Link to download the QuickTime .mov of the amusing incident is here (3 MB).

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You can see pictures of the burn marks on Lasser’s body on the CBC article. In fairness, it appears that he became delusional and pulled a knife, and wouldn’t let go of it after police showed up. But for goshsakes, there’s got to be better ways to deal with this than overreacting by tasering an 82-year-old hospital patient. This is the kind of thing that kills elderly Polish immigrants who can’t speak English. It’s gone on way too long.

Hat-tip: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon

Great tits cope well with warming

It’s about birds (tits, like ‘tit-willow‘), of course, but who in this day and age is going to read it that way?

Hat-tip: Dan Savage

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

Lazer Brody, our friendly neighbourhood chassidic nut, informs us—complete with video—about an intriguing custom that is apparently Jewish: saying blessings over fruit trees that are blossoming in the springtime. According to Rabbi Lazer, this is a great mitzvah because

According to Kabbala, this blessing is deeply significant, and helps correct the soul that is reincarnated within the tree. That soul is forever beholding [sic] to the person that makes the blessing, for he or she has done a great favor in helping that soul attain its tikkun, or correction.

You can’t make this shit up. (Actually, I guess you can.) I am stunned. Souls being reincarnated in trees?! This is the kind of thing the Kabbalah Center would come up with, and then sell twigs to unsuspecting celebrities and Angelenos for $150 a pop.

If this were not a Jewish ritual, and a Jewish (sort of) spiritual justification, Jews like Rabbi Lazer would instantly associate it with barbaric and misguided animism or spirit-worship or idolatry, just like the Bible condemns cultic worship involving the asherah. But since this one is sui generis Jewish, or something, it’s totally kosher and Kabbalistic and a beautiful and important mitzvah and a great way to “correct” reincarnated tree-souls.

If my spirit ever has to get reincarnated into a tree, I hope it’s one of those awesome bristlecone pines that live forever and are basically indestructible. Actually, what with the pine beetle going around these days, maybe not…

Among the particulars of this audit that I find so amusing: employees made their own contracts with the phone companies, resulting in a patchwork of over 1500 individual contracts, 20% of all the devices were owned by people who had no reason for owning one in their job, and the department in question had no procedures to recover the cost when an employee used a government-provided mobile device for personal matters.

This is a perfect example of what happens when laws and government policies are too slow to catch up to actual practice. It’s a shame that an audit—probably costing the taxpayers the equivalent of a year of wireless services for Natural Resources Canada—had to be conducted as the first step on the road (hopefully) to eliminating some of this waste. No surprises here, and I bet that nobody’s going to raise the issue in today’s Question Period because they’ll be too busy benefitting from government waste elsewhere.

And here’s what you get if you reverse those directions:

There are, of course bus services operated by both cities’ transportation systems, naturally. I am uncertain as to whether you can walk through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, though.

There’s no word for hockey puck in Mandarin.

So Jason Wang, who’s been calling the Montreal-Boston series of the NHL playoffs in his native Chinese language for the CBC - a first for the public broadcaster - just uses the Mandarin word for ball.

It’s one of the many hockey terms Wang has had to translate and in some cases make up as he calls the games for a Chinese audience. He says it’s no easy task.

“Especially in hockey, where Chinese culture doesn’t have a context for it, so I have to translate a lot of the terms, all the penalty calls, and sometimes I have to borrow from other sports,” says Wang, sitting in the small recording booth at the CBC building in Vancouver where he calls the games while watching them on a large TV.

This appears to be a textbook example of translation involving cultural compatibility issues. There are many words and phrases that can’t simply be translated but which exert influence on the patters of idiom in a certain cultural context. Hockey in Canada is a perfect example. Consider this exchange during Question Period in the House of Commons the other day:

KEN DRYDEN (Liberal, York Centre): Mr. Speaker, with every scandal around him, the Prime Minister can pretend—

VARIOUS MEMBERS: Oh, oh!

SPEAKER: Order, order. This is question period, not a hockey game. We are hearing now a question from the honourable member for York Centre and we have to be able to hear the question. Order, please. …

DRYDEN: Last week [James Moore, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services] talked about something else he was almost too young to know. Pull the goalie? This is April. I do not get pulled.

