Israelis like to say that they are under siege. I don't know if it stems out of the Holocaust, the first decades of Israel's existence, or maybe from millennia of antisemitism in Europe, but it is quite preposterous now. It is not that Israelis, and Jews in general, are liked everywhere nor by any one, but enough with this siege syndrome. So, when I get an email asking me to support Dr. Yoram Blachar, who is up for or has been elected as the Worlds Medical Doctors Association (or something of the like, I don't really follow) against a fierce opposition that claims that he supported Israeli torture of prisoners, or a highlight about an Israeli Facebook group, whose goal is to counter another Facebook group that calls for a boycott over Israel, I am left speechless. This is preposterous. At least theFacebook group could attach a link for the other group that we know it is real.
And even if Facebook decides to boycott Israel - fine, let them. They won't be the first nor the last to do so. I think most Israelis drive cars manufactured by companies that used to boycott Israel until the 1990s, succombing to Arab and Isalamic pressure. Mazda, Toyota, Honda, and Mitsubishi - all had been boycotting Israel until the peace process with the Palestinians began and the Arab boycott was lifted in the 1990s. Of Japanes car manufacturers, only Subaru were selling cars in Israel in the 1980s or earlier. Mitsubishi were the first to break that boycott in 1989 or 1990 if I remember correctly.
Being paranoid is not a problem, naturally. People might be trying to hurt you. As anything, it is a good thing when taken moderately, until it makes you do stupid things. It seems to me, from afar, that the new Israeli government has been adding to this siege syndrome. I wonder if it is for political survival purposes, gaining internal cohesion before some controversial military act, or something done without a goal. In any case, playing with fire might get you burnt. I hope this will not be the case for us.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Las Vegas
I promised in my Delta tirade that I'll write about our trip to Las Vegas. What can be said about Las Vegas that has not been said before? Probably nothing. Therefore, this post will only list a few points that I find unique.
Las Vegas is expensive. Don't let yourself be fooled by the low accommodation prices (we stayed at the Stratosphere for about $40/night). The main idea is to lure you in, and once you're there everything costs. A lot. I like to use an index that I call "The diet index" - how much you pay for a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi bottle at a vending machine. As I am addicted to these drinks this is an important index for me. In Las Vegas the average vending machine price was ~$2.50 for a 590ml bottle. That's about twice the price I pay at the university for the same bottle, and I think that the ratio of 2:1 is quite typical to Las Vegas. We ended up spending around a thousand dollars during the five days we stayed there, not including the flights and hotel room. And we actually spent less than the $100 we intended to spend on gambling, so most of the money was spent on food.
Las Vegas is disorienting. D already wrote about the way hotels are trying to disorient their visitors. However, there is more to it. Hotels, and lots in general, are just huge. I think that the lots are measured in squared kilometers (or their American equivalent) and not dunams. Hotels are built huge in order to be able to give it some theme, for example The Paris Las Vegas, The New York New York and The Venetian are all trying to imitate the look and atmosphere of their respective city. That goes both inside and outside. This imitation requires a lot of space and thought. Space is abundant as Las Vegas is practically built out of the desert, but it's not that simple. Since tourism is mainly concentrated at the Las Vegas Strip, which is a single boulevard, the best hotels compete for a central location ("Location, Location, Location").
The disorientation is not limited to the facades of the hotels. It's mainly inside the hotels. In an effort to block the outside world from the gamblers inside the casinos, there are no clocks and very few windows, thus the sense of time is lost. Add to that the constant bombardment of jingling sounds and dazzling lights and inside the casino from all the slot machines, and one can hardly process where one is or what was his or her intentions. The paths between slot machines form a grid that do not lead to or from any exit or entrance, again trying to create a maze where a person will get lost and start playing. Once you're seated at a card table or a slot machine, waitresses with minimal clothes will come to offer you free drinks, in order to keep you sitting. I wonder how come they don't connect people to mobile latrines.
