How you can tell a Wikipedia author is writing, not for other people to learn but for him to express his knowledge:

1. Malabar (Nadan/Native) - As the name suggests, this is the native variety of Kerala. These plants have pannicles which grow horizontally along the ground.
2. Mysore - As the name suggests, this is a native veriety of Karnataka. These plants have pannicles which grow vertically upwards.

This is from the entry on Cardamom. Empheses mine. This was either copied from a cardamom-related specialist source, or just by a particularly obnoxious, smarmy git.

Outside the Chester Beatty museum in Dublin there’s a small gumball dispenser, the kind you see everywhere, only this one wasn’t filled with gumballs, but with gemstones. The charm of this method of delivery is kind of ruined when they had to put this sticker on, to avoid broken teeth and potential lawsuits. For those who can’t make it out, the label says “Warning: These are not sweets. They are gemstones.”

Meanwhile, in O’Neill’s bar, an old advertising sign sells “Invalid Port – Specially Selected for the use of invalids”. We had a hard time deciding what constitutes valid port.

Tags: british isles, my journeys among the heathens

Tags: music

I find myself, somewhat surprisingly, in possession of six (6) little microSD memory chips, each one containing about 2GB of storage. They are tiny – about the size of a fingernail – and very precious to me. I intend to send them  forth into the world to find new sources of music and return to me, sated and full, to discharge their harmonious cargo into my hands.

But until that happens, I simply plan on loading them with MP3s from my collection and having different chips carry different music – one chip with fast-moving bicycling music. One with gloomy winter music. One with Beatles. You know how it works.

My problem here, as is often the case, is one of logistics. These chips should ideally travel with me whereever I go, whether in a bag, a pouch or (if necessity demands) inserted into a bodily orifice for safekeeping. For that, I need them encased in something that is both protective and usable, suitable for both storage and retrieval. Right now I’ve got all five that aren’t in use in the little plastic snap-case they came in, pictured on left. This isn’t sustainable, though. The case keeps opening and sending its precious cargo hurtling through the dark recesses of my bag. Any other solutions I can think of make it much too difficult to open and pick music-chips.

So help me, gentle readers! How can I best convey my music around with me?

• Vague rambling posts.
• Personal stuff about my life.
• Fragments.
• Observations about lesbians.
• Stuff in English.

• Long-form articles and essays.
• More focused bullshit.
• Hebrew.
• Linking back to other bloggers so I can join in the big link-fest blagosphere .

• Short impressions of music, movies and books.
• Linking to cool stuff I found online without much commentary.
• Replying to other people’s twitter-burps.

• Longer movie/music/book reviews. Here? Blog? last.fm blogging service is crap. Yet Another Blog on strawjackal.org?
• Creative writing projects – private? public?

I think I like the concepts – tiny, self-contained, nano-movies. Usually badly made but it doesn’t matter – at 5 seconds, you have a one-shot and that’s it.

Originally published at דברים אחרים. You can comment here or there.

Tags: מנהלה

Yes, yes. Yet more fragmentation. Will have more Hebrew and longer topics, probably. Will also be less personal. Details at http://blog.strawjackal.org. I’ll crosspost here a bit, to see how it goes.

If anyone has a good idea for a (Hebrew) title for it, I’m open to suggestions.

“The white South, if it responded at all to the atrocities [committed to freed blacks after the Civil War], chose to recall how slavery had afforded black men and women a positive protection from such violence”

- Leon Litwack, "Many Thousands Gone: Black Southerners and the Confederacy”, 1984.

You gotta appreciate the logic of that. The passive-aggressive violence, the self-justification, the shifting of the blame.

Am I the only one to notice that Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America, looks (in some pictures) suspiciously like Lincoln? It’s as if they selected an Anti-Lincoln to head the rebel alliance. It’s eery.

(Picture courtesy of Wikipedia)

Bonus fact: After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis was tried for treason but never convicted, though he was banned from running for public office. In 1978, 89 years after his death, the ban was lifted.

Tags: americana

The Yiddish Black Hand or the Jewish Black Hand Association was a criminal organization that operated on New York's Lower East Side during the early 1900s, led by Jacob "Johnny" Levinsky … with Charles "Charley the Cripple" Vitoffsky and Joseph Toplinsky … By the end of 1913 … Levinsky [concentrated] on extortion in the ice cream trade, Vitoffsky focusing on … dealers and manufacturers of seltzer and soda while Toplinsky cornered the produce market …

Seriously. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.