Mendel Beilis Blood Libel Trial -- English Translation of Transcript on Mendel Beilis Trial page below!
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So I was wondering what was in these interchangeable needle kits that pretty much every yarn vendor carries them. I looked at two yarn vendors and what they carried, and an independent review. And the horrible truth is that about half my projects use size 2 or 3 needles, like with linen or Shetland yarn. The kits all start at size 4. What's more, the smallest size tether they carry is 24 inches.…
So here I go again, off on a tear after a skeet from an academic who is blinded by the light and tries to present all experts as equal, hoping to elevate liberal arts experts to the same level with STEM and trying to scare us into supporting them by scolding us for devaluing “experts”. Well, if you’ve been reading my blog, you know what I’ve said about experts. This is a long post but it…
Most of the linen tops I have now, I knitted from Knitpicks Cotlin, a blend. It's actually a fine tape and you knit normally. But I splurged on some Euroflax #2/Sport yarn, which you can get in hanks or cones. And it's pure linen and works differently. I started out knitting normally and realized that what I was making was see-through like fishnet stockings. Uh-uh. I didn't want to have to put a…
Here are some pro tips for doing videos to post on the web, say on Youtube. NO TTS. If you are too fing lazy to do the voiceover yourself, after learning how to say foreign names or phrases right, we don't owe you our time. NO urban legends. If you are too fing lazy to do the homework and avoid the lies, we don't owe you our time. Repetition is not detail. If you don't have enough facts to fill…
I was working on my Arabic language project and came across the topic "doubly accusative". As you know, I wouldn't bring it up unless it was a stupid piece of nomenclature. The Quranic citation was Baqara 53 which you could translate in part as "We gave Moses the Scripture..." Wait a minute. In English we would call Moses the indirect object and we would call its case dative. But the case used in…
When you use a verb that needs a preposition, do you struggle with where the preposition goes relative to the predicate? The farther you put the preposition from the verb, the harder it is for your reader to know what you meant. But sometimes it is uncomfortable to put the preposition between the verb and predicate. Maybe it's just me. I grew up west of Pennsylvania Dutch territory and had…
This is another in my looong series of pointing out that unless the person posting is a Jew, they should not be posting. It's this mistranslating "ger" as "stranger". A ger is somebody who has agreed to take on Jewish observance. A ger toshav does everything but get circumcised. A ger tsedeq gets circumcised in addition to doing everything else. So what does it mean ger b'erets nakhri? Well, a…
I watched the Stanford videos of Dr. Leonard Susskind discussing physics from the standpoint he uses in his series, Theoretical Minimum. Luckily I have some math and science background that let me follow what he said. Dr. Susskind is one of the founders of string theory, back in 1969, but now he's sounding an alarm, and the interviewer here didn't seem to get it.…
If you don't know your Tanakh backwards and forwards in Biblical Hebrew or you have never read Mishnah, you need to fix that. Then go to Sefaria, which just posted the last tractate of Babylonian Talmud with vowels. It includes translations. If you use the English one, you will see bolded words representing the actual text, plus filler. You'll only understand why the filler reads as it does if you…
If you love science fiction, you may remember the episode on Star Trek:TOS where the old man says, "All is not as they tell us, for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky." Then he screams and dies. Well, we're not going to scream and die, we're going to find out that something I've said almost since I started this blog is true. Classicists are not linguists, they are not scientific, they…