Las Vegas is also the most liberal city I know in the USA. In this sense it even surpasses Tel Aviv. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and so is gambling (of course) and drinking outside. Almost all the grand hotels offer topless spectacles with some kind of a plot or another. On the strip there are trucks advertising escort services 24/7 (or at least at any hour that we happened to be outside). At every strip corner you can find several magazines with nude photos with the same services. I have to say that you can find that in Tel Aviv as well, but at least in Las Vegas it's legal. D and I have agreed that legalizing prostitution is beneficial to all parties involved, especially the women working in it. One has to accept certain facts about human nature, even if they are not nice, for example people will always want to drink alcohol or prostitution will never be gone. Legalizing prostitution will take crime lords out of this business, just like the Mafia lost ground when drinking was legalized after the Prohibition.
All in all, it was a long awaited vacation and I'm glad we took it. Now we are already back to work: D at her new internship and I teach a (yet another) new class.
Here are some photos that D took:
The Las Vegas Strip as seen at night:
Piazza San Marco - An indoors view at The Venetian:
Gondolas at the Central Canal, The Venetian indoors:
A night look of The Stratosphere, where we stayed:
My D standing inside a street of The Paris (indoors again):
This is a slightly exaggerated size of the actual daiquiris sold in Las Vegas. This one is from the indoors of The Miracle Mile shops, Planet Hollywood
The Paris outdoors:
This is a typical casino room at Las Vegas: a lot of noise and commotion. This one was taken at the New York, New York.
And this is how The New York, New York looks from the outside:
Las Vegas is expensive. Don't let yourself be fooled by the low accommodation prices (we stayed at the Stratosphere for about $40/night). The main idea is to lure you in, and once you're there everything costs. A lot. I like to use an index that I call "The diet index" - how much you pay for a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi bottle at a vending machine. As I am addicted to these drinks this is an important index for me. In Las Vegas the average vending machine price was ~$2.50 for a 590ml bottle. That's about twice the price I pay at the university for the same bottle, and I think that the ratio of 2:1 is quite typical to Las Vegas. We ended up spending around a thousand dollars during the five days we stayed there, not including the flights and hotel room. And we actually spent less than the $100 we intended to spend on gambling, so most of the money was spent on food.
Las Vegas is disorienting. D already wrote about the way hotels are trying to disorient their visitors. However, there is more to it. Hotels, and lots in general, are just huge. I think that the lots are measured in squared kilometers (or their American equivalent) and not dunams. Hotels are built huge in order to be able to give it some theme, for example The Paris Las Vegas, The New York New York and The Venetian are all trying to imitate the look and atmosphere of their respective city. That goes both inside and outside. This imitation requires a lot of space and thought. Space is abundant as Las Vegas is practically built out of the desert, but it's not that simple. Since tourism is mainly concentrated at the Las Vegas Strip, which is a single boulevard, the best hotels compete for a central location ("Location, Location, Location").
The disorientation is not limited to the facades of the hotels. It's mainly inside the hotels. In an effort to block the outside world from the gamblers inside the casinos, there are no clocks and very few windows, thus the sense of time is lost. Add to that the constant bombardment of jingling sounds and dazzling lights and inside the casino from all the slot machines, and one can hardly process where one is or what was his or her intentions. The paths between slot machines form a grid that do not lead to or from any exit or entrance, again trying to create a maze where a person will get lost and start playing. Once you're seated at a card table or a slot machine, waitresses with minimal clothes will come to offer you free drinks, in order to keep you sitting. I wonder how come they don't connect people to mobile latrines.
Las Vegas is also the most liberal city I know in the USA. In this sense it even surpasses Tel Aviv. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and so is gambling (of course) and drinking outside. Almost all the grand hotels offer topless spectacles with some kind of a plot or another. On the strip there are trucks advertising escort services 24/7 (or at least at any hour that we happened to be outside). At every strip corner you can find several magazines with nude photos with the same services. I have to say that you can find that in Tel Aviv as well, but at least in Las Vegas it's legal. D and I have agreed that legalizing prostitution is beneficial to all parties involved, especially the women working in it. One has to accept certain facts about human nature, even if they are not nice, for example people will always want to drink alcohol or prostitution will never be gone. Legalizing prostitution will take crime lords out of this business, just like the Mafia lost ground when drinking was legalized after the Prohibition.
