just, like, stuff

February 8th, 2010

Hormones suck. They can make you feel as bad as if you have the flu, which is exactly the way I’ve felt since Friday. I’m extremely busy this week with exams and grades. I’m also preparing to do a major catch-some-cats and spay them. My neighbour Nachum is willing (and happy) to cover the cost of 20-25 cats on my street and on Oshishkin, provided that Sharon and I can catch them and get them to Ronen. That is such fantastic news that I’d be dancing around if it weren’t for fear of yakking, heh. First on the list is Gingi Shalosh Reglayim (Gingi 3 legs), who as a much smaller kitten (he’s about 6 months now) got caught in the motor of a car and had his tail nearly cut off and lost the use of one of his back legs. He gets ill quite often, never having gotten proper medical care –another neighbour did take him in to the vet when it happened but couldn’t keep him inside long enough for him to heal properly or get all the meds he needed. So Nachum wants Ronen to do a full care-taking of him, even if it means removing that back leg –personally, I think he is better keeping it as he seems to be able to use it a bit for balance but, on the other hand, being outside if he were to get it caught in something he’d not be able to get himself free and could do himself worse damage. We’ll see. He will at least get all his shots, vitamins, be neutered, and hopefully get his eye infection cleared up. He is incredibly sweet and gentle but everytime I see him half hopping, half dragging himself along to get his little food, it reminds me of the description of Captain Holly dragging himself along so injured in Watership Down and makes me really sad.

I have political rants to make as soon as I get time (stupid stupid bill to allow Israelis abroad to vote!), lots of free-floating angst over the future (my future in particular), and the discovery of a tv show I’ve gotten hooked on (Brothers and Sisters –two thumbs up).

Love to learn: MIT open courseware

February 5th, 2010

I’m an MIT girl for free. Of course, I’m not getting a degree or anything via MIT but I, and you too, can become MIT-smart through learning on your own from their utterly free online courses. What they’ve done (thank you, thank you!) is to put up all the syllabi, accompanying lecture notes, readings, exams (with answers so you can test yourself and see how you did), and often also video and audio-lectures from the actual courses that have been taught there in recent years (not like the last two years, however, as clearly that could compromise exams etc for students taking the current courses). There are more than 1,000 courses to choose from in all areas.

So, I just gotten myself all set up to learn Biology and Organic Chemistry. (Inorganic Chem will follow). The course material is from the courses that were taught in 2005 and 2006 respectively. I’m still in a bit of shock after purchasing the two (used) textbooks for the two courses — $336!!! Of course, that was at considerable savings from buying those two puppies new –it would have come to almost $500. I should note, that you can also learn a heck of a lot by taking the courses that have the video and audio lectures without investing in the books. The biology course has not only the lecture slides and notes but also videos of the lectures so I can “attend” the “class.”

I think these courses (and the inorganic chem one –this summer) will prepare me pretty well for the veterinary school exam, since that exam is based on high school biology and chemistry and I’m doing the super-science MIT version. I don’t think I’m going to stop there, however. As well as those that I think would be very useful to me as far as giving me not only a leg-in but a leg-up in vet school, when I’ve done with these 3 “basic” courses, I hope to continue on with the more advanced biology and chemistry courses. And then there are all those other exciting courses listed, and I do mean LOTS of other exciting sounding courses –everything from “Genomics and Computational Biology” to “How to Make (Almost) Anything” to “Philosophy of Film.” I mean, wow. Hey guys, check it out and get learnin’ at MIT for free

I’m pretty excited. I love to learn!

Bibi, Obama, same poll results, different reasons

February 5th, 2010

Public opinion has turned against both Obama and Bibi Netanyahu after their first year in office. Obama’s ratings have fallen in the U.S. in the last year more dramatically than for any previous President in his first year. A majority of Americans believe Obama is leading the country in the wrong direction. Yet, Obama personally remains very popular, with a majority liking him. So for Obama, it is his policies and not his personality that form the crux of voter dissatisfaction.

