Friday, November 30, 2007

Electric Dildos are Safe!

An electromagnetic field (also called electromagnetic radiation) is a region in space through which energy passes that has been created by electrically charged particles. EMFs are produced by such things as power lines, electric appliances, radio waves, and microwaves.
Many people fear that EMFs cause cancer; however, a causal connection between EMFs and cancer has not been established. The National Research Council (NRC) spent more than three years reviewing more than 500 scientific studies that had been conducted over a 20-year period and found "no conclusive and consistent evidence" that electromagnetic fields harm humans. The chairman of the NRC panel, neurobiologist Dr. Charles F. Stevens, said that "Research has not shown in any convincing way that electromagnetic fields common in homes can cause health problems, and extensive laboratory tests have not shown that EMFs can damage the cell in a way that is harmful to human health."( ...more >>)

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Bagel fo beggars, sundae's for Shahs


New Yorkers have no problem dropping hundreds of dollars on lavish meals, but the price tag on one hotel’s new “luxury bagel” might leave even the most extravagant of diners gasping for air.
Chef Frank Tujague of the Westin New York at Times Square has created the $1,000 bagel, complete with Alba white truffle cream cheese and goji berry infused Riesling jelly with golden leaves. It’s a far cry from a schmear and lox, but how does one justify such excess? No need for guilt: All bagel sales will benefit Les Amis d’Escoffier Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships to culinary arts students.
(via forward)
A day after New York City came up with a $1,000 bagel, a local restaurateur unveiled a $25,000 chocolate sundae on Wednesday, setting a Guinness world record for the most expensive dessert.
Stephen Bruce, owner of Serendipity 3, partnered with luxury jeweler Euphoria New York to create the "Frrozen Haute Chocolate," a blend of 28 cocoas, including 14 of the most expensive and exotic from around the globe.
The dessert, spelled with two Rs, is infused with 5 grams (0.2 ounces) of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold. At the base of the goblet is an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds.
The sundae is topped with whipped cream covered with more gold and a side of La Madeline au Truffle from Knipschildt Chocolatier, which sells for $2,600 a pound.
It is eaten with a gold spoon decorated with white and chocolate-colored diamonds, which can also be taken home.
"I wouldn't be surprised if soon we get a call from a Middle Eastern prince or Shah willing to give something sweet to his many wives on his next trip to the city," Bruce said.

The law of Moore


The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

TINO- Nora's Teddy Bear

Tino's face and foo pads are sculpted in japanese clay, air dried in stages to avoid cracks, his facial features are colored with acrylics and powders, shaded in bronze; browns and pinks over a skin-color muzzle. His nose and paws are rich- dark brown. All colors are sealed in matt varnish. I work without the use of molds to give each bear his individual and unique personality.
His eyes are hand made in a special technique; enhance his amazing thoughtful expression. His left eye has a green tint and the right one a golden tint.
Tino is made from a gorgeous soft curly faux fur in goldish brown with lighter tips.
Tino wears a removable silk and tulle collar, in "smoked"- brown and burgundy shades, tied with bronze ribbon that compliments Tino's beautiful fur color.
Tino is 5 way jointed with double wire armature in his arms, he can be posed in endless ”serious" as well as playful poses. He is filled with fine poly-fill, (not too stiff so he can achieve his flexibility and softness). (more on ebay)

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

November 27, 1969 Jimi Hendrix


"I remember one time in 1966 ... 67 ... I think 67 ... I played in San Francisco at the Fillmore West, and I was playing with John Mayall; Albert King was playing and Jimi Hendrix was at the top of the bill. At the end ... some guys from the Grateful Dead got together with us and jammed all night.
One time, he came to this little club in London called the Speakeasy. It was a little club that musicians came to ... Hendrix came there anyway... it was that kind of club that musicians used to go to in the evening. He wanted to play, but there was no spare guitar... I'm right handed ...and he's left-handed...and all he did was just turn it upside-down ... It was amazing to hear someone play so well...and with the guitar backwards! Jimi Hendrix could play both ways...which is quite phenomenal.
I've never met anyone else that could do that. It's like playing the piano backwards.... Because all the strings and notes are reversed. He seemed to be able to play equally well both ways ... which is quite phenomenal.
You can't learn to play one way...and I can't think of anyone that I've ever met who's left handed that can just turn a right handed guitar upside down... To turn it upside-down and play backwards. All the chords are reversed...and instead of bending a string.... You'd have to pull it.
There were a few other times that I remember ...backstage at Madison Square Garden in 69 with the Stones. He came to the show, I think he was living in NY...during his band The Gypsies period...he came backstage ... and we had a little jam in the dressing room. I've actually seen some photos of that published in a magazine a few years back. I very rarely ever saw Jimi Hendrix without a guitar. He was always playing a guitar." MICK TAYLOR
This is Jimi Hendrix celebrating his last birthday backstage with the Rolling Stones at the Madison Square Garden in New York City on November 27, 1969.
Background music is "MY LITTLE ONE" recorded by Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Dave Mason and Mitch Mitchell studio recording at the Olympic Studios in London on October 5, 1967

