Logic Wiz Sudoku - App to Play Sudoku Variants

Logic Wiz is an app to play 16 variations of Sudoku (probably more, by now). It was recently developed by Avner and Udi, co-founders of the company Logic Wiz, for Android and iPhone. Most variants and levels are free with ad support, some require payment.

There are other apps that offer Sudoku variants (I have not played any of these), some of which have levels with the same variant ideas found in Logic Wiz. However, Avner and Udi created some original variants, and they created, handcrafted, and implemented all of the boards in each variant. The app works fine and has a nice interface, with visual hints for newbies like me. It comes in multiple languages. Eventually it is supposed to come with leader boards of some kind.

IOS:  https://apps.apple.com/app/logic-wiz-sudoku/id1530683853

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.uvmlab.usudoku

Note: I am not affiliated with them. They sent me a premium-enabled copy to play with.

Bias, continued

 Israeli jets pound Gaza as rocket fire resumes and Palestinians hit streets to protest

Why? Why not "Hamas continues to launch hundreds of missiles at Israeli cities, targeting civilians; Israel responds"?

And then ...

"The first priority for the Palestinian political leadership now is to have Israel stop its crimes and massacres against our people in Gaza," Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Executive Committee in Ramallah, told CNN on Tuesday.

Really? Because Israel stopped firing at Gaza after Hamas stopped firing at Israel. Then Hamas started firing at Israel again, and Israel responded. It seems easy to me. Unless your definition of "crimes" by Israel is responding to your war crimes of firing at Israeli civilians.

Israel briefly allowed trucks carrying international aid into Gaza for the first time since the conflict began last week, but Israeli authorities halted the entrance of aid trucks in response to mortar fire at two border cross crossings.

This makes it sound like Israel decided to punish Gaza for some unrelated abstract mortar fire. Gaza was shooting mortar fire at the trucks carrying Israeli and international aid to them. Again: at the aid coming to them.

I should be depressed by the likes of as John Oliver and Trevor Noah as they completely screw up coverage of this conflict, by downplaying the thousands of unprovoked rocket launches against innocent Israeli civilians - all war crimes, terror, and killing people despite our best efforts - and sympathizing with the killers, despite every caution that Israel takes to avoid any casualties with civilians. But I always listen to this criticism to see if I am missing something, some real logic, some real balance that would give me an indication that Israel is doing something wrong. Instead, the arguments that I hear are so biased, so lacking in common sense and thought, so inconsistently discussing the two sides - not even mentioning the horrors inflicted by Hamas, yet trumping up horrors that did not even occur (but could have!) from Israeli actions - that I am actually comforted that Israel is still morally in the right. Every innocent death on either side, every scared person running from the conflict is a tragedy. But whose actions are purposely, or even accidentally, killing civilians (often it is the Gazan missiles falling on their own citizens, and then blaming Israel), who is the one putting civilians in harm's way, and who is the one who actually wants to prolong this conflict? Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to that, do some actual research and read deeper into and beneath the biased reporting.

Bias Against Israel Revealed in the Use of Active Tense for Israel, Passive Tense for Palestinians

 This is the headline from CNN:

Israel launches airstrikes after rockets fired from Gaza in day of escalation

(Unless they have since changed it)

I thought it was a simple aberration in language, but it is not. CNN uses this continuously in order to portray Israel as aggressors and Palestinians as victims. "Israel launches" is an aggressive act. "rockets fired" is passive: who fired them? Maybe they fired themselves? Maybe it was an accident.

Consider this text from the article (emphasis mine):

Israeli airstrikes have left at least 24 dead, including nine children, in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials. The Israel Defense Forces says it killed 15 militants. 

Meanwhile, at least six were injured in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Tuesday morning after a residential building was struck with rocket fire from Gaza and after the Al-Qassam Brigades, the militant wing of Hamas, vowed to "make Ashkelon hell."

Why do Israelis perform aistrikes and kill people, while Gazans do nothing? "Rocket fire from Gaza"? How about "Gazas missiles - several of which Gaza launched at Jerusalem and Ashkelon on the previous day, starting this exchange (not the Israeli airstrikes) - struck a building in Ashkelon and injured six Israelis (and killed two others)".

