1 Cheshvan/19 October, 2009

Freedom! I don’t have to grade for two weeks! Well, I have a couple of midterms to finish but those are fast and short. No papers, though. Yeah. Today I was like a walking zombie. I did not get much sleep again; I can never sleep properly right before a deadline. And I had to get up at 6:30. Before I started teaching at 10:20 I thought I might fall asleep in class. But I didn’t. I was just winging it; it is not that hard after teaching this class before. The folder review itself was easy. I just meet with the assistant director and she checks to see if my grading is on the level with the department and also who my trouble students are. I never stress about the meeting itself, just getting all the grading done for it. Ok, for the next two weeks I’ll just work on my own stuff. After three full days of grading I’m really for history.

Stupid Baseball! And Stupid Fox! Preempting “House” tonight. And I was looking forward to it all day. And since it is on schedule tonight and will probably show in other parts of the country, Fox will probably not rerun it and I will have to wait eight days for it to show up online: after the next episode airs. Argh. Instead I watched “How I Met Your Mother” live, which was good, but I actually prefer watching that online the next day. I also remembered that Wil Wheaton is guest starring on “Big Bang Theory” tonight, a show I never watch but will probably check out for just this episode. Stupid Baseball! (But, Go, Yankees!)

Ok, I looked at Fox website and they promised to run “House” right after baseball. Which they did around 9 pm. I missed the teaser but caught the rest of the episode, yay. ( House S6E6 )

Numbers WTF moment of the day: chapters 11 to 15 are about fire and quail from the lord (I’m trying hard not to make too many Cheney jokes as I read); Miriam, Aaron and Moses having a bit of family feud; exploring Canaan; rebellion; more offerings; stoning a guy just for gathering wood on Sabbath and tassels on garments. Now the fire for God was not a friendly fire, God was pissed that people were bitching about how hard it was to live in the desert. Moses had to calm him down again. And I was right to wonder before if people would get sick of manna after a while; people started craving meat and recalling other vegetables they ate in Egypt. It is fun to see what people expect to eat. Moses got whiny himself that he had to be responsible for all these people and feed them and listen to them complain. So God created a committee of seventy elders to share Moses’ burden. Putting responsibility on underlings is the key to any management. God also decided to give people so much meat that they would get sick of it too and stop bitching comparing everything with Egypt, “until [meat] comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it.” (11:20) But when the quail got there and people were happy and gathered it and started eating it, God just send plague on the people for craving other food than manna. That was not a fair move on God’s part, teasing people like that and then killing them. But they learned a moral lesson there, I guess. Moses is also a good negotiator and can quell God’s anger like no other person. When the people thought getting the promised land was too hard and rebelled a bit, Moses again prevented God from killing them all by appealing to God’s reputation and how other nations would see God. God does forgive but promises that all those who rebel will never enter the land, only those who want to go there and the children when they grow up. It is one reason why it takes so long (forty years) to get to Canaan as a group. When some tried to get to Canaan without God’s blessing, they were killed by locals.