Day 93

I think informing the author about the decision is another stage? 

It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep

Excerpt from the book, the story of Jonathan Safran Foer's grandmother:

"We weren't rich, but we always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a little more fat. The fattest piece was the best piece. It wasn't like now. We didn't have refridgerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn't have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted... But we were happy. We didn't know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.

"Then it all changed. During the War it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I'm not talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn't too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn't eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn't tell you about.

"Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.

"The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn't know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me."
"He saved you life."
"I didn't eat it."
"You didn't eat it?"
"It was pork. I wouldn't eat pork."
"Why?"
"What do you mean why?"
"What, because it wasn't kosher?"
"Of course."
"But not even to save your life?"
"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."

Down with men & homeopaths!

These are two videos that I happened to stumble upon on Twitter (just to show how very useful or at least interesting this medium can be). If you wouldn't happen to have the time to view both of these rather lengthy videos - you really should though - I can heartily recommend the first bit of the Naomi Klein/TED one (though you'll probably want to keep watching it after the first bit) and the last bit (from around 9:45) of the Ben Goldacre one on Matthias Rath - if evil has a face it must be this man.

Code writing

By courtesy of xkcd

Article submission attempt #4 - Day 77