Food Friday

It has been a food Friday here at home. The wife catered on Wed and she has a huge picnic to cater tomorrow. So the fridge is full to bursting and we have been eating very well. Her friend Jill, who is one of those really good people you can always count on, also caters and explained that the family must always get first pick. I like that. There are salads and sandwiches, brownies and chips - all sorts of goodies. There is food everywhere on every surface. Its not all that good for the diet though.

Going to the dogs.

I think this is an excellent commercial. That's all. It's Thursday and I'm tired and worn out. My lost filling seems to have turned into a 2 hour dentist extravaganza next Thursday which includes another unrelated tooth. I have been at work every day by 5:15am this week and still I have not managed to do all I planned. I now have the weekend to finish my paper on fieldwalking. At least there is a lot of food left over from bwo's catering gig. Who says onion quiche is not for real men. Enjoy the dogs - it's where my life is going to.

900 Capsules of Coffee on the Wall.

We narrowly averted a crisis at squint central today. Our new batch of coffee arrived just as we were running out. 900 capsules of LavAzza's best. I am not sure how long this lasts, probably less than a month. Not bad when you consider there are maybe 20 or so serious coffee drinkers in the office. I am not able to start my day without my double espresso. There is god in the foam.

Jeff Healey

I have been listening to a lot of The Beatles the last few days. Someone here at squint central brought in the new Stereo Box set and I have been listening to it on random play. "While my guitar gently weeps" is ONE of my favorite Beatles songs of all time. So I went looking for it on the YouTube. I found the classic Concert For Bangladesh version, where George Harrison puts a heroin fogged-out Eric Clapton to shame. It's worth a watch. But then I found this unbelievable Jeff Healey version. I always liked him, back from the first time I saw him in a stupid Patrick Swayze movie. He was blinded by retinoblastoma, a rare eye cancer, when he was a little baby, and died of cancer in 2008. His guitar more howls than gently weeps, excellence I tell you.

The Human Spark

One of the less enchanting things about living here away from the centers of the civilized world is the fact that more and more sites are disallowing access to media based geography. I am able to avoid some of these problem by owning a US credit card and some sympathetic family in Texas. So I can still buy music from iTunes and amazon does not give me grief. But, I have run into serious issues with streaming media from places like the BBC, ESPN and others. So I was overjoyed to learn that PBS (Public Broadcasting) in the US allows access from anywhere.

I heard quite a lot about the Alan Alda documentary called "The Human Spark" and was surprised when my download dealer (bwo) said "Hey you can watch it on the PBS website". So tonight I watched the first part. It covered a subject I find most interesting. Why did modern humans survive and Neanderthal's die out? I still don't know and don't think anyone does, but the show is well done and well worth wasting an hour on.

Of course, not all is rosy. It crashed both Firefox and Google Chrome and would only run on Windows Explorer. You can't have everything, I suppose.

Purim

Oops, I nearly forgot to blog today. I have to say it seemed a very 80% sort of Purim this year. What with the rain and all (everyone says it always rains on Purim, but it has not rained for five years before this) there were very few dressed up kids on the streets of Raanana yesterday, and I saw none today. I hear Tel Aviv was quite a blast, but here it was rather sad. The only thing of excitement that happened today is that one of my teeth seemed to have cracked and bits of tooth are falling out. This has never happened to me before. So it's off to Cecil the dentist, with me.

Tel Michal

I woke at 5 as usual this morning. I heard the sound of the rain and rolled over and went back to sleep. By the time 9am came around there was a break in the clouds and so the boy and I decided to go somewhere close by. It is difficult to find anything closer than Tel Michal (Makmish). It's a small tel overlooking the Herzliya Marina (and Arena Mall). It is maybe 5 minutes walk from squint central.

