A Message of World Peace

From Flight of the Conchords:

If every soldier in the world
Put down his weapon and picked up a woman
What a peaceful world this world would be
Redheads not warheads
Blondes not bombs
We're talkin' about brunettes not fighter jets
Oooh Oooh it's got to be Sweet 16's not M-16's
When will the governments realize it's got to be funky sexy ladies?

Here's the video.

I know this is a bit old but these Kiwis are hilarious!

Happy Hannukah All!

Me, Armin and Noam - Because That's How I Roll Biatches!

This post is part of Common Sensorium's "History Series"

So there we were at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning in July 2004 in Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera. The sea of hotties parted to reveal the hottiest of them all, Armin Van Buuren, World's # 1 trance DJ for 3 years running (he was #3 at the time - he's really picked up his game since then). The moment yielded this picture, our greatest souvenir from our one month trip to Turkey with the possible exception of Erkut's beach towel (long story, can't get into it now but Noam knows what I'm talking about as he was the perp ;-).

click all pics to enlarge them
Notice Noam flashing the 3 there for #3 DJ in the world!

Armin was super nice - and not ditzy at all despite his uber-blond hair and generally 'I'm an awesome Trance DJ guy' attitude. In truth, he actually didn't seem full of himself at all and was just a normal guy and wanted to know how we liked the party.

So how did we come to meet the man who is currently the world's #1 trance DJ? All week in Bodrum, where Noam's old Harvard roommate, Erkut Kokobiachi's parents, have a beach house in Turkey's finest, honeyest beach town, we kept seeing signs for the 'World's #3 DJ, Armin van Buuren'. The party was to take place on a boat (with a light up glass bottom that allowed you to see the ocean underneath!) called the Catamaran that sailed out to sea at 10 p.m. and returned at 6 a.m. Armed only with the vodka red bull in our bellies and our best impersonation of Eurotrash, we set sail on the Gulf of Gökova in the Aegean Sea with Armin's trance synthesizer our syren's song.

In general, our trip to Turkey was awesome - I got a really good impression of the people and country. Turks know how to have a good time but they're also a pretty intellectual bunch and it was cool to be in a country that is 99% Muslim and tell everyone we were Jewish and see what sort of reactions we got (they were mostly positive).

Here are some more pictures from our magical evening with Armin van Buuren, World's #1 Trance DJ, because that's how I roll biatches!

Oh no, too much vodka and red bull!

Is that Armin van Buuren's Jewish stunt double?

And finally, a YouTube video with Armin vB spinning on the party boat (it may actually be from 2007):


Work it Armondo!

Just a Game

So I've got the NFL.com football package which gives me access to live streaming of every NFL game and it's been great. Sunday has fast become my most anticipated day of the week as I wait for friends to gather, drink beer and eat crap I'd never get away with eating for dinner (we had hot dogs in blankets this week).

My favorite team is the NY Giants. I grew up watching Big Blue win the Super Bowl when I was 10 (the famous Gulf War game) and have been a fan ever since. Recently, the G-men knocked off the undefeated New England Patriots to win their 3rd franchise championship - an especially sweet victory due to the way it went down (the 'Helmet' catch and last minute drive to put the Giants on top).

This season has been a fairly disappointing one for the Giants thus far but they went a long way towards salvaging things on Sunday with their 2nd win this year over the hated Dallas Cowboys. As I see it, the Giants really have two problems this year: an erratic defense and an inconsistent offense. After starting out 5-0, they failed to score more than their opponents 5 of the next 6 weeks - something I blame both their defense and offense for. At 7-5, they're on the bubble to make the playoffs. Hopefully they continue to score more than their opponents - if not they will lose games and not make the playoffs.

Which is the great thing about watching football: it's a good excuse to get together with the guys and have some fun but at the end of the day, it matters not whether your team wins or loses. I'll never understand people that go into some sort of deep depression if 'their' team loses. After all, it's just a game. And I get to eat my hot dogs in blankets and drink my beer and see the guys whether the Giants win or lose.

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

So I had a very Israeli experience at the pharmacy today. I was in Gilo picking up my vitamin B12 which my doctor is obsessed with for some reason (every doctor seems to have some similar obsession - it's exercise for my Dad, Vitamin D for Simone's Mom) and there was the usual long line to get service. I initially sat down next to this 20-something arsy girl (that the sephardic equivalent of white trash for those that are unfamiliar with arsim) who looked pretty ill. Then she started up with the hacking cough. My immediate instinct was to move to the other side of the room. But she was indignant and called out to me, "What, you think I have Swine Flu?" to which I responded, "I don't know, do you?"

I'm not normally a paranoid type with these things but I figure with an 8-month old in the house, I can't be too safe in the age of Swine Flu (though I'm not afraid of it personally - I don't think it's all that dangerous for healthy adults).

The real kicker came on the flip side. I went to the ATM to withdraw my money for the week and there was hacking cough girl smoking a cigarette. I sincerely hope she didn't have Swine Flu as it seems to attack the respiratory system more than other bodily systems. But whatever she had, I'm pretty sure smoking a cigarette was the last thing she should have been doing. Only in Israel!

Fort Hood Shooting an Act of Islamist Terror? A Little Honesty Please

If you can heal the symptoms but not affect the cause
Then you can't heal the symptoms

- Tom Marshal, Lyric from Phish song 'Sand'

It's probably a bit odd to quote a lyric from the least political band ever in a very political piece but it's very appropriate in this case. The mainly left-wing American mainstream media and our current administration have refused to even contemplate what I think most intelligent Americans know to be obvious: That Nidal Malik Hasan committed the worst massacre on an army base on U.S. soil as a result of his holding a radical Islamist ideology. If that's not terrorism, I don't know what is? And what do we gain by playing some idiotic semantic game, as the Obama administration would like?

