Now I am convinced

Now I am convinced American Idol is rigged! Constantin voted out and Scott Savol still in - yeah right! when he survived after attempting Bohemian Rhapsody I thought for sure he would win - I am shocked!

Oh well Bo - it's all yours - mwa

Quote of the Day

Daniel Finkelstein in today's Times:

"I am glad that Moses got Pharaoh to let the Jews go, but did he have to invite them all round to our house?"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,21129-1586267,00.html

Oh you silly people....

Much has already been written about the woeful and misguided decision of the British Association of University Teachers. to boycott the Israeli Universities of Haifa and Bar-Ilan. I saw a couple of excellent articles in the British media which slammed the boycott. The London Times condemned the boycott on Monday in its leading article. Another of the articles in question was written by David Aaronovitch, in last Sunday's Observer newspaper. The Observer is hardly a pro-Israel newspaper, and is the sister-paper of The Guardian, so that makes it even more interesting.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1468969,00.html

Ushyman

Pope Beanedict CVI

Pope Beanedict XVI

Parked in #2

Yesterday I went to drop some stuff I had bought for Pessach at my sister-in-law. There were 8 parking spaces and only one car parked in the 3rd space from the right. So I parked in the last (number 8) parking space because I didn't want to block someone and I also didn't want to be there more than 5 min, so I left my bag on the front seat - grabbed my shopping - and rushed up the stairs (1 flight) to drop everything off.

When I came back down 10 min later (I had to get at least 5 kisses from each of my 3 nephews), the woman whose parking space I had obviously taken had PARKED-ME-IN! That is to say she had parked her car directly behind me and I could not reverse out of my space! I went back to ask my sister-in-law whose car it was. I intended to knock on the door, explain very nicely and apologetically that I was in a rush and had lots of parcels to carry and I was only going to be stopping for 5 min etc... I did not want to get into a fight because I figured it would be counter-productive to yell at someone blocking my car.

I knocked on her front door and she refused to open it and after the first knock just ignored the rest of my pleading. I waited 30 min and tried her door again, she continued to ignore me. After a phone call to cancel an appointment with my dietician in Jerusalem, I eventually became enraged! What sort of F#$%^& up person does this to another person for parking in their space? My sister-in-law tells me that this woman hasn't paid her Va'ad Bayit for 2 years and that the whole building pay on her behalf. She would not even open the door and yell at me for parking in her space!!! WHAT SORT OF PERSON IS THIS?

Eventually I got into my brand new Mazda 3, moved my car within a millimeter of the car behind and floored the gas, I managed to move the car behind me just enough to be able to squeeze my car this way and that until I got it out. All I can say is that this woman is very lucky not to have 4 flat tires and a couple of key scratches down the side of her car. I hope when she does teshuvah next YK she remembers what an absolute idiot she has been to people around her this year!

Chag Sameach you moron!

When did Geek become cool

I am sitting here at the IDC in Herzeliyah at a competition being sponsored by my company. Basically it is a competition for extremely clever kids, they have 1.5 hours to answer 44 questions about computers and codes. The competition is called CodeGuru.

What amazes me, besides the fact that there are no females in this competition, is that these kids don't look like your sterotypical geeks. In fact I would go as far as to say some are quite cute! (girls where are you).

Of the 35 participants only 5 or so wear glasses, either contact lenses are in or maybe they forced kids with a certain IQ to wear glasses back when i was a young lass. Anyway kudos to these kids. One of them will win a laptop computer today ala IBM.

-------------------

When we had an organizational meeting a few weeks ago there was a riddle we had to solve before we could move on. I didn't solve it but hey - I don't claim to be a genious! Can you solve it?

עיכר - is to מכונית
as
אני is to ברך
as
חיבוק is to ????

Icar is to Mechonit
as
Ani is to Berech
as
Chibuk is to ????

