Gooten Yontiv to All

To all my goyish readers, merry Christmas!

And for those readers who, like me, will be spending tomorrow watching movies and eating Chinese food, a timeless classic:

Twas the night before Chanukah,
boychicks and maidels
Not a sound could be heard,
not even the draidels.

The Menorah was set on the chimney, alight
In the kitchen the Bubba hut gechapt a bite.
Salami, pastrami, a glessala tay
And zayerah pickles with bagels, oy vay!

Gezunt and geschmack, the kinderlech felt
While dreaming of tagelach and Chanukah gelt.
The clock on the mantlepiece away was tickin’
And Bubba was serving a schtickala chicken.

A tumult arose like a thousand brauches,
Santa had fallen and broken his tuches.
I put on my slippers, eins, tsvay, drei,
While Bubba was now on the herring and rye.

I grabbed for my bathrobe and buttoned my gotkes
While Bubba was busy devouring the latkes.
To the window I ran and to my surprise
A little red yarmulka greeted my eyes.

Then he got to the door and saw the Menorah,
“Yiddishe kinder,” he said, “Kenehora.
I thought I was in a goyisha hoise,
But as long as I’m here, I’ll leave a few toys.”

With much gesshray, I asked, “Du bist a Yid?”
“Avada, mein numen is Schloimey Claus, kid.”
“Come into the kitchen, I’ll get you a dish,
A guppell, a schtickala fish.”

With smacks of delight, he started his fressen,
Chopped liver, knaidlach and kreplah gegessen.
Along with his meal, he had a few schnapps,
When it came to eating, this boy was the tops.

He asked for some knishes with pepper and salt,
But they were so hot, he yelled “Oy Gevalt.”
Unbuttoning his haizen, he rose from the tisch,
And said, “Your Kosher essen is simply delish.”

As he went to the door, he said “I’ll see you later,
I’ll be back next Pesach, in time for the Seder.”
More rapid than eagles his prancers they came,
As he whistled and shourted and called them by name:

“Now Izzy, now Morris, now Yitzak, now Sammy,
Now Irving and Maxie, and Moishe and Mannie.”
He gave a gesshray as he drove out of sight:
“Gooten Yontiv to all, and to all a good night.”

[Insert “Meniscus” Joke Here]

After a month of my limping around, Jess finally shamed me into visiting an orthopedist, who confirmed that, much as I’d suspected (given my wincing at self-conducted McMurray tests), I’d torn the lateral meniscus in my right knee.

As usual, the cause of the injury is a bit short of spectacular: near as I can tell, I did it by planting my foot weirdly while carrying a box of bottled water. Though, this time, I was at least carrying that water to refill the refrigerator at CrossFit NYC, so I can say I injured myself in the gym. [That’s a fair step up from my prior left-ankle disaster, which owed simply to stepping off the curb. While sober.]

At this point, there’s a reasonable chance that I can resolve the tear by rehab rather than surgery. And, if nothing else, it’s a relief to know that – unlike, say, with a partially torn LCL – any pain simply means that my knee hurts, rather than that I’m further damaging it, en route to total immobility.

It also reinforces something I’ve long considered: that a bunch of movement dysfunctions – like, in my case, walking duck-footed – aren’t simple human variations, but symptoms of muscular imbalances that predispose people to experiencing a predictable group of related injuries, again and again and again.

I’m still trying to figure this last point out, reading dorky kinesiology texts and articles on muscle fascia. But I’m convinced it’s time well spent. Otherwise, by the the upward progression, I think the next joint to go would be my hip, and from the eighty year-olds I’ve spoken with, I hear that one’s a bitch.

Take Dictation

The problem with choosing the size and shape of an electronic device – what’s commonly called ‘form factor’ – is that it’s inevitably an act of compromise. Make something big enough for a keyboard and sizeable screen, for example, and it’s too big to pocket. Make it little enough to cart around, and there’s simply not enough space to squeeze in a keyboard and resonably-sized display.

Some devices – iPhones or tablets – try and work their way around the problem by faking one element for another: the screen doubles as the keyboard and the mouse. Others – like the new Droid, with its slide-out keyboard – approach the problem like origami, looking to tuck elements behind each other when not in use.

And, invariably, those approaches suck. Another approach – voice recognition – sucks, too. But it sucks in different and complementary enough ways that, when paired with the indigenous suckiness of a device’s design, it often hugely improves the overall experience.

That’s certainly the case with Dragon Dictation, a new app for the iPhone. The idea is simple: you speak into the iPhone, and, within a second or two, the phone uploads the data, transcribes it to text, then displays it on your phone. You can use the iPhone’s software keyboard to tweak any mistakes, though, to my surprise, the accuracy of the translation, even in noisy settings, is surprisingly good. Then, with the touch of a button, you can transfer the transcribed text to an email, text message, or to the clipboard for pasting somewhere else.

For the first time, I can now enter an entire email’s worth of content in less than ten minutes of laborious thumbing.

Which isn’t to say that voice transcription will be replacing my laptop keyboard any time soon. While the human ear scrubs out the ‘ers’, ‘uhms’, and non-grammatical structures that populate at least my own speech, Dragon isn’t nearly so kind. And, similarly, while conversational speech tends to move only forward, typing is usually full of long pauses, and even regressions, moving backwards to edit prior fragments.

The writing I can do with text-to-speech, then, is well less than perfect. But, as compared to what I can accomplish with the iPhone’s keyboard, it’s an improvement nearly impossible to overstate. And, at the moment at least, the price is right: download it for the introductory $0 price, and give it a whirl yourself.

[Nota bene: You may see a lot of negative reviews on the iTunes site, mainly from people unhappy that the app uploads the names of your contacts to the Dragon servers. I suspect this is a tempest in a teapot, as Dragon uploads only the names, not any further info like emails or telephone numbers. If you have a Facebook account, you’ve already given up way more information to a company that’s repeatedly proved itself to be way less competent in respecting privacy concerns. In the end, it turns out most people are willing to give up a little privacy for a lot of functionality – Dragon can spell the names of your friends and colleagues right if it has a list to help educate guesses – and for most people that’s a reasonable trade.]