So what's the big deal? A murder is a murder, right? And if what happened on Thursday in Texas was terrorism, why isn't the Oklahoma State Bombing or Columbine or any number of other incidents?

Well first of all, I'd argue any incident committed out of an ideology that preaches hatred and mass murder is indeed an act of terror. The notion that only a muslim can commit terrorism is downright offensive; anyone can commit an act of terror and the ideologies that can lead someone to commit so horrible an act are varied. In my experience, the people who commit these sort of acts within open and free societies rely on an ideology of some sort that demonizes large swaths of their fellow members of society and that demands vengeance and mass murder as a result. So there's nothing qualitatively worse about radicalized Islam then say the far-right ideology that led Timothy McVeigh to murder hundreds in Oklahoma City. It doesn't matter whether the terrorist acted alone or as part of some larger group. It's the ideology and targeting of a specific national, religious, or sexual group or orientation simply because they're members of that group that makes an act a 'terrorist' act. (Thus, a military targeting fighters that accidentally catches civilians in the crossfire is not committing a terror act.)

That being said, to deny the background that led to this most recent attack, to use Orwellian news-speak as the NY Times has in refusing to even identify the shooter's religion for over a day after the attack and fail to report details like that he screamed 'Allah Akbar' as he opened fire is downright dangerous and extremely dishonest (not that I expect honesty from the media ;-). Because it places a barrier to preventing this sort of act in the future. As in the AA's 12-step program, the first step to arriving at a solution is admitting you have a problem and identifying very specifically what that is.

As Mark Steyn wrote in the National Review this weekend in his excellent piece:

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.

If you can't even admit that ideology exists and is at the root of this sort of act, then you can't fight it or stop it. And if this root cause isn't properly addressed, I assume this sort of act will happen again and again on U.S. soil. And President Obama will be digging his own political grave, because mainstream media denials aside, the American people are pretty perceptive when it comes to this sort of thing and they're gonna want to know why their men in uniform are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and strategic ignorance in the face of a threat that won't simply go away because we pretend it doesn't really exist.

Naked in Fairfax County, VA

So apparently, being naked in your home carries up to a year in prison in Fairfax County, VA. The Washington Post reports here. Eric Williamson was making breakfast naked is his own home, minding his own business when some cops arrived at his door and arrested him. Apparently a mother and her 7 year old son were passing by and saw him and did the obvious thing to do in that situation: they called the cops. They would have made for fine informants in Nazi Germany but that's besides the point.

Viewing nudity as some mortal sin stems from an overly Christian view of the human body in my opinion. If all sexuality is evil, then exposing a naked body, even in your own home, must be some sort of cardinal sin. Makes me glad I live in Jerusalem where the thought of imprisoning someone for this sort of thing would be laughable.

It also reminds me of a run-in I had with the law in Fairfax County, where this absurd comedy of justice is taking place. The year was 2002 and me and two friends (Eytan Bayme and Noam Osband) had done a 2 week spin from NYC down to the first Bonnaroo in Tennesse, then to Memphis, Little Rock, and New Orleans across the Panhandle and back up North. By the time we were passing through Fairfax, our car (the famous 'Lissmobile' '89 Red Astrovan) was a total mess. It was 2 a.m., Osband was at the wheel and got lost and made an illegal turn. Big mistake in Fairfax. We were immediately pulled over and 4 cops spent the next 2 hours combing over every inch of our van until 4 in the morning. They of course found nothing except a legal pill case with prescription medication.

Every so often, the Alpha Male of the group would say 'I know that's ecstasy in the pill case - you boys are in a heap of trouble.' He also asked us if we were following the Dead around - I had to break him the news that Jerry Garcia had died 7 years earlier. He was a pretty sorry excuse for a human being, relishing every tiny bit of authority he had. They also found fireworks which though legal pretty much everywhere south of the Mason Dixon line were illegal on that one stretch of road we happened to find ourselves on.

To conclude, if you happen to ever find yourself in Fairfax County, VA, run like hell. They don't look kindly on people like yourself, unless you've never before had a bottle of prescription medication in your possession and of course never been naked, even in your own home.

There Go Those Horrible Settlers Saving Another Palestinian Life

It's a shame some news doesn't get reported by the liberal-oriented western media. Anyone who knows me knows I'm certainly not the biggest fan of the settler enterprise. But last night pulling out of Efrat in the West Bank just past Bethlehem, I noticed a scene I have come upon once or twice in the past. An Arab family was sitting at the gate looking on hopefully while Jewish paramedics in full settler attire (if such a thing exists) were working frantically to save a Palestinian from a neighboring village. Being that Efrat has better first response medical supplies and personnel than many of the local Palestinian villages, Palestinians in dire need come right up to the gate of this settlement for emergency care when they truly require it.

I'm sure there was no time for these 'settler' paramedics to take a security history of this dying Palestinian. He or his family could have been terrorists or terrorist sympathizers for all they knew. But a human being in need showed up in desperate shape and they treated him as any decent person would: like a human being. Race, religion or creed played no factor in their medical decisions. And if the settlers were so damn dangerous, would a whole family of Palestinians really risk coming right up to the gate of a settlement and risk getting medical treatment? Clearly they wouldn't.

The NY Times, Haaretz, and assorted European media outlets should take note: Things in the territories are rarely what they seem. Or do some members of the western media elite already know this and choose to paint a far more black and white picture of things anyway just to further a predetermined agenda? Either way, these sorts of omissions in reporting on life in the Territories is nothing short of criminal. And instead of focussing on things that bring could people together, they create an unnecessary level of distrust between people for no real reason.

P.S. Thanks to Simone for this title - she exclaimed it immediately after we witnessed the scene described above and I instantly knew it would be the title of my next blog post.