Oh Larry! Spies always get caught! How could you be so foolish?
There are some good posts about the spy story leak around the blogosphere today.
Dave, looking really special in his new home, does a run down of the Arab press coverage of this incident.
The Jerusalem Post has a source which believes that this leak was sinister and nefarious at it’s origins. That it’s an attempt to discredit Bush and his neo-con buddies on the eve of the RNC. Interesting.
According to Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo, the meat of the story has more to do with Iran than Israel.
And the always intelligent Head Heeb believes the leak “as much to do with American election-year politics as with either Iran or Israel.”
Allow me to be honest. I was actually relieved to hear that Larry Franklin wasn’t a Jew. I just can’t stand to hear that dual loyalty argument again. It does my head in. Allow me to go off on a irrelevant tangent….
While I was in the army and had a month off to visit America I went to Albany to speak to the Hillel on campus and to get drunk with my friends who were still in school or hadn’t gotten around to leave the city yet. I was downing my fourth of fifth pint of Guinness when a friend of a friend kept bombarding me with questions about my life in Israel and the army. He considered me a traitor to America for not making my life in the USA (USA! USA!) and moving to a foreign country (Bet he wouldn’t have had a problem if I was living in Thailand or Singapore). I found his myopic view infuriating and that he couldn’t “get” the concept of dual citizenship. He then asked the most unintelligent, ignorant, dumb as nails question that infuriates me and puts me into a rage whenever I hear it:
“If Israel and America were in a war whose side would you choose?”
I explained that I had never thought about the issue because it is completely irrelevant - Israel and America are staunch allies and America supplies Israel with a hefty sum of money for defense and stragetically. As a satellite state, Israel’s stability in the region is of the utmost importance. I was expecting violence - and at this point I would have welcomed it (it was the poison I was drinking). Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. He just glared at me with a puzzled look for a very long ten seconds and walked towards the pinball machine.
Israeli Windsurfer Gal Friedman scores himself a gold medal.
I think it’s cool that Israel’s first gold is in windsurfing.
We bought our digs about a year ago and haven’t done much in terms of giving our place a bit of flava. The Wife and I have declared the last months of 2004, “The Season of Home Improvement.”
So I had a really exciting week. We antiqued and distressed Ikea purchased bookshelves (yes, I had a hot dog) and painted the entrance way to our apartment.
What? You want to see photos? Sure!
Click here, here, here and here to see different angles of the bookshelves.
Click here to see the digusting vile bright green our entrance way was painted.
Click here to see the new tranquil and welcoming shade of blue.
So we were on a real high. We were so excited. Then my brother in law called and told us that he won an all expense trip to Miami to the Video Music Awards courtesy of 92.3 K-Rock. He is going to get to see if Linsay Lohan has implants or not! Now that is exciting!
Apparantly when he won, the DJ asked him who he is looking forward to see. Well, my bro doesn’t really listen to the radio all that much (so he says!) so he replied with the first name that came to his mind - Jessica Simpson. Nice one K-lo.
Then what happened is truly amazing. The Wife and I realized that we were excited by painting walls, putting together bookshelves and all the other DIY projects we have on our agenda. And we sobbed.
I fail to see what the big deal is with Jdate’s use of porn models in their advertisements. Everything else in this world is sold by using sex so why not Jdate? And did anyone honestly believe that Bracha from the Upper West Side was going to look like “porn model” Kari Gold? And what the hell is a “porn model” anyway? Porn actress maybe, but porn model?
Anyway, I know that a lot of religious folk looking for serious partners use Jdate. I also know many people who currently use or at some point used Jdate for the purpose of getting laid.
Haaretz has found that the site’s banners systematically use fictitious characters based on pictures of models taken from pornography sites.
The changing banners carry pictures of different women, all of them young and attractive, and they all invite the surfer to “chat.” Apart from Hila, you can meet Sharon, aged 26, who is also very pretty and single, and like all the girls, she too is looking for a Jewish husband from a good family. At least, that is what the banner says.
But Sharon is Devon Sweet, a model whose homepage says she is a shy student from the United States who “is carrying out an in-depth study into the popularity of bisexuality among young American girls.” And what about the Jewish husband from a good family?
The question no one is asking. How did the reporter of this article come to realize that this photos were of “porn models” and not real women on Jdate? Hmmm.
Heil to Albany!
