New Story: The Earth Angel; Soviet reversal jokes; new text in The Pope and in Selina Mandrake; “Put
Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.
-
There is a new story titled The Earth Angel which I have started to write:
Dr. Alan Stein (Attn.) had not seen that side of Samantha before. As they sat there in the Chinese restaurant, two days before Ari, their system administrator, left for a trip to Israel, Samantha was emitting a lot of profanity, and sharing her frustrations of her life and the world. Dr. Stein was beginning to regret the fact that he had agreed to comply with Ari’s wishes, and invite her to lunch with them.
Samantha Rodriguez was the newest hire at Alan’s law firm - a brilliant attorney in her early thirties, who looked great, was always groomed, and got a lot of work done, despite the fact that she almost never stayed overtime, and also took many days off. One fly in the ointment was the fact that she was single, sexy, and kept asking her co-workers out on dates, or accepting their own invitations. As much as Dr. Stein agreed that she had been a good hire, he was desperately trying to avoid interacting with her.
“Anyway, I ended up telling my friend, Jasmine, who can be a real bitch sometimes, to fuck off, and deal with her troubled life herself. I simply ran out of patience.” she said.
“Bravo!” Ari said while clapping his hands. “By the way, Samantha, how did you become a lawyer?”
“Oh, that's a long story.” she said while playing with her fork.
“And we’ve got time to hear it, right Mr. Stein?”
“Yes, I guess we do.” Dr. Stein answered.
“Well, I studied Linguistics as my B.A.,” Samantha said “and by the time I graduated, my head was filled with vocabulary, and to a lesser extent - grammatical rules, my heart was broken from many heartbreaks, and I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my life. I ended up narrowing it to three options: 1. Find a paying job - as a programmer or whatever else I could land. 2. Stay in the academia, studying for a Masters and/or a Ph.D. and — 3. Go to law school. I figured out fucking Med School was never my thing.”
“Anyway, after consulting it with my friends, I became even less capable of knowing what to do. So I did the logical thing - I rolled a die.”
“A die?” Ari said.
“Yes, a ten-sided die or a 1d10 in role-playing game parlence. That’s usually what I use. It landed on the law school option, so that’s what I decided to pursue.” Samantha said.
“So, you placed your fate in the hand of chance?” Ari asked
“Yes, I did. Nothing wrong with doing that, if you ask me.”
“Well, everyone say you are an excellent attorney.” Ari noted.
“So they do.” Samantha said, “Maybe they are right.”
-
The translation of the already written part of my story, The Pope Died on Sunday is now complete:
Rachel contemplated how to start the conversation.
“So how did you become an infrastructures engineer?” Rachel asked.
“Well, ever since I was young, I wanted to be a plumber.” Greg replied.
“A plumber? Seriously?” Rachel said with astonishment.
“Yes. Very strange, but what can I do — that is what I wanted to be.” Greg said, “I spent a large part of the summer vacations being an apprentice for plumbers and enjoyed every moment. Anyway, after I graduated from high school, I was planning to go through a plumbing training course and to get my qualification. But my father approached me and told me: ‘Greg, my son, I have, thank God, enough money so you study what you want in university. So why not exploit that? If you want, you can become a plumber who graduated from university.’”
And he went on: “So I agreed with him, but decided to study the closest thing to plumbing: civil engineering with a specialisation in the engineering of water and sewerage infrastructures. And surprisingly I realised that a large part of it was quite interesting.”
“So did you become a qualified plumber eventually?” Rachel queried.
“Yes, I passed the course. But I still got a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and that’s what I prefer to do.”
“Hmmm…” Rachel said “Finding a good plumber in this day and age, to say nothing of one who is a university graduate, is hard.”
“Well, I cannot testify that I’m a good plumber. A person cannot testify for his own qualities.” Greg replied.
“Well, even a bad plumber is good enough for certain needs.” said Rachel and witnessed Greg bursting into laughter.
-
There are some new or extended scenes in Selina Mandrake - The Slayer:
[ Selina is sitting next to her computer at home with Firefox browsing the Hebrew wikipedia. She keeps highlighting words and hovering over them to find translations using a Firefox extension.