JAMES MOORE: Mr. Speaker, he says he does not get pulled. He pulled himself on every confidence vote in the House of Commons. He did not show up. Again, I know 1972 was a fond year for my colleague from York Centre, and 1974 may be a fond one for him as well with the Nixon administration, but the reality is that we have spoken the truth. We have stood up and have consistently voted in the best interests of Canadians. The member for York Centre can sit there and sulk, and slowly skate to the bench as he sits there and does nothing for Canadians.

Devoid of a context in which hockey is part of the cultural discourse and the speakers can count on their interlocutors understanding and correctly processing these metaphors, this exchange makes much less sense. It can probably still be understood, but some of the flavour would be lost. The task of the translator, then, is not simply to translate the words, but to translate the cultural context as well.

I wish I spoke Mandarin so I could really understand the nuances of this process. And I wonder how the Chinese Ice Hockey Association and Chinese ice hockey teams, like the China Sharks, deal with these issues. Anybody who knows more than I about Chinese, hockey, or Chinese hockey, is encouraged to contribute!

As reprinted here, the manuscript cuts off writing out all the repeats after the first two verses and skips right to the last verse. Some of the handwriting in the manuscript is difficult to make out; this transcription is as accurate as possible given the limitations of current understanding of Klingon papyrology and manuscript tradition. Errors in spelling or grammar should be put down to thousands of years of transmission—and the fact that this is a drinking song in the first place, designed to scan and sound euphonic.

At any rate, a great mystery of the cosmos can now be put to rest. A zissen Pesach, or as they say throughout the Klingon Empire, veb DIS veng wa’Dich Qo’noSDaq!—”Next year, in the First City of Kronos!

(Edited to add: Yes, this is an original translation of mine.)

Here are the predictions I made regarding the conference quarterfinals, with notes revised now that all the series have been concluded, plus a judgment (in bold) of just how right or wrong I was in my prediction.

• Western Conference
  • #1 Detroit Red Wings vs. #8 Nashville Predators. I predicted: Detroit, 4-0. Result: Detroit, 4-2. Nashville gave a tremendous effort, in large part the result of terrific goaltending from Dan Ellis. Detroit did overpower them in the end, but it wasn’t the blowout that I predicted. Half-right!
  • #2 San José Sharks vs. #7 Calgary Flames. I predicted: San José, 4-2. Result: San José, 4-3. This one was awfully close to my prediction: the series was incredibly physical, with two games going to Calgary on the strength alone of hits delivered at exactly the right manner. Joe Thornton and Jeremy Roenick finally came alive to seal the deal for the Sharks in Game 7, however. Nearly right!
  • #3 Minnesota Wild vs. #6 Colorado Avalanche. I predicted: Minnesota, 4-1. Result: Colorado, 4-2. Boy, was I wrong about this one. Excellent goaltending from the Avs, plus opportune goal-scoring—especially in overtime—catapulted Colorado over the favoured Minnesota to the second-most stunning upset of the playoffs. Completely wrong!
  • #4 Anaheim Ducks vs. #5 Dallas Stars. I predicted: Anaheim, 4-3 (all games will be won at home). Result: Dallas, 4-2. Another one I was completely wrong on—the Ducks dropped the first two games at home, then made up the third on the road. They defeated themselves by taking too many unnecessary penalties. (Dyed-in-the-wool Anaheim fans will tell you that the Ducks get too many unfair penalties because the referees, for whatever reason, just don’t like them, and see penalties where there are none.) The Stars just played like they wanted it more. Completely wrong!
• Eastern Conference
  • #1 Montréal Canadiens vs. #8 Boston Bruins. I predicted: Montréal, 4-1. Result: Montréal, 4-3. Wow, this one was a lot closer than I suspected. Mistakes by B.C. kid Carey Price gave away Game 6, but he redeemed himself with a spotless 5-0 victory in game 7 to show that the Canadiens really did deserve the top spot. A shame, too, because Boston played exceptionally well—they were simply outplayed by a superior team in the end. Half-right!
  • #2 Pittsburgh Penguins vs. #7 Ottawa Senators. I predicted: Pittsburgh, 4-0. Result: Pittsburgh, 4-0. The Pens just outplayed the struggling Sens. Gerber was not very strong, but he was completely let down by his team’s offensive lines. To top it off, Emery is gone for good, it appears—if anybody else in the NHL will have him. Exactly right!
  • #3 Washington Capitals versus #6 Philadelphia Flyers. I predicted: Washington, 4-3. Result: Philadelphia, 4-3. I was close about this one: it was a close series right up to the end, when game 7 was decided on a power play in overtime. A shame for the Capitals, getting upset at home, but an otherwise excellent, physical series. Half-right!
  • #4 New Jersey Devils vs. #5 New York Rangers: I predicted: New Jersey, 4-3. Result: New York, 4-1. I was completely wrong here. Lundqvist out-goalied Brodeur by a long way, and with the loss of Scott Gomez (ironically, to the Rangers), they lost their offensive punch. “When you limp into the playoffs, this is the result you get,” said the Devils’ centre John Madden. And he’s completely correct—this was a well-deserved upset for the Rangers. Completely wrong!

