Colourful Semitism

Antisemitism is on the rise. Whether it is from the rocks and firebombs thrown in the Caucuses, the salutes of French comedians and soccer players or the ink from newspapers, it is all against the Jews.

Image of New Statesman Cover from wikipedia commons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No-one is surprised. There are no cries of 'leave the Jews alone'. I've written about it before here and here. That's fine. That's why Israel exists, you know like all other religions have their own country because they've been the recipients of hatred so much, like the Christians who have....sorry. The Muslims have...

Anyhoo, I was reading a few articles about the rise of antisemitism from such august bodies as The Guardian, The BBC, The New Statesman, The Jerusalem Post and of course, The Times of Israel and realized that if only the Jews had followed the more colorful of their ancestors, maybe the hatred wouldn't be so fanatical?

Over at Buzzfeed they have some great photographs of Russia in the early 20th Century from the Library of Congress, and I found this amazing image that would have made antisemitism nothing if not more colourful!

kthanxbai!

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101 Kinds of 'Wow' - Zach Galifianakis

Way back in December 2013 I wrote a little piece about giving His Majesty the Justin of Bieber some respect for interviewing with Zach Galifianakis. I had no idea that this charming individual was taken so seriously as to have politicians come to his studio and his 2 ferns.

And yet, here is the most powerful man in the world. In between 2 ferns.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama from President Barack Obama

Yeah, it blew my mind too.

kthanxbai!

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Game of Thrones, Season 4

"I liked the product so much, I bought the company" to paraphrase Victor Kiam in his legendary Remington shaver commercials of the 80's.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I love me some Game of Thrones. I liked the TV series so much that I bought the books, on my Kindle Fire. Boy - is that an amazing series of books.

L-E-G-E-N-D-A-R-Y. No, literally, he writes about legends.



The TV show is great, and I'm really looking forward to the 4th series, but if you can, I strongly recommend you buy the books. Well worth the time and money invested.

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Revenge Is Sweet

Jeff Gordon with the Subway Fresh Fit trophy in Victory Lane. Photo by Jordan McNerney, AARP. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jeff Gordon is a top NASCAR driver, and a bit of a hero of mine too.

About a year ago he joined up Pepsi to scare the bejesus out of a car salesman, by disguising his looks and then taking a car for a test drive. With the car salesman in the passenger sit, not knowing that he was driving with one of the top drivers in the USA.

The salesman's terrified reactions, and subsequent reaction to discovering it was a NASCAR driver all along, earned the Pepsi spot more than 40 million views on YouTube.

Not everyone was so impressed with the stunt, many taking to the interwebz to deride young Mr Gordon as a fraud and a falsifier. One of those deriding the stunt was Travis Okulski, a reporter for the Jalopnik website.

Okulski's words seem to have annoyed Mr Gordon, or at least, given those clever chaps at Pepsi a way to make yet another cheap and easy ad ;-)

in the ad below, Gordon disguises himself as an ex-con (I did 10 years inside) cab driver who gets pulled over by the local law enforcement. What ensues is quite funny, and I just wonder what I would do if I were in Mr Okulski's situation.

The video has just under 14 million views at the time of going to press.



"So, just as I was able to say with total certainty that the first Pepsi Test Drive ad was totally fake, I can say with total certainty that this second Pepsi Test Drive ad is unequivocally, one hundred percent, totally, absolutely real," Okulski writes.

Youc an read Okulski's side of the story here: How Jeff Gordon Scraed The Crap Out Of Me With This Epic Prank

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Just Plain Ugly

I was watching an amazing National Geographic show about the American Wild West, narrated by none other than his amazingness, Timothy Olyphant, of Justified fame.

The show is either great or abysmal - I'm still undecided. Its one of those shows where they stand on the precipice of good taste by making analogies of basically everything. in this instance, to the Old Days of The Wild West. There are 'Homesteaders', 'varmints', and they even call a banana snail 'Slick'.

Yes, its that bad.

On the other hand, the photography is stunning, showing us another angle to the western side of the USA.

Oh, and the ugly? That'd be an underwater elf shown as an aside in the first show.

Yup - just plain ugly.

kthanxbai!

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How To Peel A Banana Like A Monkey

Been peeling your banana from the top down? Well, yes, you've been doing it wrong your whole life! Watch and learn.





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7401 - So Moving

This article moved me so much I just had to share it:

As a child growing up in the Bronx, the last four digits of Terry Noble's phone number were 7401. Coincidence: When Terry was assigned a social security number, the last four digits were 7401. And years later, when he found himself as a volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel - where he now called himself Tuvia Ariel - he worked with a carpenter whom he respected.