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Dizzy Gillespie - Swing Low Sweet Cadillac

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet and Umbrella Man Lois


They talk about the music at the Monterey Jazz Festival, but it is the writer whose words keep the early days of the festival alive. Specifically, it was one writer, the late Ralph J. Gleason

Saturday, November 24, 2007

The Irish Fly in your soup O'lympics-Spike Milligan


Terence Alan Patrick Sean Milligan KBE (16 April 1918–27 February 2002), known as Spike Milligan, was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet and playwright. He played the piano, trumpet, guitar and saxophone and was the creator, the principal writer and a performing member of The Goon Show.
There is a fly in your soup...eurojokes

Max Wall meets Spike Milligan


Max Wall (12 March 1908--21 May 1990) was the stage name of British comedian Maxwell Lorimer. His performing career covered theatre, films and television.
Wall made his stage début at the age of 14 as an acrobatic dancer in a pantomime, but is best remembered for his ludicrously attired and hilariously strutting Professor Wallofski. This creation notably influenced John Cleese, who has acknowledged Max Wall's influence on the creation of his own Ministry of Silly Walks sketch for Monty Python.
...and Spike Milligan

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

Surfer dude and An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything


An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.

Art Brut in Ein Hod


The term Outsider Art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as "Raw Art" or "Rough Art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane asylum inmates. While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "Outsider Art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as Outsider Artists have little or no contact with the
(more pictures on Ein Hod site) institutions of the mainstream art world; in many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths Much Outsider Art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
Sorin (Semion) Kahana
Levendel Bloch Gallery
Ein Hod
Opening Sat. 1.12.07 13:00
To Babushka site
More on outsider art on Raw Vision

Friday, November 23, 2007

My Prick Is Like A Mountain (Croatian Anthem)


The team may have crashed and burned, the distraught supporters will not be buying plane tickets to Austria or Switzerland, but one Englishman may be on his way to Euro 2008.
Tony Henry, the opera singer tasked with singing the national anthems before England’s game with Croatia earlier this week, has become an unlikely hero of the Croatian game after appearing to make a somewhat risque slip of the tongue while belting out the nation’s tune.
The singer, from St Albans, Hertfordshire, should have sung “Mila kuda si planina”, which translates roughly as “You know my dear how we love your mountains”. Instead, he appears to have sung “Mila kura si planina”, which, although moderately nonsensical, can be interpreted as “My dear, my penis is a mountain”.
(more on TimesOnline)

"I'm a lumberjack" at Hollywood Bowl (Eric Idle)


This sketch appeared originally in Monty Python's Flying Circus, Series 1, Show 6, "The Ant - An Introduction." We have made some changes to reflect later performances and also a few just for fun. The casting here is a bit odd as the cast did pretty much change with each performance. The original mountie chorus consisted of the Fred Tomlinson Singers, John Cleese, and Graham Chapman, but they were joined by Eric Idle and the Terrys for And Now for Something Completely Different. In the Hollywood Bowl Michael Palin was replaced by Eric Idle, and Connie Booth by Carol Cleveland, and the mountie chorus consisted of the remaining Pythons and Neil Innes
(...more>>)

Online Bookseller: Guide for the Perplexed

Since the invention of movable type the sale of new, used and rare books has been a large, steady worldwide market. The sheer love of books has segued many from collectors into dealers, the 'prestige' of dealing in a respected product has compelled others into the trade, as have the mathematics: few collectible commodities can be as readily found as books. Even in today's competitive market, book gems can still be found in such pedestrian venues as flea markets, garage sales, thrift shops and even thrown out on curbs and in dumpsters.
Prior to the Internet, finding salable used books had often been easier than finding their values. Information of all types values, bibliographic lore and edition status were jealously guarded secrets acquired through experience, expensive sets of auction record books and by plowing through piles of auction catalogs.
Years ago, the most common way booksellers discovered they had under-priced a book was to list the title in a catalog or industry magazine and receive 10 orders for the book within a day. Now, thanks to Internet book-listing services, meta-site search engines and auctions, all that has changed.; today there is a transparency to book pricing that allows virtually anyone retirees, 'once-cent wonder' types and the semi-literate to become booksellers. All that is required is an Internet-connected computer, access to books, a place to store them and the willingness to do the work.(much more on ecommerce )
for eBay selling guide click here
For Israeli best site-goto Findabook
For analog bookstore-come to Ein Hod!

