Swimming the Channel

I’m a couch potato by nature. There’s nothing I like better than curling up with a mug of whatever and letting the Hollywood entertainment machine work its magic in my head. I’d be overjoyed to never have to move from that state of bliss. Sadly, in the real world if you want to live longer than 15 minutes you have to put in a certain amount of exercise. I don’t like it, but I do it. So when, during a chat with my friend, Maya, she mentioned that she’s swimming every day before work and that I should do it, too, because it gives her so much energy for the rest of the day, I inwardly groaned. The world if full of fitness gurus who want to get you out of bed early and run you around a track “for your own good.”

Still, there was something slightly attractive about the idea of having a dip on these sultry summer mornings. So I started doing it and it’s a humbling experience. I have always loved immersing myself in water. Like Labradors I think water is the best thing in the world. But as for propelling myself through it – isn’t that what outboard motors are for? Luckily, there are very few people there at that hour to witness my performance. I move at glacial speed through the lovely, silky water, enjoying every moment of it and just sorry I have to get out of it to go to work.

I don’t get the energy rush Maya talks about. If anything I find myself longing for a nap afterward. But come to think of it, I haven’t seen her there in the weeks I’ve been doing this. I guess we work on different schedules. In any case, I’m grateful to her for the suggestion because it’s about as pleasant as exercise gets. And as everybody knows, exercise is a good thing when it doesn’t kill you.

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, FIFA

Now that the World Cup is finally drawing to a blessed close, I find that I have some feelings on the subject. Normally I wouldn’t care because I’m so not a sports fan. Watching any sporting event for me is about as exciting as watching chorus lines of ants marching in and out of their hill. But for some reason this event seems to arouse global passions, so I thought it was worth a look.

Wrong. This is the most boring thing ever invented. As my nephew wisely observed, any sport where you can only score one goal in 130 minutes isn’t worthy of the name. This could be the American in me. We like our athletes to look and act tough. American football could never be played by wimpy little guys in shorts. Americans can’t respect guys in shorts. Well, ok, basketball players – but they’re tall.

So tonight this event which has been going on for 30 or 40 weeks will end. That means only one more night of going to sleep with plugs in my ears to muffle the cheers and groans coming from neighboring fans, especially the slightly incapacitated ones that gather at the House of Wine. Then maybe they’ll talk about something else on Israel Radio.

The final – I like the sound of that – features the team of seriously anti-Semitic Spain against mildly anti-Semitic Holland so I guess you know who I would be rooting for. If I cared, that is. Instead I plan to be blissfully asleep.

Catastrophe

I’ve always been a cat person. I like dogs –I’m a big fan of Cesar Millan – as well as just about all other mammals and birds but when it comes to sharing living space cats are ideal. They’re sweet and loving and you don’t have to worry about them barking in the night and biting the neighbors.

On the down-side, cats are not really trainable. Or controllable. In fact, they seemed convinced that they are the Masters of the Universe and we humble humans were born to serve them. There may be something to this: cats can change their mass at will which you know if you’ve ever tried to lift an unwilling one.

I bring this all up because of the current tribulations of my poor Chloe. After having disappeared for 3 days she dragged herself home and through the cat flap with a hind leg so broken that even I could tell the bone wasn’t attached to anything. The vet thinks she was hit by a car. I am simply amazed she survived that, got herself home and then also survived the surgery to repair the damage because this cat is 21 years old. How old is that in cat years? I don’t know, but it’s ancient.

I hope our relationship also survives this. Chloe already thinks I’m trying to poison her. The liquid antibiotic I have to force down her throat is pineapple flavored – utterly vomiticious to any self-respecting cat. So I’m not her favorite servant at the moment. But I am full of admiration for her. What a survivor, what a worthy cat!

Not As Lost As You'd Think

This week we said goodbye to the survivors of Oceanic 815 and all the other lost souls of “Lost.” I was a big fan. I see there has been a lot of discussion on the net about the finale, much of it very wrong-headed in my opinion. So here are my thoughts on what we saw.

Most importantly, the survivors were not dead all this time. My evidence for this is a) the producers said so a couple of seasons back and b) otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. There were characters like Ben, Desmond and Juliet who were not on the flight and had their own histories. They were not only seen through the eyes of the survivors. The last shot of wreckage on the beach was the plane carrying Kate, Sawyer & Co.

The sideways alternate universe was some sort of afterlife or more precisely, the anteroom to it. Jack was the last one to realize it, but then he was usually the last one to realize a lot of things. And since it was the afterlife it was outside of time which is why there was no “now” there and people like Hurley who presumably died long after Jack were there.

The polar bear: the Dharma Initiative did animal experiments. You’ll remember the comment when Sawyer and Kate were locked in cages about how much faster the bear figured out how to get food from the machine. The Dharma Initiative was just what it said it was, an organization trying to tap into and exploit the energy at the heart of the island. This is why Jacob (we can assume) had them all killed when they got too close, to protect the island.

It was a great series about grand themes: sin and redemption, the power of love, the overarching need and supreme difficulty of letting go. None of the characters was untainted. Even Hurley told a lie toward the end. But all at the end rose above their flaws to achieve something magnificent – which can also be said of this series. How wonderful it was to have a show that didn’t insult our intelligence. I suspect it will be a long time before we have that again.

