Category Archives: Aharonium

B’yadeinu ohr va esh | In our hands are light and fire

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It is the eighth and final day of Chanukah, Chag Urim, festival of lights. It is the day after the world comes to grips with the latest horrible spasm in the terrible saga playing out between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinians in Gaza. Gershom Gorenberg of South Jerusalem, always conscious of terrible ironies, shares this:

Last week I received a press release from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel about a sharp increase in child burn victims in the Gaza Strip. This was before the Israeli air campaign began. After what’s happened in the last couple of days, PHR’s email now seems like a message from another historical era, a time so calm that it was a major concern that

“In December alone, 16 Palestinians were hospitalized who were burned while trying to heat their homes. Most of the cases reported to the NGO were of children playing with fire, following attempts to light bonfires for heating and cooking and lighting candles in order to illuminate homes.”

The fires, that is, were the result of the siege of Gaza, which included fuel shortages and power outages. The head of the burn unit at Shifa Hospital in Gaza reported that his unit was collapsing under the strain. I can only guess that Dr. Nafed Abu Shaaban is having a much harder time this week. [read the full post]

This news hits home for me. This weekend I learned that my youngest nephew, a resident of the occupied West Bank, received first and second degree burns after his clothes caught on fire, the result of his grasping for a Chanukiah (chanukah menorah) candle. Everyone is in shock, exhausted, and thanking God that at least he wasn’t wearing a polyester shirt, oy, he was wearing polyester Tzizit. Thank G!d  he wasn’t hurt even worse than he was.

For all the negative attention given over to the Cult of Molokh in the Torah, one would think that any fire ritual in Judaism be undertaken with many precautions to preclude even the possibility of fire related injury, especially of children. According to M’lachim Bet (2 Kings 23:10) and Sefer Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah 32:35) the fire ritual of Molokh seems to involve the passage of the first born male child through fire. The Jewish tradition finds it obscene to create situations in which children, any children, are subjected to such danger.

Hatzalah, an international volunteer emergency response organization serving mostly Orthodox Jewish communities provided a safety guide this year  to help prevent Chanukah related accidents. It reads

  • Remove curtains or any other flammable objects from the area around the menorah.
  • Keep the menorahs away from the reach of small children and make sure the menorah is on something solid and leveled.
  • Children bring home beautiful projects on Chanukah. If they are flammable, either paste them on the wall or place them away from menorahs.
  • When making latkes, keep ALL children away from the hot oil.
  • Turn frying pan handles away from the edge of the stove and try to use the back burners.
  • House fires tend to occur more often during the winter months. Prepare an escape plan and frequently rehearse it with your family.

It adds this helpful information in small print:

First Aid for Burns – this is for immediate care only.

  • Skin continues to burn for a while after the heat source has been removed. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to begin cooling the burn as soon as possible. A first-degree burn that is left untreated can quickly become a second or third degree burn.
  • Cool a burn by running cold (not freezing) water on the affected area, or by covering the area with a wet towel. When using the towel method, it is important to occasionally re-immerse the towel in cold water as the burn warms the cloth.
  • Burns, regardless of the cause, have to be cooled for a minimum of twenty minutes. The hotter the skin, the longer the cooling process.
  • It is advisable that any burn to an infant, child or the elderly that affects the face, chest, abdomen, or back should be considered an emergency.

This information needs to be more widely disseminated. And if we consider the safety of our children to be a priority and a religious obligation, then we should also find obscene what has been happening to the children of Gaza under Hamas and the past year’s siege.

It’s amazing to me that its easier to find information on fire related injuries to Gazan children than statistics on how often Jewish children are injured due to Chanukah related accidents. I can’t find anything online. I’ll post them on my blog as soon as I can find some.

In the meantime, I pray that we all become mindful of each other’s health and safety, and act accordingly to increase light in all of our communities, to preserve each other against callous disregard and aggression, and find shelter under a common awning of peace. This is my humble and sad wish on the last day of Chanukah.

We come to chase the dark away
In our hands are light and fire
Each individual light is small
But together the light is mighty.
Flee, darkness and night
Flee, before the light.

