Taking the eruv with the smooth

by Feòrag

An eruv is a special enclosure used by Orthodox Jews to symbolically extend the boundary of the home, and therefore permit certain actions, such as pushing a wheelchair, which would not otherwise be allowed on the Sabbath. In other words, it's a legal hack. After much arguing with planning officials, the North West London Eruv is due to go into operation any day now, and as it's fragile, the website provides an eruv status message to warn the observant if a recent inspection has revealed any breach in the eruv. But, as Yoz Grahame has noticed, there's a problem with the warning on the website:

What's that? You can't see it? Ah. That'll be because you're using Mozilla. Or Safari. Or a phone browser. Or anything that isn't MSIE. Or you're running MSIE with Javascript turned off. Or you're a disabled person using a browser with extra accessability features, and now you're really annoyed because the main recipients of the benefits of the eruv are, of course, disabled people. The silliest thing here is that the web page seems to be dynamically-generated anyway (or, at least, hand-edited at least once a week)

Maybe it's to promote other, more profitable, methods of finding out about the eruv's condition? Yoz continues There's also an email and SMS service, though (in classic synagogue style) they seem to be demanding an 18 quid donation for subscription. (via BoingBoing)