Watch the ridiculous video embedded in the article. Palestinians enjoying meals in Ramadan interrupted by Israeli extremist violence, when in fact the Palestinians have been rioting and violent for days. Where are those videos? The proximate cause is a dispute over some houses in a sensitive area; I'm not going to argue who is right or wrong in this case, because I still don't understand the legality of either side's argument. But that doesn't stop people from fear-mongering using racist terms, and yes, that includes the Arabs who claim, over and over, that the Jews are coming to storm and Judaize the temple mount and everyone must rise up in resistance immediately. This clarion call never gets old, never gets questioned, and the violence that results from it never gets mentioned by the foreign media, only the reaction to it.

And listen to the terms used by the journalist:

- About Arabs: "A car is torched." By whom? An accident?

- About Jews: "A blast of pepper spray and a volley of plastic chairs" Active and violent.

- About Palestinians: "Bottles, rocks, and other objects are thrown by other protesters, ..." "Are thrown by protesters"? All passive and innocent.

- Then about Jews: "Police use gun grenades". Why not "gun grenades are used to disperse the protesters"? Why "Police use gun grenades"? Because it is active and violent.

CNN, an example of bias in new coverage.

Interestingly, BBC News, which is usually equally biased, covered it with much less bias.

Hamas Has a Board Game: Reaching Jerusalem

Via MEMRI: The board of the "Reaching Jerusalem" game (image: Facebook.com/MaAmriti, April 4, 2017)

According to MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), Hamas has published a board game called "Reaching Jerusalem". The game is based on Snakes and Ladders. Snakes are Israeli military equipment, ladders are secret tunnels and Hamas rockets.

According to the designer, who works at the Hamas Interior Ministry, the game is aimed at "strengthening children's military culture and love of jihad."

MEMRI got the information from a Facebook site which does not appear to be accessible, at least not by me.

Theora Design: From The Holocaust to a Game Company Success Story

Michelle Spelman, writing for Mary Couzin's Chitag magazine, profiles Ora and Theo Coster, the couple behind the successful Israeli game company Theora Design (Guess Who, Zingo, Elefun, others). Worth a look.

Poem: Headstrong

O golden robed Moses, divinity-defier, is that you levitating in a wavering nimbus under an absent moon?
Where do your open soled sandals of glory fly tonight?
Come black-bearded shepherd, passionate prophet of awesome consequences,
Come perambulate among the remnants of your descendants in their stateless state, a dead line drawn from your flame-haloed bushtop to decades of dispute.

Come tap your magic staff on children tussling in the dirt you were denied, earthen and iron idols in their hands, hunting for virtual gods. Their leathered footsteps have trod every centimeter of this land.

We built your broken tablets into silicon halls, shopping malls, and supermarkets. Come walk the aisles of our exile, where artificial orange heads push cartons of crembos, occlusions of cantaloupes, cheese loaves and labane for Friday night beach blankets. Your stiff-necked people heed scribbled signs about 10 items or less as surely as they heed your engravements about 10 commandments.

We built your pitched basket of tar and reeds into roads that would amaze you, but we drove out the white haired goats and dripping honey dates. Come argue with our reckless chariot drivers who peel sunfruit by the yard, mustaches spitting stolen olive pits and politics. We plastered those gossiping spies carrying grapes and bemoaning the inhabitants onto every brochure as our national symbol for welcome.

If you are wondering what happened to your omnipresent ever-protective clouds of smoke and fire, they are still belching as the sun burns red-orange over Haifa bay.

Did the leaders you so carefully picked to minister to the hundreds, the fifties, and the tens sell their favors for hundreds, fifties, and tens?

Come swing your compelling compass needle to the backgammon players, sunflower seeded sabras and saviors, baby angels learning all night instead of living all day. Here the Arabs dance as Jews, the Jews dance as Christians, and the atheists patrol the watchtowers.

Here knives stab without hands (apparently), bullets spring miraculously from bodies (allegedly), Midianite spears pierce the wombs and genitals of righteous zealots, and hatred is the cream in our morning coffee.