Pope Hype

In honor of the hype surrounding the death of one Pope and the election of a new one. The BBC News website has published a section called "A-Z of religions and beliefs"

Here's what they say about Judaism (strangely enough when I hit the page the first time, Islam was the featured religion at the top of the page - conspiracy? nahhhhhh)

Judaism is around 3500 years old. Jews believe that there is only one God and that the Jewish People were specially chosen to receive God's guidance. Find out more.

They even have a section titled "Basics". I think I should write a letter and tell them there is NOTHING basic about Judaism :)

Overview of Judaism
Around 2,000 years ago a non-Jew told Hillel, a famous Jewish teacher, that he would convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the whole of the Torah in the time he could balance on one leg.
Hillel replied… "What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary. Go and study it."

The Bare Essentials of Judaism
* 3500 years old
* Began in the Middle East
* Founded by Abraham and Moses
* Parent faith of Christianity
* Jews believe that there is only one God
* Jews believe that the Jewish People are specially chosen by God
* Jews worship in Synagogues, their spiritual leaders are called Rabbis
* The Jewish Holy book is the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, especially the first 5 books, called The Torah
* 12 million followers, most in Israel and the USA
* 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust in an attempt to wipe out Judaism

Well anyway I think it's an interesting site - well done and I am sure it took them a loooooooooong time to come up with things to write there that they thought wouldn't be controversial - but I am sure that somewhere, someone will have an issue with something that is written. I can feel an anti-semitism cry coming....

plus ca change

Is there a phrase that is the opposite of "deja vu". Something that you can use that sounds a bit more sophisticated, educated and less yobby than "been there - done that". You know the sense of deja vu - when you see something that you know is new, but you have the feeling you've seen it before - somewhere.

I was looking for such a phrase when leafing through an old copy of the Jerusalem Report - October 26 1998 to be exact, and I had exactly that feeling - the opposite of deja vu. Everything I was reading was today's news. It was simply remarkable how you can look at a magazine that's nearly 7 years old, and still get the overwhelming sense that although we'd obviously been there before, it was all new. Just look at some of the headlines and content I read.

1. Main story - For the Love of Gaza
"Gaza's Jews say that their reality now awaits West Bank Settlers if another withdrawal takes place."
"Rafael Eitan says "there's going to be war for every inch of territory' "
"Isolated, sometimes besieged but determined to stay put, the settlers of the Gaza strip say .."
"Anticipating siege, the settles have stockpiled canned food..."
"...political stickers are common here - 'We are not budging from Gaza' 'We are all Netzarim'. "
"In terms of attachment to the Land of Israel, we're at the bottom of the ladder. Still, we do have have support - even 30% is significant ... My job is to hold any part of the Land of Israel that I can"..

2. The Courts
"The courts are castigated by politicians...."
"a growing wave of well-publicized verbal assaults on the judicial system, particularly from ultra-orthodox quarters..."
"...relentless criticism of the legal system comes from two groups - the religious parties and the far Right..."

3. Palestinian "Justice"
"..tribal bloodletting has worsened in Palestinian society..."
"thousand of armed security force members ... who routinely act as though they are above the law..."
"... there is always someone killing someone else, in the process of taking revenge for a previous killing, seemingly without end."
"..within a day, 3 members of the clan were sentenced to death....there are reports that the convicted men are now free"

4. The region
"..Egypt has regained a position of seniority by taking a line of occaisional recalcitrance against the US..."
".. Hizbullah has absorbed weapons that are more accurate and dangerous than anything previously in its posession"
" Iranian Admiral Shamkhani has threatened retaliation in the event of an Israeli strike - within two years Israel will be within range of operational Iranian missiles"

5. The economy
" despite a shaky start, privatization - the crown jewel in Benjamin Netanyahu's master plan to reshape the Israeli economy, appears to be moving ahead..."
"...the Manufacturers Association is comlaining about a drop in R&D funding in the budget ..."