Tel Michal was probably a maritime fort or small harbor and was occupied intermittently from the Middle Bronze Age II (around 2000 BCE), and reached it peak during the Persian Period (586-332BCE). The ancient city was spread over five small hills and sherds of pottery from all the periods of occupation can be found on the sand (Bronze Age, Iron Age, Persian, Hellenic, Roman and Byzantine periods). Excavations took place over four summers (77-80) and there is a nice report for those interested.
It is pretty incredible, I have been past this tel thousands of times. I used to run past this wall on the Karkur cliffs overlooking the beach back in the old days, yet I never knew this tel existed. Until today that is. This is the view approaching the tel from the north side.
This is the corner of the wall of what I believe was a Roman fort that eventually was abandoned as the big fort and harbor at Appolonia took its place (Appolonia is about 3Km north).
This is the view of the marina and the mall's parking lot from the top of the tel.
There are definitely remains of walls here.
This is some sort of bath or something. The site was still wet from the heavy rains. But besides the strong wind the weather was fine for us. (It started raining again a few hours after we left).
The view of Tel Aviv to the south from the top of the tel.
The boy examining the millions of ants out sunning themselves after the rain.
It is springtime in Israel. The side of the tel was covered in wild flowers.
This is the highest part of the tel with the Oceanus in the background.

That was very cool. I was looking at this map this morning to see if there was anything interesting to see close by when I found this tel. Its a great resource and although the map is a little out of date, the pointers to the various interesting places are very relevant. That was a nice way to spend an hour.

Size Matters

First they gave us Masbirim, where the geniuses in charge of Israel's international image decided to use everyday Israelis to promote the country. Now "The Canadian Council for Israel" put together the following clip to promote Canadian students to come visit. I have no issue with the using sex to entice visitors, but this is just a little lame. Just show them a perfect fallafel bursting with fresh salad and tehina, or a delicious plate of humus and a fluffy pita, with some pickles and harif. Now that is really sexy.

The Dog Ate My Post

Last night I got home from work and it was raining. Hard. I was looking forward to climbing into my bed early with a nice book. I had decided to give myself a break from reading about surveys and fieldwalking and pottery sherd distribution on colluvial slopes. So I picked up the "Lord of the Rings", which I reread every few years. I was still marveling at Tolkien's masterful use of language, beginning in the introduction, when the lights went out. This is nothing new. We have a lot of power failures in winter, especially when it rains. The kids checked the neighborhood lights and it became clear this was a problem localized to our house.

The boy went downstairs and started flipping breakers. Nothing seemed to work. On further inspection it became clear that there was a serious problem with the GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter - the blue breaker that always seems to be the first to go). There was no way to get the circuits in the house to all turn on. The best we could do was turning on the lights in the kids rooms.

Last night 9pm was also the first program in the TV series that we are rumored to be appearing in. We knew we would not be in the first show, but still received quite a number of phone calls to synchronize the family around taping or watching the show. Clearly we could do none of this, as the TV was not getting any juice. Along with the rest of the house. Between calls we scrambled madly for candles and flashlights. It was all rather a lot of fun. Blackwifeo slept through all this.

I arose at 3am to the annoying beeping of the alarm telling us that its battery backup was failing. I tried all the circuits again and still no luck. I managed to recharge the battery enough to have it stop beeping and went back to sleep. The angry alarm awoke us all again at 6am. It seems there is no way to turn the dammed thing off (a safety feature I guess). We got the kids off to school with a minimum of threatening and scrambled eggs. Bwo called the electrician at 7am. She woke him. All this time I tried every combination of breakers and could never get more than three circuits to work and never three useful ones at that.

Arie the electrician arrived just after 8. He took one look at the circuit board, flipped all the breakers - and we heard the beeping and whirring of appliances turning on all over the house. Just like that. I then identified how the squints at work must feel when they bring me some miserable, dead piece of hardware only to have it work in my office. Arie went around the house and checked the outside sockets. He claims that there must be a short to ground somewhere - this was causing all the circuits to trip. This does not really make sense to me, but then I'm not an electrician. He sealed all these sockets with silicone sealer took his money and went off.

And that's my excuse for why I did not post yesterday, and I'm sticking to it.