All in all, it was a long awaited vacation and I'm glad we took it. Now we are already back to work: D at her new internship and I teach a (yet another) new class.
Here are some photos that D took:
The Las Vegas Strip as seen at night:
Piazza San Marco - An indoors view at The Venetian:
Gondolas at the Central Canal, The Venetian indoors:
A night look of The Stratosphere, where we stayed:
My D standing inside a street of The Paris (indoors again):
This is a slightly exaggerated size of the actual daiquiris sold in Las Vegas. This one is from the indoors of The Miracle Mile shops, Planet Hollywood
The Paris outdoors:
This is a typical casino room at Las Vegas: a lot of noise and commotion. This one was taken at the New York, New York.
And this is how The New York, New York looks from the outside:
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Kindle 2: impressions of the first two weeks
One of the best things about living in America is the ability to experience all the newest technologies. That is, if you have the money, which we usually don't. However, in the case of Amazon's Kindle 2, one can almost find the perfect excuse for buying a Kindle: it will eventually save us money, as I am an avid reader. So, as the inventory of new books for me to read was diminishing we decided to get me one instead of new books.
After receiving the Kindle 2 I can say that it is a fun gadget and it does make you want to read more. It is fairly easy to use, although in today's world of touch screens I was expecting it to have one as well. I think, however, that there are too many buttons to control the device. For example, there are two "Next Page" buttons, one on each side of the gadget. Most of the functionality is controlled by the "Menu" button and is quite basic.
The display itself is very readable and easy on the eyes, due to the Kindle's best feature: the electronic ink screen. The display is very power efficient and uses battery only when the display is changed, for example when you turn a page. So far I am very impressed by the efficiency: I haven't charged the Kindle since the initial (and partial as I was too eager to start using it) charge. In the time until now I have already finished one book and more than a hundred pages. On the other hand I scarcely use the wireless capabilities, because I haven't downloaded a book from Amazon yet. The Kindle is equipped with an experimental basic text-based web browser. We tried to use it in Vegas to get some information from the Lonely Planet website, but it was too slow and awkward to use.
The web browser also emphasizes one of the few shortcomings of the device: the display refreshes very - very - slowly. There is a significant latency between the command you give (e.g. turn a page) and the refresh of the display. It's less than a second, but more than a comfortable time lag.
By a recommendation of one of D's classmates I downloaded several books from the free and open library of Project Gutenberg. The books in this library come in various formats, ranging from simple text files to a variety of e-book formats, but none of them is the Kindle's native - and property of Amazon - format. However, Kindle itself supports several e-book formats, some of them can also be found at Project Gutenberg. You can also use Amazon's services to reformat a file that is not supported by Kindle, e.g. Word documents or PDF files. To do that just send the file to an email address provided by Amazon. The reformatted file will be sent back to you either by email (for free, but then you have to manually transfer the file to your Kindle) or directly to the Kindle (for $0.10). See the link above for more details.
One last feature, which I find very useful and I enjoy a lot, is the built-in dictionary. If you happen to encounter a word that you don't know (and it happens a lot in Project Gutenberg's books, as they are all from the 19th century or older), simple use the navigation joystick to point at the word. The dictionary will automatically show you the meaning of the word, and if you want to know more, you can press "Enter" to show a page with the definition. If only I had had that before the GRE course I took...
In summary, I think that the Kindle is an excellent book reader and something that I will recommend to any book-lover. The only small problems with it are the slow refresh rate of the display, and the non-functional web browser. If Amazon are looking at further improvements to the Kindle I recommend they start there. In addition, I think that the price ($359.00) is too expensive, and should have at least included a free gift for several books to be downloaded from Amazon. In a short time the Kindle changed my reading habits and made reading a better and a more educating experience. Just remember: you cannot use it to read books during take off and landing, but I think it's okay to use it in steady flight if you turn off the cellular connectivity.