Gimme Shelter

Tomorrow should be fun. The whole country is doing a defense drill. I can’t remember another like it, at least not in recent years. Our government happily assures us that nothing ominous is on the horizon and cautions us not to read anything into this. It’s just an exercise, the lack of which would be irresponsible. I am reassured. It’s not as if there’s a maniac in some not-too-far-off country trying to develop nuclear bombs and threatening to wipe us off the map or something.

As a humble civilian not too much is expected of me. At the sound of the siren one is supposed to sprint to the nearest bomb shelter within 2 minutes – I have visions of my grammar school gym teacher standing by with a stopwatch – and stay there until the all-clear. Luckily for both me and my gym teacher, I don’t have far to run. Like all new houses, mine comes equipped with its own bomb shelter. It’s just behind my back as I write this, the entrance being maybe a meter away. So I’m confident I can make it by the deadline.

The thing is, it’s my walk-in closet. I can spend 10 minutes in there if I have to, so I’m ok for the drill. But would I really want to stay there for hours in a real emergency? I don’t think so. Salient point: there’s no bathroom. That means after two, three hours tops I’m out of there. Way back when Saddam was lobbing scuds at us and we had to have a sealed room, we sealed the bedroom and bathroom so we could wait it out in comfort. Those were the good old days.

I have no one to blame but myself, of course. When I was planning this house, a shelter didn’t seem like such an issue. I thought it was a waste. Kibbutz houses are small and everyone uses this space for something else, be it bedrooms or offices. Then a few months after I moved in, Hizbullah started shooting missiles at us from Lebanon and I wondered whether I should be sleeping in there. That’s out of the question. I’m too old to sleep on the floor and the bed’s too heavy to move. But there’s no need to worry about that now. Tomorrow is just a drill and I can stay there for a few minutes. I may even get some cleaning done.

Bovine Positioning Systems

If you’ve ever tried to navigate in Boston you know what a nightmare it is. Streets wind around, merge and diverge without so much as a by-your-leave and street names repeat themselves in every neighborhood without any connection to each other. Navigating around the kibbutz is kind of like that in miniature except without any street names.

You can wander around for quite a while, depending on the dependability of the directions you got, until you stumble upon your destination. Not only are the roads unnamed, the buildings are more or less unmarked. I always pity the visitors who ask me for directions and explain to them as exactly as I can what the dining hall looks like. I still remember the directions I got to the laundry sorting place, the Communa, when I was new – “Turn left at the first cow.”

The situation changed about 5 or so years ago when we were all given plaques with our family names hanging on poles in our front yards. This was a vast improvement. Now, assuming you can read the language, you can locate the house of the family you want to visit if you wander around enough without having to knock on a random door to ask if Pinchas lives there.

This all came to mind yesterday as I took a break over the cup of tea I’d made an hour before. Suddenly I was roused from my reverie by the sound of drilling on my house. Upon investigation I found that a number plate had been fastened on, high up next to the eaves. I’m 252. I suppose this means everyone will be locatable by number which is a good thing. But why is it placed so high? So it’ll be identifiable from the air? That’s an alarming thought. Still, it’s a cut above the former system of direction-by-landmark – especially since the cows are now elsewhere.

Jimmy Carter, Jr.

I’ve been seething for the past two weeks. I thought I’d be over my anger by now, but I’m not and so I must descend from the usual trivial topics I write about in this space into the murky netherworld of politics. I am so incensed by the phony, manufactured crisis with the American Administration and the humiliation of the Prime Minister of Israel that I must speak out.

When Obama first stopped the peace talks almost a year ago by demanding a settlement freeze, I thought it was just a rookie blunder by a man who’d been elected despite having no executive experience and no qualifications for the job. He’s now done it again, just when indirect talks were supposed to begin, by demanding that Israel stop building in Jerusalem. Jerusalem – our capital! This time I don’t think it’s a mistake. I think it’s intentional.

The Palestinians refuse to talk, for which they receive not a whisper of criticism. Instead, Israel is heaped with calumny for the stalled peace process thereby setting the stage. For what, you ask? For an imposed solution. I think Obama, a man with more hubris than any collection of Greek tragedies, wants to impose a solution on Israel including the division of Jerusalem and a return to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. Of course, any such solution would just be an intermediate stage before our final destruction.

Let me be clear: I don’t like Obama. Never have. I don’t like his arrogance and I don’t like the way he mocks ordinary people, witness Joe the Plumber and Scott Brown and his truck. And now, like the cowardly schoolyard bully who picks on the kid who won’t fight back, he slaps Prime Minister Netanyahu around as if Israel is a banana republic and not a sovereign state. This from the man who bows before Saudi royalty, begs Ahmedinajad to sit and talk with him and has nary a cross word to say as the Russians announce their intention to keep on helping Iran build a bomb.

I don’t know what I’m worried about. Mr. Netanyahu is a smart guy who can be trusted to defend our interests. I’d be so happy, I’d swell with pride if he’d tell Obama to stick it, but of course he’d never be that blunt. In any case, with an estimated national debt of $20 trillion in the next 10 years, America won’t be a superpower for much longer. In the meantime, we will continue building housing in Jerusalem and anywhere else we see fit.

At this holiday time, let me wish everyone a happy Passover. Next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem.