🌳 A picture of an almond tree in the Land of Israel, in honor of the Jewish New Year of the Trees (ראש השנה לאילנות‎).

Uncredited illustration in Palestine: The Physical Geography and Natural History of the Holy Land …, by John Kitto, London: Charles Knight & Co., 1841, 212. (In the public domain.)

(Internet Archive) (Flickr)

Taken in by the Propaganda

The only thing that marred my otherwise wonderful extended New Year’s/Perihelion weekend was hearing in conversation that two different intelligent Jewish‐American atheist friends of mine have apparently fallen for the propaganda of fanatically religious Islamic extremists and their allies: One of them was accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” for issuing identification numbers, and the other was saying that radical Islam is no more a problem than extremism in any other religious group and that terrorism has nothing to do with Islamic doctrine but instead with economic disadvantages and a loss of “dignity” that make terrorists turn to terrorism in order to “shake things up.” This was saddening and disheartening but is also quite rare in my social circles.

Autumn trees on 35th Avenue

My cover photo/header photo on the social media sites these days.

Trees on 35^th Avenue between 64^th and 65^th streets, Woodside, 4 November 2015. (Photograph by Elyaqim Mosheh Adam.)

Saturday evening, I arrived quite early for a social engagement at One Mile House on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side and was standing in front of the venue wondering what my next step should be. Should I wait there or try to find something else to do in the meantime?

While I stood there, about ten emergency vehicles—police cars, ambulances and fire trucks—pulled up alongside me with their sirens wailing, and EMTs, fire fighters and police officers filed into the Bowery subway station. A little while later, a police officer emerged with a loudly crying witness to whatever it was that had happened in there. As a crowd gathered, people were helping to translate her testimony from Chinese for the policeman as well as apparently helping her contact some family members on her telephone. I overheard what some passengers and some emergency workers were saying, and it turns out that her companion was struck by an arriving train as he stood on the platform.

Soon afterward, the injured passenger was brought out on a spine board to a wheeled stretcher that was waiting atop the stairs and rushed to an ambulance. I later learned that he had been wedged between the train and the platform and that his fellow passengers were pushing on the train trying to free him and that he later died at hospital.

Related

• Ben Kochman and Ryan Sit, “Straphangers heave subway car off Queens man trapped, killed by J train,” Daily News, 9 Nov. 2015.

• Linda Adams, Twitter, 7 Nov. 2015.

• New York City Transit Authority, Twitter, 7 Nov. 2015.

October

My current header/cover picture on most of my online social media accounts. 🎃🎃🎃

🖺 “October,” illustration by Mildred C. Jones, St. Nicholas, Oct. 1905, 1142. (In the public domain.)

Good news and bad news

So the sciatic pain about which I complained in August is gone, at least for the time being. However, the routine x‐ray of my lower back incidentally revealed what look like calculi in my kidney, so now I have an appointment with a urologist too. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. 🙂

🖻 Uncredited frontispiece in De ischiade nervosa commentarius, by Domenico Cotugno, Vienna: Apud Rudolphum Gräffer, 1770. (In the public domain.)

Previously

• “Sciatica I have,” 21 Aug. 2015.

• “Sciatica ideographs,” 25 Aug. 2015.

• “It seems a warm shower…,” 26 Aug. 2015.

Holiday convergence

Today is International Day of Non‐Violence, World Smile Day, and one of the days of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (סכות), the feast of booths or tabernacles. One of the symbols of Sukkot is willow (ערבה ʻaraba), the leaves of which are said to represent the human mouth. So use your human mouth today by giving someone a disarming smile and thereby making the world a better place. 👄☺

Equinox stroll

For no other reason than because the equinox was nigh, I took a stroll around a four‐block radius from my apartment building early this morning. I didn’t expect many persons to be out and sure enough the streets seemed to have even less human activity than usual, especially 37^th Road. (Noteworthy was a very large, drooping sash or scarf of unknown significance tied between two poles on 37^th Road near the corner of 73^rd Street, and I wondered if it were somehow related to ʻIdu‐l‐Aḍḥa/Qurban Bayramı.) There was nothing to see and nothing to do at that hour on a weekday, certainly nothing related in any way to the equinox, so I soon went home, but I was glad to be out breathing the night air and having some interaction, however minimal, with neighbors.

September 2015/Tishre 5776 equinox

♍ In the New York City area, the equinox will be Wednesday morning, the 23^rd, at 04:22 EDT, coinciding with Yom Kippur. 🌐 ☀

• “Sun at the Equinox,” uncredited illustration in A Short Course in Astronomy and the Use of the Globes, by Henry Kiddle, New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co., 1871, 31. (In the public domain.)

Notes on Conversation Last Night

Some notes on conversation last night

• Though many persons say the phrase root beer more like roo’ beer, the beverage is in fact not made from (or for) kangaroos.

• Gram snacks are not served in India with peppercorns but in paper cones.

• My friend said neither optimist nor octopus as I had thought, but alchemist.

• The same friend became incredulous and asked “Does it eat?” when told about a cat that doesn’t shed. I then emphasized that the word he had misheard was shed.

• It’s fun to say cashews and pistachios as if they rhyme.

• Saying a man is subdued is not referring to him as a lesser type of dude (a sub‐dude).

Memory Card Woes

I got the catastrophic news on Thursday from the data recovery company that not a shred of data could be recovered from my camera’s memory card that abruptly failed back in April, and so all the photos I took with my Nikon camera (as opposed to those with my smartphone camera) from February or March to April are forever lost. Of course, I should have backed up my photos more frequently and thus had fewer images on the card when the calamity struck, but I am grateful that I was very lazy during those months and shot most of my photos with my smartphone anyway. However, I did lose my photos of the St. Pat’s for All parade, of the Sunday Assembly in April and of the spectacular Persian Parade.