The carpenter was a wiry, solid man, dedicated, the silent type. Ariel learned that he was one of the few who had escaped Auschwitz and survived, that he then joined the Polish partisans, then the British Army. It sent him to Palestine, where he deserted to join the Palmach, the Jewish fighting force, and helped Israel win her independence in 1948.
Quite a history.

But more than awe piqued Ariel's curiosity about this survivor's experiences in the Holocaust. Ariel had read the number tattooed on his arm. The last four digits were 7401.

"Don't talk about it!" Ariel recalls the carpenter telling him forcefully, painfully. "I lost my whole family, my mother, my father; there was a brother in back of me, a brother in front of me - I'm the only one left. Don't bring it up again!"

Ariel didn't.

Except once.

Tuvia Ariel is a man with many stories. In fact, he is a story: the man who was once a famous musician's adviser and arranged for kaddish to be recited for an estranged Jewish radical; the man who put in a stint at Yale Law School and was a soldier in the U.S. Army in Israel during the 1956 Sinai war. He tore the "USA" from his uniform and, looking like an Israeli, hitched his way down to the Sinai Peninsula, ready to fight, only to find that the war had ended two hours before.

I was told in advance how colorful Ariel was, but nothing prepared me for the likes of a comment he made one hour after I met him on Friday afternoon. I knew he had a new leg. I knew it was breakthrough for him. But who gives thought to such things? Who wonders what it is like to be without a leg, or with a new one?

Praying in the synagogue on Friday, I sensed nothing unusual as Mincha came to an end. Suddenly, Ariel approached me, almost in tears. "This is the first time in my life I prayed the Shemoneh Esrei standing up. I have never been able to address God like any other Jew, beginning the prayer by taking three steps forward, ending it with three steps backward..."

As follows:

Ariel was raised in a non-observant home, in which the Shemoneh Esrei was not recited. Then he went to Israel to volunteer. In 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he saved his life by cutting off his own leg as it got caught in a machine he operated on a kibbutz - a machine that sucked his leg into its grinder and from which the rest of his body escaped only by his quick and gruesome self-amputation. A little over ten years later he became a religiously observant Jew. By then he was rotating between a wheelchair, crutches, and artificial legs, which, however, could never keep him standing still long enough to pray the Shemoneh Esrei.

Then, that Friday, he did it. After walking home (only three blocks), he choked up again, "That's the longest I've walked in 22 years."

He was fitted with a new leg only shortly before - the day the Berlin Wall crumbled. He found his new leg innocently enough. Ariel was in the United States at the beginning of 1989 on a business trip.

He saw an advertisement, featuring a new kind of plastic developed for spacecraft, also used for artificial limbs. The ad featured amputees engaged in vigorous basketball, not from wheelchairs, but standing up, running, passing, even jump-shooting. A regular game.
Not with people amputated below the knee, but above the knee.

Ariel thought to himself that seeing this was like seeing a grandmother, who had died long ago, suddenly walking down the street. When he lost his leg 22 years earlier, he never thought he would see himself live normally again - and here were people just like he was, playing basketball.

He inquired and was directed to an advanced prosthetic clinic in Oklahoma City. For above-the-knee amputees the old system had the stump rest on the prosthesis, which caused pain and circulatory problems and often did not work well, sometimes not at all. Using the new, flexible, rubber-like plastic, the new prosthesis grips the stump, which not only relieves pain and circulatory problems, but also better channels the energy and movement of the stump into natural, leg-like movements.

Even in advance of receiving his own leg, Ariel was not satisfied to give himself new life. He wanted it for all the above-the-knee amputees in Israel. So he had a long talk with the prosthetists in Oklahoma City about bringing this technology to the Holy Land. They agreed to train Israeli prosthetists in Oklahoma City and to travel to Israel to train Israeli prosthetists there, provided only that Ariel supply the plane tickets.

Ariel's goal reached even beyond making the technology available in Israel. He aspired to establish a "Hebrew Free Limb Society" to provide a limb to the amputee as a loan, until - only a person like Ariel has the right to make this pun - "the amputee gets back on his feet."

Strictly speaking, it is not idealism that motivates Ariel. It is something more - his sense that he has been designated as an angel of God before. He has reason to think this, and the way he sees it, his years of suffering now make him a messenger again - to help those whom the world forgets. Why is he certain he has been an angel once before, thus able to be so once again?

Ariel volunteered on two kibbutzim. The one where he lost his leg preferred that he leave the country. He was an embarrassment to the kibbutz. But Ariel would not leave Israel, no matter what. It took him about five years of various struggles to get into tourism schools; and somehow, between cars, crutches and artificial limbs, which kept him in pain and then went bad altogether, he remained a tour guide for 15 years.

Toward the beginning of his career, when he was low man on the totem pole, he was assigned to pick up tourists at the international airport in Lod and to bring them to the main office, whereupon an experienced guide would take over.

One day he picked up an American, ostentatiously wealthy, ostentatiously dressed and mannered. Even crude. Ariel could not bring himself to be friendly, so he was formal. Halfway from Lod to Jerusalem, the tourist, a perceptive man, yelled, "Pull over!" Ariel pulled over. The man barked, "You think I'm just a materialistic American tourist, don't you? Well, I've paid my dues!" He yanked up his sleeve to show Ariel a number tattooed on his arm. Ariel looked, almost went into shock, and before he knew what was happening the tourist was saying, "I lost my whole family ... a brother in front of me, a brother in back of me..." Ariel's mind burned.

The man's face was florid. Ariel calmed himself, saying simply, "Was your brother's name Shimon?" The red face turned white. "We're turning around, I'm not taking you to Jerusalem."

Ariel made a U-turn and drove one-and-a-half hours to the kibbutz where he had worked with the wiry carpenter, near Afula. The psychic noise in the car was palpable. Finally Ariel reached the kibbutz and then the carpenter shed. He saw his former supervisor for the first time in ten years. Without introduction, he said simply: "Was your brother's name Reuven?"

The carpenter's face turned white.

Ariel returned to the taxi, unloaded it, told his American tourist, "Come. I am bringing you to your brother."

He led him to the carpenter shed, did not enter - did not want to infringe on the privacy of the moment - then made a U-turn and drove to the entrance of the kibbutz. He stopped, and wept.

Why?

When he had seen the number tattooed on the tourist's arm, the last four digits were 7-4-0-2.

Source: Virtual Jerusalem

kthanxbai!

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Food For Thought

Okay, I don't actually have astonishing news, but I did watch a pretty standard video that blew my socks off.

What's Cooking? with Jamie Oliver (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jamie Oliver is a British chef who grew up as the son of a landlord, near where I grew up, in Essex (yay!), England. 'Pub grub' is common fare in the UK, always nice for a spot of Sunday lunch or for a family meal midweek. but Jamie has always tried to make it healthier.

Part of that change is from the 'carrot' of having good healthy food and thus, over a period of time, being fitter, happier people.
The 'stick' part of his process is to show just what is in the food you are currently eating. Mix the two aspects together and you have a food revolution.


Or do you?



Quite scary how they have literally seen what goes into their food and still choose what they did.

Mind blowing!

Its an uphill battle folks...


kthanxbai!

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Frosty Bum!

The Olympics are here, well, the winter ones anyway, and its time for me to reminisce about some great times I spent with some simply marvelous people. Whats the connection? Well, one of them couldn't come to my wedding on Valentine's day many moons ago as he was in charge of the ice skating at the Olympics that year!

Oh yeah, I'm connected.

English: Ice skating in the Canada Centre, Metulla, Israel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used to travel in connection with ice-skating. Memories abound of traveling to the middle of nowhere, normally off-season, to spend weeks in empty hotels watching angry parents push their kids to be the next Torvill & Dean, or Michele Kwan.

 Many a cry of 'frosty bum' as a young lady fell over during her sequence, and probably half a flask of 'medicinal' rum was most afternoon's menu. But it was fun, and the people were great.

Admittedly, similar to dressage, the discus and the 200m hurdles, and unlike the biathlon, figure skating is of absolutely no use in the real world. It is however, very pretty, concise, artistic and I for one am very happy that I get to see Olympic quality skaters every 2 years, as opposed to a summer Olympics every 4 years.

kthanxbai!

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More Pomplamoose Magic

Back in November (yeah 2013, that seems so long ago doesn't it?) I wrote about Pomplamoose's latest  music video so imagine my surprise when hi-tech guru site Mashable blogged about Pomplamoose's next video which I hadn't even seen yet!

Pomplamoose + Mashable = awesome

pomplamoose (Photo credit: reidspice)

kthanxbai!

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Coke, No Ice Please

Nothing personal, I just don;t think this coke needs any ice.



I always like watching fire, its what we men do so well! Watching rocks so hot that they melt just blows my mind.

Mesmerizing...

kthanxbai!

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