Up

When it has been a tough day all around and you get home tired and weary. When your shoulders hurt from holding your head up all day. My advice is to listen to Peter Gabriel's Up, the whole thing from beginning to end. I don't know why, but this particular album is working for me at the moment. Excellence in any form.

Placebo/Bowie

Jo here posting Tunes for Tuesday.
Petero has had an exceptionally exhausting day, what with waking up at 5am, slaving away all day at the salt mines and attending a squints wedding on the other side of the country. He then rushed back to pick me up just in time for my 10pm CT scan appointment in Tel Aviv. Just got home. Whew.

So as a favor, I am posting for him. Poor baby. I've decided on Placebo featuring David Bowie. This live video is crap, but the song is awesome.
So here it is - Without You I'm Nothing.



PS: This song was background for a super hot scene in the U.S series of Queer As Folk (episode 219 if anyone is interested- Brian and Jason doing it in the shower.) Tick Tock.

Das Capital

There is so much to rant and rave about today, I am not sure where to start. I could go off about the settler fools who decided to risk soldier's lives by breaking through a barrier in order to pray in a synagogue in Jerico. Or that our far-sighted PM decided to add Rachel's Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron (serious West Bank) to the 'heritage list' - I'm not sure what inclusion on that list means, but I have a feeling it will not end well. Then there's the matter of the family of five who got wiped out on the Arava road today. Then there is the ongoing mess with that assignation in Dubai. Oh, and it rained mud early this morning, messing my newly cleaned car. All this and more.

But, in fact the thing that got me the most worked up today was the incredible need of Hebrew Speakers To Capitalize Every second Word In Email. Now I know there are no capital letters in Hebrew, and so this may come as a shock to the natives, but there are some rules of capitalization in English. We use them to start sentences and proper nouns. There are a few other places that they are acceptable - But Using Them For Every Word In A Sentence Is Just Plain Wrong.

Scarves

So, I'm supposed to be the obsessive one in the family. Last week (It feels like it was last week) blackwifeo declared "I think I will crochet some scarves". These are some of them (yesterday's batch I think). She has, of course, given most of them away, but she is producing a scarf every 20 minutes or so. She does not seem to be able to stop. We don't even have a proper winter.

Tel Zayit (and Tel Burna)

This morning I set out alone. My family wanted to sleep in, so I was all on my lonesome. I decided to go check out two tels near Beit Guvrin (around Beit Nir and Gal On). Neither of these are huge and well known sites, but both are interesting in their own light. Both were on, or close to the border between Judea and Philistia during the old days.

I first visited Tell Burna. I came upon the webpage for this tel while looking for interesting places to check out. In June 09, the two guys responsible for the upcoming excavations held a survey. Their website shows some of the results nicely illustrated, using GIS (I assume). They found pottery spanning the Early Bronze Age (3200-2300 BCE) through the Middle and Late Bronze up to the Iron Age I (1200-1000 BCE). They found some Philistine pottery, so even though the city was on the Judean side of the border it seems they interacted with the Philistines.
The tel itself is surrounded by a formidable, if rusty barbed wire fence and seeing I was on my own, and with bso, the fence expert, I decided just to walk around the tel and look at it from all sides. I wish these guys a lot of luck with their dig this summer. It must be exciting to have your "own" site that you can track from idea, through survey to excavation.
My only company at 6:30am was this flock of birds that flitted around from spot to spot just in front of me. Israel is wonderfully green at the moment and the Beit Guvrin Valley is no exception.

After a nice walk around Tel Burna, I drove off to Tel Zayit which is just past Kibbutz Gal On and probably not more than three kilometers down the road. This tel has been excavated a number of times over the last few years and it appears they will be digging there once again this summer. The ancient city on the tel seems to have been a border town with almost continuous occupation from the Middle Bronze Age (around 1800 BCE) to the Ottoman period (1517-1917 CE). Neither of these cities has been officially named, although either one of them could be the biblical Libnah. It's hard to put a definite name to an ancient city unless some writing or other specific characteristic is found on site.

