Well, folks, I’m off to spend a couple of weeks in beautiful Eretz Israel.
I won’t have much internet access while there, so posting will be either minimal or nonexistent. I do promise to make up for it when I get home, as I’m sure I will have lots to say, both about the trip and about all the things that happened while I was away.
In the meantime, if you’re bored, you can browse the archives or the newly-updated Hall of Fame. I also highly recommend all the excellent blogs that I’ve linked to on the left of this page.
I’ll be back on the 19th, so have a good one, and try to behave while I’m gone.
Fly safely and hurry back! Say ‘Hi’ to my sister while you’re there.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/30/saudi.alqaeda/index.html
DaninVan, what if Sari decided to stay?
Sari, let me know if you’d like to tour the Shomron a bit or stay a Shabbat.
Josh; life is a series of “what ifs…”
Like the song says, “que sera sera”
I’d just have to find somebody else to pester.
Have a safe and wonderful trip, Sari!
You plannin’ ta visit ALL of “Eretz Israel?” Might do ya some good. Have a good holiday 🙂
AND NOW, THE WORLD NEWS:
Women Reportedly Plowing Naked in Nepal
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) – Female rice farmers are plowing their fields at night in the nude to please the rain god during a dry spell in southwestern Nepal, a news report said Sunday.
A 35-year-old farmer, Ambika Tharu, said she and other women were daring to bare all for the rain god because of a delay in the annual monsoon season and the need for precipitation for their rice crops.
“My mother-in-law said the God would be pleased and make rainfall if women till the land naked,” Tharu told the Himalayan Times newspaper.
The delay of the monsoon rains, which usually begin in the first week of June in Nepal, have prevented farmers from planting rice.
Weather forecasters in the capital Katmandu – 310 miles northeast of Baijapur village, where the naked farmers are appealing for rain – said the situation is expected to improve in the next few days.
shoot an ism idiot for me.
me too.
oh. and bring me back an ear.
Have a good trip.
oh, and you can still have a game of tennis with an ism idiot, just after the game you say “i think i’ll go get a beer now” and they say “i think i’ll go blow myself up on an israeli school bus now”.
Discuss:
Israelis Fight Palestinians in North Gaza, Kill 7
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli troops killed at least seven Palestinians Thursday in the fiercest fighting in a northern Gaza Strip town since the army invaded 10 days ago to stop rocket attacks on southern Israel.
In an ambush in southern Gaza, Palestinian militants wounded two top army commanders, one of whom had been preparing to implement an Israeli “disengagement” from the territory planned by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a military spokeswoman said.
Violence has surged in Gaza in the run-up to any withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from the area by the end of next year, with Palestinian militants and the army vying for supremacy.
Witnesses in the Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun said five of the dead were gunmen — including Nahed Abu Odah, local chief of the Islamic militant group Hamas — and two were non-combatants.
Colonel Avi Levy, commander of Israeli forces in the area, said his men reported eight or nine Palestinians were killed and one soldier wounded.
Calling the Beit Hanoun deaths “real massacres,” Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told reporters the Israeli operation in the area “happens at a time when they are talking about the withdrawal — the fake withdrawal.”
A gunman in Beit Hanoun said his squad was trying to leave town via a back road when they were surprised by Israeli special forces on the ground and soldiers firing from rooftops.
“Three (of my comrades) were killed. I crawled away. A man came out of his house to help but he was hit by a sniper. A woman and her daughter were watching from their doorstep and were also hit by gunfire,” he said.
Hospital officials said the man and the woman were killed.
Asked about civilian casualties, Levy said no non-combatants were shot intentionally and the woman might have been hit when troops laid down covering fire to evacuate the wounded soldier.
Fearing a Gaza power vacuum after an Israeli pullout, international mediators have stepped up pressure on Arafat to institute security reforms to help keep militants in check.
Envoys from the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union told Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie Wednesday the world had run out of patience with Arafat’s “empty promises” of change, said a senior diplomat.
In separate comments Thursday, U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen called in an Israel Radio interview for “broad and deep necessary security reforms on the Palestinian side so that all … terrorism and violence comes to a complete halt.”
ARMY, MILITANTS STICK TO THEIR GUNS
The latest fighting in Gaza’s densely populated Beit Hanoun area erupted on the 10th day of an open-ended operation that began after a child and an adult were killed by a makeshift rocket fired at the Israeli border town of Sderot.
“Twelve rockets have been launched since the operation started, but their effectiveness a
a makeshift rocket fired
These aren’t ‘makeshift’ rockets. The Kassams and Nasser missiles have been developed with research and development and are produced with specific plans, not hit and miss metal tubes with some explosives packed into the nose cone.
read more;
http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=21472
and
http://tinylink.com/?wG8kLb3yTv
Josh; I just copied the newspiece. Maybe they weren’t regular production models, no idea why the newservice used that expression. Maybe Hamas (or whoever) is outsourcing…
Time and time again, we see that news services aren’t really concerned about accuracy. This isn’t also about getting breaking news out quickly, it’s about sloppy reporting that isn’t even approaching minimal journalism.
Anyone wanna talk about Canadian life insurance anti-Israel discriminatory policies?
Did you know that if someone shows a pattern of visits to Israel (I suppose more than one time, ever) they are refused by Canadian insurance companies life-insurance coverage???
And how many and which countries are also on this ‘travel advisory’ list? Only one -> Israel.
Sari, I’m sorry, you need not bother to apply.
They’re probably not entitled to ask for that type of info. You probably have a far greater chance of getting injured (or smooshed)if you commute into Toronto every morning. While we’re on the subject of money; this just in on Netscape’s News:
Money Buys Happiness, But Not Sex
Great sex at least once a week is worth $50,000 in happiness, while the emotional lift of a long-lasting marriage is worth $100,000. A divorce will cost you $66,000 of happiness.
Two economists–David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England–have done the first rigorous econometric analysis of money, happiness, and sex, and their findings have turned conventional wisdom upside-down, reports The New York Times. Their conclusion in “Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study”: “Money does seem to buy greater happiness. But it does not buy more sex.”
One of the things they wanted to measure is this: How much happiness is sex worth? The answer: $50,000. That is, having sex at least once a week provides as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank. A lasting marriage offers about $100,000 worth of happiness a year, which means a single person would need to receive $100,000 annually to be as happy as a married person with the same education, job status, and other characteristics, notes The Times.
The study: This new branch of economics actually has a name: Happiness economics. It applies econometric measurements to human emotion. In this study, Oswald and Blanchflower analyzed the self-reported sexual activity and levels of happiness of more than 16,000 American adults who participated in a number of social surveys since the early 1990s, notes The Times.
The results: The more sex someone has, the happier he or she is. But when that happiness is measured in dollars through econometrics, the researchers concluded that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week offered as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank.
There was one surprise finding: A larger income does not buy more sex or sexual partners. “That was surprising to us as economists,” Oswald told New York Times reporter Eric Dash, “because by and large, we think money can buy anything.” And in case you’re wondering, the study also found that men who paid for sex with a prostitute were considerably less happy. “The ‘Sex and the City’ view of the world is falsified by the data,” Oswald concluded.
Other interesting findings:
* Married people have 30 percent more sex than their single friends and are significantly happier.
* The happiness of being in a gay or lesbian relationship is virtually identical to being in heterosexual relationship.
Just thought you should know, eh?
That was me, as if you didn’t guess…
Fuck. I’ll take the 50 grand(!)
Hanthala; you’ll enjoy this…
http://members.home.nl/saen/Special/zoeken.html