CLEAN DISHES NOT ONLY LOOK nice, they’re more healthy to eat from. Everyone has their own special method for this daily (or twice-daily) chore, and I’ve found this one to be most efficient in terms of time and water savings:
YOU WILL NEED:
– Large or divided sink
– Drain rack
– Dirty dishes
– Dishwashing soap (I like good ol’ yellow-bottled Crystal White for its inexpensivity and universality)
– Rubber gloves
– Sponge with one soft-scrub side
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW how much you don’t know, tell a young child it can ask you anything.
AND AFTER ALL IS SAID and done, and the horrible truth revealed
The bodies taken away, the last question answered
Comes William S Burroughs
(the gravelly graandpa who’s done things the grownups won’t let you ask him about).
“Interdimensional Alka Seltzer,” he says, proffering a grey fizzing mug,
and sits down beside you.
You take the cup.
He speaks volumes with his eyes
(they’ve seen it all, long before you were born)
but his mouth only says
what you wish it always wouldn’t:
“That’s just the way it is, Out Here.”
IF YOU HAVE NEVER READ the original James Bond stories by Ian Fleming, you don’t know James Bond.
You also don’t know sweeping prose that zips along like a rocket; lush description with a reporter’s eye for detail; fourth-wall breaking double-entendres; high-concept doomsday plans only one man can stop; and some of the best philosophical bon mots in the business. I like Fleming’s Bond for all these reasons, but mostly I like Fleming because he is a writer who inspires me to write — he makes it look easy, unlike some of my other literary heroes.
Prosatio Silban in his galleywagon / Illo (c) 2008 Alana Dill, http://youbecomeart.com
The most addicting D&D element for me has always been “worldbuilding” – establishing an ecology of people, monsters and treasure within a self-consistent storytelling framework. It’s an excellent outlet for structured creativity, and one day, while at my day-job as an offset printer, I grabbed a pad, scrawled a coastline and bay, added some mountains and a river basin, and began describing those who lived there.
Some years later I had compiled several notebooks and folders full of maps and diagrams, charts and lists, races and religions, legends and monsters, mostly written in two-to-60 minute slices during and between offset jobs. It was a lot of fun. But it was also pretty lonely; at that point, I didn’t play D&D anymore, and I felt a bit … unrequited. And, to be honest, somewhat silly.
The Exilic Lands and environs
So in 2005, I decided to tell stories to answer the question, “What would it be like to actually make a living in one of these invented worlds?” After all, somebody has to clean up all those slain dragons (and, probably, buy groceries and pay rent). Thus was born Prosatio Silban, self-defrocked holyman and mercenary cook.
Worldbuilding and its fruits have brought me great joy (and occasional comfort) during the past several decades. I hope you have found some joy in it too.
FAMILY’S WHO YOU EAT WITH. (Conclusion drawn after viewing the final scene of “Safe.” Those who know, know.)
THAT’S THE TITLE OF A provocative but understated op-ed today on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website, and it’s a point of view with which I find myself agreeing: that if one sees Judaism as only an excuse for right action, and ignores its religious and intellectual aspects, one is shortchanging both oneself and any interesting sort of Jewish future. (“Tikkun olam” = “rectifying/repairing the world,” a qabalistic doctrine which has been a big focus for Jewish leadership and study since the 1970s.)
This shortchagement is not new; people (including me) are always trying to “define” Judaism: is it a Faith? A Folk Tradition? A People? An Intellectual Puzzle? A Way Of Life? The answer, of course, is that it is all of these and more. And one of its most important qualities is that it fosters, in the diligent, a different way of thinking than the Aristotelian two-value logic on which most of Western Culture is based — a way of thinking that seems to me better suited to the complexities, complications and contradictions of modern life.
Mr. Alperson is more worried than I am about assimilation (after all, he’s a Jewish Professional), but his piece is definitely worth a read: http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/07/27/3088736/op-ed-judaism-is-more-than-tikkun-olam. (Also referred by the always-interesting Jewish Ideas Daily website: a rousing cry to study the Mishna independently of the Babylonian or Jerusalem Talmuds which are derived from it (http://thetalmudblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/protestant-mishnah/). It’s still a good world, where websites and debates like this can exist.)
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