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Just gave my talk at the Newcastle Day Limmud. It went down very well, and I got twenty people turning up, despite all the talks it was up against—sufficiently many that I ran out of handouts, even for one between two. At the end, I even got two people (one of whom wasn't a parent of mine) suggesting I write a book.

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From:

green-knight.livejournal.com

Write a book? That idea has never occurred to you, I suppose...

Hey, congrats on your audience, and FWIW, I won't be surprised if you _do_.

From:

lethargic-man.livejournal.com

Well no, because all my material is secondhand, lifted largely from the Encyclopaedia Judaica, more damningly, Wikipedia, and more damningly still, the Balashon (http://www.balashon.com/) blog. The guy behind the Balashon blog has a whole pile of big dictionaries on his desk, and goes through them looking for the interesting bits; I just observe the interesting bits as he's pre-prepared them on his blog. (The only one of his dictionaries I have is the Jastrow's Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/jastrow/), though I do intend to get Klein's Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for my next birthday.) It would seem to me fraudulent to try piggy-backing on that.

Besides, I don't think I've got enough material kicking around my head for more than a slim pamphlet; the one hour forty my two talks, combined, added up to pretty much exhausted my material. There was a reason I didn't leave time for questions at the end of my talks—I didn't want people to start asking me questions I wasn't able to answer! (Though some people did come up with questions and observations anyway, and I was able to answer them all, and debunk one folk etymology, of abracadabra (http://www.balashon.com/2007/08/abracadabra.html).)