All your basil are belong to us

Yesterday I made my last big gardening push of the year, figuring that we'd be lucky to get another well-timed break in the heat. Plus we'd had a spot of rain to soften up the soil. So I hacked away half of the lovage so it wouldn't throw so much shade and ripped up all the wood sorrel, chickweed, and other noxious growth I could reach. In doing so, I made the happy discovery that not all the purslane had been torn out. With any luck, in a few weeks' time I'll have two healthy patches of it.

The volunteer catnip I'd known about already; I've been regularly stripping a leaf here and there for the Whiny Grey One. I thought I'd massacred it in the course of transplanting it all to a buried pot; even though I watered it immediately and well, the leaves all wilted to the ground. But its resilience is impressive, and today in leaving I saw that it had all perked up again. That should help compensate for the catnip pot alongside the porch, which has been completely ravaged by earwigs.

Once the valuable plants were marked or out of harm's way, I was free to have at it with the tiller left behind by the gays. Scooter was right: it makes for much easier work. I stuck some cocozella seeds in the ground at the back, just for grins, transplanted a dill plant that was getting crowded out, and sowed the rest with basil. Of the seedlings I'd transplanted a few weeks ago, one is looking very good, a couple more are surviving, and the rest died. I put the second round in the ground, reserving one to a terracotta pot, and already last night's downpour seems to have taken one out.

It may have cooled off a bit, but the air today was humid as a frog's crotch. After the rain, it spiked at 92% but should drop as the temperature rises. It was a pleasant enough stroll to the shuttle stop today, but there's certainly no mistaking this weather for autumn. Still haven't needed the AC, however. Instead, I'm relying on my traditional two-shower routine, the second one taking place right before bedtime and involving drying off in front of a box fan. Refreshing!

Consumer magic

Game Night was okay. The new guys who made it a bit more interesting last month weren't there which meant that the haunted house game I played with them was absent as well. It was good that I passed on the Cards Against Humanity pre-game; apparently my pal neglected to ask his roommate for permission to use his deck and when he showed up he was well pissed off.

In any case, I insisted on playing something geekier than Catchphrase, so we banished most of the attendees to the bedroom so we could have the coffee table for Munchkin Cthulhu. A cute game, but not without its flaws. Keeping track of other players' boni so you know when to intervene in their combats is a job of work, something that cries out for an app. There is an official app--one of the players had it loaded on his phone--but all it keeps track of is your own character's advancement (something the rest of us were able to do with a ten-sided die), plus give you a "boon".

The whole idea of someone paying a fee to gain an advantage in an off-line game didn't sit well with a couple of us. I can see how it must seem perfectly normal to someone raised on MMORPGs rather than tabletop games and how it's a predictable outgrowth of the kind of crazy secondary market for cards spawn by Magic the Gathering and its imitators (not to mention capitalism in general). But when it reaches the point where you can buy t-shirts which confer a bonus to play when destroyed during a game session the cynicism in the face of antiquated notions of good sportsmanship is too much to bear.

I came close to winning but got hosed on a technicality--my fault for not reading the rules ahead of time, but I just wanted to get playing. After that, we called everyone back in for an all-inclusive game of Catchphrase which went better than expected, although the huge differences in background and ability are still an issue. At one point I got The scarlet letter and said, "It's by Nathaniel Hawthorne. You read it in high school." One of my teammates got it in two (first guessing Seven gables) and from some of the reactions you would've thought we'd used witchcraft. Same as when I got Gone with the wind from the clue of "Four words, a book and a movie" and someone blowing.

"No Jews were harmed in the making of this film."

Yesterday I finally got around to watching the Coen Brothers' A serious man. I invited the Old Man to watch it with me, but he had better things to do. (Though he did stumble by during the prologue and end up watching most of that.) Who knew there'd be Yiddish! I understood some of it, but not nearly as much as I would've hoped (i.e. I couldn't've gotten the gist without subtitles). Also Allen Lewis Rickman as a beardy shtetl yid = SUPERCUTE.

It was a solid good watch. Even though "nothing happens" in terms of plot, I found myself engrossed throughout. Top-notch performance from Stuhlbarg. And it's so clearly a labour of love. I've had some harsh words in this space for the kind of mess you get when the Coens stray too far from their home turf, but this was practically filmed in their own backyards and populated with personalities they grew up with. The work of the production team is phenomenal; you won't find more fidelity to a period setting this side of Mad Men.

But what stimulated my nostalgia with the sheer overwhelming Jewiness of it all. I mean, for the love of Abraham, the action opens in a Hebrew school and culminates in a bar mitzvah! Of course, having been raised Catholic, the nostalgia is all second-hand: It recalls not my own adolescent experiences but the crash-course in Judaism I received when I came to U of C ("a Baptist school where Jewish professors teach atheist students Thomas Aquinas"--also heard with "Jewish" and "atheist" swapped). Before then, the only Jews I knew personally were our landlord and my siblings' friends from public school; by the time I graduated, I was volunteering my services as a shabbes goy.

But hitherto I'd read and I'd watched. Bizarrely I'd even participated in a seder before organised by one of the nuns at my grade school. (Cultural appropriation FTW!) And as someone raised in a tradition-weighted religion with a strong ethnic component, a dead liturgical language, parallel legal and educational systems, etc. it all felt instantly familiar to me. Certainly, I felt more kinship with my Jewish classmates than I did with those oddball Protestants. (It just weirded me out to hear one of them tell me about the succession of different sects he and his family had cycled through.)

Maybe without that thrill of the nearly-familiar, I would've been more troubled by some of the critics' complaints--like the underwritten female characters (no Bechdel pass here!) or the generally bleakness. But I felt like I was being granted privileged access to a world that I'd only glimpsed before despite living next to it all of my life.