After receiving the Kindle 2 I can say that it is a fun gadget and it does make you want to read more. It is fairly easy to use, although in today's world of touch screens I was expecting it to have one as well. I think, however, that there are too many buttons to control the device. For example, there are two "Next Page" buttons, one on each side of the gadget. Most of the functionality is controlled by the "Menu" button and is quite basic.
The display itself is very readable and easy on the eyes, due to the Kindle's best feature: the electronic ink screen. The display is very power efficient and uses battery only when the display is changed, for example when you turn a page. So far I am very impressed by the efficiency: I haven't charged the Kindle since the initial (and partial as I was too eager to start using it) charge. In the time until now I have already finished one book and more than a hundred pages. On the other hand I scarcely use the wireless capabilities, because I haven't downloaded a book from Amazon yet. The Kindle is equipped with an experimental basic text-based web browser. We tried to use it in Vegas to get some information from the Lonely Planet website, but it was too slow and awkward to use.
The web browser also emphasizes one of the few shortcomings of the device: the display refreshes very - very - slowly. There is a significant latency between the command you give (e.g. turn a page) and the refresh of the display. It's less than a second, but more than a comfortable time lag.
By a recommendation of one of D's classmates I downloaded several books from the free and open library of Project Gutenberg. The books in this library come in various formats, ranging from simple text files to a variety of e-book formats, but none of them is the Kindle's native - and property of Amazon - format. However, Kindle itself supports several e-book formats, some of them can also be found at Project Gutenberg. You can also use Amazon's services to reformat a file that is not supported by Kindle, e.g. Word documents or PDF files. To do that just send the file to an email address provided by Amazon. The reformatted file will be sent back to you either by email (for free, but then you have to manually transfer the file to your Kindle) or directly to the Kindle (for $0.10). See the link above for more details.
One last feature, which I find very useful and I enjoy a lot, is the built-in dictionary. If you happen to encounter a word that you don't know (and it happens a lot in Project Gutenberg's books, as they are all from the 19th century or older), simple use the navigation joystick to point at the word. The dictionary will automatically show you the meaning of the word, and if you want to know more, you can press "Enter" to show a page with the definition. If only I had had that before the GRE course I took...
In summary, I think that the Kindle is an excellent book reader and something that I will recommend to any book-lover. The only small problems with it are the slow refresh rate of the display, and the non-functional web browser. If Amazon are looking at further improvements to the Kindle I recommend they start there. In addition, I think that the price ($359.00) is too expensive, and should have at least included a free gift for several books to be downloaded from Amazon. In a short time the Kindle changed my reading habits and made reading a better and a more educating experience. Just remember: you cannot use it to read books during take off and landing, but I think it's okay to use it in steady flight if you turn off the cellular connectivity.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
To Vegas and back with Delta
We spent a few days in Las Vegas. A more complete account of that will follow sometime soon, I hope. In the meantime you can see D's account here.
This post, however, will be dedicated to the worst airline company I have ever traveled with: Delta (do yourself a favor: don't follow that link and book a ticket with them). For starters, they are the stingiest most penny-pinching bastards in the industry. Everything - and I literally mean everything - costs an extra. The extra for checking in luggage is not new, but is still annoying. From here it just goes straight down: do you want to eat on a four and half hours flight? No problem - you can either get two tiny "complimentary" peanuts packages or pay for a sandwich. Are you thirsty after eating "all these peanuts"? We'll fetch you drinks, don't worry. It will take us a full hour before we start doing it, and then it will take us another full hour to traverse the entire length of a Boeing 737 aisle (it's not long, believe me), and then we'll give you a small cup of water or soda. Don't think of getting another one before landing.
