I dreamt of my uncle last night.

He called me and was scared and didn't know where he was. I figured out which hospital he was at from the background noises, and as I got there he was just sneaking out (in a red hoodie).

I could tell he didn't recognise me but I gave him such a hug anyway, even as I did so I was thinking this must be a dream because I knew he was gone. Then I took his hand and started walking him home, and was talking about all the things we would do, and how I would take care of him, and then I noticed my hand was empty and he was gone.

And I thought it was better this way, that I was glad he had gone so quickly, but that a little bit of him was still alive in me.

Glasgow

To set some context, I was not expecting much out of Glasgow. Although it's the biggest city in Scotland, it's strictly an industrial heritage; the cultural heritage is in Edinburgh. If I can draw a comparison, Edinburgh is to San Francisco as Glasgow is to Los Angeles.

I never actually wanted to go to Glasgow, but I had a business meeting in Penrith on Friday, and had an empty weekend, so I looked at the map, shrugged my shoulders, and gave a half-hearted "what the hell, let's go to Glasgow."

I knew I booked a cheap hotel, but I still wasn't prepared. For starters, it was on the ground floor but to access it you had to go down one flight of stairs and then up another! The bathroom was bright pink, the room overlooked a busy street, and the bed was so lumpy my back still hasn't recovered. But after a certain point it stops being annoying and becomes funny, and this was hilarious. So now if you look at TripAdvisor you'll see a steady stream of one-star reviews interrupted by my 4-star review labelled 'quirky and fabulous!'

Unfortunately that was my only good review for Glasgow. The Kelvingrove museum was in a fantastic building but it was just a sprawl with no rhyme or reason--one exhibit compared animal adaptions with human tools, such as walrus tusks and swords. You just had to shake your head.

I took a tour of the University of Glasgow, established in 1451, but the campus was only 100 years old. The Glasgow cathedral was authentically medieval, but the Victoria pollution had turned the sandstone black and so it was quite disheartening, inside and out.

I was also not impressed with Glasgow's patron saint, St Mungo, who is known for four miracles: The bird that never flew, the tree that never grew, the bell that never rang, the fish that never swam (which almost rhymes, in that it doesn't rhyme at all.)

From Wikipedia:
The Bird — Mungo restored life to the pet robin of Saint Serf, which had been killed by some of his classmates, hoping to blame him for its death.

The Tree — Mungo had been left in charge of a fire in Saint Serf's monastery. He fell asleep and the fire went out. Taking branches from a tree, he restarted the fire.

The Bell — the bell is thought to have been brought by Mungo from Rome. It was said to have been used in services and to mourn the deceased.

The Fish — refers to the story about Queen Languoreth of Strathclyde who was suspected of infidelity by her husband. King Riderch demanded to see her ring, which he claimed she had given to her lover. In reality the King had thrown it into the River Clyde. Faced with execution she appealed for help to Mungo, who ordered a messenger to catch a fish in the river. On opening the fish, the ring was miraculously found inside, which allowed the Queen to clear her name.

And finally, I walked around the city centre which appears to be one giant shopping centre. Worse, most of the shops were chains--it was very difficult to find any independents! So all in all, I thought Glasgow was better than expected, but only because I had no expectations.

That said, there are still many places around the north of England I'd like to check out, and I'm planning to spend every other weekend up there. The Yorkshire dales, the lake district, and the Hebrides should be fantastic in spring. Dublin, Belfast, and the Isle of Man are a short ferry-ride away. Manchester and York are worth another visit. I still haven't seen Hadrians wall and I'd like to visit Blackpool.

I may try skiing again--it's been 20 years since the last time, and the pain and humiliation I felt then has faded a little.

Hell weekend

The weekend after next is going to be insane. As I've been working in north England, and was going stir crazy trapped in hotels (primarily because of my irrational avoidance of taxis--is there a word for cab-phobia?) I brought my car with me. However, because I hate to drive, I take the train home. That works great during the week but on the weekends my options are limited, so I lump everything that requires a car into one weekend, and then drive my car home.

So weekend after next I'm driving Thursday night (180 miles), Friday I have to do security at my synagogue (40 miles round-trip), Saturday I'm visiting my friend in the Cotswolds (63 miles), then Sunday I have to go back to Maidenhead* (63 miles). Monday morning I have to drive to Thornbury (97 miles) for a business meeting before driving back to Runcorn (155 miles). That's 600 miles in 4 days!

