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I know you do it like a Greek and you're hung like a Christmas tree
The sandwich I made for dinner tonight was probably not a Reuben by any canonical definition, but it was delicious: I toasted Wensleydale with cranberries on two pieces of challah, filled the intervening space with corned beef and a lot of red coleslaw, sliced the whole thing in half and ate it while reading more Alexander Mackendrick. The cranberries picked up on the orange and the tart cherries in the slaw and the Wensleydale combined very savorily with the corned beef. The sole drawback is that it will be almost impossible to repeat unless I feel like making this particular coleslaw again, which was something of an adventure—I had been aware for years that red cabbage can be used, like beets and onion skins, to dye Easter eggs, but somehow this failed to translate into a practical understanding that slicing enough red cabbage for eight people's worth of coleslaw turns your kitchen into a Tyrian dye-works and your fingernails cyanotic for the rest of the week. Everything I touched was going porphyry. (I took some photographs; I may post them. At the point where I gave up and dumped everything into the Cuisinart, it actually became quite attractive.) If I could get the red slaw Reuben at a local sandwich shop, I'd be a regular, but I'm not sure how reasonable it is to go around marking red-letter days on all the dishcloths every time I feel like a hot sandwich.
I discovered Schmekel last month in an article in the Jewish Daily Forward and then never posted about them or Berel-Beyle of Krizover. This weekend I saw they'd gotten a writeup in the New York Times. Today I actually bothered to figure out Bandcamp so I could download their last year's Hanukkah single. It's pretty awesome. Brooklyn's only 100% Transgender, 100% Jewish schtick-rock band. I should probably just preorder their first album: they have songs called "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur," "Pharaoh/Moses Slash," and "You're Not the Only Bear I Fisted."
It feels infinitely more natural for me to be awake at three in the morning having stayed up translating Yiddish songs, as I've been doing since around one o'clock, than for me to fall asleep around three in the morning having gone to bed around midnight, as I did last night when I felt abysmal. By now there are years of evidence that it's worse for me. I find this very frustrating.
I discovered Schmekel last month in an article in the Jewish Daily Forward and then never posted about them or Berel-Beyle of Krizover. This weekend I saw they'd gotten a writeup in the New York Times. Today I actually bothered to figure out Bandcamp so I could download their last year's Hanukkah single. It's pretty awesome. Brooklyn's only 100% Transgender, 100% Jewish schtick-rock band. I should probably just preorder their first album: they have songs called "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur," "Pharaoh/Moses Slash," and "You're Not the Only Bear I Fisted."
It feels infinitely more natural for me to be awake at three in the morning having stayed up translating Yiddish songs, as I've been doing since around one o'clock, than for me to fall asleep around three in the morning having gone to bed around midnight, as I did last night when I felt abysmal. By now there are years of evidence that it's worse for me. I find this very frustrating.
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Wait a minute, “there are six recognized genders in the Talmud”?
Nine
"So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."
That's ish and isha, andgrogynos (both), tumtum (neither), ay'lonit (female at birth, becoming male), saris (male to female).
"The midrash (in Bereshit Rabah) posits that Adam, the first human being, was actually an androgynos. While in the Babylonian Talmud (Yevamot 64a) the radical claim is made that Abraham and Sarah were tumtumim, people
with indeterminate gender."
Nine
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Brooklyn's only 100% Transgender, 100% Jewish schtick-rock band. :-)
I also like the idea of the Sovay household turning into a Tyrian dye-works.
Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."
What distinguishes ish and isha, if both are androgynous/have both sets of equipment?
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Hey, Livejournal came back!
. . . I have absolutely no idea. I assume it's named after either Reuben Somebody or Somebody Reuben, but this may be as difficult as attempting to prove conclusively the provenance of beef Wellington.
I also like the idea of the Sovay household turning into a Tyrian dye-works.
Right, I'll put up photos.
Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."
This article.
What distinguishes ish and isha, if both are androgynous/have both sets of equipment?
No, ish and isha are cisgendered man and woman.
Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."
Tumtum seems to be more complicated: it's not that the person is a clearly definable "neuter," but that it is difficult to determine whether s/he should be classified as biologically female or male, as opposed to androgynos with identifiable characteristics of both. There seems to be some implication that someone classified as tumtum might yet go either or both ways (presumably, one could also opt out of both) or is essentially nonbinary.
The significant point, I think, is that being a tumtum or an androgynos does not shut you out from being part of the Jewish community, even if it creates additional restrictions or confounds others. I've just hit a reference in the Babylonian Talmud to a tumtum who raised a family of seven children. There's a whole raft of Mishnah pertaining to the androgynos, including marriage. Which won't fix all the other problems with sexuality and gender in traditional or contemporary Judaism, but I still think it's nice to know that the issue c. 200 CE wasn't whether it was possible/permissible to marry as a genderqueer person, but exactly how you should go about it legally.
ay'lonit (female at birth, becoming male), saris (male to female).
These sound like categories originally designed to cover the cases of intersex children who turned out to have been misclassified once their secondary sexual characteristics came in and then the definition broadened to encompass transgender identity. Which is also cool.
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Caw! Gimme your sandwich.
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See? You should just have come by Boston and then you could have gotten normally sick.
Caw! Gimme your sandwich.
Next time I make terrifying incarnadine coleslaw . . .
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Thanks for asking this question, because it's made me to realise that I've never seen an explanation that wasn't a joke.
At least I
hope thatam pretty sure that "named for Saint Reuben, Apostle to the Anthropophagi, martyred by being sliced thin and served on rye with sauerkraut and swiss" is a joke.I don't know why I've not looked it up before, actually. Will have to do so.
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I've never thought of making coleslaw with red cabbage, although I'm very fond of braising it with cinnamon and maybe some chopped apple.
Brooklyn's only 100% Transgender, 100% Jewish schtick-rock band.
I'm glad there is such a band. I suppose that Brooklyn would be the logical place for them to live.
I hope you enjoyed translating the songs and that you've had some rest.
Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."
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... a saint for our zombie-obsessed times!
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I’m sorry that I set all your Enya tapes on fire
I’m sorry I forgot that binders don’t go in the drier
I’m sorry that my emails had an authoritative tone
I’m sorry that I creeped you out by talking about my boner
(From "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur".)
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This made me laugh, because I did the same thing with beets for a salad a few weeks ago, and I noticed while I was making dinner that the cutting board still has a distinct tinge.
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Slaw: one red cabbage, sliced as thinly as humanly possible; three carrots and three scallions, ditto; the cut-up segments of two clementines; one cup dried tart cherries; and some pine nuts, toasted until fragrant in a small skillet. Toss.
Dressing: two tablespoons brown sugar; one tablespoon orange juice; salt and pepper to taste; and one clove of very finely chopped garlic. Whisk together, then whisk in a quarter-cup canola oil.
Pour dressing over slaw. Toss. It will try to get everywhere. You will also be covered in red cabbage juice if it hasn't happened already.
It will be delicious, however, and even more delicious—like many stews and things of a marinating nature—on the second day.
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Yeah.
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The cutting board also looked like a casualty . . .
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Indeed!
As I think on it, I suspect I read that bit about St. Reuben in one of Poul Anderson's essays.
Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."
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Read the interview with Lucian Kahn. Gotta love anything where the punchline is "Occam's Razor." ; )
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I seem to have failed to find this. Link?
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That is a great interview.
"Most of it grew as a result of bi-weekly testosterone injections. The rest, I stole from a moose."