Month: April 2023

Thinking About Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Anne Helen Peterson had a piece in her Substack recently about work patterns among people in supposedly higher end jobs. It’s all about how they put in the extra hours, never take all their vacation time, and so forth.

People in less prestigious jobs do not work extra, but of course they don’t get paid well and these days are often stuck with jobs with erratic hours and no benefits.

The solution to both these problems is unionization, as Peterson points out. Of course, people in white collar jobs think they’re too good for that and people in a lot of service jobs are risking their rent and food money when they organize.

It occurs to me that when I went to work as a legal editor and reporter for the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (known as BNA) — a major publisher of notification services for lawyers and other professionals that was at the time I went to work for the only legal publisher in the U.S. that was not owned by a foreign company — I ended up in a white collar salaried job where I worked the stated hours every week and went home and left the job behind.

After some years of practicing law, especially in a nonprofit firm that specialized in low income housing and never had enough resources, it was a relief to go home and forget about work.

Here’s the thing about BNA: it was owned by its employees and we had a union. Continue reading “Thinking About Work”…

On Productivity

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Like way too many people, especially U.S. people, I always feel like I’m not getting enough done. I need to write more. I need to manage my money. I need to clean this house and get rid of lots of stuff.

On social media, I see lots of my friends doing all these things and more and I feel guilty. Though I often also feel exhausted just reading about all the things they’re getting done.

Still, too many things remain undone. I’m not being productive.

But this morning, while I was meditating, it came to me that I am actually doing several things I never used to do, things that take time and are great for my quality of life even though they don’t weigh much on the productive scale.

(I know you’re not supposed to “think” while meditating, but one of the useful things that happens to me during that time is that I suddenly understand something that’s been going on under the surface.)

(I probably need to meditate more.)

Maybe the biggest newish thing I do is that I get a good night’s sleep, usually eight or nine hours worth. Sometimes I have trouble going to sleep or wake up with worries in the wee hours. After those nights, I sleep in.

This is after a lifetime of refusing to go to bed early, even if I wasn’t doing anything but staring at bad TV, and getting up early to do things.

I got up early to go to 7 am Aikido for about a third of my life, just as an example. And of course, even without that I had to get up for things like school and work.

These days I rarely have to get up early to be somewhere and I love it (even if I will always miss the 7 am Aikido class at Aikido Shobukan Dojo in Washington, D.C.). Continue reading “On Productivity”…

World-Building, Dying, and the Memory Lane of Comfort Foods

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I wrote this in 2013, while taking care of my best friend as she died from ovarian cancer. From time to time, I want to be reminded of the wisdom that arises in times of crisis.

 

The brochure from hospice inform me that as a dying person’s body winds down, appetite becomes erratic and diminishes. The sense of taste changes so that formerly favorite foods are no longer appealing. The person eats less when they do eat.  Finally, many dying people refuse all food. This can be complicated because throughout human cultures, offering food is a way of expressing love. The dying person may continue to eat in order to please a loved one, but in the end the demands of the body prevail.

Besides nourishing our bodies, sometimes past the point of health and into diet-related diseases, food is laden with symbolic meaning. We celebrate with festive meals; we soothe ourselves with favorite treats from our childhood; we give candy to our sweethearts. Even the term “sweetheart” refers to sweetness, a taste, as do “honey” and other endearments. Taste and smell are the most basic, “primitive” senses, so our expressions of care go zing! right into the oldest portions of the brain.

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of world-building is creating different cuisines for each culture or social class, ethnic group or family. While it may be true that just about every cuisine has some version of pancake-rolled-around-filling, stew modeled on the canned stuff in American supermarkets shouts “generic fantasy!”

Just as every family seems to have their own special recipe for spaghetti sauce or meatloaf, you can devise variations on the same dish. Sometimes these variations might reflect notions about what is suitable food for people of different ages, different social status, or even genders (“manly meals” or “kiddy food” or salads-are-for-women). Even within these variations, not everyone has the same taste. Some may be innate (how cilantro tastes is genetically determined), or influenced by personal history (travel, associations with significant events or relationships) and health status.

