Imagine my Americanized surprise to find this page in my daughter’s school book:

The bird is in the birdhouse. The cat is in the garbage. The cow is in the shed. The fish is in the water.

Doubletake.

The cat is in the garbage?

Indeed, in most parts of Israel cats are not pets, they are rodent control and garbage scavengers. They are considered almost like rats (and as infectious).

Even when we think we know what we’re all talking about (cats), sometimes we don’t know at all.

I didn’t manage to catch a picture of the rabbi himself, but the respect with which he was escorted to pray at the Western Wall was impressive. One person held a colorful umbrella over his head; the others followed. The rabbis robes were bright and colorful, with metallic highlights.

Seen in a Jerusalem apartment building. It’s very common for Orthodox women, who generally cover their hair after marriage, to wear wigs. This one appears to be left out for pickup (by a hairdresser?). Note that while women generally are discreet about a wig (shaitl in Yiddish; pe’ah in Hebrew), there is no shame in wearing one, which explains why it’s in poor taste but not shameful for this specimen to be outside the front door. I’ll admit that it did give me a surprise as I came up the steps. (In fact, good wigs cost well upward of $1000, are identified by brand name and worn with pride.)

An advertisement in an Israeli newspaper that caters to the haredi market:

The ad reads: “One for All” (less literally, “One Size Fits All”). In this case, that one building developer is right for various “streams” of haredim. The implication is that this contractor recognizes the subtle differences between different groups of haredim, and knows how to meet each one’s particular needs.

If you don’t hang around the “Black Belt”, you likely saw a row of “identical” black hats under the yellow hard hat; it’s only haredim who are accustomed to instantly make the distinctions in style and proportion that signify group identity. The ad is clever. It’s tapping into what black hat-wearers (and their families) experience all the time: the assumption by non-haredim that haredim are a homogenous group (they’re not), that they are all the same (as if any two people ever are).

I’m not sure how relevant those subtle distinctions are to home construction, though.

I was very impressed to hear a Bituach Leumi (Social Security) manager say, “We have to get to the point where our desk has no lines, and we can do it.” It seemed a laudable goal (especially since I had been standing in his line for 15 minutes waiting to get a number.)

Unfortunately, the context in which he was publicly rebuking his colleague (whose line moved a lot faster than his) took the shine off his public service aspirations.

Still, a startling change is in the air at the Jerusalem office. Two years ago, if you required service from the Bituach Leumi, you had to call a voice-mail system to find out which days of the week the service you required was being offered, and during which hours (8.00-11.00am? 4.00-5.30pm?). You showed up, only to find that the employees were on strike.

Today, they’ve opened a new branch to reduce lines and pressure at the first one. A supervisor has the job, apparently, of approaching every person in the waiting room and inquiring after their purpose in coming, and making sure they are in the right place with all the right documents. If not, she walks them over to where they need to be. I’m bowled away. Is a government agency with a captive audience actually thinking about “customer satisfaction”?

I participated in the very exciting MobileMonday Global Summit* in Helsinki this September.

Arriving fairly early, I went to take a drink of water in the main hall.

Hm. I’d say this warning label pretty well killed my interest in having anything to do with this water dispenser. The caution has destroyed the utility of the whole, in this case. (I can say that because this was, after all, Helsinki. In Israel in September it is still hot enough that thirst will overcome squeamishness.)

Still, it’s interesting that the warning label was invisible from the front.

*Did you spot my brief appearance as an extra near the beginning of the video?

[via Aisle One]

A great ad campaign concept. Of course, in Israel, everyone thinks they’re tough enough to park that way (a side effect of mandatory draft). So much so that it is actually formally sanctioned (pictures taken just up the street from my home):

Via Core77:

Isn’t it great when something suddenly just makes you laugh out loud?

I get an image of an insecure, smooth-shaven fellow who wants to blend into a haredi crowd.

More seriously, this hat also reminds me of the scandal in Israel following the first Gulf War, when it was revealed that the gas masks that had been distributed and worn throughout did not actually provide protection for men with beards. (Translation: did not provide protection for the majority of religious men, Jewish and Moslem. Also for clergy of the Armenian Orthodox church.) It doesn’t help build bridges when the ruling clique acts as though certain segments of society don’t matter very much.

Blackberry has this nice feature where you type a word without bothering with capitalization or punctuation, for example, typing “im” for “I’m”, and it changes it on the fly. (Funny, because there’s no actual spell-check…) It’s a feature that’s convenient, although I tend to under-use it.

Anyway, little glitch, I tried to send someone my Israeli email address the other day. It ends with @netvision.net.il. Except that my alert Blackberry insisted it was @netvision.net.I’ll. I went back to erase/change/fix maybe 6 times, unsuccessfully. Not a helpful feature, in this case! Why should I be in a power struggle with my cell phone?

As with many of my blog musings, this one is written on my Blackberry. It’s one of the main uses I have for it: jotting down thoughts and notes to myself for collection and processing on my laptop later on. I’ll have to move now before I get beaned by a hard date; several have clunked down hard from the date palm under which I am sitting in the warm breeze of a luscious Israeli autumn afternoon. Golden light. Sweet smell of the dates. Some lazy, dusty trees in what was, I guess, an orchard some years ago, but now is the parking lot adjacent to a major corporation. Aaaaaaah.

Update (December 16, 2007):

Found another one: can’t type the word “id” (as in Freudian), or the initials for identification or industrial design (ID). I just keep getting “I’d”.

When is the tradeoff of 95% accuracy offset by the 5% error rate (uncorrectable errors)? Another long tail question? Kind of.