06 September 2006

Hm...

Dad sent me this today. It's worth a read.

"Dennis Miller is a comedian who has a show called Dennis Miller Live on HBO.
He is not Jewish.
He recently said the following about the Mideast situation:

'A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need.

Here we go:
The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention.
Before the Israelis won the land in the 1967 war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians."

As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."

So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" anymore to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths, until someone points out they're being taped.
Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death."
I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters."

Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't.
They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David but if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living.

That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel.
They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course -- that's where the real fun is -- but mostly they want Israel.

Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it --for the last fifty years, has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth . . . you know that's really saying something.
It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Middle East. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Chew this around & spit it out: 500 million Arabs; 5 million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that, if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals.. Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea?

Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the Numbers. Imagine 500 million Jews and 5 million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it.

Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves?
Of course not.
Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea?
Nonsense.
Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents?
Impossible.
Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children?
Disgusting.

No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.

Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that, with vital operations in Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of super models who've just had their drugs taken away.
However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight. We've already lost some.
After September 11th, our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them.

Beautiful.

Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day), start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.
If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan.

Please feel free to pass this along to your friends
Walk in peace! Be Happy! Have a wonderful life!'



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12 August 2006

Dinner on Me

Last night, Jena & Adam and Laura & Barry came over for dinner. I cooked. The parents cleaned up. Very therapeutic. Then we all went to Sweet Life for dessert. It all added up to quite a decadent evening.


Here’s the Israeli salad recipe, the best I’ve ever made:
4 small plum tomatoes
2 cukes, peeled
3 scallions
1/2 cup parsley
1/4 cup fresh mint
1/4 cup fresh dill
3-4 tbsp olive oil
1 lemon

I personally would have used more tomatoes, but maybe my cukes were just too big. The most important part of Israeli salad is chopping the veggies very small. Not fine, just small. The dill was particularly good with the mint and cucumbers.
I also made spiced roast lamb and roasted red peppers and feta, but those aren’t kosher, especially together, so it’s better not to say anything about them, in case I am ever audited by the “Are-you-Converted-Enough-Inquisition-Society-of-Jews-for-the-Purity-of-Keeping-out-non-Orthodox-Converts”.


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A Solution to Katyushas?

While on Haaretz’s Link English edition website, reading about Olmert’s decision to (finally, to Israelis) authorize the implementation of the IDF’s full-scale ground offensive, I saw this advertisement, placed so very conveniently in the middle of the story.



How absurd! I said to myself. I have to check this out. Remember that Haaretz is a relatively liberal Israeli newspaper, not one known for any type of religious sympathies. So, being the curious cat that I am, I clicked on the ad. This is what I found on the page to which I was sent:

“For thousands of years it has been proven that the Jewish people have the ability to 
incapacitate and destroy their enemies through 
increased Torah study and prayer.

Sign up now for weekly Torah commentaries.

We invite you to participate in over 15,000 online classes that are currently being attended by about 100,000 people around the world every week.”

What?? I thought I was being sent to a site where I could buy M-26 rockets and nukes in bulk!
Instead I am being told that my clicking on this picture and studying Torah from these people has some supernatural effect on whether or not cities in Northern Israel are bombarded with rocket attacks.
The message is clear, I don’t even need to spell it out for you, but I will: ‘For thousands of years’, the Jewish people have been subject to persecution and torment from their enemies, but they were not defeated. How do we know this? The Jewish people, as a nation, still exist today. The Jewish people were able to ‘incapacitate and destroy their enemies’, i.e. win.
How did they do this?
How did they finagle getting thousands of slaves out of Egypt, one of the most technologically and architecturally advanced societies at that time? Okay, maybe the Egyptians weren’t that good at security. They should take some help from Israel.
How did the Jewish people manage to retain their cohesiveness in exile when all evidence pointed to a contrary outcome, one that plagued the Northern tribes after they were defeated and dispersed by the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE, namely assimilation?
How did a small but highly organized and motivated Jewish community in pre-Israel Palestine defeat the armies of six nations and declare independence less than a decade after six million were killed in Europe?
The solution, according to this organization – Yad Avraham (“Hand of Abraham”) is that the Jewish people were able to defeat their enemies because they were engaged in ‘increased Torah study and prayer’.
At some level, this is an accurate claim, although there are some holes to fill.
True enough, one of the reasons the Jews did not fall prey to the ills of assimilation and loss of identity was their Torah study and prayer. By the common era (0 CE), the Jews had a codified collection of writings known as the Tanakh (an acronym for the three sections – Torah (Law), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings)), also known as the Hebrew Bible or New Testament to Christians. By 500 CE, the Babylonian Talmud, the fundamental source of Jewish law, was completed. Jewish communities around the world also followed a similar liturgy in synagogue and in daily prayer. Thus Torah study of a standard codification of Jewish law, such as the Talmud, and prayer of a similar liturgy and content, served to united Jewish communities around the world, whether they lived in Lisbon, Bialystok, Cairo, or New York City. This unity allowed the Jewish people to ‘incapacitate and destroy’ the evils of assimilation and loss of identity, which, for the Jewish people, meant extermination.
In this sense, Yad Avraham’s claim that Torah study and prayer were for the Jewish people what General Patton was for the US in WWII.
In another very important sense, I reject the notion that studying Torah will destroy Hizbullah. Torah study did not save the Jews of Europe from the gas chambers, and to my knowledge, prayer did not avert atrocities such as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the massacre of Israeli athletes by Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Pious, righteous and Torah-studying Jews wi
The other side of this claim disturbs me as well. If the Jewish people are not engaged in ‘increased Torah study and prayer’, bad things will happen. In other words, if there are atrocities, if Jews are killed or seemingly unable to annihilate their enemies, they are being punished for not engaging in these activities – for not studying Torah.
I accept that the study of Torah for its own sake has united the Jewish people, giving them strength and wisdom, but I reject the notion that lack of Torah study has brought the Katyushas or that, by studying Torah, I can stop them. Maybe I am too much of a skeptic.