Overall, not so bad, eh? Especially since I gave myself the latitude of upsets in three of the four cases where they actually happened.

The conference semifinals pit both conferences’ #1 and #2 teams against the #6 and #5, respectively. Someone more intrepid and bored than I should look up just how rare that is. Someone’ll probably bring it up at some point… Anyway, here are my guesses for Round 2:

• Western Conference
  • #1 Detroit Red Wings vs. #6 Colorado Avalanche. By most metrics, Detroit is the clear favourite here, but Colorado showed in the quarterfinal that they can—and will—play to win over the best of them. Detroit will have home-ice advantage, and with the special rabidity of the fans in Detroit, look for this to be a factor. But if Colorado’s goaltending is strong, and they put in good efforts in the first two games—they don’t necessarily have to win them both—look for them to be formidable contenders. Prediction: Colorado, 4-2.
  • #2 San José Sharks vs. #5 Dallas Stars. The Sharks showed they could beat the Flames physically, which means they’re going to have to do more of the same with the Sharks. There were 160 or so penalty minutes handed out in the last game of the regular season between these two foes—each team sent a message that they were going to play it hard and physical if they met during the playoffs. If Thornton, Cheechoo, Marlowe, and that crowd come alive for San José, they can put this one away quickly—if they don’t, it might take a while. Prediction: San José, 4-2.
• Eastern Conference
  • #1 Montréal Canadiens vs. #6 Philadelphia Flyers. Montréal will clobber the Flyers; the only question is by how much. I said the same thing about the quarterfinal, but Nashville turned out to be much more tenacious than I gave them credit for. Philly will pick up the one game which Price drops for the Habs, but otherwise they’ll lose, lose, lose. Prediction: Montréal, 4-1.
  • #2 Pittsburgh Penguins vs. #5 New York Rangers. This should be a terrific series. New York is just coming off a terrific upset of the Devils, and Pittsburgh basically coasted through Ottawa. Expect Pittsburgh to be tested, but Crosby, Malkin, and Sykora versus Lundqvist is the matchup to watch in this series. This has the makings of a game 7—the only one I’ll predict here. Prediction: Pittsburgh, 4-3.

My pick to win it all still remains the Sharks. After besting Calgary 4-3, they deserve it. Shame that series had to come so early, but at least everybody came out of it without horrendous injury…

האוכל מצה בערב הפסח כבא על ארוסתו בבית חמיווהבא

One who eats matzah on the eve of Passover [i.e. before the holiday has started] is like one who who has sex with his bride-to-be in the home of his future father-in-law.

Asher Ginsberg, alias Ahad Ha’am, is reputed to have said in response:

עשיתי שניהם ואינם דומים

I’ve done both, and they’re nothing alike.

Also, my good friend the Friar notes that Ahad Ha’am was an early blogger, griping about the state of things in the Holy Land decades before it was cool.