They dug here in 2009. You can see the remains of the excavations.
Most of the site was covered with black plastic, but it seems to have been blown away by the weather in this corner. You can see the stratigraphy in the walls of the pit.
The view from the top of the tel is excellent. If only Israel could stay this green all year long (then it would not be Israel I suppose).
If you look closely at this picture you can see the sandbag staircase the excavators use to climb the tel. It is still in perfectly good condition even though there has been some rain.

I made myself coffee and ate the wife's excellent homemade granola bars for breakfast, while sitting below Tel Zayit. By the time I left, around 8:30am, it was getting quite hot. I like visiting these smaller sites that have not been completely excavated (although nothing is really ever completely excavated), I will go back and visit these once after the digging season. Both sites have good web pages and that makes a lot of difference.

Friday Morning

Some days things go well. I got up this morning and it was Friday. The sun was not yet up when I had my double espresso and I swear there may be god in the foam. I did a little work on my essay, threatened the kids and ensured they got the bus on time and then took my usual Friday stroll down to the center. Most Fridays I take a walk into the center, check the post-box, buy some nuts (garinim and almonds) for the weekend and then walk back. This morning I was on a mission. Blackwifeo has been in the throws of spring cleaning and it was time to do my bit. I needed to find a replacement light for the fridge, a replacement UV bulb for Frank, the bug Zapper, and two replacement rechargeable batteries for our two cordless phones (so we can go ahead and lose them somewhere in the house again). Oh, and I needed to get some plans of a Fox bender copied for a fellow luthier in the US.

I am usually happy to be successful on just one of the four missions I set out with, but this morning I scored on all four. I found the replacement bulbs and the right rechargeable batteries. Then I moseyed on over the Chen Copies (opposite the Iriyah - city offices). I got there just as the copyman unlocked the door. I sat down on the chair he offered, we chatted about the unseasonable heat and how there is no rain and how this is our biggest problem here in the desert. I showed him my plans. "No problem" it will take a minute and would I like some coffee. He agreed I could take his picture, but could not understand why on earth I would want it. I don't know his name, I'm afraid, but he is one of a dying breed in these days of Office Depot and Quickcopy. I can't help liking Friday mornings in Raanana.

A Symposium

I'm a little tired today. Its been a hard week, as usual. I went to an Archaeological Symposium at the University of Tel Aviv this evening. I tell you one good thing about archaeology - there are quite a lot of old people involved. I felt quite young sitting out there in the audience.

Masbirim

O.K. So the government decided that Israel has a "declining international image", and so has utilized its secret weapon against the negative vibes - Israelis. I mean it. Check out this site: http://www.masbirim.gov.il I'm afraid it's in Hebrew, but basically it tells you how to be a good ambassador for Israel overseas. The fake news clips are cute in their lame way. "Together we will will change the picture" is the slogan. I suppose it's cheaper than having an independent inquiry into the Goldstone Report.

Radar Love

This is just too cool. This must still be one of the best driving songs of all time. This video is just so seventies - perfection. As the banner claims in the beginning, Golden Earring were in fact one of the only Dutch bands to ever really make it on the international scene. We loved dancing to this song when I was in high school. I just love this video, pity it ends so abruptly at 4:17.

Hey You!!

Yes you! You know I'm talking to you! Yes you, the Rabbi dude, dressed in your black jacket, white shirt furry hat. I mean you driving the white Mitsubishi with the "Mashiach Now" bumper sticker, standing next to me at the traffic light on Sderot Yerushalayim. Look, I can see you picking your nose. I'm sitting here watching you wipe your finger on the window. I see you examining your finds - maybe you're looking for gold. Please be reasonable and make sure you wash before you shake hands with any of your congregation. OK. Sometimes I just wonder.

Death Star Canteen

I saw this clip a while back and it is very excellent. I was reminded of it again yesterday. Eddie Izzard is one funny dude. It works so well in Lego.

Seeing as this makes the perfect Lego sketch, here's another version.