A New Year's Rant

The books are here: What constitutes a good compilation editor? The ability to select appropriate pieces? Basic command of punctuation, grammar, and spelling? An understanding of appropriate layout and design? Judging from any of these, Michael Totten's "books" about the Lebanon war (and I use the term loosely) expose him as an untrained amateur. The three skimpy mini-pamphlets (Blog Digest #1: The Hezbollah War, Hassan Nasralla: In His Own Words, and Everything Dould Explode at any Moment) includes such errors as the bizarre choice of a monospaced typeface, the use of hyphens instead of em dashes, the misspelling of Karmiel (even to the point of changing it in my entry), and the general confusion between your and you're, these documents constitute a busha (shameful thing). A few fellow bloggers have good pieces from the Israeli perspective, but unless you are curious about the depth of hatred flowing south over the border towards us, you can give the series a miss. Apart from the diatribes and rants of some of the posts, I am mostly filled with a deep sense of shame that so few native English speakers can write a grammatically correct and well-punctuated sentence.

Holidays for one and all: Sunday marked a day of across-the-board events. For Moslems, it was Idul Adha, and slaughtered goats and sheep were the order of the day. For Jews, it was Tzom B'tvet, a fast day. For Christians, it was Sylvester (aka New Year's Eve). Traveling by train from Akko that day was a noisy and uncomfortable ride, with what seemed like half the Moslem population of the Galilee going to visit friends and family. Add in cold, rainy weather, and the whole thing was a mess. The ride, which normally would be a quiet chance to rest and snooze before another intense training session, turned into an endurance test of patience and tolerance, with kids running up and down, luggage clogging the aisles, babies crying, and did I mention the kids? Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against Moslem kids per se; I uniformly dislike all forms of knee-biters, rugrats, and even most teenagers. Race, religion, and nationality have nothing to do with it. As WC Fields once said, "I am free of all prejudices. I hate every one equally."

Indulge your paranoia: A local reader sends me a link to a global incident map, to let you track terror events as they happen around the world. Oooh! Police find a suspicious purse in Montana! A shed burns down in Brazil! The whole thing has a faintly "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition" feel to it—a suspicion quickly confirmed when one of the site's sponsored advertisers assures me that "the only solution to the Middle East conflict is through scripture prophesy." Color me orange alert.

See what you're missing: Even the most devout of TV junkies among you may not realize that you are missing out on a wealth of stuff not shown in your country. I'm not talking about programming, but ads! Funny, naughty, rude, silly, and downright creative TV ads from all over the world are featured at Very Funny Ads. Make sure to click the browse country link to see all the ads from each country.

If she was a car, they'd recall her: Nadine has another malfunction, leading to (dare I say?) unfortunate and somewhat explosive leaking from both ends. We clean up messes, change the sheets, and put her back on a restricted diet. Embarrassed and uncomfortable, she retreats to a safe place under her Fluffy Blanky and sulks.