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I just remembered that I’m now well past page 123 of The Surgeon of Crowthorne (I’m well past the book’s end). Unfortunately, I can’t say that the 6th, 7th and 8th sentences on the page (see the meme) are the most exciting:

Each and every time he found a word that piqued his interest he wrote it down, in tiny, almost microscopic letters, in its proper position on the eight-page quire he had made. The unique manner of his procedure was soon to become a hallmark of Minor’s astonishing accuracy and eye for detail.

I used to write in tiny, almost microscopic letters. It was actually somewhat more legible than my usual scrawl.

I never wrote any entries for a dictionary, though, which is the subject of this book: a man with paranoid schitzophrenia who made an enormous contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary from his padded cell. The book also uses this as a channel through which to marvel at the creation of the OED, whose concept of popular collaboration, along with its “complete” historical review of the English language, had been revolutionary and extraordinary (and in many ways still is). One could say it was really Dictionary 2.0.

Yes, you might see parallel’s to our contemporary grand collaboration, Wikipedia (which I have contributed to). Though it is much more based around consensus (or it would like to be) than editorial subtleties, and is a little more post-modern than to be concerned with extactitudes on some topics. And there is also an important immediacy factor playing a role in modern (espeically collaborative) media that wasn’t there before. And of course the monstrosity of Wikipedia brings me back to my honours work, which really I should be doing right about now…

So I guess even with a poor effort from myself, I have to tag. (For the tagged, take 6-8th sentences of p. 123 of nearest book, discuss and pass on as per meme.) I’m curious to hear what Alicia and Eve are reading in their respective corners of Asia. And Frikle has good literature. And DLC might find an interesting word to talk about on the 123rd page of some book. And, why not, my brother. See if he has the time for books at the moment…

Yay. My first not-so-viral meme over and done with!

I should read Simon Holloway’s blog more often. Not only do I enjoy his clearly-put insights, but I managed to miss by over a month the one time he was tagged in a blog meme and decided to tag me in turn. As he puts it:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

Now for him this meant not only quoting from Waltke and O’Connor’s, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, but then discussing the fascinating notion of honorific plurals in Biblical Hebrew (among things).

Not all of us keep quite as neat a desk as Simon, though.

Mine is packed with relics from various moments of the past months of my life, as well as long before that, and some quite useless things indeed. Some day I’ll clean it. (My desk at uni is cleaner, but still piled with papers left by its last occupant!)

Now, the nearest book to me happens to be the university diary I don’t use. While it has more than 123 pages, it doesn’t number them, so I’m defaulting to the second-nearest book, which is The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester.

And thus, after such a long prologue, I’m going to cop out. I’m not up to page 123 yet, and I don’t intend to tell you what it says there until I am. So this post is more an IOU than anything. (If you’re in suspense and want to speed up the reading process, you could try poisoning my food with laxatives.)

First, Keren became USyd’s sample student. Now this:

Trudi told me he was everywhere. But it was hard to avoid a full-page in Honi Soit…

You have seen that which I have done to Egypt, and how I have carried you upon the wings of eagles, and how I have brought you to me.

How should we understand the allegory of being carried on eagles’ wings?
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I just came back from hosting a post-wedding “sheva berachot” meal for Kim and David who got married on Sunday. This is two weeks after the wedding of other good friends, Mike and Lior. This coming weekend, I have Josef and Abigail, and Ryan and Alla will finish off the month. Being Jewish weddings, they take up a whole lot more time than just the weddings themselves: there’s a day or two before, and a week after, that have related celebrations. So it’s really been taking up a lot of my time lately. My weeks have been almost saturated in work and weddings.

Not to mention my brother busy with his own wedding to Shimrit, which is happening in February in Israel. He seems to be on top of things, though.

And just when I thought I’d had enough weddings for one season, I found a voicemail on my phone. My hosts from the High Holidays in Surfers Paradise (Shai and Sandra) will be having a wedding too, at almost-last-minute notice. At the time I stayed with them, Sandra was completing her conversion to Judaism. So now with that all done, there is a Jewish wedding to be had (apart from the civil one they were already bound by!), and it happens to fall on the one weekend in December that wasn’t already taken by someone else’s nuptials.

It’s tiring. But I love it. What can I say? Mazal Tov to you all!

A couple of weeks ago, amid spewing out essays, I was relieved that I would finally be completing five years of Science/Arts and moving onto honours. Only, when I went to hand in my honours application, I couldn’t be found on the list of students qualifying to graduate. Hmm…

It turns out that while I could pass first and second-year maths without a problem, primary school arithmetic had let me down. My transcript listed 239 credit points. I needed 240 to graduate or go onto honours. Whoops!
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Having applied in August, I finally received word this week that I will be working as an intern with Google over summer. Squeezed in between exams and my brother’s wedding, I hope it will be a great experience and opportunity, working in the Google environment, on big and practical projects, and with important and intelligent colleagues.

At the end of the day, though, the way to get into Google is not by applying.

It’s by being bought.

I recently took a Jung personality test as a subject of Nic(k)’s research work. It classes me as an ENTP, one of sixteen boxes for each the 6.6 billion people on earth.

Now, everyone has something different to say about ENTPs. And let us just ignore the bias caused by it being me that answers the questions, and me that reads the description of my type (and being able to just ignore statements that don’t quite match). Nonetheless, the description page Nic sent me got me right in stating:

ENTPs are less interested in developing plans of actions or making decisions than they are in generating possibilities and ideas. Following through on the implementation of an idea is usually a chore to the ENTP. For some ENTPs, this results in the habit of never finishing what they start.

I’m part of that some. I have numerous half-finished blog entries. Some never make it to the web. Just as many projects off the blog are floating around my mind, or with planning documents on my computer. But nothing or very little by way of implementation.

Implementation is indeed a chore. And sometimes I do it, if there’s some motivation, or if I’m just in the mood to do a chore. (You know, like the days you just feel like cleaning your room, or bringing in the washing. Or is that just me?) Or, if it’s for someone else’s benefit more than mine, then I actually get around to doing the thing.

All in all, this (and the high frequency of High Holidays and flights to and from the Gold Coast recently) might explain why I’m not a very good blogger and, although I have many half-baked posts open in my Opera browser, you haven’t heard from me in a while. And this happens on a regular basis.

I’ll get there. When I feel like a chore.

Praying for the sick is deeply instinctive. Divine petition is closely tied to hoping for and requesting the recovery of the sick. And yet, when emails are forwarded with names of the ill, and occasionally a description of their affliction, and we are expected to add them into our prayers, I usually delete the email. Heartless? Perhaps. (more…)

I’ve discriminately selected 279 personal favourites from thousands of my photos (although a couple were taken by others) taken over the year that I was away from Sydney. They’re not necessarily favourite moments from my trip, but I enjoy the image, maybe even the art. They are pictures made up of trees, lamp-posts, animals, flowers, nature, children, old people, artists, tourists, businesspeople, people…, poverty, parenthood, enthic relations, love, leisure, culture, places, weather, structure, symmetry, geometry, reflection, refraction, colour, contrast, shade, light, sun, textures, water, strange subjects, strange angles, irony, humour, purity, blemish, focus, blur, evocative images, emotion, and all of them memories to me.

I would love to hear your comments, here on my blog, or on the photos themselves, which ones are your favourites; whether you like or dislike any in particular; whether you think some should be incldued from my other photos that weren’t.

So go check them out and let me know…