How quickly can we rush to birth to offset our rush to death? Bodies struck down and buried in the sand don't stay buried here for long.

(I take your hand and pat a jagged stone wall, wet with blood and papers and thorny brush falling to a discordant dissolution. Your sister's tambourine was knocked out of her hand by a folding chair.)

Dear introvert, shy shepherd, wolf-tamer, what do your circumcised lips utter so softly in your trembling lisp? Is this the vision of the borders of Israel that the Almighty showed you as He cupped you in His palm and raised you over the majestic mountains of Gilead?

Copyright 2016 Yehuda (Jonathan) Berlinger

Mini Vacation with Tal and Saarya

Tal and Saarya and I have returned from our annual Pre-Passover mini-vacation.

We go before Passover because a) it's still "off-season", so it's cheap, b) it avoids the Passover crowds, c) it's the perfect time of year for hiking in Israel, and d) it forces us to have our apt ready for Passover early, but allows us to go into Passover feeling refreshed rather than post-cleaning frazzled (at least in theory). The problems are a) it forces us to have our apt ready for Passover early, b) we sometimes hit the holiday of some other religion (such as Druze), and c) not everything is open before Passover (e.g. certain swimming pools and attractions).

Each year we stay somewhere different. This year we stayed at Rothschild Guest Hospitality (a strange name), which is a simple place to sleep on Kibbutz Hagoshrim on the Dan river. The owner is nice, the place is clean, comfortable, simple, and really inexpensive, though it comes with no breakfast. It's situated in the beauty of nature, surrounded by fruit trees and flowers.

Kibbutz Hagoshrim has a popular rafting business that was one of the highlights of our trip. Really lovely and ideal, though we couldn't get the raft to stay straight; it kept spinning around. The kibbutz is within hiking or driving distance of several entrances to the Dan, Snir, or other tributaries, but it contains within it the most beautiful short walk I've ever done in Israel, right below the hotel (the most beautiful long walk is the Tel Dan Nature Reserve). It descends into this fairy forest tunnel of bamboo, pine, and wood-slatted bridges criss-crossing over a stream. The earthy feel and smell reminded me of hiking in Scotland. The kibbutz has other amenities, such as a pool, a bar, a restaurant, paintball, some kind of flying activity, a gallery, min-zoo, etc, etc.

There is a hotel on the kibbutz in which you can eat your meals, but we self-catered from Supersol and a prepared food place in Kiryat Shmoneh called Tadmit (good food, although heavy). Unfortunately, we didn't take pictures: couldn't bring a camera with us on the raft, and then it was shabbat.

Review: Rihanna in Tel Aviv

Source: http://instagram.com/badgalriri

Rihanna played to an audience of some 50,000 to 55,000 people in Ganei Yehoshua/Park Hayarkon in Tel Aviv last night. Summary: She was late (as expected) but performed well. Everyone was happy and she promised to return.

This was her second performance in Israel; the last was in 2010. Like other international performers, Riri faced a vocal and loud series of absurd appeals from movements who wanted her to boycott Israel. And, like most (but not all) international performers, she didn't even acknowledge the boycott. [1]

This is the first ultra-massively large outdoor entertainment event I have been to and it will probably be the last. [2] I'm a little old for the volume (I stuck paper in my ears), the entertainment value is really lessened when you are so far from the stage that the performer looks like a small pink blur and you spend more time watching the video screen, and it's really expensive. For the same money, I can have several evenings of entertainment. It was worth it to say I was part of it: once.

We arrived at 5:00 or so for a concert that was originally supposed to start at 7:30. This allowed us to camp out closer to the stage, though it really didn't make much difference. Rihanna was supposed to come on at 8:30, or maybe 9:00. She started at 10:00 on the dot.

First up at around 7:45 was an hour set from some DJs called We Are GTA. I don't get electronic club mix: I liked some of the songs they were playing - dubstep, pop, grunge, rock - but they only sampled a minute or less of each song and they sped them up and added electronics over them, making them worse. Every two minutes they crescendo'd, paused for effect, and started a new beat. Every once in a while the beat was right and they had the audience; the rest of the time the audience was indifferent.

