Happy New Year

RantWoman wishes all her Jewish friends and Friends of Jewish affinity a Happy New Year.

RantWoman herself saw in the occasion as part of the team fomenting a first in a long time in Seattle candidates' forum on issues of concern to people with disabilities. The Forum was in many respects a great success. We assembled a thoroughly motley "that of god in everyone" freak show of diverse people (probably not diverse enough but..._ with diverse disabilities and those assembled all coped quite tolerably as the diverse disabilities manifested themselves. The candidates were candid enough between platitudes in a couple cases to cause RantWoman to despair of her choices. This definitely does not mean all was peace and light, but let us get to those points slowly.

RantWoman has been reflecting about whether or not Business Meeting sets up unrealistic expectations of work in other contexts such as patience in human interactions or collective finesse in fine-grained wordsmithing.

Forget that. The above sentence is Quakeres for "RantWoman thinks it is only by the grace of God and certainly not for shortage of people she would be tempted to boil and in some cases further not for shortage of reasons to be so tempted that everyone RantWoman was collaborating with emerged alive and several pieces of technology RantWoman would have liked to rely on emerged no more dysfunctional than when RantWoman initially addressed them." RantWoman is also turning over thoughts of whether the urge to boil people could have been at least partially ameliorated with a long dose of silent worship but alas part of the problem is others' disinclination to conduct such an experiment.

Our crack team of provocateurs and malcontents at large assembled a list of somewhere around 35 questions. We had 4 panels of two candidates each and each panel had time for about 4 questions. We had brilliant interesting questions, which of course was beside the point. In several cases the candidates clearly did not know enough to comment in any depth and merely did mental cut and paste of their pet talking points.

Thus, despite RantWoman's ferocious wordsmithing bent and that of a, um, peerpetual Difficult Collaborator it would have been perfectly adequate to print our questions much earlier in the process. Then RantWoman would not have had to watch a printer grind thoughts out excruciatingly slowly. She would not have had to think yet about many soap operas at her beloved Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing.

But let us return to the circumstances of our panel. RantWoman would like to say "I told you so." The Forum wound up conflicting with the start of Rosh Hoshanah as well of course as Friday prayers at local mosques. This meant one pair of candidates could not participate though they willl get a second chance at our fearsom questionnaire.

Even more touchingly, a Friend who is on such mailing lists informed RantWoman that he got email from the Jewish Federation of Seattle calling on people to protest our forum because of the timing. RantWoman for her part is deeply touched that the Seattle Jewish Federation noticed our forum enough to want to picket. RantWoman assured Friend that he would have been most welcome and RantWoman would have been thrilled to have such a picket show up. RantWoman knows perfectly well this Friend's general taste in pickets and he confirmed that probably the Jewish Federation of Seattle would not be at the top of his list of people to picket with.

Then we digressed to the logistics of protests that span the beginning of the Sabbath. Basically, if the pickets had shown up they would have needed to spread out mats on our breezeway and spend the Sabbath there until they could travel home at the next sunset. RantWoman thinks given her exasperation about how the forum was scheduled and other finer points of coalition coexistence that such a spectacle would have been the perfect touch. RantWoman however cannot say she blames people in the least for wishing to see in the Sabbath at home and she wishes blessings on them all.