Which brings me again to caring for a terminally ill friend, in particular providing meals for her. She jokes about taking a trip down the memory lane of the foods she’s enjoyed during her life. Her tastes have become nostalgic, erratic to the point of whimsical, but fleeting. Some of the things she’s asked for are cream of mushroom soup, watermelon, Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, buttermilk biscuits from scratch (which I do know how to make), hot dogs with sauerkraut, salami, and vanilla ice cream with lemon sorbet for breakfast. No pickles with the ice cream, at least not yet, although she jokes about the food cravings of pregnancy. Life is indeed uncertain, so she eats dessert first.

The food comes with memories, of course. “Do you remember the time we ate this when we were students and…” or “I made this recipe while horse camping on Mt. Hood…” or “my father used to cook this for a special occasion…” I think the same is true for everyone, but the awareness that time is limited, that the number of times you will eat this dish or reminisce over the adventures that once accompanied it are not limitless, adds a special poignancy. As my friend’s appetite wanes, she eats less in amount and frequency. There’s a shift from the fullness of having eaten to the sensory pleasure of eating to the anticipation, the idea of that particular food. If there is a sense of re-visiting the past – comfort and celebration, adventure and sharing – there is also a gradual farewell.

Charming Synchronies

personby Gillian Polack
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Yesterday I found my research self and my fiction-writing self in perfect synchrony.

My research self is looking at old tales newly told, from a number of angles. I’m focusing very closely on how writers build the world for their novel. One of my favourite techniques is to look at the various roles food and foodways play. There’s not enough work in this field for me to rest on the work of others, so I spend a lot of my time in an alert state, watching different kinds of narratives and checking the role food and foodways play so that I can deepen my research.

Over time, this alert state has given me a lot of questions that need answering. For instance, in K-drama, there are a number of ways people drink and they are connected to different drinks The most formal ‘proper’ way of drinking was easy to determine, but it wasn’t until I obtained flavoured soju and drank some that some of the more casual ways people drank became clearer. Flavour, mouthfeel, level of alcohol all play as much of a part in how characters drink on K-drama as tradition and courtesy.

For my fiction, I begin with recipes and the food itself. Then I start thinking about what the appropriate ways of presenting the food are. This approach was sparked 30+ years ago when a favourite writer had people throw food that would have been dripping with honey, in a social group that has given us no historical evidence for treating food that lightly. Several possible messes entered into my visualisation of the scene: honey everywhere, and the very important personages acting as ill-disciplined overgrown children. I talked to the writer about the scene and she had not considered either aspect. The throwing was in the modern American cultural sense of being light-hearted and the characters were demonstrating how close they were to each other.

This was the first time I discovered just how much of our own culture we place in our constructed worlds and how, unless we consider things really carefully, we echo what we think we know and it is our own way of doing things.

I started to do two things at that point.

The first was to find out what my own cultural nuancing is and where it comes from. How do I assume people eat and drink in various circumstances?

Just like almost every other fiction writer, I draw the worlds for my novels from places I’m always ready a bit familiar with and many of them echo my life and experience. The difference is that I do this while aware. That state of alert becomes increasingly handy. I watch television and go to movies partly to continue this dialogue with myself.

This helps inform the second thing I do, which is research and teach. My most recent research thingie (I hate the words “outcome’ and ‘output’; ‘research monograph’ doesn’t work when the book is available very cheaply to anyone who wants to read it and is written in ordinary English) is, of course, Story Matrices. (At this point I’m supposed to remind everyone that it’s Hugo eligible and to suggest that you think of nominating it. I normally don’t do this, but in the case of Story Matrices, I want people to read it and they can’t read it if they don’t find out about it and the Hugos are a really good way of letting people know a work exists and that it’s worth a look.)

So how did everything come together? The soju and my thoughts about it gave me an ‘aha!’ moment for my research. One of the writers I’m focusing on always gives precise cultural places for drink, another does but they’re historically incorrect, and the third doesn’t at all.

This ‘aha!’ moment made me realise I have not worked on drink for either of the novels that I’m slowly, slowly writing. The novels will be out way after the new research, because the new research takes priority, due to there being income attached. I do love it, though, when they talk to each other while I imbibe someone else’s foodways.

Asking the Wrong Questions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Maybe when it comes to the chat bots and art bots and other such creations, we’re asking the wrong questions.

I mean, if a chat bot can pass the bar exam, the question shouldn’t be “can a chat bot practice law” but rather “does the bar exam do a good job of determining whether someone would make a good lawyer.”

Having taken a bar exam, I can assure you it’s primarily a hazing ritual. I’m sure the chat bots do very well on the multistate multiple guess portion of the exam, which requires you to memorize vast amounts of information, much of which is not relevant to actual practice.

My experience with bar exams is out of date, but when I took it, we had to learn all the old common law (based on British law) definitions of criminal behavior. These were no longer in use in Texas (where I took the bar) or in any other state that had adopted a modern penal code.

I bet a chat bot is hell on wheels at stuff like that, but I suspect a bot lawyer would not know what to do in a situation where its client was before a judge for revocation of probation (on a felony drug charge) and the judge, in the middle of ranting at its client, gave it a huge wink.

I’m not even sure how a chat bot would know about the wink, but assuming a bot could see it, I suspect it wouldn’t know it was a signal that the judge wasn’t going to revoke probation.

The time it happened to me, I knew what it meant. In fact, I knew from the moment the judge started ranting that he wasn’t going to send my client to prison. He winked at me because I was a young lawyer and he wasn’t sure I understood yet that he was yelling at my client in lieu of revoking probation.

The real practice of law is about subtleties. I suspect algorithm-driven software fueled by large language models is very useful in plowing through reams of documents and will get better, but it’s going to be crap at the negotiating table or in the courtroom where you have to read people as well as put the right information before them at the right time.

Continue reading “Asking the Wrong Questions”…

In Praise of Fanny Price

personby Madeleine Robins
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Originally published in 2016

I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene in Sense and Sensibility that turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the original Austen is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and funny.

So far I have gone through Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, and I’m almost through Mansfield Park (I skip Northanger Abbey, because Catherine Morland annoys the hell out of me). I started out, as one does, loving Pride and Prejudice; then for a long time Sense and Sensibility was my favorite; then, for almost as long, Persuasion. Now it’s quite possible that I am going over to Team Mansfield Park.

This is, apparently, unusual.

The Paris Review stated that Mansfield Park was Austen’s least popular book:

Austen’s own mother reportedly found Fanny “insipid”; the critic Reginald Farrer described her as “repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice.” Even C.S. Lewis—in the voice of his demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters—let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen’s most priggish heroine, calling her “not only a Christian, but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss … A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … Filthy, insipid little prude!”

Wow, that’s a little over the top, don’t you think, Clive?

Okay, I get it. Fanny is physically delicate, shy, easily overwhelmed. She doesn’t have her cousins’ robust physical health, and she certainly doesn’t have their robust egos. She’s meek and self-effacing (though I don’t think she simpers once, thank you very much). But do you blame her? Here’s a child who, at the age of ten, is sent to live with her very privileged cousins. Her aunt Norris (and to a lesser extent her uncle Sir Thomas) are determined to make the distinction between Maria and Julia and Tom and Edmund (the cousins) and Fanny’s charity-case self. She’s constantly reminded of it, and of the fact that she can’t (and shouldn’t) expect to be treated the same way. She’s physically slight and easily overwhelmed (I suspect nutritional issues and an anxiety disorder, but can’t find any textual evidence to prove it), and initially she’s academically and socially way behind her cousins. It might be satisfying to see the worm turn, the mouse face down the cat, and so forth. That’s bread and butter in a 21st century YA novel. but in Austen-land, where class suffuses everything so deeply that it’s hardly necessary to mention it, it would be hard to make it believable.

Like the Bertram girls, Fanny studies with a governess. But her real teacher, the one who informs her tastes and her heart, is her cousin Edmund. And Edmund, destined for the Church, is a prig. He’s kind to Fanny; he’s really the only one who sees, and values, Fanny for who she is. Everyone else sees only her utility, the perfect poor-relation who can be counted upon to fetch a shawl or stay tactfully home so there won’t be an odd number at the dinner party. Her frankly loathsome Aunt Norris sees her as someone further down the class scale whom she can bully without fear of repercussion. It’s no wonder Fanny loves Edmund, who encourages her to explore literature and history, who talks about religion and principles and right thought–who treats her as if she were intelligent which, as it happens, she is.

Look, I had a serious crush in 6th grade on a kid who held the door for me (because I wasn’t used to people being, um, nice to me at school). I totally get Fanny seeing Edmund as a combination of Parfit Gentil Knight and Moral Arbiter. About the only thing that saves Edmund from being an irredeemable prig is that he falls in love with Mary Crawford, whose moral compass is–shall we say–variable. For once Edmund’s rectitude abandons him and he is blinded by, and led around by parts of himself he would ordinarily not admit to owning. He sees Mary’s witty, shiny, beautiful, feckless self and tries to believe that deep down she’s got the same sort of moral center as Fanny–in a sense, the woman Edmund created. It’s hardly surprising that when Mary displays her lack of moral base, Edmund recoils. At that point it’s inevitable that he’ll back to Fanny.

A lot of people think of Jane Austen as a “romance writer,” a notion that would very likely have made her head explode just a little bit. But, as Austen herself said, she wrote of “love and money.” And class. Austen writes about class all the time. Elizabeth Bennet’s comment to Lady Catherine de Bourgh that Darcy “is a gentleman and I am a gentleman’s daughter” is quite correct. They may be at different ends of the “gentleman spectrum”*–he’s got relatives in the peerage, and centuries of economic and class privilege behind him, and she’s got “inferior connections:” relatives in trade–but they in terms of class they are equals. Sir Walter Elliot may regard himself as the very model of a modern country baronet… but he can’t suck up fast enough to his cousin the viscountess. Fanny Price, whose mother married beneath her, is introduced to a world very different from her own when she moves to Mansfield Park.

Fanny Price has good reason for being the person she is. And she continues as that person despite pressure from within and without her family. For a woman constitutionally skittish and anxious as she is, that in itself is heroic. It’s nice that she gets the guy in the end. It’s nicer that she does so without having to become a Mary Crawford or a Maria Bertram.

Enjoying fandom, online

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m a bit late this week to the Treehouse because my Monday included a science fiction convention in the UK. I was on three panels, and I had such a fine time that I’m reluctant to let it go and get back to my everyday. The amazing thing about this is that, because of the usual health issues, I had to attend long-distance. Hybrid events are changing and with those changes come ever-increased level s of being an actual and real part of the events one is attending via computer.

My hybrid panels meant I was a giant head on a screen, but I was just as much part of the discussion. There was one when I felt a bit on the side, but that wasn’t due to the hybridity, it was due to me trying to be brief for the audience and the other panellists talking at great length. Since, in real life panels (or meat panels, as someone described them over the weekend) I’ve been guilty of exactly this thing, I now feel that the universe is a bit balanced and maybe, next time, we can all talk about the same amount. I was able to talk freely about my research past and present and about my fiction and about all sorts of things that mattered to me. And that talk was part of extended and fascinating discussions with others.

What made the difference, for me, was that the online audience chatted in Discord throughout the panel. I could see what the audience thought if I was able, and I could drop in and chat when my end was quiet. When I was audience in panels, I actually had a better panel experience than face to face because we all made smart remarks and added our own insights and got excited when something clever was said.

If I’d been able to get to Conversation in person, I can see that we would have moved to the bar or tea room after several panels (both the ones I was on and the ones I was audience in), but the Discord aspect gave me some of that. I didn’t make new best friends, but I did meet new and wonderful people and we’re already working on catching up sometime. And I got to spend quality time with old friends. And… it was all at my computer.

The biggest thing is that I’m as well today, the day after the convention, as I was the day before the convention. I so hope that hybrid conventions become the norm and that they are all as clever (or cleverer!) than Conversation, where those of us who are not blessed with abundant good health and the capacity to travel (and the finances to travel, and the time to travel and all the other reasons many of us can’t get to live events) still have an amazing time.

There are four US events (that I know of) that work like this, and I’m already signed up for three of them this year. Those committees who put in that extra work to make conferences work for as many of us as possible are amazing. Every time I emerge from someone online that leaves me feeling as if the world is friendly and welcoming and that isolation is relative. This weekend I feel all that, but that my work is appreciated, as well.

I am raising my cup of tea right now to all those who make hybrid conventions possible, but particularly to the amazing group who ran Conversation in Birmingham, this weekend.

Acting Collectively

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I find myself thinking a lot these days about the difference between individual and collective solutions to problems.

As a lifetime martial artist, I believe personal responsibility is important, especially in a crisis situation. But personal responsibility does not necessarily mean individual solutions; rather it means that you take action in a situation instead of wringing your hands.

It can, for example, mean you follow the evacuation plan out of a disaster area. Or that you organize your neighbors to deal with a disaster. Or that you follow public health recommendations about things like wearing masks and getting vaccines. You take personal responsibility to behave in a useful and collective way.

But in the United States, we all too often take the attitude that all problems are individual, not collective, with the “you do you” approach to the pandemic being only the latest example.

A couple of weeks ago I did a lot of driving on California freeways, which made me extremely aware of how building a society around cars takes individualism to an extreme. We have this whole network of high-speed roads, driven on by people with varying degrees of skill in vehicles of all sizes and in all conditions of repair.

Individualism only goes so far in that situation. Even if I’m doing my best to drive safely and responsibly, there are only so many options to protect myself on a six-lane highway clogged with cars if someone else is driving like an idiot or even just has a tire blow out.

43,000 people died due to traffic “accidents” in the U.S. in 2021. (I put “accidents” in quote marks because I read Jessie Singer’s There Are No Accidents, a book that points out that many of the deaths and injuries we put under that title are caused by policy decisions. I wrote about it here.)

I wonder what our life would be like today if we had put the same amount of money that went into motor vehicle infrastructure into rail systems.

Rail is collective; cars are individual. Continue reading “Acting Collectively”…

Love Letters from Space Telescopes

personby Deborah J. Ross
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 What an age we live in!

A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float serenely near this scene, and the smudged shapes of much more distant galaxies are visible in the background. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun. Article here.

On March 1, 2023, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew by Jupiter’s moon Io, coming within 51,500 km (32,030 miles) of the innermost and third-largest of the four Galilean moons. The stunning new images provide the best and closest view of the most volcanic moon in our Solar System since the New Horizons mission flew past Io and the Jupiter system in 2006 on its way to Pluto.

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Jupiter’s moon Io, as seen by the JunoCam instrument on Juno, on March 1, 2023. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/ processed by Kevin M. Gill.
Cleary, Io still looks like a pizza. The mottled and colorful surface comes from the volcanic activity, with hundreds of vents and calderas on the surface that create a variety of features. Volcanic plumes and lava flows across the surface show up in all sorts of colors, from red and yellow to orange and black. Some of the lava “rivers” stretch for hundreds of kilometers
 
 


Glimpsed only occasionally at the hearts of massive clusters of galaxies, ultramassive black holes are some of the largest and most elusive objects in the universe. These black hole behemoths have masses exceeding that of 10 billion suns, making them far more monstrous than even the supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way, and their tremendous size has long perplexed astronomers.

Now, researchers studying a rare galaxy merger with three supermassive black holes at its center may have finally discovered the origins of these cosmic monsters.

Using a high-resolution cosmological simulation called ASTRID, the team modeled the evolution of the universe as it appeared about 11 billion years ago. In the simulation, the team witnessed the birth of an ultramassive black hole following the merger of the three galaxies. Each of these galaxies contained its own quasar, a supermassive black hole that feeds on gas and powers massive outbursts of radiation that can outshine all the stars in their host galaxies combined.

If Sleeping Beauty Were Jewish

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m working on fairy tale retellings right now, and preparing for Pesach (Passover) and getting ready for Eastercon (the UK’s national science fiction convention which is hybrid, is called Conversation this year and has a spectacular programme) and so time to do things is rare and fleeting. Fortunately, I have insomnia tonight, so spent two hours in bed, thinking. I got out of bed because I remembered I needed to write something for all of you, here. Insomnia doesn’t lead to great amounts of intellectual capacity, so it was very lucky I remembered a little story I wrote many years ago. It explains why I have insomnia… and is a fairy tale retelling about Passover. I’ve given you a link to the original, just because.