At your service

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I am an urban planner by profession and degree, but while I’m looking for work I am also a technology consultant, copy editor, bicycle messenger, ipod manager, technical writer, blog reader, proofreader, and coffee sipper.

Perhaps you don’t have a significant other or know-it-all child or lucky friend to ask you for your computer help when troubles arise. If so, please feel free to give me call. My parents tell me that while I’m busy looking for work I should also make myself useful by helping people with their computer problems. That, after all, is what I do for them when I return home, so, you know, obviously.

But beyond the esteem my parents beam on their tech-savvy son, I also have some street cred. To note, before I became a planner I was a computer dude in Philadelphia, first working with Windows and Macs at the University of Pennsylvania, and then afterward as an open source programmer on linux servers at a small web hosting company in Center City. I gave up that career when I moved away from Philly to go to grad school six years ago. I never really looked back but my talents were always of use, whether it was repurposing an antique Sun server into a low cost web server for my school’s planning program, or configuring a CMS out of Movable Type or WordPress, or simply teaching my coworkers how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator. I also found myself doing a lot of work using ESRI’s ArcView GIS software in addition to the other familiar research and writing tasks of planners.

But now I’m living in the West Washington Square Park neighborhood of Center City Philadelphia and hunting down job leads (that hopefully won’t take me away from Philly again). And while I’m doing so, I’m taking my parents advice to make my IT consulting services available to everyone. It’s a pretty competitive market from what I can see from Craigslist, but I imagine that plenty of folks looking for computer help in Center City might still find this post and give me a call (513.405.3603) for my competitive rates.

It being the Winter holiday season, I thought it might also be pertinent to advertise that I can also be of service ripping compact discs to mp3 players, and providing all the nice cover art and metadata that modern audio players use to organize the music they contain. Give me a call if you’d like to pay someone else to take over the mind-numbing task of ripping CDs and/or correcting your music’s metadata. I was just reminded to add that I also do freelance editing. Need a second (or third) pair of eyes on your paper? Need someone to help polish your text? References available upon request.

And hey, if you’d like some help preparing your charette, researching your plan, or illustrating your reports with maps and charts, don’t hesitate to nab me before someone else does.

Kitteh Yoga

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Kitteh Yoga: Exhale arch, Inhale stretch

Last night was my second night in two weeks of yoga with K. Clair and friends at her West Philly loft. I’m even starting to remember some poses for practicing during the rest of the week. But the hardest part, for me anyways, seems to be associating correctly each pose with either inhaling or exhaling — and then keeping aware of where my breathing is as I exercise each position. As a teaching and memory aid, I created the above image macro with the help of icanhascheesburger.

Much appreciation to Kristina and my other fellow Philly yoga friends for making this a fun and instructive part of my week.

UPDATE: Hilariously, I got my (in/ex)hales mixed up in my first attempt at this lolcat. See comments below. Thanks again to Kristina :)

Text Cloud of the Omphalos

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Behold, my Omphalos as digested arithmetically (with some aesthetic treatments) by Jonathan Feinberg’s text cloud application over at wordle.net. Makes for a rather elegant visual poem, no? The wordle engine accepts site URLs, RSS feeds, or giant gobs of text. The latter is what I fed it after copying the source of my ATOM feed and removing all the links, html, and other xml cruft using NoteTab. Hat tip to Jamais Cascio over at Open the Future for sharing the coolness.

The application provides some control over the appearance of the cloud. You can configure how many words appear (I chose 200). There are also settings for the orientation of the words (vertical/horizontal), palette, and font choice.

Some comments. It doesn’t appear as if the wordle engine is context sensitive to words that appear in close proximity to each other; place names like Bond Hill and Baton Rouge are thus not recognized as such. It would also be nice if common words such as “like” and “also” could be filtered out or relegated to the background as glue for more significant nouns like “heierophant” and “cosmogonic”.

Still, looking into the world cloud as a mirror of my writing over the last three years or so is interesting. All those music related terms are surely the result of importing all the posts I made over at mog.com in 2006 and 2007. Should I be as surprised as I am that this blog is so “Jewish”? Probably not.

Joe Lamantia has written more about text clouds here. (A tag cloud with all the tags and catgories of articles posted at the Omphalos appears on the right sidebar.)