A large Jewish village

Remains of an ancient synagogue from the Roman-Byzantine era have been revealed in excavations carried out in the Arbel National Park in the Galilee under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The synagogue ruins are located at the foot of the Mt. Nitai cliffs overlooking the Sea of Galilee, amidst the remains of a large Jewish village from the Roman-Byzantine period. The first season of excavations there have revealed the northern part of the synagogue, with two rows of benches along the walls. The building is constructed of basalt and chalk stone and made use of elements from an earlier structure on the site.
The excavators were surprised to find in the eastern aisle of the synagogue a mosaic decoration which to date has no parallels -- not in other synagogues, nor in art in Israel in general from the Roman-Byzantine period. The mosaic is made of tiny stones (four mm. in size) in a variety of colors. The scene depicted is that of a series of woodworkers who are holding various tools of their trade. Near these workers is seen a monumental structure which they are apparently building. According to Dr. Leibner, since Biblical scenes are commonly found in synagogue art, it is possible that what we see in this case is the building of the Temple, or Noah’s ark, or the tower of Babel. The mosaic floor has been removed from the excavation site and its now in the process of restoration. (MORE FROM NEWS@HEBREWU)

Why Bullshit Is Worse Than Lie


"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves".
On Bullshit is an essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Originally published in the journal Raritan in 1986, the essay was republished as a separate volume in 2005 and became a nonfiction bestseller.In the essay, Frankfurt sketches a theory of bullshit, defining the concept and analyzing its applications. In particular, Frankfurt contrasts bullshitting and lying; where the liar deliberately makes false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth.Rather, bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences. Whereas the liar needs to know the truth the better to conceal it, the bullshitter, interested solely in advancing his own agenda, has no use for the truth. By virtue of this, Frankfurt claims, "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
This work laid the foundation for his 2006 follow-up book, On Truth.(Via Edge)

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Babushka


Forgotten for a half-century, Kote Mikaberidze's MY GRANDMOTHER (CHEMI BEBIA/1929) is a delightful example of the Soviet Eccentric Cinema movement as well as an irreverent satire of the then still-young Soviet State system. Noted for its anarchic styles—which include stop-motion, puppetry, exaggerated camera angles, animation and constructivist sets—the film unspools the foibles and follies that abound when a Georgian paper pusher, modeled after American silent comic Harold Lloyd, loses his job. Beth Custer created a quick-paced pastiche of American jazz and blues, contemporary classical, and world folk music.
My Grandmother was heavily influenced by eccentrism, a Russian movement indebted to both pop culture and the avant-garde. Its most obvious precursor was Dada--the eccentrics were known to disrupt plays with whistles and rattles--and it drew on native absurdist authors as well. But its chief inspirations were American. The Eccentric Manifesto, published in 1922, includes a list of the eccentrics' "parents"; among them are jazz, boxing, "the cry of the auctioneer," "the jacket of a cheap pulp thriller," and "American song and dance routines," the latter identified as their favorite form of ballet. The eccentrics loved vaudeville, advertisements, and machines; "the 200 volumes of German expressionism," they wrote, "do not offer the expressivity of one sole circus poster."(more on Ein Hod Babushka)

"It's a very stupid animal."

A stuffed roast turkey is about as all-American as baseball and apple pie, but a report shows that Israelis lead the world in the amount of.
Residents of the Holy Land eat an average of 34.5 pounds of turkey per year, with Slovaks coming in second, according to a report cited by National Geographic magazine.
In a country where red meat is expensive and pork is not kosher, turkeys provide a lot of meat that can be served a lot of ways including as schnitzel, kebabs and even faux lamb chops. Ironically, the birds were first brought over to Israel from the U.S. back in the '50s.
Some other fun facts from the article:
*The U.S. raises 272 million turkeys a year.
*Hens are the usual holiday birds, harvested at about 15 pounds, while toms hit 40 pounds and look forward to a destiny as deli meat.
*Turkeys are so big they must be artificially inseminated.
*And if that isn't insult enough, Silver ends by addressing the turkey's IQ, which is nearly as non-existent as its sex life. As Silver quotes Israeli poultry geneticist Gaddi Zeitlin: "It's a very stupid animal."
The United States placed third, with Americans eating an average of 16.1 pounds annually. It’s a surprising statistic, but one theory for turkey’s popularity among Israelis is that many don’t consume pork. Turkey is native to the United States...
(via forward)

We missed canadian turkeys...

