TheLady's New Writeups

Shomer negiah (thing)

2009-10-02T17:59:28Z

When I was sixteen, I went to Italy on a summer assignment for the JDC, teaching kids Hebrew at summer school. While there, I got to know some of the rabbis of the Habad mission that was based in the town we were running the summer school in. They were very nice men, and they made me pretty welcome despite being more or less a godless heathen (in micro-mini sun dresses, what's more). I thought they were decent enough guys.

Then one day they were all standing talking to a new rabbi that I've not met before. I stopped to say hello to them, and they introduced me to New Rabbi Guy. Instinctively, I profferred my hand for a handshake.

New Rabbi Guy, smiling: "I don't shake hands with women".

Me, embarrassed: "Oh".

New Rabbi Guy: "I only shake hands with my wife. But even that, not always! Ha ha!"

The Other Rabbis: "Ha ha ha ha!"

Me, even more embarassed now for being laughed at: "Wait, why not?"

Rabbis, en masse…

A Decade of Decadence: Britnoder Memorial Pub Crawl (event)

2009-10-02T12:46:37Z

Well folks, the title really tells you everything you need to know here. But I'm gonna go ahead and tell you a little story anyway.

A few days ago, I decided to organise all my Facebook friends into lists, by how and from where I know them. I was secretly getting a bit worried that most of my "friends" were really work colleagues and that I'm turning into one of those corporate types and will eventually replace my profile picture with my cat in an Intel t-shirt or something. So I broke it up into family, work, friends from back home, people I know from when I lived in Dublin, people from the old alt.fan.pratchett community, misc, and noders. And you know what? After my old school friends, the noder list turned out to be the longest.

And then I sort of went down the list and started remembering all kinds of fun stories I know about these people, all sorts of adventures we shared... Like the time I went to a residential gaming convention in deepest darkest Irish countryside…

Lemon and basil chicken escalopes (recipe)

2009-08-12T13:57:37Z

Easy, light, summery, simple and quick: a perfect weeknight meal for 2 that requires no further introduction.
Quite simply, take:

2 chicken breasts

A handful of basil leaves

3-5 garlic cloves

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 teaspoon coarse salt

Freshly milled pepper

Then, very easily, do:

If you have a meat mallet, beat the chicken breasts until they are an equal thickness all across. If you don't, the same effect can be achieved with a rolling pin. Or you could, you know, not bother.

In a pestle, crush the garlic with the salt until a paste is achieved. Whisk in the lemon juice. Pour into a bowl or flat-bottomed dish and add the pepper, wine and chopped or torn basil leaves. Whisk it all up, pop the chicken in and make sure it's all covered in the marinade. Leave for about 1 hour.

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Peaches and Cream (recipe)

2009-08-04T09:57:48Z

It's the first week of August. Height of summer. Roads should be shimmering with resentful heat. Plant life should be reduced to so much prickly kindling. Tempers should be fraying. All my white linen trousers should have ice cream stains on them. And I should be wallowing and luxuriating in a diet consisting entirely of sweet, cold, juicy-bursting-leaking fruit.
Except someone has switched over the scripts, and I seem to have found myself in the wrong movie, becuase it's cold, soggy-slippery and miserable. And the only fruit to be easily had is the supermarket variety, which, if you don't live in the UK, has one important characteristic that you should be aware of for the purposes of understanding my angst here: it can rot to putrefaction from the outside while still being rock hard and acidy inside.
This is especially true of stone fruit such as plums, peaches, nectarines etc. And that breaks my heart every year anew, because peaches and nectarines are my

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June 4, 2009 (log)

2009-06-04T10:35:51Z

Some things are so awful that writing fails one. Mass rape in war-torn Africa is one of them.

I tried for a very long time to come up with some words to preface this node with, something articulate, erudite and worthy of E2's writerly ethos; but I just can't. The raw horror can only be allowed to speak for itself - but it is a mute horror. It is a nightmare we don't tell anyone about.

A bunch of people cleverer and braver than me have decided that the horror should no longer be mute. They are organising a campaign called Silence is the Enemy, and below is the post I wrote promoting it on my blog yesterday.

Apologies for the crosspost - but this is important.

In Liberia, sexual predation during the civil war was "normal." One major survey found that 75 percent

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Why religion is bad (idea)

2009-02-11T18:09:09Z

Religion is bad because it stunts intellectual growth and cripples human interaction; because it is an engine of control and oppression (mostly of women), and because it alienates people from the real, physical world and all its wonders. It narrows horizons, engenders isolation and fear, and strives in most cases to limit and control the experience and value of emotional, sexual and physical pleasure.

To try for quasi-empirical evidence for the "badness" of religion in the GDPs of more or less religious countries, in the level of incarceration, social disruption etc., to say "it leads to poverty!" is to cheapen the argument against religion, to reduce it to a capitalist cost/benefit calculation - and so, perforce, to undermine the secularist, pro-intellectual position.

Secularism

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