sundries

[rm]

Patty's parents are here which means lots of food and lots of walking. Yay.

I am often taken aback, not by your answers to my polls, but that so many of you answer them at all. I know it's the lure of the ticky box, but it always sort of touches me that you're willing to confess or play along in passing. Y'all have no love for production people, though. None. Fuckers. Heh.

I have recently been friended by a rash of blogs that just randomly repost full news articles about random celebrities. It's annoying and weird.

It wasn't one tornado, it was two tornadoes.

Celiac Alert! This looks really exciting. But apparently it is only available at Walmart?

The Liberace Museum is closing its doors. Article is surprisingly smart and melancholy (while, I think, also leaving out a lot of context that's important), but it does note, among other things, that Liberace was Lady Gaga before Lady Gaga was even born.

The inherited mezuzas of New York. People move, not everyone is Jewish, but in New York people don't often take them down.

An update to a prayer book used by Conservative Jews will include a prayer for a deceased partner in an effort to include Jewish gays and lesbians.

DADT discharges continue to disproportionately affect non-white and female service members.

Last night on Angel: Lorne's throwing a Halloween party for Wolfram & Hart. This is total monster of the week crap, but contains a number of things of passing note.

1. Who else had had things done to them and not shared with the class. Gunn didn't hide his lawyer stuff for more than a second, but Lorne hid the sleep thing. Angel's deal was for Conner. What stuff has Wesley and Fred had done or will have done?

2. On that note, here I felt sure Wes and Fred would finally hook up in this episode and didn't. This is getting tiresome. Will Wes's deal with the devil be for Fred?

3. Spike is hilarious in the episode.

4. Okay, those fucking horned demon things. It's like, everytime they're on screen I can hear the writers cackling. "Do you think we can get away with putting the little one on a leash?" "I know, I know, let's have his horns be sawed off to make it clear that he's somebody's bitch!" The whole thing seemed like a throwaway joke in the name of "what will the network let us do?" that happened to have gotten REALLY uncomfortable and was sort of accidentally really smart. But awful and presented in a way that it was just impossible to know how to process. Um, I bet no one cares about this but me.

Comments

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Gosh! In addition to being celiac-friendly, that Ben & Jerry's flavor sounds tasty.

[deza.livejournal.com]

When my father was a boy, his father worked for the Georgia Power company. Pop got a call to do some emergency repair work in a county seat a few counties over. He brought Dad along for the trip, thinking it would be farily simple to do the repair, maybe pick up something for the family and come back home.

They drove into the aftermath of three tornadoes, one an F4, converging in the city square.

My 5-year-old father helped dig bodies out of the rubble and brought water to rescuers. It's something that effected him for the rest of his life - particularly when he decided to retire in the same town and work at the local history museum. Somewhere there is a photo of my 60-something year old dad, holding the head of a statue that had been decapitated by the tornadoes, standing in front of an oversized photo of himself as a child, recovering the same piece of statuary from the rubble.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

The mezuzah article made me very homesick, and made me want to put one on my front door here.

Also, everyone they interviewed was from my old neighborhood.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's no Walmarts near where I am either, and even if there were I wouldn't go there. That's really lame, to have a celiac-freindly flavor exclusive to Walmart. :(

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Oh that's so unfortunate about the Walmart exclusive ice cream. It looks so tasty too. I won't set foot back in Walmart for anything though.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Our house came with a mezuzah and a holy water fount. We have kept both.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Our building has a mezuzah on every doorway, most under at least five layers of paint.

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

re: angel - that is one of my FAVE episodes!
2. ... I WILL NOT SAY A WORD!
4. oh god, that one gets MORE uncomfortable, right to the end of the series...

[soukup.livejournal.com]

My friend's old apartment came with a mezuzah! It was decorated in a way which unfortunately made it look a little like a doorbell, and her guests always mistook it for one.

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

We've got mezuzahs on our front and back doors, under paint--our two flat was owned by the same Jewish family for about seventy years before the management company that now owns it bought the place. Inheritance is the only way I would have ever ended up with mezuzahs on my doors, but it makes my mother happy.

[billijean.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about you yesterday. I have had to start searching for wheat-free food for J and wow.. really tough here. So I heard about a hotel whose bakery makes rye bread, so i went there to ask if it still has wheat, and how much and what other no-wheat breads they might have. Right away, they sat me down and brought in the pastry chef. he sat with us and i explained that I was looking for wheat-free bread. he explained to me that it is not possible. *eyeroll* I corrected him - totally possible. So then he changed tacks and said oh yes, of course, my mistake. The rye bread they sell is still 70% wheat flour. BUT, he can order new mixes and be making 100% rye and 100% spelt loaves within a month. I'll have a standing order and every Monday and Friday, my driver will go pick them up. So yay.

But.. at one point, he was going on about making 'gluten-free' breads with just a little bit of wheat flour, say 20%, for people who have celiac disease. I said.. WAit! What? No. No. ANY gluten is too much. It can't be just a little bit, it makes people *really* sick and puts them at higher risk for future disease. "A little bit' of wheat, or bread that is "almost gluten-free" is NOT gluten free. You are messing with people's lives. That's not ok.

He had NO idea. He thought that Celiac Disease and 'need to avoid wheat mostly' (like J) were exactly the same thing. He was really upset and kept asking me more questions. I finally had to tell him that I am no expert, but he needs to do some research, and he needs to educate himself about what gluten-free food is. So he said he was going to do that and he thanked me because he was preparing to offer gluten-free food and kind of had it wrong. He didn't understand the consequences. Then he verified again that I was not looking for gluten-free bread, I was looking for no-wheat or low-wheat bread.

So yeah. I'll believe the availability of the promised bread when I see it. Nothing ever happens on schedule here. lol

[rm.livejournal.com]

You know, I have TOTALLY heard stories like this in the US too (well, most specifically, a company that was taking regular bread, repackaging it as gluten-free and making a lot of people REALLY sick), but god that is terrifying. More and more I'm thinking I should get the instant test strips that are available in order to do science on my food before I eat it.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

Crazy fact: I learned about mezuzot at a night-time Methodist bible camp. They told us about them in a way that made it seem like we should all have them, which I blame for my continued, lingering disappointment at not having a comparable tradition in my life.

Incidentally, this would be the same Methodist bible camp where I punched a girl who wouldn't quit hitting me.

[adelheid-p.livejournal.com]

The article from the New York Times about the two tornadoes was so well written. The writing quality of our local newspapers is just appalling and pales in comparison.

I've been to the Liberace Museum and I'm glad I was able to visit it. Perhaps it needs to be a part of a Las Vegas History museum. It's really sad that it has to close it's doors.

It was two tornadoes

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

It's really heart-touching to read about people in NYC mourning their trees.
Old trees are the hardest. Despite our storm losses, the loss that really bites were the ones that the Bulldozers got at our old place. Particularly our huge ancient crab-apple. Loved that tree.

Trees are supposed to outlive us.