Month: October 2008

  • Hebrew-speaking dogs.

    I’m sitting on my couch and I hear a scratch at the door. My first thought is, did a jackal from the forest across the street come all the way upstairs to haunt me? My second thought is, it does, however, sound like a dog. After peeping through the door, I realized it was a…

  • Live, in Israel.

    Last night was the first time in a long time that I remembered I am in Israel. I was driving through the winding, narrow streets of Katamon listening to the radio. A campaign ad featuring Nir Barkat came on. I had a flashback to my first ‘term’ as an olah chadashah. It felt good.

  • Ynet resourcefulness.

    Does anyone else find it funny that Ynet used very little resourcefulness to fill in an appropriate stock photo for this article, under which they captioned it, ‘Resourcefulness’?

  • Presenting: the sukka boat.

    Like the water? Even on Sukkot? No problem. You can build a giant sukka on a giant boat: Big boat… …big sukka. Found on the Herziliya marina yesterday.

  • Birkat Kohanim at the kotel.

    I had never seen it, and my dad is of the priestly persuasion, so the three of us went down to the kotel in the Old City yesterday to hear/see/be present at the ginormous Birkat Kohanim for chol hamoed Sukkot. Birkat Kohanim – known as ‘duchaning’ in Ashkenaz circles – is like a representation of…

  • Making an ass out of Israeli marketing.

    Anise: it’s the stuff behind arak, licorice, a new flavor of Wrigley’s Airwaves gum… …and it’s the butt of waaay too many inappropriate jokes, courtesy of the company’s Israeli distribution sector:

  • And a happy 'queer rite of Jews' to you.

    Because I already have posted my past homemade sukkot, New York and ghetto Israeli style, I figured I’d post my first own semi-respectable Tzur Hadassah sukka: Spacious because we have a decent-sized mirpeset. Sturdy, because we have paychecks that can buy metal poles. And fun, because I did a search for ‘sukkot’ on Google Images…

  • Ella Valley winery.

    My father’s in town, and as I got my habit of fermented grape-consumption from somewhere, we took him over to Ella Valley winery. The Ella Valley is just about my backyard, nestled in Matte Yehuda. It’s lush, it’s green, and according to the winery’s 6-minute propaganda video, it’s the perfect place to grow the right…

  • Return our sons to our borders…

    A reminder message from the airport parking pay station: How many more chagim will pass before Gilad Shalit comes home? (How many airport parking tickets will we buy before there’s a new message?)

  • Not my kind of hot dog.

    As we know, there are always going to be some things that get lost in translation. And one of those things will always – always – be the weiner hot dog. Big Willie? Really? That’s the kind of hot dog I want to eat at a gas station rest stop on erev Shabbat?

  • Avoiding headaches over Yom Kippur, Jerusalem-style.

    Ok, coolest thing ever. It’s not the fact that there might be a way to prevent headaches over fast days; I’m not much of a headache-sufferer myself. It’s the fact that Shaare Tzedek – the Jerusalem hospital that is conducting the study – totally started it and framed it in a way trying to ease…

  • Progress.

    Here’s how you know you’ve developed as a student over years of Israeli grad school: First semester of Israeli grad school, three long years ago, you were told to write an end-of-term paper using the proper guidelines of the university’s thesis policy. You scrambled to find it after being told it was ‘somewhere on the…