This comes straight from harav Feivel Avraham Karlinsky Eliashiv.

It is forbidden to eat anything on passover that contains recycled carbon molecules. After all, those carbon molecules could have come from chametz, and since there’s no bittul on pesach, you could be eating something that used to be chametz, and in reality, still is. Now that we have the technology, we should only be eating food where the carbon molecules have been freshly created from pure energy by particle accelerators.

I’m teaching at DC Beit midrash this coming Monday, March 30. The
schedule is as follows:
7:00-7:30 – food and socializing
7:30-8:00 – I talk, you criticize
8:00-9:00 either individual learning, go home, or a smaller discussion group led by me.

I’ll be speaking about the development and origins of different pieces
of the hagaddah, and attempting to use historical context to better
explain troublesome parts. (When Rebecca heard my outline she said
“that sounds like a connection series on the hagaddah. I don’t know if
that’s a compliment or not). My current plan is to talk about:

1. How the seder resembles, but is not a Greek symposium
2. afikoman does not refer to matzah
3. the four sons
4. Laban didn’t really try to kill anyone

I’ve uploaded my source sheets if you want to see them. (Please also note that all of the translations on the source sheets are mine, so if you see mistakes or typos, please let me know).

Unfortunately, time dictates that I will have to eliminate half of
that by Monday night. If you have suggestions on which part(s) to keep or which to eliminate, I’m open to suggestions.

I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to deal with text messages. Seriously – not a clue. Are they like email? Are they like IM? Are they just substitutes for short phone calls? Each of these three has a different etiquette and I don’t know which system to apply to text messages. When an old friend texts to say “I’m in town”, does that mean I should text back to say “let’s meet up?”Am I supposed to return the text with a phone call? What is the acceptable time frame in which to return a text message? Do people get upset if you don’t respond to a text? How do they even know I got it? (Answer: they don’t. I had text messaging blocked until a short time ago when I was offered it for free, and text messages to me simply vanished without informing the sender that they hadn’t been sent).

Guard duck

Originally uploaded by bachrach44
Our building has apparently decided to beef up security lately, so they’ve hired a security guard. Unfortunately, when you’re on a budget, I guess this is all you can afford.

Of course, if you read Pearls before Swine, this will be even funnier.

Somehow I’ve managed to go my entire life without reading Watchmen. That was a mistake. Watchmen was dark, thought provoking, interesting, well written, well drawn, non-linear, twisted, disturbing, and will be haunting my nightmares for years to come. In short: awesome. Best comic book ever. I don’t even think I want to watch the movie now, because I know there’s no way it can possibly live up to the comic book.

Aliza’s first word

Originally uploaded by bachrach44

Aliza’s first word is “uh-oh”.

I was reading about the Chevy Volt today. (How sad is it that wikipedia has far more and better information than Chevy’s website, which doesn’t even tell me what the Volt is or how it’s supposed to work). I have a few thoughts:

1. Very, very cool. Alcohol can keep it’s claim to be the cause of life’s problems, but technology is the answer.
2. I’m not about to run out and spend 30k-40k on a car, but it’s still cool.
3. Batteries have a memory effect, wherein if they are consistently discharged to a certain level and then recharged, they suffer. Since most people drive the same amount each day (commute to work), this is a real risk. Have they found a way to avoid it?
4. The battery won’t start with the temperature below freezing (32 F, 0 C, 273 K). I’m thinking this won’t be a huge seller in Wisconsin.
5. Electric car may sound very very cool (see point 1), but where does that electricity come from? Don’t you pay for the power to get from the wall? Doesn’t coal have to be burned to generate it? When calculating your total cost of ownership, don’t forget the cost of a daily recharge. A study commissioned by the state of California showed that a $3.73 gallon of gas and plugging in the Volt are equivalent. (oh-oh).
6. I’m not really sure plugin hybrids are the ultimate solution – they just move the problem around a little. Given that, I don’t think I want to spend the effort necessary to completely revamp our roads, utilities, homes, offices, etc. to support charging stations. This is the first solution, not necessarily the best or ultimate one, and we’re not going to want to make this kind of investment twice
7. Lastly, the car’s software is designed to be updated. One part of me can’t wait till someone hacks the firmware and comes out with a skin that makes your Volt look like the starship enterprise. (On that day even I will be tempted to go spend 30k for a car). The security professional in me thinks that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

I just came from the fastest megillah reading I’ve ever attended (and I’ve heard some fast ones). The baal koreh read incredibly fast. For those of you who used to live in Philly, think Shelly Stohl only without a pause between words, and with the chabad pronunciations whih don’t require enunciation of words. For those of you in Washington, Shelly Stohl made Andrew Jacobavics look slower than a mailman in a coma. Chabad also does not drown out the name of Haman unless his full name (Haman ben Hammedatha ha-Agagi), which doesn’t happen a whole lot. I didn’t look at my watch at the start, but we were done by 8:18, and I don’t think we started much before 8.

I would like to present to you the Canadian as a second language institute. Eh?

Having the clocks change this early in the year is weird. Today’s fast didn’t begin until after 6, which meant I got to have breakfast this morning before I left for work – something I don’t usually do on a fast day. (On a related note I can now say that I’ve had pickles for breakfast – I figured I needed the salt and electrolytes). On the down side, I found myself driving to work in the dark. It also pushes back tonight’s megillah reading by an hour, making it much more difficult to squeeze in both an early and a let reading like we usually do. Tomorrow will be ever more bizarre – neitz hachammah isn’t till about 7:28, which means that you can’t daven shemonah esreh or read the megillah until then, so an early minyan is out of the question. In my case I managed to find a 7AM shachrit near my office, but even with a 2 minutes drive between megillah reading and work I’ll still be about an hour late simply because we can’t start the megillah till close to 8. (Don’t worry – I already cleared it by my boss). I know most people focused on how the clock change would affect pesach, but pesach already forces us to be so out of whack and to take off from work that being a little more out of whack isn’t that big a deal. For purim on the other hand, we don’t take off from work or temporarily remove ourselves from societal forces at large, so the effect is felt much more directly.

If I gave you a thousand dollars that had to spent on one of the following wagers, which one would you put your $1000 on:

1. We will make contact with intelligent alien life during your lifetime.
2. No one on the planet will burn fossil fuels for energy by 2070.
3. The US national debt will be down to “only” 5 trillion by 2025.
4. You could buy 1000 shares of Citigroup -owner of the world’s largest financial services network.

Thanks to a USB card reader, external HD, and USB connected camcorder, I have currently assigned letters A through J to physical drives. (Except B of course, no one uses B any more).