After Bibi’s first year, a majority of Israelis now disapprove. Unlike Obama, however, it is Bibi’s personality that voters despise. A majority of the Israeli public is dissatisfied with his performance and questions his suitability as prime minister. Yet, support for his party, the Likud, is skyrocketing. If elections were to be held today, his party would receive 35 Knesset seats –8 seats more than they got in the last election and a startling 23 seats more than in the 2006 election.

Mofaz, meanwhile, is determined to destroy the Kadima party from within in the quest for personal power. Despite the fact the fully 89% of Kadima voters prefer Livni over Mofaz (I find it surprising that there is 11% who can even stomach this idiot), he has been stirring up all kinds of internal warfare –and making it quite visible to the public.

Voters in general, however, are not particularly happy with any of the existing parties. The same poll showed that, if Yair Lapid can successfully start a party to enter into the next elections, fully a quarter of Israelis would vote for it –enough to put him into the Prime Minister’s seat. That is, of course, why there is broad support across all the existing parties for what is being called the “Lapid law” — a law making anyone in the media business, whether it be journalist and other media personality, ineligible to enter politics until they’ve resigned all media positions and been out of the media spotlight for one year. Ironically, or perhaps not, that proposal has served to put the wind in Lapid’s sails, politically speaking.

Bizarre weather and other things

February 4th, 2010

So I was in Herzliya this morning giving a final exam. It was cold, windy, rainy …and there were teeny tiny snowflakes floating on the wind as I was leaving. Arriving in Tel Aviv, it was cold, windy,…and sunny! We are talking about two places that are less than 10 miles apart. It seems that the north has gotten quite a bit more than teeny tiny, nearly invisible, snowflakes. Nearly a foot and a half (20+ cms) fell in parts of the Golan overnight and this morning and even Jerusalem has now gotten into the act.

I guess it a good day for the beaches to be closed while they search for more explosives sent courtesy of Hamas terrorists via the sea.

I have a huge pile of work that I need to do. I don’t feel like doing any of it. Ever have those days where you just can’t concentrate on anything? What I want to do is to curl up with Pride and Prejudice and a big pot of tea, a couple of cats, and a blanket.

Early next week I have an appointment to talk with the Israeli representative for vet schools abroad. His clinic is just a couple blocks from my house. Very convenient, I say.

Dude, this is harshin’ on Obama

February 2nd, 2010

If you think Republican criticism of Obama has been harsh, dude, the people on the left side of the aisle are starting to view him as something worse than the devil himself. Since Obama got elected, I’ve been doing my own little experiment. About every 3 months I do google searches on key terms like “disappointed in Obama” and disillusioned + Obama and betrayed + Obama (I’ll explain in an upcoming post why I decided to do this).

In the first three months, searches only turned up some Republicans predicting that Obama would betray America/American values and some stuff regarding Israel and the Palestinians (with both sides expressing feelings of betrayal). At the 6-month mark (May-June-ish), there was a flurry of disillusioned, disappointed, feeling-betrayed postings by folks on the far-left of the “progressive” tide. Things had changed a bit by September-October, with more of the “conservative left” beginning to get in on the act and voicing their disappointments and feelings of betrayal (particularly not feeling the love with Obama’s vision of healthcare reform and being angry over (non-inherited) fiscal matters). I did the search again today and HOLY MOLY. Here’s a representative comment, taken from his op-ed, by a Hofstra U professor who falls into “center left” territory that was made a couple of weeks before the Big O’s SOTU address

Like any good progressive, I’ve gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this President. Now I’m fast getting to rage.

How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage.

Did this clown really say on national television that “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street”?

Really, Barack? So, like, my question is: Then why the hell did you help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street? Why the hell did you surround yourself with nothing but Robert Rubin proteges in all the key economic positions in your government? Why did you allow them to open a Washington branch of Goldman Sachs in the West Wing? Why have your policies been tailored to helping Wall Street bankers, rather than the other 300 million of us, who just happen to be suffering badly right now?

Yo, this piece was downright complementary compared to what he is saying now about, as he has begun calling him, “Obama Nothingburger.”