What about in-flight entertainment? Contrary to most airlines (including Delta) that use a small airplane that doesn't have in-flight entertainment systems, we had a system on both flights. However, this is probably only for extortion purposes: Delta charge for everything, except maybe some TV shows. They charge $2 for the headsets, and about $5 for every film, game or other entertainment during the flight. May I remind you that it's a 4.5 hours flight, which is roughly the time to fly from Tel-Aviv to any Western European destination?
The seats in coach have such a small leg-room that I think Delta actually broke El-Al's record here. Do you want to stretch your legs or God forbid use the bathrooms? You're pushing your luck, pal, because for every stray cirrus cloud seen from 40 miles distance the pilot turns on the "buckle your seat-belt" sign and you're not allowed to get up. This literally left about 10-15 minutes of flight without being constrained to the seat. Needless to say that with other airlines I was able to go to the restroom and use them while the aircraft experienced much greater disturbances.
Since the seat-curfew was enforced on both flights (to Vegas and from Vegas) I am quite certain that it's a policy with Delta. Like in any crime one can only ask what is the motive behind this crime? Well, it could be as benign as the simple explanation: it's easier to control the crowd when they all are seated and buckled to their chairs. It could also be something more problematic: someone realized that this way people will not be able to get to the kitchenette and ask for more drinks, or nobody will use the restrooms, thus the airline can spend less on toiletries. I am not joking here, from all the stinginess I have experienced from Delta I am quite certain of the latter being the real reason.
This post, however, will be dedicated to the worst airline company I have ever traveled with: Delta (do yourself a favor: don't follow that link and book a ticket with them). For starters, they are the stingiest most penny-pinching bastards in the industry. Everything - and I literally mean everything - costs an extra. The extra for checking in luggage is not new, but is still annoying. From here it just goes straight down: do you want to eat on a four and half hours flight? No problem - you can either get two tiny "complimentary" peanuts packages or pay for a sandwich. Are you thirsty after eating "all these peanuts"? We'll fetch you drinks, don't worry. It will take us a full hour before we start doing it, and then it will take us another full hour to traverse the entire length of a Boeing 737 aisle (it's not long, believe me), and then we'll give you a small cup of water or soda. Don't think of getting another one before landing.
What about in-flight entertainment? Contrary to most airlines (including Delta) that use a small airplane that doesn't have in-flight entertainment systems, we had a system on both flights. However, this is probably only for extortion purposes: Delta charge for everything, except maybe some TV shows. They charge $2 for the headsets, and about $5 for every film, game or other entertainment during the flight. May I remind you that it's a 4.5 hours flight, which is roughly the time to fly from Tel-Aviv to any Western European destination?
The seats in coach have such a small leg-room that I think Delta actually broke El-Al's record here. Do you want to stretch your legs or God forbid use the bathrooms? You're pushing your luck, pal, because for every stray cirrus cloud seen from 40 miles distance the pilot turns on the "buckle your seat-belt" sign and you're not allowed to get up. This literally left about 10-15 minutes of flight without being constrained to the seat. Needless to say that with other airlines I was able to go to the restroom and use them while the aircraft experienced much greater disturbances.
Since the seat-curfew was enforced on both flights (to Vegas and from Vegas) I am quite certain that it's a policy with Delta. Like in any crime one can only ask what is the motive behind this crime? Well, it could be as benign as the simple explanation: it's easier to control the crowd when they all are seated and buckled to their chairs. It could also be something more problematic: someone realized that this way people will not be able to get to the kitchenette and ask for more drinks, or nobody will use the restrooms, thus the airline can spend less on toiletries. I am not joking here, from all the stinginess I have experienced from Delta I am quite certain of the latter being the real reason.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Weather
In Israel summers are very dull: hot, humid and no rain. In Cincinnati it's quite the opposite. It started as a nice day. Really.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Sitting on the balcony
We have a small balcony. It was mainly unused so far, except maybe for piling up snow in the winter. As spring is almost over and summer is upon us, the neighbors all started putting garden chairs out. Today we also bought a couple of foldable chairs and now we are sitting outside, with our laptops, naturally. Thanks God for wireless LAN.
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