Give me a break

Maybe I'm unusual (I hope so, but in a good way).

I go 6 days-a-week to bet knesset (“shul”) - Sunday I stay home so I can say my prayers slowly and correct reading errors and study commentaries and footnotes.

Monday through Friday I go to work right after the minyan. Ideally, I'd like to start at 6 or 6:30 so I can be “on the job” by 8. We normally start at 7, but with the extended s'lihot (that doesn't start until 6 or a little later) and add the extra prayers for a fast day, I got to the office at 8:30.

Young Israel down the road – which only now is encountering s'lihot – has an earlier minyan and, if the one time I was there years ago is any indication, the service moves along at a rapid pace; perfect for the working man (who “davens” Nusach Ashkenaz – don't ask me which “variation on the [Ashkenazi nusach] theme” is used at YI; I wouldn't know Litvak from German from Chelm).

In Bet Shean the nusach changes (to nusach North Africa), but a fast, albeit complete, service is the rule. No hazan.

Because some – OK, much - of the service is recited with a melody, the Bet Shean morning service, complete with Torah, takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes more than the same service at Young Israel. Both YI and the congregation I join in Bet Shean are “working men's minyans.”

I'm not anti-social; if I'm on vacation or have a day off, I'll gladly join my fellow “minyanaires” for a cup of tea (with nana [spearmint] and too much sugar, if you please) and maybe a cookie. But for day-to-day services, I'd like the hazen to either take a break or get with the program. My congregation “imports” a hazan from Israel for Yomai Noraim – same fellow every year, I'm told.

His voice is OK, but – as you may have guessed – I go to synagogue to pray, not to be “entertained.” In short, I am not a fan of “hazenute” and I particularly am not a fan of paying to bring, house, and feed a hazan from elsewhere, especially when we HAVE a hazan.

To me fair, both the resident hazan and the rent-a-hazan have good tenor voices (I'd prefer a baratone, but those apparently are harder to find) and, to his credit, the rent-a-hazan showed up at the Monday-after-Rosh HaShanna morning minyan … as “just another Jew.” He has my fullest respect.

There was a self-proclaimed hazan at one congregation who dragged out a blessing soooo long that by the time he finally got to “Baruch atah” we'd forgotten what the blessing was all about. It's about the same on Yomai Noraim, especially on Yom Kippor.

I don't begrudge the time I spend with HaShem, but do I have to listen to what pains my ears? Next year I'm going to look for a congregation that is too poor to hire a hazan, one where the members come to pray rather than be entertained.

My brother-in-law and his son are part-time hazens in “the olde country.” They are nice guys, but even with the family connection my opinion of hazenute stays at the same level - “spare me.” Maybe I'll chalk up the “entertainment” as “afflicting my soul” on Rosh haShanna and Yom Kippor, but if I had a choice . . .

Yohanon Glenn
Yohanon.Glenn at gmail dot com

Good-bye Microsoft

 

I've used Microsoft products for years - since Word 1.0 was distributed in a popular pc magazine - ON A SINGLE 5 1/4-INCH FLOPPY !!

I've suffered each time Redmond "improved" the product with a new User Interface or "UI."

I LIKE the MS Office products - Access, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. I like many of the utilities that come with the operating system - the many "accessories."

But the constant mucking around with the UI has finally caused me to look elsewhere.

I just bought a new notebook (nee' laptop) from Toshiba. Nice machine.

It came loaded with Vista Home - a major step down from XP Pro that was on my Compaq replacement machine and on the office machine. (The new office boxes probably will be loaded with Windows 7, but the cycle for me is a couple of years away.)

I both love and hate Microsoft Word … as a simple word processor, I think it is great. My preferred word processor. It has severe limitations, but realizing that, smart documentation people use other programs for serious documentation; creating text in "weird" and pouring the text into a real page composition application. Likewise graphics. Sure, Word can be used to create simple graphics, but Visio is bettere for block diagrams and flow charts, and there are a few good programs out there for "real" graphics.

But much as I love Word, I have come to the end of the line with Microsoft products.

I just tried to access the COOKIES "folder" (a "sub-directory" to my peers in age). I don't have access to the folder.

Yet I am, by default, the "system administrator." In fact, I am the ONLY user of this computer.

What do I care about accessing the Cookies folder? Turns out Microsoft's Internet Explorer V8 can't seem to purge the cookies . . . on XP Pro IE 7 could clear out all the cookies AND let me confirm the deletion. Actually, I want to manually DELete cookies so I can "save" one; the cookie StatCounter uses to ignore hits on my Web page and blog that originate from my computer.