6. Politics
".. Barak has yet to learn that, unlike generals, politicans cannot order people to vote for them..."

One of the redeeming features of life is the feeling that we are going somewhere. Here in Israel, the overwhelming feeling has to be that wherever we may be going, we've been there before. How depressing!

The French say "plus ca change, plus ca meme chose", which means "the more things change, the more they stay the same", but I don't speak French, so find me something in Yiddish, Latin, or even Japanese, that says the same thing in two words.

Affective advertizing?

Posted this morning in Janglo

Message: 20
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:35:51 -0000
From: xxxxx
Subject: English and maths tutoring for elimentary school students



Let your child improve their english and maths in a friendly and fun
environment, at a very reasonable price.

At lease she didn't offer alimentary tutoring.

Probably got her education here http://www.gtc.ae/businesslanguages/elimentary.htm

Random observations from a visiting Catholic

1. On asking her how she feels about the death of the Pope. People shouldn't mourn the Pope, he was a saint and has his path to heaven is mapped out - they need to pray for me!

2. On her flight to Israel with a Charedi family, who she refers to as "wiggy woman and curls man." "I just don't understand why they have to do that to those poor children. And the family look so unhappy, it must be because they are dressed so awfully, they look depressed and it's not surpising."

3. On seeing another religious curly haired man with his 5 children in tow. "Are all those children his, he should get a television or something?"

Requiem in Pace

So we come to the end of a special week. All this week, we've been reading about what a good man Karol Wojtyla was. A few brave people spoke out and said he wasn't all he was cracked up to be, especially by the Jews who have been raving on about how wonderful he was for the Jews and Israel, but rather than get into this argument (especially since I'm tending to swing more to the former side), let's stop for a few minutes to consider another line.

Stories have been trotted out all week about how some incident many years ago goes to prove what a good man he was. For example, a young girl who survived the horrors of a Nazi death camp was spotted huddled near a train station, starving and sick, and this priest went up to her and gently got her name and home town (his own, of course) and carefully helped her with a meal and a lift into a cattle car heading for that destination. A touching story, and I have no doubt true in basic fact if not in every detail.

But can I ask a question. Why is such a story remarkable - so remarkable that it gets retold 60 years later. Unhappily, I know the answer. It is because such an incidence of basic humanity was very rare. The Pope's fellow Christians were rarely "menchedik" enough to do such a fundamental right deed. So he, who was a mench, stands out, just one in many millions, for having done the right thing. How sad for the rest of the world. If I were in his co-religionists place, I wouldn't rush to tell such stories about Karol, because in using the tale to tell what a good man he was, you're admitting that the rest of the Church falls a long way short of what anyone would regard as decent and honourable.

May he rest in peace, but if his life is going to be an example, let it not be used to tell us how much the Church has done to extend the hand of friendship to the Jewish people, but rather how much is has got to make up for before it can expect a handshake in return.

Democracy for dummies - part 99

The human species is the most adaptable on this planet, as we can see from our inhabiting environments as widely different as Iceland and equatorial Africa. Collectively, we add up to about 300 megatons of biomass, far more than any other species except those which we cultivate for our own use. In every respect, we can be seen as the success story of planet Earth.

One of the signs of this adaptability is that we come to accept the conditions we live in as "normal" and anything else as "wrong". This is largely what allows us to go on slogging through the meter-deep snow, or in swamps hotter than our own body temperature, without stopping and say "that's it for me - I'm not built for this cr.p!".

How else can you understand Pinchas Landau's diatribe against the British and American parliamentary systems in Friday's JP. He goes so far as to say the "British system is in fact much worse than the America one". This would be weird enough if it came from a commentator who had experienced living in one of these countries, or the many offshoots of British colonial history that use the Westminster system as their model. Coming from an Israeli, however, it is entirely understandable, since he has sees the local system as "normal" and the other as wrong.