So SUNY Albany once again deemed America’s number one party school. I was a student at Albany in the mid-nineties and while I had a great time I never got the impression that we partied any more than any other school. All the parties were the same and quite boring to be honest. I never actually did a keg stand, but I was once dangled over a balcony by my feet while woodchuck cider was poured on my face. This was done by friends. admittedly, I was quite inebriated at the time. When I was placed upright my fists flew in the direction of the instigator. I missed him and put my hand right into the wall.
Thankfully, my Dad helped me repair the hole on one of their visits. I don’t remember what I told my Dad caused the hole. Hmmm.
Well, nights like the above were not the norm for me. I preferred to play music with friends, discuss eastern philosophies and metaphysics at coffehouses and I once spent 14 hours trying to solve a Physics equation.
I also spent a shitload of time involved in Tagar, combating the anti-Semitic propaganda of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party and the strong Nation of Islam presence on campus.
Albany may have been ranked as the number one party school by Princeton Review but the other rankings are even more telling.
Ranked Number 1: Professors Make Themselves Scarce
Ranked Number 3: Bad Food
Ranked Number 3: Least Happy Students
Ranked Number 1: Their Students (Almost) Never Study
Ranked Number 2: Campus Is Tiny, Unsightly, Or Both
Ranked Number 2: Dorms Like Dungeons
Speaking of Dorms Like Dungeons…
As a student I had published a humorous tabloid called The Toilet Paper. It was one page and I distributed it by taping an issue to the inside of every bathroom stall on campus. It was quite funny and not very well circulated. My stories were always of the satirical nature and always critical of the campus and administration. I wrote an article about the inhuman size of the dorm rooms and compared them to the housing of primates at the Bronx Zoo. The people at the Bronx Zoo were incredibly cooperative. I know I have an issue somewhere in the inner bowels of my file cabinet…gotta find that. Good times.
Sometimes I just don’t have anything to say.
The cowardly Iranian
World Judo champion Arash Miresmaeili won’t be competing in Olympics due to the fact that he weighed more than the 66 kilogram limit for his class. Miresaeili carried then Iranian flag in the opening ceremonies Friday night, and is one of the most experienced in his sport but suddenly made a amateurish “error” and was deemed unable to compete.
And now, the rest of the story.
Miresmaeili’s first match was supposed to be against Israeli Ehud Vaks. There is no question that Miresmaeili would have wiped the floor with Vaks but Miresmaeili, fearing retribution in his own country and ignoring the “spirit” of the Olympics refused to compete.
Story here.
Jerusalem City Council member David Hadari has had a change of heart. Last year he called for the Jerusalem Municipality to change the name of Gaza street because of the name association of “Gaza” with “terror.”
The city councilor, David Hadari from the National Religious Party, had originally asked Mayor Uri Lupolianski to change the name of Rehov Azza to Dr. Yosef Burg Street, in memory of the late National Religious Party leader who lived on the street “in order to win a symbolic victory over Palestinian terror which originates from the Gaza Strip.” The central city thoroughfare, lined with trendy cafes, small boutiques, and residential apartment buildings, is located in the city’s upscale Rehavia neighborhood.
His waffling on this incredibly important “issue” explained:
“Regretfully, since I raised the request to erase the name Gaza from Jerusalem [city streets], Sharon’s bad unilateral disengagement plan has come into the world, which will erase all memory of Jewish settlement in this important area,” Hadari wrote Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski on Monday.
“Changing the name of Rehov Azza at this time is likely to be viewed [erroneously] as support for the disengagement plan – something I neither agree with, nor am interested that the Jerusalem Municipality should be seen to be getting involved in,” the letter reads.
Then why did you write this fucking letter and send it to the press?
The Jpost’s Calev ben David discusses the Jewish aspects of The Big Lewbowski and his experience at the Israeli premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival many moons ago.
DUDE: It’s all a part of your sick Cynthia thing, man. Taking care of her fucking dog. Going to her fucking synagogue. You’re living in the fucking past.
WALTER: Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax – YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I’M LIVING IN THE FUCKING PAST!”
YOU HAD to be there; believe me, I’ve never heard a Jerusalem audience laugh as hard as it did that night.
I was at the same screening. It was indeed a sight to see. The dialogue threw everyone off guard…all that talk about Shabbos and Herzl. It was truly a surreal experience sitting in Sultan’s Pool, watching the dude drink White Russians with the Old City as a backdrop. The other thing I remember about that night is that I forgot my jacket and I was cold.
I once read that Ethan Coen served in the IDF (in a tank unit) but I can’t find anything online to back that up…
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