There is a signal, and the Pidgin icon in the status bar starts blinking. Selina clicks it. ]
Mosheh Ben-Amram: [on IM] Hello, Selina! How are you doing, today?
Selina: I’m fine. Trying to contribute to the Hebrew wikipedia. These Affixes are driving me crazy.
Mosheh Ben-Amram: Heh, עברית קשה שפה, but there are worse.
Mosheh Ben-Amram: האם את מדברת עברית? [= “Do you speak Hebrew?”]
Selina: Qtsath, or as new speakers will say Qetsath. Heh.
Mosheh Ben-Amram: Yes, one of the first words you have to learn to say, and it’s already a Shibboleth.
Selina: Emeth. [= "True."]
Selina: BTW, are you actually Mosheh Ben-Amram (= Moses) the Hebrew prophet?
Mosheh Ben-Amram: I won’t deny that I am.
Selina: Hah!
-
I added a page of “In Soviet Russia” factoids:
-
In Soviet Russia, cats own you. No, wait! Cats own you everywhere.
-
In Soviet Russia, superstition believe in you. (Sawyer X)
-
In Soviet Russia, food tastes YOU! (Leuthihi)
-
-
“Freecell Solver Enterprises™ Acquires Google Inc.” - a breaking news story published on 1 April 2013:
1 April, 2013, Tel Aviv, Israel: Due to the spectacular commercial success of Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s Enterprise Edition and its Webscale™ edition, we have amassed quite a bit of cash in the bank, so we decided to make a small but important strategical acquisition. As a result, Freecell Solver Enterprises™ is proud to announce its upcoming acquisition of Google Inc., which will result in an exciting synergical merger.
Some of the upcoming changes would be replacing Google’s tech support (which is notoriously bad) by Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s world-famous and superb tech support (as detailed in the essay “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” by Joel on Software), as well as integrating Google search into Freecell Solver™ for an enhanced experience in solving Freecell. We are also planning on creating a separate YouTube top-level category for card Solitaire-related videos (including screencasts and presentations).
Another one is “Announcing New Israeli Usergroups”.
-
There are some new sections in my essay “Putting all the Cards on the Table (2013)”:
During the Middle Ages, the apprentices of craftsmen graduated to become masters, and started their own shops, at a much younger age than 18. Today, most people graduate from high school at that age, and are expected to remain disadvantaged until then. There isn’t a good reason why the youth of today should not be able to make useful contributions to arts, sciences, philosophy, and entertainment, despite their young age and inexperience.
Here are some examples:
-
Dmitri Gaskin is a core developer of both jQuery and Drupal and gave a talk about jQuery on Google Tech Talks, while being 12 years old.
-
Maria Aragon was 10 years old when she was recorded performing a cover of Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way”, which has received over 50 million views on YouTube as of April 2013 (and which I like better than the original).
-
Much previously, Samantha Smith changed the fate of the cold war, when being 10 years old, by the simple act of writing a letter.
-
In the 18th century, Carl Friedrich Gauss started making important contributions to mathematics from a very early age.
Our contemporary culture sort of expects kids (what Americans refer to as children, “pre-teens”, and “teenagers”) to remain “innocent”, naïve and inexperienced, and immature, and, as a result, most of them behave accordingly.
-
-
The abstract to my yet unwritten novella “The Road to Heaven is Paved With Bad Attentions” is now partly translated to English.
-
There are new quotes in the collection of Unix-like fortune cookies:
An engineer dies and reports to the pearly gates. St. Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, you’re an engineer. You are in the wrong place.”
So, the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing and building improvements. After a while, they’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and the engineer is a pretty popular guy.
One day, God calls Satan up on the telephone and says with a sneer, “So, how’s it going down there in hell?”
Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and there’s no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next.”
God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake. He should never have gotten down there; send him up here.”
Satan says, “No way. I like having an engineer on the staff, and I’m keeping him.”
God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.”
Satan laughs uproariously and answers, “Yeah, right. And just where are you going to get a lawyer?”
-
Many meaningful <meta name="description" /> tags were added to the pages to help with the descriptions in search engine results.
-
I added a set of links to all the pages referring to my online presence elsewhere on the web, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Reddit.