do you see with Sherlock Holmes backpacks, lunch-boxes or sneakers? How many adults do you see wearing Tarzan of the Apes t-shirts? How many shops or cars or houses do you pass with Superman figurines and mascots in the windows? 

Times change: there is a pretty good chance that you will see a Harry Potter hoodie; a Mickey Mouse romper suit or just possibly a James Bond t-shirt. But I don’t think you’ll get to the end of your walk without seeing some version of the Spider-Man motif. 

Dearly as I love them, Winnie-the-Pooh is not reducible to the twenty perfect short stories A.A Milne wrote about him and his friends. Winnie-the-Pooh is also Disney cartoons and Hallmark greetings cards and dreadful Facebook fan fic about helping your friends through difficult patches. 

What is Spider-Man? Is he  simply a red and blue costume with white slanty eyes? Is he the idea of swinging through New York on web ropes; of putting two fingers on your palms and saying “fwtp, fwtp”? Kids don’t necessarily know about Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver, and they certainly don't know about Anne Bonnet or Captain Kidd or Elcid Barrat; but they sure as heck know that pirates say “Arrrr!”.  

Spider-Man is quite possibly the most famous fictional character in the world — which, incidentally, makes Stan Lee the most influential writer of all time.  Even if he is now more a meme than a story or a character, these are the comics from which that meme emerged. They are worthy of our scrutiny. 

2: Discourse about comic books, like every thing else in the post Twitter world, is toxic and polarised. If you cleave to the old story that Stan Lee was, in the traditional sense, a writer, then you are likely to believe that Ditko and Romita were no more than hired illustrators --and over-rated ones at that — and that anyone who thinks differently is being iconoclastic for bad motives.  But many people who agree with me that Steve Ditko was the primary creative force are inclined to call Stan Lee a swindler and a bullshit-artist and a nepo-baby; and to say that his text should as far as possible be ignored when looking at the comics. And they’ll say that the people who think that Stan was the creator are buying into a corporate myth for bad motives. 

Stan and Steve and John and Jack are no longer alive: but the comics they created are freely available in many formats. Comics, just as much as poems and plays and songs are complex, multi-faceted things; they affect readers in complicated ways. 

Perhaps if we get away from acrimonious arguments about who said what to whom nearly seventy years ago, and look closely at the words and the pictures they left us, we may get a better understanding of their creative talents involved in their creation. 

3: I loved these comics; it is a love which has never left me. 

There are very many very much better books in the world: but I never loved Estragon or Paul Atriedes or Parsifal in the way that I once loved Spider-Man. 

I am no longer eight years old and I cannot read these comics as if I was eight years old, although in some cases I think I can remember what it was like to read them at that age.

Rarely, I think, can I actually remember the first reading of the stories, but I can remember the black and white television, the ringing landline, the neopolitan ice-cream, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hector’s House and the Magic Roundabout, Ed “Stewpot” Stewart and grown-ups talking in hushed voices about a war in a place called Watergate. 

I have never wanted to preserve a first reading or a first viewing of anything in aspic. In fact I am far from sure that I know what aspic even is. I want to keep these stories alive; to read them as I would read them if I had not read them before. It was C.S Lewis who said that a very small child might draw no distinction in his mind between chocolate easter eggs and the resurrection of Jesus; but that if his understanding of Christian theology doesn’t become more sophisticated as he grows up then the eggs will stop seeming special. 

Of course I can’t enter uncritically and imaginatively into the world of these comics any more; and of course I can see their many faults. But studying them them critically and intellectually is a way of re-engaging with them. Of keeping them, in a way, alive. 

4: I have heard that there are Rabbis — I was about to type ‘Jewish Rabbis’ as if there was another kind — who will deliberately make absurd and pedantic arguments about the Torah, in order to demonstrate their knowledge of it, and as a scholarly game. 

But I think that they think that the game is a pious one: that proving from scripture that there is no afterlife and then proving equally convincingly from the same scripture that there is an afterlife demonstrates a kind of wholehearted devotion to the Law. John Sutherland’s questions about Daniel Deronda’s foreskin and what part of the pig Arabella throws at Jude are part of a similar game.  Sometimes it is fun to ask a silly question and come up with a silly answer; but sometimes you uncover something that’s really present in the book which you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t deliberately overthinking it.

I am quite sure that Stan Lee did not have a time line in mind when he wrote these stories; but I still think that it is worth looking at all those “Meanwhile…” and “The Next Morning…” captions, and pondering how it is that Norman Osborn gets from New York to the coast and back in a single morning, and how it manages to be simultaneously  night in one part of New York and day in another. Because it makes us pay attention to things that perhaps no-one else in seventy years has paid any attention to. And because it is a way of describing, to ourselves and to others, what reading these comics actually feels like. 


5: John Betjeman kept, even as an old man, his childhood teddy bear Archibald on a shelf in his home, and occasionally went to check on him for comfort. This seems perfectly healthy: provided, of course, you also care about adult things like gels and old churches and silk slippers. I am aware of people who put all their childhood interests in a box when they turn sixteen and never think about them again. Christopher Milne, who also had a bear he was particularly fond of, maintained he had no interest as an adult of returning to his childhood loves (or even of visiting his parents).  Critically engaging with old comic books is like patting a beloved bear on the ear. It is a way of maintaining the connection. 

6: I am not, in fact, writing about Spider-Man. I am in fact screaming into the void about my awful terrible English childhood and in particular my awful terrible English primary school. I should have thought that was perfectly obvious. 




My study of Stan Lee and John Romita's first Spider-Man comics are currently available on www.patreon.com/rilstone. 

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