I mean really, this is seriously harsh. Even I wouldn’t wish a Palin Presidency on anyone. There are still lots of starry-eyed Obama folks out there, but, like, they are kinda in the minority. I’ll post later (maybe tomorrow as I’ve still a ton to do today) on why I figured there would be such a major crash-n-burn happening in Obama-land.

seeing things, the getting glasses experience

February 2nd, 2010

First, little touches clearly make a difference. When I got in to work yesterday, I had some time to hang out and chat with my friend Keren before meetings. When I walked in, she was like “You look great. Something’s different, wait you got new glasses!” Ehhh no, at least not yet, as I was actually going to go and get new glasses after all my meetings. The new and different thing was simply that I’d used the eyeliner that I bought when I had that makeover. I didn’t do the whole eye thing (never do), like mascara and shadow and so forth. I’d just put on a very tiny touch of eyeliner. Clearly, I should do this every day.

Getting the glasses was a big experience and took like 3 hours. Ronen had shown off his spiffy new glasses to me last week, modeling all 3 of his new pairs. Yep three new pairs. There’s a great deal going on at the glasses shop on Ivn Givrol and Arlozorov: if you buy one pair, you get two others for free including one of them being prescription sunglasses. Not only have I been needing, for like years now, new regular glasses, but last week I also lost my sunglasses. They seemingly fell out of my purse on the day I was lugging large amounts of heavy books home from the office and my purse kept sliding off my shoulder and banging against my knees as I walked and I had no hands free to get it back on my shoulder. It seems the knee-bouncing knocked them out of the purse :( So yofi, glasses special here I come.

Into the shop I went and tried on like a million pairs. I had first one, and then two, shop women helping me in my choice. (For one thing, I am blind as a bat without my glasses on and so had difficulty seeing in the mirror how the various pairs looked). They were really cute as they searched out the ‘perfect’ pairs, “I like this shape on you the best but wait, I think we have the same frame in a different colour that might really suit your eyes, just a moment, let’s try it…” The nice thing was that they were really being helpful and not pushy or overbearing. So I picked out a pair of sunglasses, a pair of “workhorse, everyday” glasses that are in a classic style but with a bit of subtle pizzaz (the metal frames have a blue tint to them), and then a “fun” back-up pair where the frame is in red but only frames along the top and sides (this is my favourite pair). The cost of the glasses with eye exam was just going to be affordable via a 16-month tashlomim. Excellent. Then I went in for the eye exam.

Now my eyes are not only bad (I’m legally blind without glasses) but funky. I have not one but two astigmatisms with the two eyes differing radically from each other. It is not a case of vive le difference. It is also the case that, with glasses, I can see far and I can see close but anything mid-range is ehhhhh yeah kinda blurry. She did all the standard making sure I don’t have any kind of eye disease and then started testing me. Nu, they’ve obviously got something relatively new on the market, namely multifocal lenses that can be specifically calibrated. Before, the doctors always said there wasn’t a viable option for fully correcting my vision –they could give me a pair for far (really close isn’t an issue for me with or without glasses, if it is say a foot to 1 1/2 away, I’m good) and then another pair for mid-range, but that doesn’t really work out to be a practical solution –imagine changing out your glasses every time you want to see something without blur that is between like 2 and 6 feet away…. But now they have these all-in-one’s that include bifocals (which I don’t need yet, thank goodness) and a mid-range correction calibrated to my special needs (which would let me see my computer screen without leaning way close to it and clearly distinguish which black and white cat in my house was crossing my path), that was awesome when she, for my first time ever, had me seeing everything with total clarity. The miracles of modern science.

I didn’t get them. Not only did the 3-for-1 deal not apply to the (specialized) multifocals but to get a single pair was going to cost twice as much as the 3-for-1. And in this climate with my light blue eyes, I really need sunglasses. Totally couldn’t afford it. But ya know, I don’t care. I really, really don’t care. I didn’t see the world as most people know it until I was 14 years old because every eye doctor I was taken to as a small child was convinced I was “faking it” for attention or whatever because they couldn’t conceive of the idea that I couldn’t see the Big E, or that when I could with correction, I couldn’t see the middle-ground clearly, etc. Since I did get glasses and could distinguish that there are individual leaves on trees and that the world really doesn’t look like a Monet painting, the last thing I take off (if I get around to taking off) before sleep is my glasses and I put them on before I open my eyes. Besides, I may want to drive a car at some point and my understanding (I’m very proud of myself, by the way, as the exam, discussion, and everything else was all in hebrew) if I understood correctly, is that the multifocals have a side effect of not giving correct depth perception at a distance and so shouldn’t be used for driving.