What's worse is that my business meeting on Monday is literally 10 minutes from where I'm staying on Sunday in the Cotswolds! However, I've been invited to discuss my 'Jewish journey' for a potential presentation at Limmud, a Jewish conference in May. While I don't think my journey is that interesting or unusual, there are several other people participating and I asked them to reschedule to this weekend specifically when I'd have my car, so I'd feel guilty pulling out now.

I could also cancel my business meeting on Monday, and just do a conference call, but when they asked me if I wanted a tour of a nuclear plant, of course I said "yes!!" and so they've arranged access for me, and I'd feel quite bad cancelling that.

So in the end, the person who hates driving, is tired of travelling, and just wants to spend some quiet time at home is going to spend 10 hours on the road and only be home one day before heading back up north. Insane.

2012 in review

Obviously this is the point where you think, "holy cow, where has the year gone!" Well in my case, straight in the crapper*.  And yet, it ended on such a hopeful and uplifting note, it made everything else worthwhile.

Of course, if you're reading this on my blog you can already see what happened to me throughout the year, and so it hardly seems worthwhile to summarize it. However, I may be able to distill its effects on me.

The most painful event, of course, was losing my aunt and uncle in May and June respectively. I have not recovered from that, and find myself avoiding people as a way of avoiding dealing with that. However, as I'm going to be visiting my family in 3 weeks, I won't be able to avoid it much longer. I am hoping my cousin will get her act together and I can go back to spread their ashes soon.

Much of 2012 was spent making up for my lack of dating in my youth. I didn't find any lovers, but I did pick up 5 or 6 friends along the way.

Spiritually, I continued to be impressed by, and drawn further into, Judaism. After accidentally volunteering for security duty in March, I seem to spend more time outside the synagogue than in, but ironically this makes it easier to get to know other members, which in turn makes me feel more like part of the community. I've also read several books and went to a Jewish conference, which was brilliantly held over Christmas!

My job has roller-coastered between having very little to do and having an insane amount to do, but at least for most of it I could work from home, or very near to home. That ended last month when I was asked to work in Runcorn four days a week for the next 6-12 months! If you look up Runcorn on a map, you'll see it's halfway between Manchester and Liverpool. What the map won't show you is that there is *nothing* around it! A couple of chain hotels, a couple of dodgy restaurants, and at least 40 minutes in any direction to find anything interesting. When I get back from California I think there will be some negotiation on how many days I need to be up there, whether or not I can get a corporate apartment rather than stay at hotels, or whether I need to start looking for a new job.

So that's 2012 in a nutshell. I really don't know what to expect from 2013, but I can tell you what I'm hoping for. :-)
*For the record, early toilets were already referred to as "crappers" before the unfortunately-named Thomas Crapper began manufacturing them.

Inquire vs Enquire

I've never been sure of the correct usage of 'enquire' so I finally looked it up...and it turns out it's only relevant in Britain, as "enquire" is rarely used in American English.

According to the Oxford dictionary:

The traditional distinction...is that enquire is used for general senses of 'ask' while inquire is reserved for uses meaning 'make a formal investigation'. In all senses inquire and inquiry are the more usual forms in US English, whereas enquire and enquiry are chiefly restricted to British English.

I think "chiefly" is also chiefly British...

Happy Hanukkah

The bible defines five holidays: rosh hashana, yom kippur, pesach (passover), shavuot, and sukkot. So where did hanukkah come from?

According to the Bible, when the Jews settled in Canaan (now Israel) the first task was to build a temple to hold the Ark of the Covenant (of Indiana Jones fame), and lit an "eternal flame" that was never extinguished. After David (of Goliath fame) united Israel (Judea), his son Solomon (of wisdom fame) built the second Temple.

In 175 BCE, Judea was under the control of Syria but had religious freedom.  Unfortunately it was also involved in a civil war between the Hellenizing Jews, who wanted to be like the Greeks, and the Ptolemaic Jews, who wanted to be like the Egyptians.  The Hellenizing Jews were expelled, so they invited the king of Syria to intervene.  Unfortunately the king went a little further than expected, captured Jerusalem, outlawed Judaism, ordered an altar to Zeus be erected in the Temple and called for pigs to be sacrificed there.

