April 11, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-04-10

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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Standing in the hallway, we count how many men have gathered for the afternoon prayers. We do it silently. In some traditions, it's bad luck to count people out loud. We need ten men. We have nine.

The insurance agent steps out onto a porch suspended above the atrium. He spots a man on a porch one floor down, in the white shirt and black trousers that religious men often wear. He calls out, "Friend! Afternoon prayers, now. We're short by one."

The man waves, heads into his hallway, and sprints to his right. That's odd. The stairs and elevators are to his left.

He disappears around a corner, then quickly reappears. There's another, similarly dressed man with him. They run back to the left. I laugh as I see them zooming down the hall. One floor down, in the enclosed space with glass on one side, they look like they're in a video game or cartoon.

They duck into the stairway there. They quickly emerge on our floor. The prayer leader begins the Kaddish, the first part of the service for which ten men are needed. The men from downstairs join in. They don't need prayer books. They have it all memorized.

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Our new mayor is closing down the illegal shops and eateries on the beach.¹

One of them appears controversial.² The previous mayor had allowed it. It was a sort of rehabilitation project for the son of our head of rescue services. The kid had thrown a Molotov cocktail at some point at something, somewhere. He was allowed to open his eatery right on the beach, which has become quite lucrative.

So now the new mayor, trying to make his mark, is shutting it down.

(Google Translate is being particularly cranky on this headline. When I last checked the page, the headline came up as "Closure order for the ex-offender's cafeteria in Zevlon Beach." When it generated it for the link, however, it became "To close the former Jewish hostel in Hof Zebulun." Google Translate worketh in mysterious ways.)

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There's a discrepancy in the reports of how much humanitarian aid we're sending across the border.³ Our agency says that the UN is drastically undercounting what we're sending. The UN disagrees.

Our agency has an ongoing web page with reports on what we're sending.⁴

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The project creating the new light rail and Metro systems is hitting an interesting problem. They're going to be digging up a whole lot of dirt. What's to be done with it?

One plan is to build an artificial island offshore, to serve as an additional port. They have to figure out a lot of unknowns, but the possibility sounds pretty cool.⁵

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Microsoft's Copilot AI system is using some awful stereotypes when asked to create images of Jews. It's a classic problem: it's learning what things look like from the Internet, where the stuff is posted by people, some of whom are pretty awful. Garbage in, garbage out.⁶

It's an intriguing problem, though: since Jews can look like literally any other person, what do you do when asked to draw a Jew? Humans would struggle to do it, too.

Other AIs are just as bad, as shown in the article. At least ChatGPT tries to do better, explaining its process as it generates an image.

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Apropos of little, the Suno AI music engine has generated a "sad girl ballad" from the text of the MIT license.⁷ Imagine a cyborg granddaughter of Tori Amos gently explaining your rights in using its software.

It's quite well done, navigating the tricky syntax of the license musically. My favorite part is a brief parenthetical note, which it whispers.

The license text isn't that far from what I've heard of the libretti from Anthony Braxton's operas.⁸ Much as I admire Braxton, I might prefer to hear them sung like this.

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After work, I go to the mall. I'm on a quest. I had gotten a UPS⁹ about a month ago. It has odd power connectors. I don't know how to plug anything into it.

My first stop is into my favorite computer shop, in the basement of the mall. Their prices are often a bit high, but they have good customer service.

I ask a worker for help, in Hebrew. He answers in English. He's helping someone else, but I'll be next. OK.

He goes back to ringing up a pair of customers, who are getting a turntable with USB connections. They want it gift wrapped. I didn't know that the shop did that. They do. The worker cuts a stretch of wrapping paper from a large roll behind him. The paper is red on one side and green on the other. The customers want the red.

The worker lays the paper out on the counter and centers the turntable box on top of it. My retail instincts kick in. I want to warn him that the paper is too narrow to wrap it that way. I restrain myself. He wraps it perfectly. I'm wrong. Good.

He comes over to me when he's done. I ask him about the adapters. I had taken a photo of the back of the UPS on my phone. I show it to him. They don't have what I need. He suggests the traveler's shop down the hall.

I go there. When the worker there is free, I ask her, in my halting Hebrew, about the adapters. I realize that I had forgotten the word for "adapter," though I had encountered it in my Hebrew lessons.

She answers in English. She's an American, with an accent like mine. They don't have them. She recommends the appliance store, back down the hall, near the computer shop.

I thank her, step out of the store, then step back in. I have one more question: How do I say "adapter" in Hebrew?

She tells me: "meta'em." I repeat the word. I'm not quite saying it correctly. She says it again, more slowly and clearly. I say it back to her. It's closer to right this time.

The appliance store doesn't have them either. They tell me to go to the home goods store, next door to them.

It takes me a while to track down a worker at the home goods store. They wear bright red shirts, but they're rare and elusive.

The one that I find doesn't know electrical stuff. He points to our left. The worker over there should know, once he comes down from the ladder.

I go and wait by the foot of the ladder. I ask the worker after he comes down, showing him the photo of the outlets.

He asks me, "American or British?" No, I live here in Israel.

He tries again. "The outlets: are they American or British?" I think they're universal. I tell him the shop at which I got it here (which doesn't have the adapters either).

He has no idea. But he says I should try some other places. He says that two shops that may have them are both at the same address downtown. I recognize the address. It's where the schnitzel joint that we order from is. I'll be down near there on Friday. I'll ask then.

It takes longer than I expect to get home. It's late enough that the bus that I take runs only once an hour, when it's running. It isn't. I wait past the time that it should have shown up.

I catch a different bus which, after winding around another part of town, drops me off outside the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. I cut across the park and head home.

Back at my desk, I look up the local distributors of the UPS and send their support address an email. Maybe I'll hear from them. Maybe I won't. If not, I'll try the next stop on my scavenger hunt on Friday.

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You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

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L'hitraot.