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"...In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”
The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.
“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.
The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.”
Now it's Pat's job to cut them and frost them. They smell awesome.
It will show me the correct maps, but clicking on most addresses will end you up in Illinois or Georgia or Virginia. Just those states for some odd reason.
And, more a Google Maps problem than anything else, it insists a house on a residential street is a Taco Bell (tbell).
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I'm a bit into maps. When I'm bored or stressed at work, I'll bring up Google Maps and pick an area of the world and just follow the lines. My sisters love to make fun of me when we go on trips because I'll sit and look at maps for hours on long car rides, or in the hotel room.
I just like to imagine going places. I like to follow the lines and picture driving along.
In grad school i had a measurement of frustration: the cave/goat level. This reflected how much i wanted to give up and go live in a cave with just a goat for my companion.
Today, i've reached a cave/goat level not seen since grad school.
Another car bit the dust today. That's someone else's story to tell. My car needs a headlight and some oxygen thingee that makes the check engine light come on. Many dollars are needed for this but not particularly available. But its drivable for the moment; this is different than the state of your other car.
I'm incredibly out of sorts right now.
Everytime we pull ourselves out of a horrible sinkhole just a little bit something else explodes. We're not living hand to mouth, we're living emergency to emergency.
Blegh. I'm sure it will all work out and i'm sure i'll feel silly about this post in the morning.
But right now it sucks royally.
My cold made me clumsier than usual, and I slammed my naked foot into a chair leg yesterday, right before work. Part of toe is black with bruises now, but doesn't seem to be broken. This is the same foot/leg that I smashed into a a hard sharp plastic container last week when I tripped over something. That left bruises over the whole wide area of my knee and a weird knob of something that seems to have diminished over time.
So now my leg is kinda frightening with bruises. And my right knee, toe, and hip all ache when I walk too much.
Added onto that the lack of voice and the cough that makes other people give me a scared-rabbit-look and I am one walking nightmare of a person.
And yet still strangely cheerful, barring some stupidity at that place where I spend the vast majority of my time and energy.
And again I'm strangely cheerful. I'd prolly be humming if it too didn't hurt so much (I just tried it, bad experiment).
Have a lap kitty and a very close sleeping kitty right now. Pretty much there are always two kitties with me whenever I'm home. They rotate. Pretty-close-sleeping-kitty is vaguely annoyed and wants to knock standing-in-my-lap kitty out of my lap. This is the normal way of things. Too many lap kitties and not enough laps.
See! See! I'm in some horrendous good mood here. I need to be sick more often.
Voice came out as a croak and squeak mixture. Throat felt all swollen and strange, prolly made stranger by the cough medicine I took earlier. Pat got me some pain meds and somehow back to sleep happened.
'Bout six there was some noise from another alarm. Woke me up. Then the coughing started. Couldn't sleep anymore.
So I'm sitting here in the pre-dawn light, with a small orange cat fast asleep on my lap. And I'm pretty amused about the whole thing.
Sometimes being sick makes me cheerful. I'm a pretty strange human being.
The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes.
Last night the moon was full or almost full, but high and tiny in the sky. We had almost all the lights turned off, and the cold house was full of puddles of silver.
...the pilgrim seeks not to conquer the worlds he visits but to surrender to them; and unlike a missionary, he seeks not to preach but, in the silence of his supplication, to listen.
Now I'm sniffly. I have a probably-a-placebo vitamin C drink powder and a bin of freeze-dried strawberries. Both are vivid and red.
That's all.
Last week it was Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell's visits to historic sites related to the assassinations of three presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley). This gave me a long list of things I need to go see (which probably no one will find interesting but me).
Right now I'm reading Magnificent Corpses, by Anneli Rufus. It's a collection of essays that revolve around visits to European pilgrimage sites -- places where dried up pieces of saints are stored in ornate golden boxes.
According to the book, in Budapest there is in St. Stephen's Basilica a reliquary that contains St. Stephens incorruptible right hand (nicknamed Szentjobb -- "holy right").
You can apparently put coins into the reliquary stand to turn on a light above the hand. It's a coin operated relic. Absolutely awesome.
You can see a picture of the hand here.
As i drove to work today, i passed a fox deadby the side of the road.
After that came a rake, tines turned up, waiting for a victim car to stumble past.
The car next to mine, in the parking deck at bridgewater mall, has a coathanger instead of an antenna. The coathanger is just folded in half and the hook is flattened out and inserted into the car.
I'm half an hour early for work. I can never be certain how long it will take me to get here; could be traffic, could be cops blocking the road. And there were both of those today, plus a stop for gas. But still i'm here, in the lot, early early.
- Location:40.589411, -74.621911
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