The Jews, who were never good subjects (just ask the Pharaoh), revolted.  Mattityahu, a high priest, and his five sons led a rebellion which took two years but was ultimately successful.  Judah Maccabee ('Judah the hammer') ordered the Temple to be cleansed, a new altar built, and the eternal light to be lit.  However, they found only enough consecrated oil to last one day, and it would take eight days to press new oil.  Miraculously, the oil lasted eight days, and this 8-day period is celebrated as Hanukkah.

However, as my rabbi pointed out, the real miracle was that a tiny little country was able to win its freedom against one of the greatest empires in history, and by comparison celebrating oil burning for eight days just seems ridiculous.

That said, a 'festival of lights' during the winter is common to many cultures, and the 'hannukiah' (the 9-branched candelabra) is supposed to be displayed in a front window to reinforce the Jewish 'differenceness' that has kept the culture alive for over four millennia.

Independence lasted until 63BCE, when the Romans conquered Israel.  The Jews rebelled against them three times.  In the first (66-70CE), a group of Jews holed up in Masada, on a mountain, for two years while the Romans laid siege and finally built a massive earthworks to breech the walls.  (The Jews, known as Zealots, killed themselves rather than be captured.)  In retaliation, the Romans destroyed the second Temple; the remains still stand as the Western Wall.

In the third rebellion (132–136 CE), Simon Bar Kokhba established an independent state of Israel for two years, but the Romans sent six legions (30,000 soldiers!) to crush it, and then barred Jews from Jerusalem.  Another effect is that as the Christians did not support the rebellion, Romans began to consider Christianity separate from Judaism.  (Until then, Christianity was considered a sect of Judaism.)

The photos suck, but I had a wonderful time

...and 66 more photos.

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Religion

If you're wondering why I converted to religion, check out this cartoon and you'll understand.  For those with a short attention span, I'll transcribe the relevant bit at the end:

Would you kill for your religion?
Would you hurt, hinder, or condemn in the name of your God?
Yes?
Then you probably suck at your religion.
You should give it up.
Maybe take up windsurfing or ping pong instead.
However, does your religion inspire you to help people?
Does it make you happier?
Does it help you cope with the fact that you are a bag of meat sitting on a rock in outer space and that someday you will die and you are completely powerless, helpless, and insignificant in the wake of this beautiful cosmic shitstorm we call existence?
Does it help with that?
EXCELLENT!
Carry on with your religion!
Just keep it to your fucking self.

California itinerary

I was watching an old episode of The Big Bang Theory the other day, and Sheldon suggested that if you only have one day in Los Angeles to make it a "train day" -- lunch at Carney's in Studio City, the afternoon at the Travel Town museum (near Griffith Park), followed by dinner at Carney's in Hollywood*.  While I'm not going to stick with that formula exactly, I am bringing a friend who wants to see California, so I've been working on an itinerary.

Personally, for me the first step in any visit to California would be getting the hell out of Los Angeles, but in this case it's complicated by the fact that she wants to see LA, I want to see my friends, and the airlines want to charge £200 ($300) more to fly into LAX and leave from SFO.  So I'm not sure exactly how this will work, but what I am sure is that I will get an angry email from my mother when she sees I've only slotted her in for 3 days...

Day 1: Arrive Los Angeles
2: Beach
3: Hollywood
4: Downtown
5: Monterey
6: arrive San Francisco
7: pier 39/Alcatraz
8: napa valley
9-12: My family
13: Sequoias
14: Fly out of LAX

This is tentatively scheduled for January 10-22, but I'm hoping to have it firmed up by the end of the week.

*Yes, the order is important -- dinners are only served at Carney's on Sunset Strip.

AOC

An "appellation" is just an identifying name or title, but it has also come to be known as a system of protection to identify where a product is made or grown. For example, Idaho potatoes or Maine lobsters, which carry a set of expectations.

This is nothing new -- the Bible references wine of Samaria, Carmel, Jezreel, and Helbon -- but until the 19th century, it was just a convention, not a law.  In 1891, the treaty of Madrid gave legal protection to sparkling wine produced in Champagne, France.  Thus, you won't see the word "champagne" on a bottle of California sparkling wine.

In 1935, the French formalised this as the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, or AOC. In 1951, the European Union extended it.  Today, it applies to wines, cheeses, hams, sausages, seafood, olives, beers, Balsamic vinegar and even regional breads, fruits, raw meats and vegetables.

