One of the blogs that I read on a regular basis is called Israeli by Day, American by Night. Today I was catching up on some reading and saw this post about bulldozers and construction in Jerusalem and the aftermath of the two recent bulldozer attacks.

Now, I strongly suspect that at least one, if not both, of those attacks were not "terrorist" attacks, but cases of individual men just snapping under the strain of life. That happens everywhere, and when it does it doesn't get political overtones unless there is an ethnic twist. For those of you who haven't noticed, it was in the USA during the 80's that the term "going postal" was coined, and I think that's just exactly what happened here, too. No one started fearing the postman or claiming that postal workers were terrorists. They were mostly white postmen shooting up their coworkers, too, so there was no reason to pull the race card. The problem is that our bulldozer incidents did have an ethnic twist, so there is absolutely no objectivity about the situation.

The post at Israeli by Day is fantastic, because it shows both how this can happen, and how events like these effect ordinary people afterwards.

Last weekend we spent the day exploring Tel Aviv-Yafo. Here are some videos from the day.

There are more videos to come, plus an article about the rest of the day. It was a great one, seriously.

You'll notice that these are a) shorter than many of the recent videos and b) better quality than most. I took them with my phone camera without using QIK for streaming straight to the Web. The advantages of this are that it uses less battery and the video quality is much better. The major disadvantage is that I only have so much space on my cell phone memory card. Also, for those who see these videos as they happen through Qik, there's basically nothing for them to see and no way to send me messages while I do the video. Let me know, though, what you think. Should I just forget about the QIK stuff? Or should I keep doing live streaming videos in addition to these compilation blog entries?

There's a bit of a trend going on in Israeli advertising these days in which advertisers imagine what our neighbors and other folks who don't like "us" or something about their product would have to say. There are two of these commercials from Satellite TV company YES. One is of ultra orthodox men in black coats and hats singing and dancing about how terrible YES HDTV is because it allows you to sin with clearer pictures. (You know, 'cuz you shouldn't see all that stuff they have on TV...) There's another commercial in which the Iranians get all excited about destroying Israel until they realize that their war timetable is going to interfere with watching their favorite Israeli TV program.

There's another commercial for a fuel efficient Nissan that depicts Arabs cursing the car because it saves so much fuel. I've heard that this one has gotten a reaction. Someone (or ones) has launched a website .. duh-duh-duh! ... cursing Nissan because of the ad.

Ummmm... duh... "We don't do stupid stuff like cursing cars because they are fuel efficient, and I CURSE YOU for even suggesting that we would!!"

Can people just stop being caricatures of the worst of themselves for a minute? PLEASE?

Miriam Schwab at IsraelPlug suggests that someone should start an initiative called "Sense of Humor for Middle East Peace"

Now, there's one piece that all falls into place with that FOX news piece. MBC ran a story about the ad and then started a conversation about how Israelis are fueling profits with "hatred and racism". Shall we compare this to the sorts of things in Arabic TV that fuel hatred against Jews and against Israel? This commercial is a JOKE. That lovely mouse that taught Palestinian children to hate Jews and was "killed by Israelis" after getting too much international attention was NOT A JOKE. Can you see the difference?

I think Miriam is right. We need a "Regional Get a Sense Of Humor Day" here.

Luis Tarraga is originally from Bolivia but has lived in Israel far more years that I have. I found him playing music in the downtown area of Petach Tikvah and grabbed this video. You can find more of his music, as well as information about booking him and his partner Sigal, together known as Los Chaskis, for an event at http://www.loschaskis.com

Our original intention had been to head down South to a nice dark place to watch the Perseid meteor shower, but we left the ice rink (where I coach) a little late, and so we missed the last ride from the last train station to where we meant to go. Soooo... I made up for it to my sprog-man by making a couple of videos with him and then going out for dinner at the mall.

The quality of these videos is really choppy. The dark makes it even worse than usual, sorry.

Today I have some videos for you that aren't mine. They are tourist fluff, sure, but they're kinda pretty. Never fear, more wonky QIK videos of the streets of Israel will be here shortly. :)

This one is from Israel-on-Blog. See also http://www.visit-tlv.co.il/

And here is a slide show with music called "beauty israel" (sic) from mahra999 on YouTube

There is a meme on the Internet in Hebrew that Petach Tikvah doesn't really exist. It's equivalent to the Iowa doesn't exist meme in the US. This idea tickles my fancy, so I've started writing stories set in an imaginary Petach Tikvah, too.

This photo was taken on the pedestrian bridge that goes between Belinson Hospital and The Big Mall in Petach Tikvah. on 21 July 2008 with my cell phone.

The look and feel of this site (and the main AlwaysSababa site) has been bugging me for a while. It just didn't feel right. So, I did a little hunting and I found this Bluebreeze theme on Theme Garden. I like it. I need to create a nice semi-transparent star of David motif thing for the logo to replace ol' Drupalicon in the header and in the favicon spot, but other than that, this theme just sort of fits, I think.

Let me know how you like the new look.