Every two minutes they tried to get the audience to do something, but always one of two things: a) wave your right arm above your head from left to right and back, or b) raise your hands over your head and clap. I get the clapping; I don't get the waving. It's pretty tiring keeping your hands above your head for an hour. In a symbolic moment, the banner advertising the band slipped off of the front of their control station about midway through the act.

We waited an hour and a quarter after that for Riri, and that's a long time. The moments drag on and on and kids begin to get tired. I don't know why there were kids there to begin with.

Rihanna's performance was spot-on, enthusiastic, and laudable. She really is a good performer. She did a lot of grinding, bending over, and shaking, and some occasional simple dance moves with backup dancers - she doesn't dance particularly much or well, but she was energetic and hit her cues. She sang over a recorded track, but she sang much of it live and she sang well. She's very beautiful. She wore a black bikini top and shorts/underwear and a black sheer half-skirt with heels. She smiled a lot and shimmied. She performed for an hour and a quarter with barely a letup (she changed her shoes once, that's all). Her songs have great beats and melodies. It was very entertaining.

She gave shout outs to Tel Aviv a dozen or so times, apologized for being late (apparently she had to take a dip in the Dead Sea and pose provocatively on the beach), apologized for being away for so long, complimented her Tel Aviv fans, and promised to return.

I thought it was as good a concert as Alanis', though I like Alanis' more. Why? Alanis didn't dance; she didn't even, apparently, know how to walk; she seemed to have trouble with certain notes; she's not particularly beautiful. But Alanis has depth. Rihanna sings well, and flirts with being soulful, but her songs and her singing are just "feel good" or "feel sad". Alanis' lyrics and singing are pure complicated, messy art. Rihanna is pure simple, clean (or dirty) entertainment. Both are very good at what they try to do.

The weather was perfect; just cool enough that the mass of bodies around you made you the right temperature. The night and the stage were pretty, and it was too loud, but not too too loud. Thanks, Riri.

[1] Several papers made mention of the fact that, while she called out Tel Aviv by name several times, that she never mentioned the country name Israel. And that she substituted in one of her lyrics "All I see is Palestine" instead of the actual lyrics "All I see is dollar signs". A) I didn't notice it. B) I don't think too much of it.

[2] I've also been to large indoor concerts of Alanis Morissette and Pink Floyd; somehow being indoors made it a little less massive.

Concert: Prokofiev, Beethoven, and Mahler with the IPO

Lisa invited me and a friend of hers to see and hear the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra last night. The evening was sublime. Lovely women companions, dark chocolate to snack on, an energetic and emotional conductor (only 24 years old) who practically danced while he conducted, an orchestra of talented and tight musicians including a phenomenal pianist, and some lovely musical compositions.

Here is the program info.

Prokofiev/Overture on Hebrew themes: This piece reminded me of the incidental music from Star Wars: lots of tentative clarinet notes. It was fun and engaging. (amazon, youtube)

Beethoven/Piano Concerto no. 5: The Allegro was exciting, and the Adagio un poco mosso was emotional. I thought the Rondo: The Allegro ma non troppo was a little long (and really just more of the same without adding much to the first two parts). (amazon, youtube)

Mahler/Symphony no. 1: This was a lovely pastoral piece (with the exception of a single low violin note that played over the first several minutes and sounded a bit like ringing in my ears) moving through an awakening in spring but eventually moving to someplace a little dark. I was just beginning to get droopy eyes by the end, which was nearly two and a half hours after the concert began. (amazon, youtube)

It was a privilege to hear such music, to see such talented performers, to be able to take a night out of one's life to experience an auditory decadence in the company of three thousand other well-behaved audience members. Every night can't be like that, but I will be seeing Rihanna in concert later this month, so I'm feeling incredibly lucky right now.

Guest Post: Games and Jewish Education

The following is a guest post from JETS Israel:

What will Jewish education look like in the year 2020? No one can say for sure but if current trends hold firm more and more educational frameworks will integrate online game models into their core curriculum as well as their enrichment activities.

