Israel Must Be 'Wiped Off the Map'

I'm really sorry about the New York Times link (all that registration nonsense) but, as I am currently living in Israel, I couldn't help but be slightly offended by this. Here are the juicy pieces of the article, cut and pasted for your enjoyment:

"TEHRAN, Oct. 26 - Iran's new hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told a group of students at an anti-Israel event today that Israel must be "wiped off the map" and that attacks by Palestinians will destroy it, the Iranian student news agency, ISNA, reported.

Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told a group of students at an anti-Israel event today that Israel must be "wiped off the map"
He was speaking to an audience of about 4,000 student at a program called The World without Zionism, in preparation for an annual anti-Israel demonstration held on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.

His tone was reminiscent of that of the early days of Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. Iran and Israel have been bitter enemies since then, and anti-Israel slogans are common at rallies.
...
He said in his remarks today that the issue of a Palestinian state would be resolved only when Palestinians took control of all their lands.

"The establishment of Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," Mr. Ahmadinejad said, the news agency reported. "The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land."
...
Mr. Ahmadinejad also called Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip a trick, and said Gaza is part of Palestinian territories and the withdrawal was aimed at convincing the Islamic states to acknowledge Israel.

"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury," Mr. Ahmadinejad said. Any Islamic leader "who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world."

nice. very very nice. What a jerk.

And I'm sure I don't need to remind us all that Israel, aside from being a symbol of the "surrender and defeat of the Islamic world", is also home to the Baha'i World Centre. Which Iran isn't really a fan of either.

Macgyver eats Granola bars

(this post has been sitting for a while. so this was about 3 weeks ago)
After my last ride down the mountain I couldn't wait for the next one. I'd sit in my office and dream about loose, rocky soil; thorny bushes scratching at my arms; the dust hanging in the air when I stopped to rest...
So all week I waited and planned and dreamed.
And finally on friday afternoon I jumped back on my bike and raced back up the mountain to sniff out some new trails.
This time I found a twisty little piece of trail that ran up and over a small hill next to the rocky road that I rode last week. Up and over the crest of the hill, through some tight and twisty turns and back down over sheer rock faces and gnarled roots to the jackhammer staircase from last week.
Now as everyone knows, there are really only two ways to ride really rough trails, either really slow or really fast. If you try to ride it in between you'll just get bounced around too much and end up off in the bushes (which here are all really thorny and nasty, unless you have the good fortune to take a tumble into a sage bush, then you come out smelling all sage-y... not that I would know). So if you get going fast enough you can just skip along the tops of the rocks, instead of running into each one. And besides, the faster you go, the more momentum you have and it's much harder to get knocked off course by baby-head-sized rocks, right? (Though to be fair, by the time you get going fast enough to skip over the tops of the rocks if you do get knocked off course you'll be in the bushes before you have time to do anything about it).
So here I was, racing down the mountain, skipping over the tops of the little babies' heads and dropping off of stone ledges, grinning like a fool. I stopped about half-way down to catch my breath, get some feeling back in my arms and enjoy the view of the Mediterranean sparking down below me. I sat for a moment enjoying the sun and the fresh air, already planning my ride for the next day.

Now, have you all seen those cartoons where the cat goes through the big slicing and dicing machine and then comes out the other end in one piece? And just when you think that he miraculously escaped the whirling and spinning blades he collapses into a little pile of cat-cubes?

That was exactly what happened to my tire. There I was, sitting and enjoying the view when suddenly pssssssssssst.... my rear tire goes completely flat. Like it was just sitting holding it's breath, waiting for me to decided to push off down the hill again. stupid tire.

Luckily I have a bit of the boy scout always-be-prepared thing so I was carrying spare tubes and a pump and tools and water and a rag and chain lube and an apple and a granola bar and... so I found a nice flat rock to sit down on and pulled my rear wheel off and went to work. I checked the tire for signs of thorns or glass or sharp pointy stones. Finding none, I pulled the tube out to try and find the source of the leak only to find that my tube had split along one of it's seams. Weird.
So I put it aside, pulled out one my spare tubes and pumped it up a bit. pssssst. My spare had a hole in it too. Also split along the seam. huh.
No worries. I pulled the second spare tube out (see? always prepared), put a bit of air in it and... silence. sweet silence. I tucked the tube into the tire, put the whole thing back together and finished pumping up the tire.
psssssssst.
not funny.
I pulled the tube out and saw that it too and had along its seam. So here I was, half way up a rocky and rutted trail, three punctured tubes and no more spares. right. Macgyver time. I pulled out my granola bar, ate half of it and then ripped a piece of the wrapper off and tucked it into the tire over the whole in the tube. Holding the tire to keep pressure on the hole I pumped the tire back up. and.... silence once again.
I know, I'm just as shocked as you. I felt like getting up a doing a little dance. Instead I jumped up, packed the useless tubes back in my bag and put the back wheel back in the bike. I flipped my bike over again and was about to jump on when I noticed that... my... front... tire... was... also... flat. (I know you're all thinking this is the lamest made-up story ever, but really it was flat. totally, completely flat)
Giving up on the whole Macgyver style, I just grabbed my pump and furiously pumped it back up again in the hopes that it was just a slow leak and it would hold until I made it down the mountain. Well, the front held for a while and the back slowly leaked away, so I stopped again near the bottom and filled them both a bit, carrying on I noticed the front getting flatter and flatter and although I stopped a couple of more times to pump it up, it just wouldn't hold. So I ended up walking down to the beach and catching a ride back with a friend of mine. So now all rides are off until I can get some new tubes. sigh...

