In Pursuit of Mysteries

The Jews of Lake Merritt

the table is prepared for seder
(instead of a plate)

R and I were invited to celebrate the final night of Passover with friends today at a seder. Our friend, Jonathan, has been orchestrating passover with a friend of his, Alysse, reliably for eight years now. They both mentioned today that the first time they celebrated together was in 1994…

This is the same event that we attended last year, which was the first time that I had been to a seder but Alysse’s place is now a wonderful apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. This is a much more loose and fun event than the family run passovers, which much explaining, drinking, and sharing of good times. At least half of the people in the room were not Jews and a number of the Jews were people, like R, who had a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother. They mentioned that it made them “Jew-ish” (with a little hand waggle when saying it). It was also a good chance for “Jewcruitment” as one person put it.

We arrived at about 7:00 PM and got home around 1:00 AM so it is a bit of a night. The food was excellent but my head is pounding from the combination of alcohol, food, and, later, sugar. I really enjoyed attending this and I’m glad that R and I are invited to these events. Eventually, we may even recognize a few more people but we had met a number of them before, either last year or at Thorn Coyle’s housewarming a number of months back (Thorn being present as well at these events).

I took quite a few pictures this evening as we were doing things. A few are below:

me with a boil, one of the seven
plagues that were passed around as plushie toys

the enjoying of the matzoh soup

Elijah’s cup is filled but he did not arrive to collect it…

Tags: Jewish, Passover, Seder

Lucky JuJu Pinball

Tonight, R and I went to Lucky JuJu Pinball in Alameda. (For the non-locals, Alameda is a small city on island in the Bay next to Oakland.) Lucky JuJu Pinball is, you guessed it, a pinball place. It is only open on the weekends and is filled with a variety of pinball machines, both old school and more modern digital devices.

The place charges a ten dollar fee and you can stay and play all you want. They have a list of their machines on their website.

The Embryon and Orbitor 1 machines were my two favorite of the bunch.

This is the Embryon:

It had a lot of cool lights, shiny bits, and a third flipper up near the top for a fun play. I took somes closeups of the shiny joy as well:

The Orbitor 1 was just downright weird. It has a three dimensional surface with curves and spinning bumpers. The way the ball moves, it would seem like their were a bunch of magnets underneath but the link above claims that this is not the case, that it is done with the shape of the space and the spinning bumpers. The picture doesn’t really convey it well but I did take a few:

I put a set of photos up on Flickr this evening after we got back if you want to take a look. It was good fun and I’m glad that we finally took the time to get down there. We had encountered their traveling RV full of pinball machines at the Cruicible’s fire festival in previous years but it was only a sample of the machines that they have. According to their site, the three rooms have three dozen machines available for play.

Creating a Group Blog and Open Buddha

At this point, I am pretty willing to admit that Open Buddha is a failure as a web forum or community site. I’ve had it up for over five months now and it just hasn’t gelled. To really get a web forum going, you need a critical mass of interested parties and it just hasn’t really happened. Part of it is undoubtably my own fault but it really is not easy to build a community from scratch.

Loden Jingpa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Australia, is making a go at a similar effort with his Buddhist Forums site. Perhaps by gathering a different crowd of people using software specifically designed around forums, he can make a better effort.

I still have the OpenBuddha.* (com, org, and net) domain name though. I’m thinking of trying to do a group Buddhist blog there. Ideally, I would get a small group of Buddhist bloggers to try to blog on Buddhist matters as a group. I’m thinking that if I could get a total of four or five other people (plus myself), we could make an interesting go of it. It would be ideal to get a diverse mix, such as a Tibetan Vajrayana practitioner, a Zen practitioner, a Theravadan practitioner, a Shin Buddhist, and maybe one of the Chinese or Korean traditions of practice or something like a Shambhala or Vipassana practitioner. Everyone gets an account and agrees to generally try to work together and follow Buddhist standards of conduct. It seems like it could work.

The idea would be to cover items of Buddhist interest. This could be current events, news, book reviews, essays, discussions of practice, etc. A diverse group of people would bring, inherently, a diverse perspective, one that was not always entirely in agreement, even. This is healthy and these differences could help the group blog be interesting, along with the variety of perspectives.

If you are a Buddhist blogger and interested in something like this or have someone to suggest, please feel free to leave a comment or forward this post to other parties. I think it would be a worthwhile effort to bring a group of people together and it would fulfill some of the ideas behind the “Open Buddha” name.