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States and on the second Monday of October in Canada.

In Canada, Thanksgiving is a three day weekend (although some provinces observe a four day weekend, Friday–Monday[citation needed]). Traditional Thanksgiving meals prominently feature turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes, though Canada's multicultural heritage has seen some families infuse this traditional meal with elements of their traditional ethnic foods. Many Canadians also consume pumpkin pie after their meal.
As a liturgical festival, the Canadian Thanksgiving corresponds to the European harvest festival, during which churches are adorned with cornucopias, pumpkins, corn, wheat sheaves and other harvest bounty. English and other European harvest hymns are customarily sung on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, along with scriptural lections derived from biblical stories relating to the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986


Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
William S. Burroughs
For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts
thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes
thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces
thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers
thanks for laboratory AIDS
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business thanks for a nation of finks yes,
thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

“Thanksgiving Prayer” was a poem first included in the chapbook Tornado Alley. Director Gus Van Sant then put together this montage whose power derives almost solely from Burroughs’ reading and, perhaps, the strange sad-old-man expression of his staring eyes at the end.
One of the many things that make William S. Burroughs unique among writers is the fact that he spent a lot of his creative energy not writing, presumably as a way to accomplish his mission of “rubbing out the word.” Burroughs painted, experimented with collage, manipulated tape recordings, collaborated on film projects, toyed with weird contraptions like the orgone accumulator and Brion Gysin’s dream machine. His interest in technology ran from the sophisticated down to the homely, as his usage of scissors and guns can attest. Contemplating the extraliterary range of Burroughs’ work, you can’t help but get the sense that he accomplished in aesthetics what Malcolm X sought to accomplish in politics with the slogan “by any means necessary.” Burroughs may have been a writer, but for him the tools of the trade were not confined to typewriters or pens. He wrote with anything that could make a mark or leave a trace, a tape effect or a shotgun blast.(via RealityStudio)

Monday, November 19, 2007

Brian's Cuts


Monty Python's Life of Brian continues to inspire an almost religious devotion among fans: at least three times this century it has been voted the funniest film ever made. But the controversy refuses to go away, and earlier this year - three decades after the film's release - there were headlines when a vicar in Newcastle screened it in his church.
A DVD edition of the film includes the deleted "Otto" scene, which features a radical, first-century Jewish revolutionary who has the same dreams as the young Adolf Hitler. Otto sports a toothbrush moustache, and, in case we still haven't got the message, his disciples all wear a symbol that combines the Star of David with a swastika. These are "Nazi Jews".
Jones insists he didn't make the cut to avoid giving offence.
"It was a very funny scene," he says, "but it wasn't relevant; it wasn't part of the story. When I took it out, the film just flowed so much better." Via Cynical-C)

Margaret Atwood :75 years after


"O brave new world, that has such people in't!" - Miranda, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, on first sighting the shipwrecked courtiers
In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.
Which template would win, we wondered. During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race( more from Guardian)

Catch 18


Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. 'Is Orr crazy?'
'He sure is,' Doc Daneeka said.
'Can you ground him?'
'I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule?…
'And then you can ground him?' ?Yossarian asked.
'No. Then I can't ground him.'
'You mean there's a catch?'
'Sure there's a catch,' Doc Daneeka replied. 'Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.'

Orr is crazy, and can be grounded, but if he asks to be grounded he is sane - and he can only be grounded if he asks. Joseph Heller complained that the phrase 'a Catch-22 situation' was often used by people who did not fully understand what it meant. Given the mental contortions of the catch, this is not surprising.

In Catch-22 everything is doubled. Yossarian flies over the bridge at Ferrara twice; his food is poisoned twice; there is a chapter devoted to 'The Soldier who Saw Everything Twice'; the chaplain has the sensation of having experienced everything twice; Yossarian can name two things to be miserable about for every one to be thankful for; all Yossarian can say to the dying Snowden is 'There, there', and all Snowden can say is 'I'm cold, I'm cold'; Yossarian overhears a woman repeatedly begging 'please don't, please don't'; and Major Major is actually Major Major Major Major.
The mad pairing reaches its apotheosis in the catch itself. As the novel says: 'Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure that he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art…'
(more from Telegraph)

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Who cares! Danny's Beer is the best in Ein Hod

