Thinly shredded cabbage.

So much for regular updates. And here I was so excited about making Diane's Going and Going list...

Also so much for the "Year Ago" link that graced the bottom of my last entry. The more I think about it, the more I realize that while such a link makes perfect sense in journals that update every day, like Kymm's, it doesn't really work in a journal with more sporadic updates, like mine's turned out to be. Using Kymm's links, I've read through her entire archives over the past year (barring only a couple of weeks in August, which I'll get when they come around again). But if I keep skipping days, anybody trying to do the same with this journal would end up missing a lot.

Oh, well. I have another idea for facilitating the navigation of past entries that may turn out to be more useful, if I ever get the chance to put it together. We'll see.

In theory, style sheets are the rare improvement that makes pages look better in browsers that support it, while making for cleaner pages in text-only browsers. It's just those darned browsers in the middle that spoil all the fun.

But I still have more to read and try, so this is only a tentative perspective on the matter.

Little known fact: I collect Jewish prayer books. See, there are all sorts of challenges faced by their designers and publishers, and I find it very interesting to see how various people have dealt with them over the years. From the typeface selected, to the way individual prayers repeated in different services are handled (reprint 'em each time, or have the reader flip back and forth?), to the inclusion or lack of marks for stresses and cantilation... there are all sorts of considerations.

Up until relatively recently, I stuck with Orthodox prayer books (or siddurim, singular: siddur), but, thanks to eBay, I now have a Conservative pair also, which, to be honest, I find interesting mostly in seeing what was excised. (Answer: plenty. Most notably, all references to the Resurrection.)

So, I was just looking through eBay, doing a search for more, 'cause I haven't yet done enough to destroy any hope of sustaining my financial solvency, when I happened across a batch of several auctions of what were billed as Jewish prayer books... from a guy who clearly can't read Hebrew or Yiddish, and clearly has no idea of what his merchandise really is.

He does state right off the bat that he's "offering a small collection that was saved from a flea market," so perhaps the seller told him they were all prayer books, or perhaps he extrapolated from the one book that has English in it. And some are siddurim. But most aren't. The frustrating thing is that he doesn't provide scans of all the title pages. For some, all he provides is the (generally blank) cover, and the publisher's imprint, which give no clue as to the content.

• The "1906 Hebrew Parayer Book Siddur" could be anything. The front cover bears the word "Mendelsohn" in Yiddish... but the guy was fairly prolific, so I don't know which work this is.

• The "1899 Hebrew prayerbook Siddur Russian Pub." is equally cryptic. He provides a scan of the author's address (whatever this was, it was written by a Rev. H. Singer, in Buffalo, NY), but that, again, doesn't help much.

• And then there's the "1912 Hebrew Prayer Book Siddur in Yiddish????" (please note that all these titles are as provided by the seller). As he goes on to say in the description, "It says The Holy Bible translated into Yiddish although I believe it is Hebrew." This suggests that the seller is unaware that Hebrew and Yiddish use the same characters. There wouldn't be much need to translate the Bible into Hebrew, as that's what it was originally written in... Anyway, this does, indeed, appear to be a Yiddish translation of the Five Books of Moses, although I'm not sure that it contains all five; it's possible that this is part of a multi-volume work.

• "1909 Hebrew Prayer book Russian Publisher" is pretty close. It's actually a Machzor, which contains prayers for holidays. With commentary, even. This one looks interesting, actually, although I don't know which holiday(s) this volume covers.

• "1879 Hebrew Parayer Book Siddur Russian." Not even close. It's a copy of Exodus, with commentary.

• "1909 Hebrew Prayer Book Siddur." As the seller notes, "This one has some English." Indeed. Which explains why he got this one right.

• "1896 Hebrew Prayer Book Russian Publisher." Wrong. I'm a bit unclear on the nature of what it is. Sefer Keren Yehoshua is the title, a nice pun that I'm not going to try explaining, and it appears to be a collection of original writings of Rav Yehoshua ben Rav Nachman Epstein. Possibly from his sermons, but I'm not sure.

• "1883 Hebrew Prayer Book Siddur Russian Pub." Nope. Sefer Kodosh Yisroel. Let's see... "on our master, rabbi, great gaon, righteous... yadda yadda yadda... Rav Yisroel Salanter." Interesting. From the (kinda blurry) title page, I have the impression that this is a biography of sorts.

• "1894 Hebrew Prayer Book Siddur Russian Pub." Sefer Emunas HaTechiah. As near as I can tell, this is a monograph on the subject of the Resurrection of the Dead, that being one of the central tenets of Orthodox Judaism.

• "1905 Hebrew Prayer Book Siddur Russian Pub." Deuteronomy. With a Yiddish translation, I think.

• "1901 Hebrew Prayer Book Siddur New York Pub." Oh, I wish the top of the title page hadn't gotten cut off. And that I had a Yiddish dictionary. This definitely ain't a siddur, and it definitely is Yiddish, but my vocabulary isn't good enough to figure this one out.

Next Stop Wonderland didn't really grab me. [Spoilers follow. Skip to the next section if you want to avoid them.] The usual formula for a romantic comedy has the male lead and female lead meeting right off the bat, with all sorts of plot twists to keep them apart until the end of the film. In this one, they don't meet until a few minutes before the end of the film, at which point they instantly fall in love, and we're expected to be happy about this simply because we've been waiting for them to get together for the whole film.

And why have we -- or at least, I -- been waiting for them to get together? Is it because they have lots in common, and we can just tell that they'd get along perfectly? No, not really; we don't know enough about either to tell. We want them to get together simply because they're the female lead and male lead, and we know that that means that they have to end up in each other's arms by the end of the film. That's simply how it works.

And it is, but it doesn't make for a very satisfying experience.

"My mother says that you're corrupting me."

"Yeah, well, that's what friends are for!"