Hat-tip: DovBear

The ruling by Judge Bar-Asher is a reasoned judgment, and it conforms with the logic on which the law is based. The judge refused to accede to the argument of the defendants that the law should be struck down because it violates their fundamental rights and is not in keeping with the values of the State of Israel. She did not accept their argument that the law represents religious coercion. The only thing she did was examine the definition of the “public” place in which the display of leaven is prohibited. She concluded that the interior of a business is not considered a public place according to the legal code, and therefore displaying chametz there does not violate the law, whose intent is not to offend the sensibilities of observers of Torah and mitzvot.

These people will in any case not enter a store or restaurant where nonkosher products are sold and served, and as such they will not be exposed to chametz and their sensibilities will not be offended. On the other hand, as long as there is no law prohibiting selling and serving leavened products to those who want them, why prohibit their display inside a place of business that is permitted to sell them?

The Israeli Haredi establishment won’t be satisfied until every square inch of Israel is a theocracy, and the men in black hats have all the power. Like Iran, but Jewish. People should have the right to buy, sell, and eat what they want during Passover. Just because some three-thousand-year-old law says you shouldn’t eat hametz, that means everybody in the country must be prohibited from it? Passover is about freedom. This includes the freedom not to give a damn about old laws and customs.

Many people know that on Passover, many Jews refrain from the eating of hametz, which is defined as food made from any or all of the “five grains”: wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt, in which fermentation has taken place by means of water for over eighteen minutes. If you bake whatever it is you’re making before eighteen minutes of hydration, it won’t rise but will turn into matzah instead. This (so goes the story) is in memory of when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, and had to leave in a great big hurry after all those ten plagues, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and various special effects.

Jews are also prohibited from “deriving any benefit” from hametz during Passover, so a legal expedient has been invented: you can sell your hametz to a non-Jew. Essentially, you sell all of your hametz for some trivial amount, like $1, and the sales contract includes a clause that makes the hametz automatically revert to you if the non-Jew doesn’t come up with the rest of the money for the full value of the hametz. Since the hametz presumably remains in your kitchen somewhere, the “wink wink” nature of this contract is clear: it is a legal fiction designed to allow Jews to get around the Torah laws. (This is nothing new, by the way. Two examples: (1) The eruv, a kind of “boundary” created around a large area like a city to “enclose” it and thus make it one “domain” for purposes of carrying things within it on the Sabbath. (2) The Prozbul, a legal fiction wherein a debt can be “transferred” to a rabbinical court so it cannot be defaulted on during a Sabbatical year.)

Anyway, I’m glad for the judicial ruling that recognizes that if people—Jews—want to sell and buy hametz during Passover, they have every right to do so. This is victory for rationality, consideration, and tolerance, and against caving to the Haredim and surrendering personal choice to the theocracy that some Jews are intent on creating in Israel. People have rights, including the right not to observe old (and frankly, quite silly) traditions.

Let Israeli Jews who don’t want to eat hametz on Passover do what we do in the Diaspora: get really jealous at everybody they know who does eat hametz, and then have a massive pizza-and-pasta party after eight days of self-affliction. And if they happen to walk by a store selling cookies, cakes, breads, what have you—they should give thanks that they live in a country that allows people to buy, sell, and eat what they want when they want.

But once in a while, it chokes so hard for some unexplained reason that it completely garbage-izes your file and throws up a hilarious error message to let you know that it’s finished trashing every last byte of data in your 200-item bibliography, such as the following:

If BibDesk cannot open files in the “BibTeX” format, what the heck have I been working with all these years?

Our Torah is sweeter than honey. Within it, you can find all the secrets of creation.

I’m going to share with you something that none of the math or geophysics professors in MIT or Cal Tech know, nor does anyone on the staff at NASA. Now hear this from your buddy Lazer:

I think there might be a reason they won’t tell you these things—but anyway, why make the facile assumption that nobody who works in science or engineering or mathematics is a Jew who takes this sort of stuff seriously?