So I said nyeh, gimme those 3-for-1’s! And in two more weeks I will have them. I’m very excited!

Climate change boss owns FIVE cars and has chauffeur

January 31st, 2010

Well now, this is a real case of ‘do as I say, not as I do.” Although he has his own eco-friendly electric car given to him (for free), Dr Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, prefers to mostly use a gas-guzzling, chauffeur driven car even for the short 1-mile trip from home to office. According to his chauffeur, he does occasionally use the electric car but not often because he would have to drive that car himself and he prefers to be driven. He also eschews the public transportation system available for the trip from home to work. Living in a 4.5 million dollar mansion, his 3-person nuclear family owns a total of five cars beyond the electric car, none of which are environmentally friendly. Indeed, far from it. Reporters on his trail also witnessed him being regularly chauffeured far shorter distances than a mile, in some instances a matter of just a couple of blocks when going to lunch. In a statement issued yesterday, Dr Pachauri insisted that he would not resign over the Glaciergate controversy – and, ironically, urged people to use public transport to help reduce global warming.

Dr Pachauri said people should take ‘practical lifestyle steps’ including ‘use of energy-efficient transport, including public transport – and in general become conscious of our carbon footprints as individuals’.

surgically embedded suicide bombs coming our way

January 31st, 2010

Britain’s MI5 has uncovered plans for attacks on the U.K. by suicide bombers that have the bomb surgically embedded in their bodies in order to bypass airline and other security screenings. We are entering a very scary age, people. Security services believe the move has been prompted by the recent introduction at airports of body scanners, which are designed to catch terrorists before they board flights. MI5 became aware of the threat after observing increasingly vocal internet ‘chatter’ on Arab websites this year.

According to an article on this in the Daily Mail: “A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants. Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal…Security sources fear the body-bombers could pretend to be diabetics injecting themselves on airliners, Tubes or buses in order to prevent anyone stopping their suicide missions.”

this should give the left a fit

January 30th, 2010

Just two days after declaring in the State of the Union Address his intention to rid the world of nuclear weapons, calling them the “greatest danger,” the Big O is upping spending on nuclear weapons by more than $5 billion over the next five years. The budget he’s asking for is nearly $600 million dollars more for this current year than Bush requested (and received) for funding on the nuclear arsenal in his final year.

The overall budget is significantly higher than that allocated by George Bush – who was seen by many as a warmongering president in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003 – during his entire premiership. Indeed, Joe Biden, in arguing for the increase said the Obama administration had inherited a ‘steady decline’ in support for U.S. nuclear stockpiles and infrastructure. ‘For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued,’ he said. “This investment is long overdue. It will strengthen our ability to recruit, train and retain the skilled people we need to maintain our nuclear capabilities. It will support the work of our nuclear labs, a national treasure that we must and will sustain.” He noted, “Even in a time of tough budget decisions, these are investments we must make for our security. We are committed to working with Congress to ensure these budget increases are approved.”

Personally, I don’t have a problem with them upping the funding and indeed approve. But his budget request, coming just 2 days after his SOTU address, has already sparked a “hey what the hell Mr. Nobel Peace Prize Dude who got the award for commitment to reducing nuclear weapons” (note: when he got awarded the prize, I said such criticisms would be soon to follow and that the Nobel committee did him no favours at all) backlash (see The Daily Mail, responses to this breaking news at places like The Democratic Underground –distinctly not happy –etc)

why why didn’t I have my camera!

January 29th, 2010

Yael is now feeding approximately 160 street cats and…a baby porcupine hedgehog. This is the second night that the baby porcupine hedgehog bellied up to the bar. It is SO cute. Tomorrow the camera comes along!