http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos Sun, 17 Aug 2008 04:42:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My friend Guilherme R. and I were chatting about the terrible new war in Georgia's South Ossetia (soon to be Russia's South Ossetia?), and he blew my mind recalling the premise of a particularly prescient video game released back in 2001, "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon." From wikipedia: Ghost Recon begins in ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/08/ghost-recon-and-the-south-ossetian-war Last year around this time I was thinking about mp3 players. My trusty old Archos Jukebox 20 Studio just wasn't cutting it anymore, even with its ROM flashed with open source Rockbox firmware. Yes, the Archos was a solid brick of an mp3 player, had a simple yellow LCD display, ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/08/the-forbidden-ipod-hfs-on-windows Ten years ago I was in Philadelphia and excited to learn that Emergency Broadcast Network (or EBN for short), an art music/video project would be touring with dj Spooky providing live mixed visuals and even performing their own set. I had first seen their work in college in the mid ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/08/more-on-emergency-broadcast-network I promised myself that I would not think too hard about You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler's comedy film this summer. But alas, reading about the story of Yiftach in the haftorah reading this past shabbat, I couldn't help but think of the context of ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/07/you-dont-mess-with-the-samson Yochanan Lavie, who regularly reads and comments over at failedmessiah.com, recently shared this poem inspired in general by the sickness and evil near the root of Aaron Rubashkin's animal slaughtering and meat processing factory in Postville, Iowa, and specifically by Rubashkin's use of PR flacks, paid industry "representatives," and the ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/06/jeer-at-them Besides working through the problem of what is meant by being asked to worship an invisible, non-verbally communicative superbeing (who is yet imagined to be present, personal, and ready to intervene), my next most-difficult problem when conforming the god of my imagination with the god of Jewish liturgy has always ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/06/zer-presence This post goes out to all the wordpress users out there who wanted to use Albert Banks' Netflix Plugin for Wordpress but were frustrated at the plugin not being accessible as a sidebar widget. I added some code to widgetize the plugin that I adapted from this goodreads plugin. If ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/06/netflix-widget-for-wordpress From her yeshivah digs in Jerusalem, Gella Solomon (of Nogah Chadash) writes to me of an aggadic commentary she's recently composed on the story of Cain and Abel (or transliterated, Qayin and Hevel). Her midrash, narrated by Cain is deeply humanistic -- Cain expresses himself and his experience of fratricide ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/06/cain-and-abel The umbilical of my omphalos winds its way back in time to the blessings of my mother and father, but also inwards and outside-of-time, stretching into a womb land that is all myth and dream and imagination. With some effort I can follow my way back into this makom, this ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/06/behema-and-bahamut On this trip, I had the pleasure of sharing a day trip between D.C. and N.Y.C. with a friend of an acquaintance. As it happens, by which I mean, by the tender coincidences blessed upon me in the happenstance of creation, this fellow, Eli K-W, also happens to love Jewish ... http://aharon.varady.net/omphalos/2008/05/the-two-lovers