Pi is the secret of creation. Kabbalah, our esoteric portion of Torah passed on to us by Rabbi Yitzchak Luria Ashkenazi (the famed “Arizal”) and his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital, may their holy memories arouse mercy on us,

(Yes, he did actually write ‘arouse mercy on us’. I am not making this up.)

explains that Ain Sof, Hashem The Infinite, created the world by a process known as tzimtzum, or contraction, whereby Hashem had to designate a point in the middle of his Divine and all-encompassing light to make room for a physical universe. This process, super simplified, was done by hishtalshelut, a series of cocentric [sic] circles the correspond to each of the sefirot, the holy spheres that mainifest [sic] Hashem’s different attributes.

Okay, whatever. It’s the conclusion that our sage mathematician/kabbalist comes to immediately after this point that really blows my mind:

Therefore, nothing in creation is square. All of creation is round, from electrons and protons to the great galaxies.

Nothing is square? Everything is round? What about: squares, cubes, right angles, television sets, sofas, stereo speakers, pianos, and books (sorry, seforim), just to name a few things? Also, many galaxies have shapes other than circles. But if you’re intent on making a silly, poorly-informed point, I guess you can’t let little details like these stop you.

A magical number, the key to computing circles, diameters, and circumferences is Pi, or 3.14 with subsequent fractional digits to infinity.

The Holy Name that Hashem used and uses (for creation is renewed every single day) in the contraction process is שד”י, the Hebrew name Shaddai, which is made up of 3 letters, shin, dalet, and yud.

All Hebrew letters have a numerical value. Shin is 300, yud is 10, and dalet is 4. Together, the Holy Name of Shaddai equals 314. If we divide this number by 100, the number that signifies perfection - which only Hashem is - we get 3.14, or pi, the secret of creation.

All right, so if you add up the letters you get an approximation of pi times a hundred. So you have to divide by a hundred to get a meaningful result out of this. What’s the justification for doing this? You could come up with so many other than ‘it signifies perfection’. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader. But more important—and interestingly, from my point of view—is the fact that unless you believe in some form of the documentary hypothesis—which I presume Lazer does not—the name Shaddai leads you into all sorts of contradictions. For a terrific example, see Exodus 6.3 and Genesis 22:14, which seems to suggest that Abraham knew the name ‘Yahweh’ (translated as ‘the LORD’). Also, Shaddai seems to have been a Mesopotamian cult title of one of the Semitic chief gods El. For a useful point of comparison, see Psalm 82, which begins: ‘God (elohim) stands in the congregation of El‘ (god? El? could this mean the council of gods under El?). At any rate, this is quite a vexed issue, much more complicated that Lazer is making it.

However, these are but minor obstacles to the determined mind of our esteemed rabbi. If he wants to believe that pi is holy, mystical, and the secret to knowledge of creation, then by all means let him go ahead and believe it. The rest of us will keep on thinking that it’s pretty neat in its own right—or, if not, then at least an opportunity to hold a demonstration.

• From Failed Messiah: Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel: Real Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t abuse children; child abuse is a problem only among ba’alei teshuvah (naturalized ultra-Orthodox Jews). Reason? Haredi children don’t call their teachers by their first names.
• From the Slog: University of Washington College Republicans are holding an odious and racist event on Tuesday: ‘Find an Illegal Immigrant Tag’. Stated purpose: ‘to send a a “clear statement that we need to get serious and crack down on illegal immigration and secure our borders.”’ Unstated purpose: to be huge white-privilege racist dicks.
• From The Province: A good summary of the problems surrounding this year’s Vaisakhi parade and festivities in Surrey, B.C. A what point does it stop being a family-friendly religious celebration and start being political, especially when you throw photographs of Sikh men who committed violent terrorist attacks against Indians in support of a Sikh homeland into the mix?
• Finally, from the Onion:
  
  

  

  Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook

  The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.

The full album of pictures is here (I’m slowly migrating my photo software to Plogger). Here are some ‘best of’ hits:

Also, check out Adam Abrams’ blog post, with which I express my complete agreement, as well as his photo album from the event. Also, if you have Facebook, check out the event page for the nationwide protests, as well as the Facebook groups for classical music at the CBC and for the CBC Radio Orchestra. Also make sure to check out the web site for Stand on Guard for CBC.