A sign in the Bank Lobby reads:

"Please note that this Bank is installing new Drive-through teller machines enabling customers to withdraw cash without leaving their vehicles. Customers using t his new facility are requested to use the procedures outlined below when accessing their accounts. After months of careful research, MALE & FEMALE procedures have been developed. Please follow the appropriate steps for your gender."

MALE PROCEDURE:

1. Drive up to the cash machine.2. Put down your car window. 3. Insert card into machine and enter PIN.4. Enter amount of cash required and withdraw.5. Retrieve card, cash and receipt.6. Put window up.7. Drive off.
***********************************************************
FEMALE PROCEDURE:
1. Drive up to cash machine.2. Reverse and back up the required amount to align car window with the machine.
3. Set parking brake, put the window down.
4. Find handbag, remove all contents onto passenger seat to locate card.
5. Tell person on cell phone you will call them back and hang up.
6. Attempt to insert card into machine.
7. Open car door to allow easier access to machine due to its excessive distance from the car.
8. Insert card.
9. Re-insert card the right way.
10. Dig through handbag to find diary with your PIN written on the inside back page.
11. Enter PIN.
12. Press cancel and re-enter correct PIN.
13. Enter amount of cash required.
14. Check makeup in rear view mirror.
15. Retrieve cash and receipt.
16. Empty handbag again to locate wallet and place cash inside.
17. Write debit amount in check register and place receipt in back of checkbook.
18. Re-check makeup.
19. Drive forward 2 feet.
20. Reverse back to cash machine.
21. Retrieve card.
22. Re-empty hand bag, locate card holder, and place card into the slot provided.
23. Give dirty look to irate male driver waiting behind you.
24. Restart stalled engine and pull off.
25. Redial person on cell phone.
26. Drive for 2 to 3 miles.
27. Release Parking Brake.

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

Garrison Keillor

Metaphor and Learning

Metaphor, analogy, imagery, and the like, not only make it easier to learn something - often they are what we know (shadows in the cave). The picture of that Neils Bohr atom comes to mind, like a mini solar system: that picture is a visual analogy, bearing no resemblance to a real atom. It is tough to integrate anything new without a metaphor to carry it into the brain. Jesus spoke in parables for the same reason. The below excerpt is from a piece by Hudson at The Ornery American:

"The very pervasiveness of this strange way humans have of explaining concepts to one another should lead us to question why metaphor is so prevalent in our communication. Why should the conflation, for example, of roses and cheeks in the same sentence conjure up images of cherubic children with the healthy pink pallor of youth? What do lemons have to do with defective cars? I believe that the answer to these questions may have its roots in the fundamental nature of human learning.

Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel has shown that memory and learning are tied to structural changes in the connections between neurons that form the functional units of the brain. Essentially, whenever we learn something new there are new connections made in the brain, and those connections are what allow us to think about the new knowledge we have acquired. It is safe to say that any bit of knowledge that we have - whether it is knowledge about how lemons taste or what the color yellow looks like, or even how it feels to be in love- this knowledge must be reflected in the physical structure of the brain."

If you can concentrate at this hectic time of year, read entire.

Craig's New Layout Boat, and some hunting photos

Layout boats fool ducks. Here's the new one, on Saturday on Long Island Sound, surrounded by Bluebill decoys. You just lie down in it and hope a big wave doesn't drown you. You tow it out and anchor it. Another boat has the dog, etc. (Click Continuation Page below to see photo of Harley)

Winter Solstice

After today, in the northern hemisphere the daylight begins to lengthen. The ancient astronomers had it all figured out - the bottom of the year, after which re-birth begins: "between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year."The precursor of Christmas festivities: Saturnalia. And, symbolically, a great place to put Christmas, regardless of whether Christ was actually born in April, because the themes of birth and re-birth, and the coming of the light, run strong and deep in the human soul.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes an ability to execute, military plans.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Taken Sunday night, with cell phone camera:

To find out what this is all about, click the ALiyah Diary Category at upper left and scroll through.

12-9-05: To Jerusalem, and not yet back.
In Jer, cafe Tmol Shilshom (the day before yesterday) sitting in
Yehuda Amichai's corner, around 5.  Today, after an early a.m. bike
ride, bad spill, bent rear wheel, I collect myself, limping a bit like
an old 'rthitic farmer feeling the rain coming on.  Deliver my bike to
Pablo to repair, check email at Ilan's, hop the bus to TA to give
lecture at Geha hospital, one of the largest Psychiatric hospitals in
Israel.  As usual, I am on the wrong bus, but relying on the goodness
of strangers, the bus driver in this case, I am redirected at the
Azraeli Twin Towers, to catch the Petah Tivka (Hope's Opening) bus to
Geha.
    Talked about dream interpretation, a paper I wrote some two years
ago, unpublished, in which I build on Erikson's idea that dreams are
dreamt at a certain moment in a person's life, sometimes embracing an
era's dilemmas, and we can explore this fruitfully, using both latent
and manifest content (the space, the time in the dream, the
physicality of it and its sensuality).  I give examples of a child's
dream, a young adult, older adult, followed by dreams in different
phases of psychoanalysis, including an elegant end phase summary
dream.
    Well, to begin, Gil Zaltzman, new head of child psychiatry, does the
usual nice introduction, then adds that I am an oleh hadash. First
quiet clapping, then across the auditorium of some 60 faculty, the
applause continues.  At the end, applause again. And good questions,
very good, making me think harder on the paper.  They ask me to stay
for lunch to talk more. The two administrative assistants attend the
talk and thank me.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Mark Twain

Auto-translation

Found it amusing when I pushed the autotranslation button on Google for this French recipe for boeuf bourguignon. Given that the translation is mechanical, it is actually comprehensible, mostly. Wasn't sure what 1 cup of flour soup meant, or 100 gms. of plugs. Translating boeuf to ox is curious. Or maybe they really mean 1 kg. of ox. Hard to find that hereabouts. And can I assume that purpose of the "grass of Provence" is to enhance the appetite? (grass is mixed herbs, plugs are lardons)

Steyn on Iraq, in Chi. Sun-Times:

"The Democratic Party have contrived to get themselves into a situation where bad news from Iraq is good for them and good news from Iraq is bad for them. And as there's a lot more good news than bad these days, that puts them, politically, in a tough spot -- even with a fawning media that, faced with Kerry and Murtha talking what in any objective sense is drivel, decline to call for the men with white coats but instead nod solemnly and wonder whether Bush is living "in a bubble."

One day Iraq will be a G7 member hosting the Olympics in the world's No. 1 luxury vacation resort of Fallujah, and the Defeaticrat Party will still be running around screaming it's a quagmire. It's not just that Iraq is going better than expected, but that it's a huge success that's being very deftly managed..."

Read entire.