The opposite side of the coin comes from me. I grew up in the Westminster system, and since making aliyah I have been astonished at how a country that purports to call itself a democracy could possibly tolerate the totally distorted system that drives Israeli politics. There is no sense here of "representation". The Knesset is a body of people who have been nominated by parties using some undeclared and wholly private mechanism, whose membership of the parliament continues, and can be terminated, by the whim of some un-named committee. I remember once being astounded by an item in the newspaper that told us that Shas was "swapping" two of its MKs in the middle of the then current parliamentary session for two other unknowns, in order to satisfy the desire of some person (no doubt Ovadia Yoseph). This didn't make front-page news, but rather was buried somewhere near the announcement that the price of soya beans had risen three cents on the Tokyo Produce Market index (the latter story got MUCH bigger headlines).

Now, in my view of what is "normal", Israel is as far as you can get from true democracy while still bothering to have elections. They are about as relevant here as they were in Iraq (99.9% in favour of Saddam, the other 0.1% soon dead) or in Zimbabwe. Your level of parliamentary representation is zero, your MKs answer to no-one but their respective party bosses, who in turn answer to some unknown cartel of either Rabbis or Union leaders. If you have a complaint or a need here, don't go looking for someone to represent you. You've got a better chance of winning the lottery without buying a ticket.

However, Landau obviously sees what happens here as "right and proper". He can go on and talk about how British and American parties try to buy their votes by offering the electorate some benefit or other. These words come in the same week that we learned that Likud had given Shinui 700 million shekels in budgetary allocations in order to secure their support of the budget. Note here - not a benefit for something the electorate was free to choose, but what the party back-office wanted.

So now if you ask me who has the story right, Landau or me, I obviously will say that I have, since I've lived here for long enough to know that what Israel calls democracy is nothing more that the continuation of a 19th century concept dreamed up by Russian and Polish socialists who had never experienced the slightest degree of personal freedom and who saw the world through strangely distorted eyes - the same eyes that later gave rise to "Big Brother" communist rule in their home countries. They lacked any experience of responsible government, but instead considered that only THEY knew what was good for the country. They had to have elections, but constructed a system where they could allow the people to "have their say" once in a while, but still go on directing the parliament to do their will no matter what the people may have wanted. Landau may call this "normal", but I have to tell him its about as normal as a three shekel coin (or a tax refund cheque!).

Culture Shock

Since making Aliyah I have only ever worked in Jerusalem with 80% religious people. Now that I am in Tel Aviv I find myself facing religious issues nearly every day. Like when they order Pizza at work and it arrives with pepperoni on it.

Yesterday I designed a Pessach greeting card for someone. They wanted something generic enough to be used for both Pessach and Rosh Hashana.

I designed a beautiful card (at least in my opinion) with a glass of wine and piece of Matza on the right and an apple and dripping honey stick on the left, with the words "Chag Sameach" in the middle. I just didn't know what to do when it got sent back to me with the instructions to remove all "symbolic" pictures. Surely whether you are religious or not apple and honey are a wonderful representation of Rosh Hashana and the same of wine and Matzah for Pessach. Am I so naive that I don't really know what these festivals mean to people who are not religious?

I never thought I would have to ask these questions in Israel. Now that is naive.

Tis the season to be scrubbing...

I have started my Pessach cleaning. Hard to believe. I am sure I used to make fun of my mother (who is obsessive compulsive in the cleaning department) for starting Pessach cleaning nearly a month before Pessach, but the older I get the more sense it makes.

I just love the way all the bits come out the fridge and can be washed in the sink. My 4-year-old fridge looks brand new and I love it clean! Who would have thought cleaning could be so satisfying.

Another thing about my mother that used to amuse me is that she used to clean the house so it was clean enough for the cleaning lady to clean? Lately though, I keep promising myself that if I can get everything scrubbed once properly then my house will be clean enough to have a cleaning person once a week.

Never thought I would turn out to be just like my mother when it comes to cleaning and just like my father when it comes to computers - who woulda thought I would be the one in the family to do all the "taking-afters"?

Tonight the oven, tomorrow the spare bedroom.