Teachers throughout the educational spectrum are increasingly incorporating games and other online tools into their lesson plans. The new media that is available on the web enables young learners to develop and sharpen their abilities, teach themselves and mentor their peers using any of the dozens -- even hundreds -- of online platforms and games. These activities introduce new subjects and reinforce previous learning as they encourage students to problem solve, engage in role-playing, and strengthen their knowledge.

The Jewish educational world has been slow to embrace the opportunities that multi-media, online games and other digital tools bring to the classroom. Every year however, more Jewish schools, both day schools and afternoon enrichment programs, integrate these distance learning programs into their curriculum. Online Jewish educational groups such as JETS Israel incorporate games in an online venue as a way of heightening the students' engagement with the subject material and reinforcing the learning.

One popular activity involves "twinning" kids in Israeli and North American and challenging them to collaborate with each other to complete assignments. The wikispace model is a particularly adaptive tool for this kind of instruction. Kids can play any number of games with their peers across the ocean which highlight the lesson's main points and support the learning model.

Since one of the objectives of the twinning project involves strengthening the language skills of both groups (strengthening Hebrew for the North American kids and English for the Israeli kids) many teachers use the vocabulary from the subject to create online word games such as word scrambles, crosswords and -- a particularly popular game, description detective. Each pair of students -- one from Israel and one from the North American classroom -- receives their own sub-Wikispace where they join forces to complete the assignment as they compete against the other student pairs.

iPad classes offer another opportunity to bring online games into the classroom. When studying Israel's history or geography students can time themselves while placing Israeli cities and other geographical locations correctly on prepared map and then count the number of events that occurred in each location that they can identify. A timeline game offers the same challenges.

The web-conferencing model presents a perfect forum for trivia games, whether the subject involve Torah, Talmud, history or current events. As the teacher moderates the trivia game from his or her station anywhere in the world the kids can compete in pairs, in groups or as individuals. This game works best when the kids are split into groups and each group is represented by a different student, with the role of group representatives revolving among the students. Multiple groups can compete and as groups are eliminated, the last group standing becomes the trivia winner.

Irena Sendler: a Holocaust Hero

The following is a guest post by the Lowell Milken Center:

Throughout the years numerous accounts have surfaced regarding the actions of Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The Irena Sendler story, although one of the most amazing tales to emerge from the era, was almost buried in the ash heap of history until a group of amateur historians -- high school girls from Uniontown Kansas -- uncovered the events and publicized the story.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker. She was employed by the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality and she took care of the poor and dispossessed Jews in the city after the Germans occupied Warsaw. Historians estimate that Sendler was able to assist over 500 Jews locate hiding places during those early years of the war. The Zagota underground, of which Sendler was a member, helped the Jews survive in hiding which included paying for the Jews' upkeep and medical care.

When the Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto and interned over 400,000 people in the small area Irena Sendler secured identification papers that indicated that she was a nurse who specialized in infectious diseases. Using these documents she entered the ghetto to bring in food and medicines.

Sendler quickly ascertained that the needs in the ghetto far exceeded anything that she could have imagined. She realized that, while the supplies that she brought into the ghetto might result in a small easing of circumstances for a few people, she would be able to better impact more lives if she were to smuggle people out of the ghetto. Sendler began to smuggle children out of the ghetto, at first smuggling out street orphans but, over time, approaching families in the ghetto with the suggestion that they allow her to take their children out of the ghetto into hiding.

In an interview that was conducted with Sendler over 50 years after the war Sendler described the agony of those days. "I talked the mothers out of their children" Sendler said as she described the long-ago events. "Those scenes over whether to give a child away were heart-rending. Sometimes, they wouldn't give me the child. Their first question was, 'What guarantee is there that the child will live?' I said, 'None. I don't even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today."

Sendler and her underground compatriots employed a number of schemes that allowed her to smuggle the children to safety. Young children were often sedated and hidden in toolboxes and luggage, under tram seats and even under piles of garbage in garbage cards. Older children could be walked through the sewers that criss-crossed beneath the city and through which the children could be brought to the "safe" part of Warsaw.

