Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-04-17
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...
Lo, the winter is past, and the voice of the cockroach is heard in the land.
OK, I know that cockroaches don't have voices. Neither do turtles, which is how the rest of that verse is usually translated. And I know that that translation is wrong, and the verse actually refers to turtledoves. Those don't resemble turtles at all. I could probably look up why they're called that. I assume they're a form of pigeon, which don't go away during the winter. This may be more true in modern cities, though, where humans leave lots of food around for them, mostly inadvertently.
Anyway, I have seen the first two cockroaches of the season in my apartment. They're the big, lumbering jukim that we get here. They can move quickly if they need to, but mostly they just wander lackadaisically across the carpet.
I don't kill them when I see them. They have as much or more of a claim to be here than I do. But I regret that I will have to spray the apartment soon.
Another sign of spring: the café downstairs from work has taken down the glass walls that had been around the outdoor seating area. They usually do this during Passover. They've removed them early this year.
I'm thrown slightly by the walls' absence. I'm not the only one. Watching other people come in, I see many of them reach to open the door, then look at their hands in confusion that the handle isn't there anymore.
My network, server, and related gear are working again. As I suspected, going directly through my ISP1 failed since they, for whatever reason, were blocking Plex, the service that I was trying to use. Putting my second router back in the loop made the requests route around the ISP and work again.
John Gilmore2 famously said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". I got to put this into action.3
I'm amused to see that, while it turns out that the added device had no effect on the problem that I originally had (Wi-Fi speed), it silently solved a problem later that I didn't know that I had had until I removed it.
I flash back to my experience as the night watchman at a church.4
I went around the premises every night, checking for and fixing problems. Most people didn't know that I did that, since I didn't report many issues. This contrasted with my predecessor, who, with his different nature, would antagonize the people whom he found on the grounds, leading to more problems.
I would solve what could be solved. If I found someone sleeping on the steps, I would ask them to be gone by dawn (when the childcare workers would arrive) and not to be there the following night. Over the five years that I had the job, only two people returned.
Some parishioners complained that they didn't know what they were paying me for, since they didn't see me raising a ruckus about security.
I enjoyed working with the church. When I had occasions to attend their services, they would call me up to do the Old Testament readings. When they had to rearrange their main sanctuary, I convinced them to bring the lectern down to the floor where the congregation sat and array the pews around it, as in many synagogues.
They had painted a labyrinth on the event room's floor. One evening a month, musicians would surround it and play meditative music for people walking on it. I would also walk it late at night in the midst of my rounds, when I needed to think.
Here, the ISP was a problem, like the security issues at the church. The secondary router solved it invisibly, suggesting to the bits that they go out the side door and avoid the mean dog. It worked before. It now works again.
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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.
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.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
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L'hitraot.