On the face of it, this seems like a good idea: If an area becomes associated with a particular product, you wouldn't want others to be able to claim their product was from the same region, right?  It's the same as trademark law -- if any IT company could call themselves "Apple," how would the Apple brand fare?

However, as with all things, whenever government protection is involved, things quickly become ridiculous.  I was intrigued by a news story yesterday that Britain now has 50 products of "protected designation of origin," the latest being Newmarket sausages.  Newmarket is a small town (pop. 15,000) in Suffolk that is more commonly associated with thoroughbred horse racing.  However, it has the distinction of two local sausage makers, who use two completely different recipes to produce two distinctly different sausages, and yet somehow the fact that they were both from Newmarket was enough to make "Newmarket sausage" a protected designation.  (Obviously I haven't tried them, but the "rate my sausage" blog doesn't give them high marks, anyway.)

In another example, "Newcastle Brown Ale" -- which was a trademark of a particular brewery -- was given protected status in 2000, but in 2004 the company moved the brewery to Gateshead, literally on the other side of the river, and had to petition the European Union to revoke the protected designation!  So just to recap, before the protection was granted only one company was allowed to create Newcastle Brown Ale, and if the protection hadn't been revoked then no companies would have been allowed to make Newcastle Brown Ale.

Cheddar cheese, by all rights, should be allowed protected designation -- after all, it originated in the town of Cheddar, in Somerset, around the 12th century, and there are still a number of artisan cheesemakers in the area -- but it was considered to be too "generic" to be given protected status.  (However, cheddar produced from local milk within four counties of South West England may use the protected name, "West Country Farmhouse Cheddar.")

"Buffalo mozzarella campagna" does have protected status in Europe (it must be made from the milk of water buffalo raised in Lazio and Campania, Italy) but not the rest of the world.  (And don't get me started on that low-moisture cow's milk product produced in the US and labelled "mozzarella"...)

Obviously these sorts of restrictions are just silly; if you're going to have the government enforcing appellations, the obvious solution would be to put a blanket restriction on geographic references; hence Parma ham has to come from Parma, and Darjeeling tea has to come from Darjeeling.  However, there was a bit of scandal a few years ago when the winner of the annual Cornish pasty competition did, in fact, come from the county of Devon, next door.  The rules were changed so only residents of Cornwall could complete, and then the following year Cornish pasties were given protected status, so even if the best cornish pasty came from Devon, they are now prohibited from calling them "Cornish pasties."  Of course, that's exactly what these laws do, reduce competition, regardless of whether it is better or worse than the original.

Today there are 1,123 products with various protected designation status in the EU.  Here is the full list of British products.  Of the 50, I recognise 8.  That is, less than 20% of these products with government protectional actually have enough of a brand presence to differentiate themselves from similar products from other locations.  (I don't even know what a "perry" is.)

Beer
    Kentish ale
    Kentish strong ale
    Rutland bitter

Cooked meat
    Cornish Pasty
    Traditional Cumberland Sausage
    Newmarket sausage
    Melton Mowbray pork pie

Cheese
    Beacon Fell traditional Lancashire cheese
    Bonchester cheese
    Buxton blue
    Dorset Blue cheese
    Dovedale cheese
    Exmoor Blue cheese
    Single Gloucester
    Staffordshire Cheese
    Swaledale cheese
    Stilton - White cheese
    Stilton - Blue cheese
    Swaledale ewes' cheese
    Teviotdale cheese
    West Country farmhouse Cheddar cheese

Cider and Perry
    Gloucestershire cider
    Gloucestershire perry
    Herefordshire cider
    Herefordshire perry
    Worcestershire cider
    Worcestershire perry

Cream
    Cornish Clotted Cream

Fish
    Arbroath Smokies
    Cornish Sardines
    Lough Neagh Eel
    Scottish Farmed Salmon
    Traditional Grimsby smoked fish
    Whitstable Oysters

Fresh meat
    Gloucestershire Old Spots
    Isle of Man Loaghtan Lamb
    Lakeland Herdwick
    Orkney beef
    Orkney lamb
    Scotch beef
    Scotch lamb
    Shetland lamb
    Traditional farmfresh turkey
    Welsh Beef
    Welsh lamb
    West Country Lamb
    West Country Beef

Fruit and Vegetables
    Armagh Bramleys
    Jersey Royal potatoes
    Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb