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12-22-05 Persimmons and Shaheebs

    Yesterday was my Friday on Kibbutz.  Pruning -- Khoftzim -- the very
limbs from which we were picking  -- Koftzim -- persimmons in the last
few weeks.  A lonelier day in several ways: the Bedouins have packed
up, back to their Kfar, the limbs are shorn of their colors, although
the leaves cling to some green, the sky is a Chicago gray, threatening
or promising rain, it is colder.  I, late, hail a cab, then call
Moshek who brings me to joining the two
Thai regulars.  Later, Moshek gives me some quick demography of
foreign workers and their experiences, at least on kibbutz. My best
remembrance of numbers is some 200,000 workers: the Thais in fields;
the Phillipinos in the homes for elderly; the Chinese, in
construction.  The Chinese are well-regarded as efficient, hard
workers, with only occasional complaints. The Phillipinos, mostly
women, leave behind family, even children for one, two years, are
dedicated, quiet, shy. The Thais, well, I have told you a bit about
Shai.  Moshek describes trying to hire workers form former USSR, the
last wave of immigrants ('90's) many of whom (perhaps 40%) came with
questionable claims to Jewish paternity or maternity and came for
economic reasons; would prefer to be in the US, Canada, Europe.  Many
have built a life here (I think Moshek is being polite or kind at this
moment), but misery for the men in particular. The women snap up jobs
-- with the elderly, kitchens and such.  Hebrew is learned in these
settings.  The men, Moshek thinks, coming from a hierarchical setting
in which their word (and fist) ruled, dismiss such "demeaning" work.
They wave off the Ulpan crap, dismiss job offers they consider below
them, and if they do take a job and find it unsatisfactory, bolt.
Yes, since the last wave of "Russian" immigrants, more prostitution,
crime, violence and plenty of alcoholism.  The irony here, I learn at
the end of the day, is that Moshek's grandparents came here from
Russia in the '30's, helped build this kibbutz, this country. But a
bit more later.

Robust, synergistic and scalable solutions to overutilized language: Just think outside the box and you'll be good to go.

Here's a site for trite, cliched, and over-used words from the tech world. Here's a list of annoying words from 2003 - still annoying. Here are 18 nasties. Lake Superior State University has begun work on their 2006 List.

This is from an email making the rounds:

The London Blitz

Scroll down this page and check the "Bomb Damage" section, which they offer in three levels of map resolution. The preservation of St. Paul's is as remarkable as the extent of the devastation of the bombing and the V1 and V2 rockets.

It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

Will Rogers

Maggie's Farm Data, And Thanks

Our gracious webmeister and good pal Chris informs us that Maggie's Farm had about 200,000 "hits" in November and between 500-2000 "unique visitors" daily. It varies quite a bit, with a long-term upward trend.

That's not very impressive, given the world's population and the size of the blogosphere, but we have only existed since late February. We had plenty of "hits" on the blog's address last month, but I don't know what that really means. Do they read us? Are they just quickly checking to see if we have something new? Are they very quick scanners like me? Are are they lost in cyberspace? Or looking for Dylan lyrics? We have no idea. 

"Visitors" is just an index of how much time is spent on the blog, and where you decide to set the threshold for the measuring software. We set it at a "very long" 5 minutes, which is a lifetime for our high IQ quick readers (except for Rick - haha - gotcha back, buddy).

We have no other information about you, our dear gentle readers, other than how you got here - eg, Yahoo, links, searches, bookmark (please bookmark us - it's easier access for you), etc. We know nothing about who you are, unless you tell us.

Being greedy, ambitious, vain, human, and lots of other unpleasant things, we'd like that visitor number to be 10,000, 100,000, or preferably 1,000,000. An exclusive boutique with a secret Walmart hidden deep inside. But markets rule in this blog game, as they must, and we do our best to please ourselves and find good stuff, in the hope that others will value what we do. If they don't, it's their loss. We enjoy doing this for the time being, and it makes us think things through, learn stuff, and polish (?) our casual writing too.

But today, I just want to focus on that word "unique." Definitely. If you are a Maggie's reader, you are a member of a unique club, and we deeply appreciate your interest in our unusual and eccentric eclectic publication. Please send us around to your friends, relatives, and enemies, if you enjoy us.

Happy New Year, and Holiday Thanks for being part of The Farm. Y'all come back real soon.

Georgetown Univ. to host hatefest: LGF. Isn't "tolerance" a beautiful thing? And isn't it interesting that "tolerance" is always a one-way street (anti-American culture, anti-Christian, anti-Jew, and anti-Western civilization)?  But this is Jesuit Georgetown! To whom I pay an extraordinarily hefty and seriously life-cramping annual tuition...say $70,000 pre-tax income. So please forgive me if I ask "WFT?" Front Page covers it in detail.

The Idiot's Guide to Victimhood, by Dr. Sanity (H/T, RWNH)

ACLU upset by DOJ investigations. Stop the ACLU. May I ask, one more time, why they are supported with taxpayer $ when their mission appears to be to destroy their country? We would be safer and better off giving the money directly to the Al Quaida idiots instead of passing it through the ACLU bureacracy.

Pilot maroons drunk passenger on desert island. Telegraph. What is this world coming to? First, they won't let you smoke, which makes everyone cranky and edgy and psychotic, and now they don't want you to get drunk and act up either. What kind of pussy world is this? Dump the bombers out the window without a FISA warrant, and leave the poor drunks alone. But OK, it's a funny story and the jerk deserved it, no doubt.

CNN's sleazy and secret deal with Saddam: Atlas

Forever young: Powerline says it all here - some people are lost in the 60s.

New Year's Thanks to our soldiers

As Mudville quotes George Orwell: "Good men sleep peacefully in their beds because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

This cowgirl sends her best wishes to our men, and says "All cowgirls prefer a military guy."

Turtle Conservation

Among the many predators of sea turtles, Mexicans with the notion that they enhance potency may be the most devastating. So there's an ad campaign. Worth trying. Story here.

Moral of the story: Guys who like turtles get the hot babes.

If your dog is fat, you aren't getting enough exercise.

Anon.

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:

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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.