I try to avoid filling up with petrol on a Friday morning. There’s a universal custom at filling stations here that anyone who buys more than a certain amount of petrol gets a free paper. Since the Friday paper is much larger than on the other days of the week, and costs more, most of […]
…when I read this comment by Ozzie on Hirhurim: Once went to a housing fair in Israel. Went to a Chareidi booth and I was not wearing a hat or jacket, my wife was in a tichel and denim skirt. We were told immediately that the development was only for chareidim. I pointed out to […]
…or, “More things that Israelis do and nobody can explain the reasons for” Drive to a parking lot about 500 meters from your house. It will be full to overflowing, but you can always double park in the access road. Set up your bonfire 10 yards down-wind from somebody else’s. At intervals during the evening, […]
It must be something in the air: the dust had hardly settled from everyone wishing Naomi Chana Mazal Tov on her engagement to D, and now Noa is engaged to B. I hope they’ll all be very happy.
In response to popular demand (well, one comment from Talmida), I’ve uploaded larger, non-animated images of the front, inside and back of the invitations. The graphics are all taken from “carpet pages” from 14th century illuminated Biblical manuscripts. The quotation on the inside is from the Babylonian Talmud, Hhullin 89a: Rabbi Meir said, “Why is […]
No reason why I shouldn’t blow my own trumpet occasionally. Here is the invitation we designed for Aviad’s Bar Mitzvah, using motifs from illuminated manuscripts, and I think it came out very well:
I wasn’t going to blog about the US election, but this was just too interesting to pass by. First of all, correlating county-by-county election returns with geographical data from the Tiger database is just so superbly geeky. Secondly, it struck me that there’s a very strong correlation between voting Democrat and living near large bodies […]
Thanks to Talmida for the pointer to Speculative Grammarian, which I think is the best online linguistics magazine ever. My favourite article so far: “The Original Language of Winnie-the-Pooh“.
Every terrorist attack brings its own horrid variations on the same old tragedy. On the news tonight we heard someone describe how he had been sitting next to the suicide bomber for part of the bus journey until he had given up his seat to a woman and moved to the back of the bus. […]
Update: some more details of the preparation added. We aren’t an all-the-year-round Hamin eating family, but the period during the summer when we don’t eat Hamin (otherwise known as cholent) gets shorter every year, and this year it seems to be over already. Like everybody else, I, and I alone, know the One True Way […]
Teen girl to teen boy: “I can’t stay later than 12: my parents told me to be home by 10.”
A few pictures here.
Searching for tickets on Orbitz I get this error message: “Flexible date” searching is available for destinations in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Please enter a new destination or change to “dates not flexible” search. Firstly, why the hell didn’t they say that on the previous screen? Secondly, do they […]
Since Daniel frustrated me yet again by writing a blog entry in a strange Gallic language, and since my knowledge of the aforementioned Gallic language is good enough to read Asterix and Tintin, and good enough to see that the aforementioned blog entry was probably interesting to me; but nevertheless bad enough that I didn’t […]
And the winner is: The Weather Underground. Try playing with your Accept-Language header and reloading.
While debugging some issues with Japanese IMEs today, I experimented with entering my own name to see what would happen. The normal way to write it in Japanese would be in Katakana, シモン, but I tried converting it into Kanji to see how it came out. The result was: 諮問 I asked a coworker what […]
Syrian President Bashir Assad, rejecting criticism of Syria allowing Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to operate offices in Syria: “Of course we don’t have, in Syria, organisations supporting terrorism. We have press officers.” A recent press release from the Jihad: four killed and three wounded during their Sabbath evening meal.
I have often thought it ironical that Paul McCartney and I happen to share our birthday. Everyone in the world is either a Lennonite or a McCartneyite, and I am a fanatical Lennonite. Recently Paul has sunk to new depths by crediting Lennon-McCartney songs to “Paul McCartney and John Lennon”. Somehow this reminds me of […]
Heh. Daniel is funny. For the record, you can get Chinese food in the Middle East, though you might have trouble ordering sweet and sour pork. I own a recipe book of “kosher Chinese cooking”, in which all the pork recipes have been changed to beef. It’s a rather sloppy job: the typeface is visibly […]