Vista shares the notebook's hard drive with Linux Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org applications, and Firefox

Firefox not only can clear out all cookies, it asks me each time an application wants to set a cookie if I want to keep it, delete it at the end of the (browser) session, or block the cookie.

OpenOffice.org - a poor man's free version of the commercial StarOffice from Sun, has allthe program types MS Office offers, but there are many features and functions missing that Office users are accustomed to using. Likewise Evolution, the email handler that functions like Outlook. Granted, all the applications that came on the Ubuntu CD are free and most are developed by volunteers, so lacking some features and functions fund in the "high priced spread" versions (e.g., Microsoft products) is understandable.

I'm sure that the freeware will, as Microsoft products did, improve with age. Likewise, I am sure there are "alternatives" and "work-arounds" to make the free applications function more like the commercial versions.

I only hope that the people working on Linux applications learn from what I term Microsoft's mistake and refrain from "updating" the UI with each new release.

If Ubuntu and Linux developers follow in Microsoft's footsteps, I may be forced to go back to pen and paper. (I wonder if I still can find a good, affordable (bulb) fountain pen … and a jar of ink to fill it.)

Yohanon.Glenn
Yohanon.Glenn at gmail dot com

Perception

 

 

I used to live near Tampa Florida.

At one time, a group of people wanted to moor a replica the (in)famous slave ship, La Amistad, in Tampa's harbor.

The area black community would not allow this, so the ship was sailed north where is it moored at Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CT.

About the same time, someone offered a railroad box car once used to haul Jews to nazi prison and death camps to a Tampa bay area Jewish organization.

The Jews gladly accepted the box car and put it on display as a reminder to all – not just Jews – that history forgotten is bound to repeat.

Were Tampa's black wrong to reject the ship? Were the blacks of Mystic Bay wrong to accept the ship?

Were the Jews wrong to accept the box car?

The answer is, for the people involved, “No.”

Perspective.

When I was little, I learned about the Uncle Remus tales and saw Disney's Song of the South.

Little did I know that to some, Song of the South is racist. To me, as a small boy, Uncle Remus would have been great to have around, telling stories – fables just like the famous Greeks – using animal characters to make the point.

Dialect? We all have a dialect of some type.

It's a skillet to some, a frying (fryin') pan to others.

I used to first listen, and then watch Amos 'n' Andy. Maybe the radio show was racist, but only because white folk played the parts of the black characters.

I didn't see racism in the program. I watched it in Indianapolis where everything was integrated, but as a child I was more attuned to personalities and characters rather than the skin color of those personalities or characters.

This “rant” is prompted because I tripped over Nancy Green as I was looking for something else on the WWW.

Lots of people don't know who Nancy Green was, but they do know her alter ego, Aunt Jemima of pancake and now syrup fame. (The Aunt Jemima on today's label is not Ms. Green who looked like a woman who cared for you; today's Aunt Jemima is thinned down and “modern.”)

When I was a youngster, Aunt Jemima WAS pancakes.

Did I pay any attention to the fact that I was several shades lighter than the character on the box? Never occurred to me.

I never thought much about Uncle Ben, either.

Turns out, Uncle Ben actually honors slaves who taught white southerners how to grow rice.

Now I'm absolutely certain there are those “out there” who take umbrage over the use of Aunt Jemima (slimmed down and modernized not withstanding) and Uncle Ben, but neither of these characters were a Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (bit of trivia – he was born in Key West Florida) who played the degraded Stepin Fetchit in the movies or the sometimes resigned, sometimes with a smart reply Edmund Lincoln Anderson's Rochester . Nancy Green WAS Aunt Jemima, and by all accounts although born into slavery, she was no one's slave when she created the Aunt Jemima persona.

I don't like stereotypes of anyone, including husbands who of late always seem unable to get out of the rain without the wife calling to them. I didn't, and I don't, see either Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben as stereotypical.

That's my perception. But then I never was offended by Jewish comedians whose act used dialect and Yiddish, although I have neither the eastern European dialect nor Yiddish.

As someone wiser than me once opined, “it's all in the eyes of the beholder.”

I appreciated Aunt Jemima and Uncle Remus as a child and I regret that today's children in a “politically correct” home will miss out on Song of the South.

At least it was not scary like The Wizard of Oz (think about that) or some of the nursery rhymes (Rock-a-bye baby falling from a tree? Come on!)

Yohanon
Yohanon.Glenn at gmail dot com