Bizarre Pansy Creature

⚘ The bizarre pansy creature wishes you a happy new year (לשנה טובה). 📅

Nineteenth or Twentieth Century Roʼsh hash‐Shana greeting card in the collection of the Yeshiva University Museum. (Photograph apparently by the Center for Jewish History. Per their Web site: “This material may be used for personal, research and educational purposes only.” Per the corresponding page on Flickr: “No known copyright restrictions.”)

Sciatica ideographs

These are the ideographs (three emoji characters and an Egyptian hieroglyph) that I used in my sciatica post, arranged like a comic strip to be read from left to right and lightheartedly portraying how my walking was affected by sciatic pain.

🚶 PEDESTRIAN

💥 COLLISION SYMBOL (here representing the sudden onset of pain)

😧 ANGUISHED FACE

𓀗 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A019 (“bent man with cane,” “be infirm; old …”)

Graphic by Elyaqim Mosheh Adam.
• The glyphs for the first three characters (🚶, 💥, 😧) are from the Twitter Emoji set, developed by Twitter with the Iconfactory, under a Creative Commons license.

• The glyph for the final character (𓀗) is from the open‐source Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs font, commissioned by Google, under the Apache License.

Sciatica I have.

I regret to say that I’ve been diagnosed with another ailment. For the past two weeks, I have had pains in my hip and thigh that led to occasional difficulty walking. I also have some numbness and weakness of the muscles in that leg that led to my knee giving out and my falling into a sitting position on two occasions (on the 13^th and 15^th, both times while socializing in community organizations).

Sunday night and Monday morning, the pain was at its worst, almost unbearable. It had largely subsided by ten o’clock so I walked to the doctor’s office and was diagnosed with sciatica. My primary care physician’s associate told me how nerve pain is very persistent and how physical therapy doesn’t work for everyone and how they would talk to me about pain management if physical therapy didn’t work for me. Then I went home and looked at Wikipedia—not the most reliable source, I acknowledge—which gave a very different story: “Often all that is required is time and in about 90% of people the problem goes away in less than six weeks.”

Wednesday morning, I limped to the nearby radiology building for a spinal x‐ray, but that night and Thursday morning, I was nearly pain‐free and was able to socialize. I’ll be starting physical therapy next week, but I’m feeling pretty well as I write this; today, only a little pain has returned and it’s intermittent. I’ll keep folks informed should they be interested.

🚶 💥 😧 𓀗

August

🖻 “A Heading for August,” headpiece by Wesley R. de Lappe in “St. Nicholas League,” St. Nicholas, Aug. 1904, 944. (In the public domain.) Internet Archive, Flickr.

🎗 Faigy Mayer committed suicide Monday by falling twenty stories to her death from a Fifth Avenue rooftop in NoMad. I had met her a handful of times at social events in the “Off the Derech” community and the “reason‐based community” over the past three years. In this photo, she was taking a selfie at a social gathering organized by a mutual friend visiting from Israel.

📷 Ami’s return to America, Oliver’s City Tavern, 190 West 4 Street, Greenwich Village, 13 September 2012. (Photograph by Elyaqim Mosheh Adam.)

📷 My marching with the LGBT cluster in the Celebrate Israel parade, Fifth Avenue and 59^th Street, Midtown Manhattan/Upper East Side, 31 May 2015. (Photograph by Harold Levine.) 🇮🇱

23 March–19 April 2015 microblogging

Microblog posts of mine that only made it to Twitter and not to Google or Tumblr.

Just another visit with my oral surgeon. —23 Mar.

A consultation with the surgeons. —25 Mar.

I’m still getting over a gastrointestinal bug I first noticed Wednesday when I preferred to stand in the hospital waiting room than sit. 🏥😷 —27 Mar.

Ensalada con pollo. —27 Mar.

House of Cards ≠ “Oscar’s Farts,” a rarely seen episode of The Odd Couple. 📺 —1 Apr.

Chef salad. —2 Apr.

With participants from the gay men’s discussion group. —3 Apr.

Una otra ensalada con pollo. —9 Apr.

At the Persian Parade. —19 Apr.

At the festival after the Persian Parade. —19 Apr.

Yesterday, I did jury service and wasn’t even picked for a voir dire panel, let alone a jury. All I did for about five and a half hours was write in my diary, check online social networks with their free Wi‐Fi, talk on the telephone with my mother, watch movies and flirt with a few attractive men. Then for my trouble, they gave me a certificate good for four years that thanks me for my “participation and contribution to the delivery of justice.” 😌

With five participants (plus the facilitator), the gay men’s discussion group Friday was quite well attended compared to how it’s been recently. The introductions and preliminary talk about ourselves led into an organic discussion about addiction. As it turns out, I was the only one without an addictive personality; everyone else present has had true addictions to alcohol or to recreational drugs or to sex or to overeating. Gripping a discussion as it was, I had difficulty relating to it for that reason, but also for one other: Multiple participants were happy to attribute their strengths to God and take credit for their accomplishments away from themselves in order to hand it over to a Deity. Even those who saw the benefit of praising and recognizing merit in human accomplishment still tempered it with God talk. (God gave me the tools the overcome my addiction but I had to use them.) The facilitator even attributed human ethics to God, saying that he truly believed that our internal voice that knows right from wrong (to which we do not always listen) is God. Another participant compared God to the sun and humans to the planets which revolve around it. Nevertheless, this was an exceptional discussion in which I learned about their strategies for overcoming their issues and I got to briefly discuss the adjustment disorder I feel I had in the early Aughts.

It was the first night of Passover and I had no seder to attend, but I went out to eat with the men’s group participants to a local diner and had a Passover meal of chicken cordon bleu, a garden salad and side vegetables (no bread).