Hebrew in Blade Runner

Blade Runner is known for depicting an extremely cosmopolitan future L.A.: it looks, as one of the film's makers put it, like Hong Kong on a very bad day, though there's also other elements in too: Gaff's streetspeak apparently includes Hungarian. However, I'll bet you've never spotted the Hebrew in there too:

( View piccy )

(The newspaper the person on the right of Deckard is reading is called Kol Bo, "everything is in it", the name of a late mediaeval law code, and also of a grocery chain in Israel.)

Actually, I cheated; there's a reason you won't have spotted the Hebrew: you never see the sushi bar from this angle in the film; most of the time you see it from the opposite side. I grabbed this shot from the making-of feature on the Blade Runner: The Final Cut DVD. Though that doesn't make it not worth pointing out. :o)

Plate tectonics!*

Seven years ago, my friend Lesley WISNOLJ, Sara (likewise) and myself went, at Lesley's suggestion to the Clay Café in Temple Fortune. I looked around the various pieces of pottery, ranging from garden gnomes to household crockery, on offer to decorate, and eventually selected a simple plate. But now I had a plate, what was I going to do with it? I looked at its shape, and inspiration struck:

( View piccy )

Not bad, I thought, for an impulse choice of decoration... but I was not entirely happy with it either: Failing to realise the extent to which the bottom coat would fade when the clay was fired and the glaze added, I did not put enough paint on, and the ocean is not the uniform deep blue it should be. Also, the outline of the continents leaves something to be desired, though I still maintain it's not at all bad given that I had to do it from memory, without any preparation at all. Finally, it was a bit of a rushed job, trying to get it finished before the Clay Café shut.

So I intended to go back at some point at do it again, doing a better job. Only I didn't. And then one day, years later, I caught the plate against my kitchen tap and put a crack in it. And then the other day, I forgot about this crack, put pressure on the plate, and it came apart into two.

So I was thinking maybe I should go back and do it again. But then I thought, what with my capel, it would probably come across as harping on the same theme a bit. So then I thought maybe I could go there early in the day and do a series of eight, one for each of the planets^†. But then I thought: what would be the point? I already have all the plates I need. But then I thought—or maybe it was lavendersparkle who came up with this, I forget—I don't have any plates bar paper ones for Pesach; and sooner or later I'm going to want to throw a big meal, or possibly even *shudder* a Seder, at Pesach.

So who would like to spend a Sunday with me at the Clay Café putting this suggestion into practice?

* Yes it is appropriate; go look "tectonic" up in the dictionary if you don't believe me.

† Well, in this solar system, at any rate. And assuming the planet I call Krishna isn't actually discovered...

(no subject)

Annoying is washing up the last of a successful Shabbos lunch for eight, and then opening your fridge and discovering still in it your artfully arranged salad dish, which you'd completely forgotten about.

*ahem* So that's going to be salad sanwiches for me for lunch, then, for the next week and a half. :-S