An Australian has beaten the Germans at their own boozy game, smashing the world record for carrying stein glasses full of beer.
Bavarian-born restaurant manager Reinhard Wurtz, who recently became an Australian citizen, broke the record for carrying one-litre steins of beer, when he carried 20 for 40 metres last night.
With each beer-filled stein weighing at least 2.5 kilograms, Mr Wurtz carried 50 kilograms of beer and glass in the record-breaking effort.
The previous record of 16 steins was held by German barmaid Anita Schwartz.(link)

England's Victory



Israel defeated Russia last night in a game counting for the Euro 2008 Qualifiers. Incredible positive news for England. If Russia would have won tonight, England would have missed the Euro 2008. It was a dramatic game. Israel managed to score the winning goal in the injury time.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

His mother's son

On December 2nd, 1980, Romain Gary lay down in his Paris apartment, a synagogue-size menorah at the foot of the bed, and put a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson in his mouth. Seconds later, the life of one of France's most celebrated and prolific novelists a decorated war hero, globe-trotting diplomat, and notorious lothario was over. But this was more than suicide: It was the final act of mythmaking from a man preoccupied, above all, with manipulating the people and events in his life almost as deftly as those in his books.
Self-invention means blurring the facts; it is only thanks to Gary's biographer (and former lover), novelist Myriam Anissimov, that the details of his origins have been confirmed. He was born Roman Kacew in May 1914, in Vilna, Lithuania. His parents, Nina and Lebja Kacew, were Russian Jews, which contradicts Gary's various stories about being of Tartar or Cossack descent on his father's side, or the love-child of actor Ivan Mosjoukine. In reality, Lebja walked out on Roman and his mother, a former actress, when the boy was ten. Without a husband, Nina immortalized in the memoir Promise at Dawn, Gary's embellished masterpiece about their relationship invested all her energy into shaping her son's destiny. Call her the showbiz mother from hell: Her own career cut short, she was determined that fame would be visited on her son. (more from Nextbook)

Underwater Fellatio


Men may be intrigued to hear that researchers have pinpointed a gene that makes females suck up sperm through their mouths.
The gene was found in the cichlid fish, where the males have evolved a way to lure females close so that they can squirt sperm into their mouths.
As is the case in many fish species, the sight of a brightly coloured male somehow triggers females with ripe eggs to start releasing them. But in cichlids, there is a twist. Females hold their eggs in their mouths and incubate them there after fertilisation – a behaviour that is thought to have evolved to protect the eggs from predators.As soon as a female has spawned her eggs, she collects them up in her mouth. Normally, sperm released into the water by a male nearby will then fertilise the eggs.But males of certain cichlid species in east Africa have evolved a way to increase the odds that females take up their sperm. Oval yellow markings resembling the eggs are found on the anal or pelvic fins. When a female approaches the male, she thinks she sees an egg on its fin, so tries to vacuum it up in her mouth – and get a mouthful of sperm from the canny male in the process)more from New Scientist)

DNA origami


Paul Rothemund compares his work to "casting a spell" -- and it does seem akin to magic. By writing a set of instructions, he can cause bits of DNA to fold themselves into a smiley face, a star, a triangle. Sure, it's a stunt, but it's also a fascinating window into the possibility of self-assembly at the smallest of scales. In other words: today a smiley face, tomorrow a micro-microprocessor.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

...we just happen to like small format


The Miniature Book Society, Inc. is an international non-profit organization chartered in 1983 by the State of Ohio. Its purposes are to sustain an interest in all phases of miniature books, to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and to serve as a clearing house for information about miniature books. MBS is an organization interested in promoting ALL aspects of the book arts(...more>>)

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Danny "Bill Gates" Verhovsky

Time Warner's U.S. Internet giant American Online is once again using Israeli technology to help it battle its rivals. This time AOL's answer to Google and Yahoo! is Israeli startup Yedda from Kfar Malal.
Only a few days after buying Quigo, AOL has decided to buy the question-and- answer-service site (www.yedda.com) for tens of millions of dollars.
Yedda's 20 employees have developed a semantic search engine that can analyse questions and requests. The site invites users users to post questions, and then asks others to answer the questions or match them to existing answers.
The founders of Yedda are CEO Avichay Nissenbaum, 41; chief technology officer Yaniv Golan, 35; vice president of research and development Osher Frimerman, 44; and entrepreneurs Daniel Verhovsky and Eran Sandler.

"Daniel Verhovsky - master of the Yedda stove pipes, making all the pieces actually work. Between Yedda and his new born, still finds time for endless hours of WoW gaming. A vocal supporter for adding “Advanced Search”, and, last but not least, his skills as a former truck driver often come in handy".

(more from Haaretz)

Sunday, November 11, 2007