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25 July 2006

Potty Training the Neighbors


So, I have been sitting here reading my morning news, and the neighbor kid (in the backyard behind us) will NOT stop screaming. Apparently he didn't tell mom that he had 'to potty'. All I got from the punctuated syllables between the sobs was "I wa.....nt sbusbsb!!" Mom, with her hands on her hips: "Are you gonna tell me next time you have to go potty?" "Yeeeess! Sob!" "Grab your pants then, right over there!" Potty training! Whew! That's one part of parenting I'd rather skip. Don't they just come out that way?
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. He finally stopped the screaming. What is it that causes kids to scream like that? Sometimes I feel like screaming, but I don't. Do these kids feel the same way and just express it more openly? Do they have no concept of the social stigma on screaming at the top of your lungs, tearing off all your clothes and running around with tears running down your cheeks?

22 July 2006

What do you do when it's 100 degrees (Farenheit)??

Look at me! I'm floating!


Ahhh! There's a fish nibbling on my belly button! Ouch! Stop!

(Thrashing, splashing. Joanna gets pulled under, is gone for a whole minute. She reemerges, having defeated the trout.



Dad quickly builds a fire and roasts the little bugger. When it has burned to a savory crisp, Sir Oliver sneaks up from behind and steals their dinner. He swallows it whole. Is there more? Urp.)

18 July 2006

Rubber Bands


Meet Zorro - quite dignified, majestic and arrogant to boot. Never has such a magnificent animal, no, being ever existed or will ever come into being again (you might say it's all in his head).
But Zorro has a secret, a fetish, if you will. Zorro, the masked cat of mystery, the fierce feline fighter, the mighty hunter, eats rubber bands.
"A cat that eats rubber bands," you say. "Absurd! Unheard of!"
You don't believe it?
Neither do I.
Mother is convinced that Zorro has a secret stash somewhere, where he deposits all the rubber bands he captures. Know where it is, mom? It's called a litter box. Yick!
It's really turning into a problem. Not a few times have I been awoken by a great tuxedo-clad beast standing on my chest, sniffing all over my neck. Oops! Forgot to take the rubber band out from under my pillow. That could have been fatal!
The funniest part of this...er...thing are the comic strips that have been turning up in the funnies lately. Seems that someone else has the same fetish. See the 'Get Fuzzy' strips below:






Maybe I need to take Mr. Zorro to therapy with me tomorrow...

I'm baa-aack!


Where did I go? Uh, nowhere. Well, I started this blog last year in a fit of whining about my boss at the YMCA. I lasted three posts. I think two people have read my blog. Me...and one other guy who left some comment about my first post. He said it was good...obviously he didn't read it. LIAR!!
Seriously, I have a much er shall we say more constructive reason for keeping this blog up to date. I grew up in Eugene (with a seven year stint an hour up the freeway in Salem), OR. (That's Orygun for you poor pronunciation-challenged people. NOT AR-E-GAN). And I am making the big move overseas in about two months. Moving to Israel. You may think I am crazy, especially with all the Hizbullah stuff going on right now, but I am not. We'll just leave it at that.
I thought it would be a good idea ('cause I am just smart like that) to keep an online journal with art (photos) and letters (entries) to let the people back here in the states in on the secret of my life in Israel. I'll try to post regularly, and I have started early so I can let you all know (maybe) just what it is like for someone like me to make such a huge move (yikes).
Well, that's it. Happy hunting!!
Signing off