If I can fit everything together neatly through something I wrote so very long ago … maybe I will be able to sleep? Also, my cleaning this year is less impossible this year because when my refrigerator died, it took a lot of the food I needed to finish with it. Such unexpected synchronicity.

Before I give you the story, let me share a link to that fabulous Eastercon programme. Only a few of the panels won’t be available virtually. https://guide.conversation2023.org.uk/ The timezone is (because I’m the kind of person who loves stating the obvious)_ UTC/GMT+1. Normally it would be UTC/GMT 0 (zero, nothing at all) but the UK is in daylight savings time, unlike me. I’m heading towards winter and we’ve lost summer time. I’m on panels and giving a reading, so, if you join us at Conversation, join me in conversation! (And that’s my bad joke of the day. Now everyone around me safe from my attempts at wit for hours.)

In the meantime, I might copy my character and sleep.

 

If Sleeping Beauty were Jewish


Sleeping Beauty was Jewish in a non-Jewish world. It was just over a week before Pesach (1). She had a thousand and one deadlines from the world outside, partly because April is a busy time of the year in the non-Jewish world and partly because if she didn’t clear the decks (2) then crucial things would fall into the mire while she commemorated Exodus (3).

She was tired of being exotic. Tired of being Jewish. Tired of being busy. Let me admit it, she was just plain tired.

Sleeping Beauty took another long look at the cupboard (4) and said “I’m going to take a nap.”

She was woken up a week before Pesach by a pretty standard handsome prince. Things were looking good. For one thing, there was the prince. For another, after a hundred years the food in her pantry was unbelievably past its use-by date. She simply threw everything away to start again. The easiest Pesach cleaning (5) she had ever done in her life. For a third thing, there was the prince.

There were no deadlines. They had all gone, long ago. So had her opportunities. So had her friends. But her prince was a nice chap. She could deal.

That next week she discovered what her new life would be like. She had hastily married her prince, which was fine. What was less good was that he didn’t even know what ‘Jewish’ meant and how her background shaped her life. She was beginning to discover the effect of cultural change on everyday life in other ways, too. For instance, she had her own castle still, but none of the servants quite understood her instructions. What was oddest of all was that the people around her kept telling her, ‘No-one hates Jews any more. Stop complaining.’ Yet she still couldn’t go to synagogue without security guards three thick.

The princess thought “At least my guard is because royalty needs security in this odd future of mine. It’s not because anyone threatens Jews with violence anymore. I know this because there was nothing about violence against Jews in the newspapers. That’s another good thing: I’ve slept through racism and it’s gone.”

She arrived at shul (6) and discovered they wouldn’t let her in unless they knew her. There were security guards 5 thick and barbed wire to boot.

“The schoolground was fire-bombed yesterday,” explained one of them, apologetically.

“No-one told me. It wasn’t in the news.”

“It happened to the Jewish community. Why should it reach the news? It wasn’t terrorism, after all. It wasn’t even important,” said that non-Jewish guard.

The princess had a very private morning service, just herself and her prayer-book, in the tower she had hidden in a hundred years ago. Then she went right back to sleep again.

(1) Passover. Not to be confused with Easter with which it sometimes coincides. It’s the time of great family feasts, much alcohol (for 1 or 2 nights) and becoming very bored with eating unleavened bread. There are no Easter eggs, no Easter bunny and there is absolutely no Good Friday.

(2) Enough cleaning to generate great angst in even the tidiest neatest human being on the planet. One part of it is to get rid of any chametz (food not suitable for Passover).

(3) Moses and his Merry Men (and Women). Or the second book of the Bible, which contains the story of Moses. Or both. Take your pick.

(4) Or the pantry. Anywhere where food is kept. They all have to be emptied and cleaned for Passover and it’s one of things that sounds simple, but necessitates many long looks and much tearing of hair. This process is the single biggest argument for never becoming Jewish.

(5) Pesach cleaning – ritual cleaning for Passover. See (4).

(6) Shul is another word for synagogue, the place of prayer for Judaism. After all that cleaning, one needs a prayer or two, though maybe not the three hours that’s traditional in Orthodox Judaism on first day Passover.