Once a child had been removed from the ghetto it was vital to immediately find him a secure hiding place. Sendler and her underground comrades forged documents for the children and brought them to orphanages, convents and to homes of sympathetic Polish families who were prepared to accept the risk of hiding a Jewish child. As a social worker Sendler had contacts with many institutions and she exploited those contacts to secure hiding places for the children including at the Rodzina Marii (Family of Mary) Orphanage in Warsaw and in convents in Chomotow, Lublin and Turkowice. Sendler listed the names and coded addresses of the children on tissue paper and placed these pieces of paper into glass jars which she buried in her neighbor's yard, hoping to reunite the children with the Jewish community after the war.

After the ghetto was destroyed Zagota appointed Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, as the director of the Department for the Care of Jewish Children. Historians estimate that Sendler, together with Zagota, saved over 2500 Jewish children.

On October 20 1943 the Nazis arrested Sendler and brought her to the infamous Pawiak prison where they tortured her. Sendler did not reveal any information about the children's whereabouts. She was sentenced to death but Zagota members managed to bribe a guard and she was released to live out the remainder of the war in hiding.

In 1999 a group of rural Kansas high school students heard a rumor about Sendler's wartime activities and began to investigate the historical episode. Their research culminated in the creation of the Lowell Milken Center along with a wide-ranging project about Sendler's activities, Life in a Jar, which has now developed into a book, a website and a staged performance.

Yom Hazikaron in Raanana

The Raanana municipality ran a beautiful ceremony for Yom Hazikaron - Remembrance Day.

The event was held (as it is every year) in front of the Yad L'Banim [1] building, whose courtyard also functions as the city square. The square was also used for Holocaust Memorial Day and is used for other events like concerts and the annual sukkot market.

There were few people there when I showed up at 7:00. By 8:00, I estimated the crowd to be over 6,000 people. It eventually swelled to around 8,000 or so. The people spilled over into and across the streets beside the square. Police kept the streets closed down for the ceremony, which included Ahuza street, Raanana's main artery.

There was complete unity of religious and secular, old and young, left and right, native and immigrant. Everyone stood for the siren at 8:00. The speeches and sad, poignant songs had biblical or ritual references. Everyone, secular or religious, stood up as the haredi chief Rabbi of Raanana walked up to the podium; he spoke about connection of between today's soldiers and the armies who fought the Pelishtim during the time of King Saul.

The ceremony included recitations of the names of all soldiers and terror victims from Raanana, from the early 1920s until just last year. Along with the names were pictures and personal details. Some of the relatives, together with young soldiers, laid wreaths. The square was draped with projections of faces and/or rolling clouds or fire at different times, and there was live music, a singer, a clarinetist, and a hazan to read El Malei Rachamim.

I felt that this, or something like it, must be happening in each town around Israel: whole populations stopped to pay tribute to their fallen soldiers, every name read out and remembered, year after year. I never went to a ceremony like this in Jerusalem (usually I went to something small in the local synagogue), but it felt right to go to this one. Maybe it's Raanana, which seems to have a kind of unity that I hadn't noticed and I haven't seen elsewhere. Or maybe it's because my own son is now in the army.

[1] Yad L'Banim is an organization dedicated to fallen Israeli soldiers.

Ticket to Ride

Tal, Saarya, and I took our annual pre-Passover mini family vacation last weekend. We vacation before Passover because the rest of Israel vacations during Passover and everything is too crowded. Also, during Hol Hamoed there js Games Day, and I usually work the rest of the time.

We stayed at Nuriel Fruit and Guest Rooms in She'ar Yashuv. The place is run by Miriam, a friendly and helpful woman who tries hard to accommodate your every need. She doesn't serve any meals (no breakfast), but she will give you milk, the rooms come with tea and coffee, and you can pick fruit from her trees. We picked a dozen grapefruit, and Tal squeezed them into juice for us to drink over the weekend.

