I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That's really the only interesting thing I did all Shabbos.

I just finished reading the sci-fi anthology that Seth got me for my birthday. It was a bit uncomfortable to read for a while there, because it got infused with kerosene fumes from my fire-spinning equipment on the bus ride home from Justin's wedding. But in the end, it was well worth the occasional choking fit, and by now it hardly smells at all.

As I predicted, Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" was my favorite of the bunch: a heart-wrenching moral parable that doesn't preach in the slightest. C. J. Cherryh's "Pots", a story centered around archeology which is not only intellectually intriguing but actually has a little exciting action, was a close second. Karen Joy Fowler's "Face Value" was poignant and haunting in a way I loved. Equally heart-breaking was Theodore Sturgeon's "A Saucer of Loneliness." I loved the intense quirkiness of Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and R. A. Lafferty's "Eurema's Dam" not just because they were cute, but because they did a great job of turning familiar preconceptions upside-down, using their absurdities as effective tools rather than mere gimmicks. "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bison was touching in a mild and slightly weird way. I'm surprised that I don't remember Ray Bradbury's "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" from The Martian Chronicles: either it's a martian story that wasn't included or my memory isn't as good as I'd like to think. Either way, it's classic Bradbury, of which you just can't get enough. Similarly, "Dogfight" was a wonderful reminder of everything I love about William Gibson, especially with Neuromancer still fresh in my mind. Although Michael Swanwick co-authored "Dogfight", it feels like pure Gibson, but maybe I just can't detect Swanwick's flavor because I'm less familiar with his work. It seemed like I had read Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies--" before, but I think I had only read about it in an essay about science fiction which detailed its rather complicated gimmick of a time-travel paradox. I suppose I might as well have read it, because the story is basically nothing more than its gimmick, flavored with a hard-boiled-private-detective motif and more casual misogyny than I'd prefer to tolerate. (I expected better from a story about a transsexual.) Isaac Asimov's "Robot Dreams" was short and sweet and not a little bit chilling, but I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't reminded me of that utter travesty involving Will Smith. And Frederick Pohl's "The Tunnel under the World" made me wonder yet again why so many people were so amazed by the ontological speculation of that silly Matrix movie. Although the idea of the whole world being an illusion is genuinely interesting and far from hackneyed, it had been explored several times already in both film and print by the time The Matrix came out, usually with better execution, although without the glitzy special effects.

Rebecca's passing on the latest Harry Potter to me, so that will occupy me for the next few days at least. I stopped reading George Orwell's 1984 a couple weeks ago because it was too depressing, but I intend to restart it sometime soonish. My old linear algebra textbook has been keeping me busy on the long summer Shabbos afternoons lately, and I'm close to half-way through. (Even though it's not a terribly long book, my brain tends to melt in extreme heat.)

The new washing machine that I ordered and which I was told would be delivered on last Wednesday finally arrived today. The shipping men had enough trouble merely figuring out how to get within the vicinity of my house, as they apparently hadn't any particular knowledge of the layout of Tzfat (and equipping delivery men with maps apparently hasn't yet occurred to the powers that be). By the time I reconnoitered with them several blocks away from my house, it had already become apparent to them that there was no feasible road access to any point directly next to my house and that the machine would have to be hauled by hand for quite a few blocks and up a few rather tall flights of stairs.

Needless to say, they were not pleased. Anger was vented. I let out an exasperated, "What do you want from me?" and one of the men explained that he wasn't angry at me, but they hadn't been properly informed by those higher on the chain about how much trouble it would be to deliver heavy equipment to the Old City of Tzfat. The bitching session ran its course quickly, and the task was presently underway. After a lot of grunting, hauling, and more than a few "are we there yet?" queries, the machine was deposited soundly in my day room.

After discarding the wrapping material, I found an instruction manual and a bag of little plastic parts within the drum of the washing machine. I deciphered enough of the Hebrew instructions to realize that installation would be more complicated than merely plugging the water and electricity into it. There were mysterious sets of screws that had to be removed before use, and the poorly printed pictures didn't seem to match up to the configuration of the actual washing machine in front of me. I decided that installation would just have to wait until the evening when I wouldn't be baked by the heat, and pressed to get to work, and depleted from the day's fasting.

Night fell, I ate some leftovers from Shabbos, and I played a round of video games to settle my nerves. Dictionary in hand, I returned to the task of decrypting the instructions. The annoying fact was that the words themselves weren't so hard to translate, but their relation to reality seemed tenuous at best. But a good investment of trial and error (with some worry that I'd take apart the wrong bit and the whole thing would fall to pieces) yielded success in applying the contents of the booklet with regard to the removal of the "transportation screws." Don't ask me how four large screws embedded in rubber stoppers in the back of a washing machine provide any assistance in its transportation, nor should you ask me to explain why their presense would damage the machine during operation. I'm just glad it's done. All that's left for tomorrow is poring over the instructions regarding height-balancing, electricity hook-up, and water supply to make sure there's nothing non-obvious to worry about. And then I'll be basking in laundry nirvana.

I know I'm a grammar nazi. This just seems to be my most recent pet peeve, so I might as well get it off my chest. The good news is that most English speakers seem to have broken their horrible habit of saying things like, "Jill and me were eaten by the alligator," instead of correctly saying, "Jill and I were eaten by the alligator." The bad news is that the price for this progress seems to be the fact that people who really should know better say maddening things like, "The alligator ate Jill and I," instead of correctly saying, "The alligator ate Jill and me."

The rule is really very simple, folks: in the subject of a sentence, use "I" as the first-person pronoun; within the predicate of a sentence, use "me" as the first-person pronoun. This can be completely intuitive to native Anglophones even if they don't want to be bothered with groking scary-sounding grammatical concepts like "objective case." The trick is to yank the other person out of the sentence (leaving only yourself) and see if still sounds right. This is what should have been taught to people who say, "Jill and me were eaten by the alligator." If you use this one tiny trick, you will always make the correct choice between "I" and "me". I suspect that most people who are not Tarzan would feel stupid saying things like, "Me was eaten by the alligator," and, "The alligator ate I."

I'm shocked at the kinds of people whom I've witnessed make this sort of mistake: well-educated people, professional editors (hi, jeff!), and self-styled amateur philologists (hi, Tycho!). The world is in a pretty sorry state if its denizens have been sufficiently terrorized by their grade-school teachers to excise the usage of phrases like "Jill and me" completely from their language even when such usage is the only correct one.

OK, fine. Maybe there are other, more significant reasons to feel sorry for the world. But still.