and an interesting footnote: Although my front tire is still pathetically flat, my Macgyvered rear tire is now holding air just fine. Maybe I should forget the tubes and just get some more granola bars...

New Zealand

About nine years ago (nine years!) I spent a few months in New Zealand Kiwiland. Where the people are kiwis and the fruits are kiwis and the birds are kiwis and the kiwi kiwi kiwi. You get the idea kiwi. So... ummm...
...
There's really not much of a point to all of this other than to give me an excuse to link to this. It's a kiwi machine. That allows you to travel through time.

ps. if you don't find it funny, please don't bother letting me know. I won't believe you.

(I'm going to skip the whole apology for the stale blog thing and just mention that this is a post for Shiori's mom)

So I was back home a year ago in the mountainous and forested wilds of the land of Canadia, breathing the fresh air and frolicking in alpine meadows and trying to think how I could bring a bit of this freedom and outdoor bliss back to Haifa with me.
Of course, the obvious answer was to spend an obscene amount of money on a bicycle and then leave it in my flat while I spent long hours surfing the web in my underground office. ahem.

Part of the problem was that my two wheel preferences run towards the off-road end of the spectrum, as riding on pavement is a really good way to bore yourself into a coma and/or get hit by a bus. And Haifa, being a city, doesn't offer much in the way of dirt. Not that's accessable from my house anyway.

Well, the other day I finally wheeled my bike out of my room, down the stairs and into the street. I sat there for a moment trying to figure out what to do. I had gotten my hands on a map that promised trails down the mountain side not too far away. I hadn't had much luck with the trails in Haifa so far, so I was facing a long ride up bus filled roads for an uncertain payoff.

But I turned my bike uphill and started pedaling. Up the winding roads of Haifa with the cars and the buses and whatnot. I finally got up to the spot that was supposed to be the trailhead, but found nothing but houses. I rode around a bit looking for a gap in a fence or a sign or something but really wasn't getting anywhere and was just about to give up when I noticed a patch of dirt far below, off a street farther down the mountain.

Suddenly energized, I raced down to investigate. And there, on the side of mount Carmel, I found a hint, a little wisp of a trail, turned my wheels toward it and dove in.

Now, as a little aside, I offer this brief history of Mt Carmel that I heard from a gardener who lives here:
Back in day this was a green, lush mountainside covered in trees and grass and little bushes and other planty things. Then the romans came along and started to chop down the trees to build houses. chop chop chop. And as the trees fell, their grip on the soil loosened and it started to get washed down the mountain. That carried on for a while, and the romans did their thing (roamin'?) and the mountian was still pretty lush and green, just not as much as it was. Then they built a railway that passed along the foot of the mountain and the engines, in that quiant 19th century way, were wood fired. And there went the rest of the trees. So now, the mountain is a big pile of rocks with a handful of trees hanging on for dear life. So you can only imagine what the riding is like here.

When I dropped off the paved road, it was into a shallow gully of rocks about the size and shape of babies heads (known throughout the mountain biking world as "baby heads"). I kept thinking that I would come over a rise to find a smooth and rolling dirt road, but it just didn't happen. The only brief respite I had was when broad patches of solid rock cut across the ditch I was riding in. But even then these solid swathes served mostly as ramps to lift me above the rocky mess for a moment before letting me drop back into the rough. And it just went on and on and on. Like riding a jackhammer down a flight of stairs. And I couldn't wait to do it again.

the post for Mrs. Ishikawa

Dear Mrs Ishikawa,
This is a blog post for you. I know that when I chatted with your dashing husband the other day I promised him a post, but the post has now taken on a life of it's own and now it just keeps growing and growing. I'm trying to finish it off, but it just won't die. So in the mean time you get this lame little post to assure you that I haven't forgotten about you and when I finish off my big post about riding bikes and falling down you can read that one too.
Also, as a service to all of my other readers (who I'm sure have given up on me and slowly wandered off to read a blog that actually gets updated) let me direct you over to the Ishikawa blog so that you can say hello to the oh-so-cute-that-I'm-going-to-die Shiori Ishikawa. She's the little one. With all the hair. And the black eye and no eyebrows. Nice shiner shiori. It's nice when parents don't hold their kids back from doing big-kid things, but I think the boxing should maybe wait a little while. At least until we can find you some little boxing gloves to match your kimono. Then maybe you can fight this kid for the title. I think you could take him.