She'ar Yashuv is a small moshav a few meters from the Banias spring. You can walk from the moshav upstream past Snir and to the falls, which is one of the prettiest in Israel. I'm pretty sure you used to be able to swim in and around the falls, but there are no swimming signs everywhere now. You can walk out the front gate of the moshav to Tel Dan, which is nearly across the street. It's a short drive to Kiryat Shemonah.

The moshav's synagogue is small, and there was only barely a minyan on Sat morning. One interesting thing about the synagogue is that the parochet has the usual gold and silver threaded stitching, but in addition to depicting symbols of the tribes of Israel they show two helicopters, in commemoration for the 1997 helicopter crash that occurred right above the moshav.

On Thursday we stopped for dinner at El Rancho, a nice restaurant that was way overpriced (but we used a groupon for half off). Friday we bought groceries and ready made food in Kiryat Shemonah for the rest of the trip. Then we visited the Banias springs and falls.

Friday night we played Ticket to Ride, our first time playing the game together. I think Tal and Saarya had both played the game at friends' houses. Tal nearly didn't complete any tickets, but she finally managed to sneak a route through the center of the map. I picked what I thought would be a series of tickets that, after completion, would lend themselves to matching at least one new ticket when I came around to drawing new ones. Alas, only one of the new tickets came even close, and I still have to build two routes (4 and 5) to get it.

Saarya fared better in his new ticket draw and even drew new tickets a second time. He ended up not completing one of the final tickets he drew, but he still won the game. We were all within 15 points of each other with Saarya leading with 125 points or so.

The next day we mostly slept. Tal beat me in a game of Gin Rummy. I think I called Gin once.

Sat night we drove Saarya back to his base (he had to be back on Sat night, for some reason) and headed home, taking  home three soldiers from Saarya's base who were headed our way.

Alanis in Israel 2012

Alanis Morissette wrapped up her global Guardian Angel tour at the sold-out Nokia Stadium (Yad Eliyahu) in Tel Aviv last night, and she was awesome, even if her performance wasn't ... exactly.

The hall was supposed to open at 7:00 for the 9:00 concert, with two opening acts: the local Israeli artist Natan Goshen at 7:30 for 1/2 hour and Alanis' husband Mario ("MC Souleye") Treadway at 8:00 for an hour.

Natan didn't come on until after 8:00, but he was AMAZING. I've heard some Israeli music here and there in the twenty odd years I've lived here, and I've been to a few concerts. Natan was among the best I've heard, both in terms of songs and live performance. There should have been more than a half empty stadium during his performance, and it should have been longer.

There was a short break and then Mario came out with a DJ backer. Unfortunately for him, since no one announced him, pretty much no one in the audience knew who he was. It must be a tough job to be on stage performing to people who don't know who you are, are waiting for the main act, and are unimpressed with your act. The audience wasn't rude - they applauded after each song - but they were confused and didn't respond to the music. Part of the problem was that his genre (white rap) was not Alanis' genre, and so really intended for a different audience.

Another problem was the voluminous sound, which made it impossible to understand more than a word or two here or there, which is death for an hour long rap song set list where all the songs otherwise sound the same. "What did he say? Something something tragic, something something automatic, something something plastic, something something uh glass bit?" Another problem was that he's white and a rapper, which is not entirely impossible but difficult for someone who looks handsome, clean, married, and comfortably well off. I'm guessing that he would make a not bad pop singer, but as a rapper, while he tried valiantly to connect to the audience, moving back and forth on the stage, and signing with his hands in sync with his words, he lacked real emotion or street cred, as the kids are saying nowadays.

Alanis came on during his set for one song (Jekyll and Hyde, I'm guessing) to thunderous applause, sang a little, kissed him, and then promised the audience to come back a little later. It took a long time between sets until she finally reappeared at 10:10, over an hour late.

