Primrose Road

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1. technological determinism AND Shakespeare
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God is a "dual-gendered deity," according to one rabbi about to publish an article entitled "Who is He? He is She: The Secret Four-Letter Name of God."

(The Hebrew word for "he" is "hoo" and the Hebrew word for "she" is "hee," hence the puns in the article title. Most of us already came up with that clever bit of wordplay in Hebrew school.)

His argument is as follows:
- The Tetragrammaton (secret, unpronounceable name of God) is spelled yod-hay-vav-hay in Hebrew.
- Backwards, that reads hay-vav-hay-yod.
- Hebrew word for he: הו, or hay-vav; Hebrew word for she: הי, or hay-yod.
- God's name backwards is "He-She"; therefore, God is dual-gendered.

(My name in Hebrew spelled backwards (הרף) means "to leave alone".)

Language: ur doin' it wrong.

PublishAmerica "author news" of the week:

Ink Blots is Phillip C. Youngs' first book of poetry. He is hoping that with the book, he will be able to raise awareness of "pondering". The more society tries to make life simple; the less we tend to lose the ability to "ponder". Read Ink Blots; its a good read.

Visit my web page and read a sample of my poetry The Nation Cried was writtent fot 09-11-01 web page is thenationcried.com follow the link "Windows of the heart" to view and purchase my book. Leave a blog while your there.

Life Through the Rearview Mirror was released June 2008. It's a collection of 50 life poems. Poems that will touch your heart. Poems about love, life, hate, death nd all the emotions that we all go through life looking back and wondering what if.

Rebecca, just finished her final pdf and is moving on to the next faze of production. She has set up signing @ Walden in Ashland, Ky, Jesse Stuart foundation in Ashland, Ky, and the Briggs libraries in Lawerence Co Ohio! Who knows, her next big step could even be HOLLYWOOD. We shall see? Congratulations again Rebecca Lesler on the big steps toward your dreams!

וְשָֹבָע וִישׁוּעָה וְנֶחָמָה וְשֵׁיזָבָה

וּרְפוּאָה וּגְאֻלָּה וּסְלִיחָה וְכַפָּרָה

וְרֵוַח וְהַצָּלָה

Just when I thought that no Facebook ad could possibly be creepier than "Neurosurgery Associates of Puerto Rico" (which has its own Facebook page where you can become a "fan"; if a doctor advertises on Facebook, s/he will never be my doctor), along comes C'elle, which, for $899 per year, will cryogenically preserve your menstrual blood. The idea is that your stem cells can help save you or your family members decades from now.

If you order now, they'll send you

"everything needed for you to collect and send your C'elle menstrual stem cells for processing and preservation, including a menstrual cup, collection tubes, prepaid FedEx airbill for return shipment to Cryo-Cell, and comprehensive instructions for use."

Startling realization: bookstores in New York never stock travel guides about Nebraska.

Shocking.

Yet they usually have "Great Plains" sections with books on South Dakota (which do not advise about the total underwhelmingness of the Corn Palace), North Dakota (the most nondescript state in the Union; one of my neighbors in Lincoln who was from ND warned me to "never be pregnant in North Dakota"), Kansas (the state you drive through when returning from Kansas City, MO), Iowa (don't get me started), and Wyoming (which clearly does not exist).

Happily WikiTravel has a Nebraska page that tells travelers to be wary of gangs, tornados, and blizzards.

There is no place like Nebraska!

My poor new Civic doesn't know it's going to be traveling 1200 miles next summer and living in Lincoln for approximately eight months while I do the defense and graduation thing.

This week's Parshah (Torah portion):

Moses' great-nephew is rewarded for his zealotry; he receives a "covenant of peace" because he killed a prince and princess from two non-Hebrew tribes who indeed posed a serious threat to Moses and his people.

In the Torah, the vav (ו) in the word "shalom" (שלום) is broken.

This story is followed by a story of five women who, facing an injustice, ask the question, "is there another way?"

(Some of the) reasons I find Oprah Winfrey repulsive:

1. She's elitist, building a school in South Africa that won't necessarily help to educate young girls but will absolutely create an instant upper class of the "chosen," and presenting a model of "big give" charity that simply involves giving people things, often with an underlying-but-still-pretty-obvious advertising-related motivation.

2. She and her team of doctors support pseudoscientific beliefs in reiki, vitamins-as-medicine, and past-life regression.

3. She regularly promotes The Secret, which is at best bullshit and at worst fascist philosophy. (And somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is "selfishness" or "self-absorption.")

4. She seems to have a bit of a God complex, no?

A 35-year-old writer in Chicago has started the Living Oprah blog, in which she will chronicle her attempts to follow all of Oprah's "lifestyle suggestions" for a year. This will be amazing.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior is a quick read, shelved with Who Moved My Cheese-style books, but far more insightful (and interesting).

The book describes experiments in economics, psychology, sociology, and biology that have attempted to explain why people make obviously bad decisions, and tells the stories of some of these radically bad decisions, including those that led to the Tenerife airplane disaster and Challenger explosion. Some of the research it describes also has implications for educational psychology: while reward systems work in terms of specific goals, they're much more complicated and problematic than we may think, actually suppressing "altruistic" mechanisms in the brain.

One amusing fact presented in the book: On the American "Who Wants To Be A Millionare?", audiences always try help the contestant when polled for the "ask the audience" lifeline, voting for the answer they genuinely believe to be correct; on the French and British versions of the show, audiences tend to help those contestants who they feel are "deserving" of the million-dollar prize but try to sabotage (i.e. purposefully voting for the wrong answer) those contestants who they feel aren't deserving of the prize (for example, one man in France who didn't know that the moon revolved around the Earth); finally, on the Russian "Millionaire," audiences almost always "deliberately misled both smart and less smart contestants alike."

"Millionaire" provides for the authors a jumping-off point for describing different cultures' notions of "fairness," and how perhaps the most economically rational notions of fairness come from an isolated tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. The book may go too far into the hackneyed territory of "negotiation skills" in the last chapter, but the stories it tells and research it describes offer some great insight into why people may be evolutionarily biased towards the irrational.

A man in the UK was arrested after he showed up at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC two weeks ago with a First Folio edition of Shakespeare's works that had been stolen from the Durham University Library ten years ago. The man claimed that he received the volume while doing business in Cuba, but, as it turns out, he's really just a 51-year-old loner who lives with his mommy.

The Playgoer puts it best: stealing a Folio and taking it to the Folger for authentication is "like stealing the Mona Lisa and trying to sell it to the Met."

Ha!