Set list (JLP=Jagged Little Pill, SFIJ=Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, URS=Under Rug Swept, HaBL=Havoc and Bright Lights):

• I Remain (Prince of Persia soundtrack)
• Woman Down (HaBL)
• All I Really Want (JLP)
• You Learn (JLP)
• Guardian (HaBL)
• Mary Jane (JLP)
• Receive (HaBL)
• Right Through You (JLP)
• So Pure (SFIJ)
• Ironic (JLP)
• Havoc (HaBL)
• Head Over Feet (JLP)
• Lens (HaBL)
• Henei Mah Tov (instrumental)
• 21 Things (URS)
• Uninvited (City of Angels soundtrack)
• You Oughta Know (JLP)

• Numb (HaBL)
• Hand in My Pocket (acoustic) (JLP)
• Your Room (JLP)

• Thank U (SFIJ)

Notice anything unusual here? Six songs from the album being promoted, nine songs from her breakthrough album 15 years ago, and almost nothing else. Ok, JLP was incredible, but so was a whole lot of material from her other albums. A few songs from the other albums made it to her set lists at other stops in the tour, and I would dearly have loved to have heard Citizen of the Planet, Eight Easy Steps, Excuses, Everything, Front Row, UR, Unsent, Hands Clean, So Unsexy, Precious Illusions, etc etc in place of a few of the songs from JLP.

Anyhoo ...

Alanis is one of the finest songwriters and music arrangers, and her raw singing passion is surpassed by no one, so being present at her concert was a privilege. Alanis and the band played with smiles and positive energy and the fan was appreciative. She still packs an emotional punch. She's no longer a frustrated jagged pill, so she doesn't sing the old songs with quite the pain they deserve, but so much of the angst is already packed into the lyrics and the music that it doesn't matter so much.

When Alanis picks up a guitar she rocks, and when she dances uninhibitedly like she did on Uninvited you can tell she's enjoying herself. It's fair to say that the night was awesome and the crowd loved it. Despite. Despite that the bass and voice mic being so loud that you couldn't really make out the words on some songs and they caused earache (I guess she had to sing above the screaming of the crowd) and the notes tended to dissolve at that high a volume, and despite that Alanis had some trouble singing all of the words in some of the more frenetic songs here and there. She looked a little out of breath at the beginning.

One lovely thing about Alanis is that she is a musician, not a celebrity pop star: there was no dance routine, no cleavage or thigh on display, no flash--in-the-pan style trying oh so hard to be a hit; just a conservatively dressed, kind of awkward powerhouse of a woman singing words she needs to sing. I say awkward, and really, during the first two songs she just marched from left to right on the stage and back again, over and over, as if she just learned how to take big steps. When she held the guitar she didn't look so awkward, and when she was jumping up and down and rocking (like on Uninvited) she looked like a typical clubber. The pacing was kind of funny.

My daughter also says that she does odd things with the mic, moving and contorting her head to control the sound volume rather than just moving the mic back and forth. However, she was holding a guitar, so I think that this was unavoidable.

On Mary Jane she proved she could still sing while belting it out. On So Pure, she changed the location from New York to Tel Aviv, but she changes the location at every concert to the local city. For Ironic, the audience sang so loudly that Alanis just held the mic out to us for most of the song. She also changed the verse from "and meeting his beautiful wife" to "and meeting my beautiful husband", which kind of robs the song of its point, but the song always was, ironically, never about irony anyway. Lens, with its lyrics about competing religions (used metaphorically) was particularly appropriate for the venue.

After Lens the pianist played a short riff through the classic Hebrew round about brotherly love Henei Ma Tov U'ma Na'im, which I'm pretty sure was not done anywhere else on the tour. It was something to hear 10,000 people scream her most gritty and powerful song You Oughta Know, including the infamous "and are you thinking of me when you f*** her" all together. I was at the concert with my daughter, as I may have mentioned.

She finished around midnight, and 12 hours later my ears are still ringing. We've had some other world class musicians here in Israel recently: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Red Hot Chile Peppers, etc. This was my first large concert in Israel, actually my first large concert since my first ever large concert Pink Floyd in 1987 at Nassau Coliseum. That one was a blast, and so was this one.

My Son Joined the IDF Today

Getting on the bus

This morning Saarya hugged his mother and father, handed in his induction card and boarded the bus to begin his service in the IDF.

I've experienced both of my step-children's (Ariella and Eitan) IDF service - they joined, they worked hard, they completed their service (Eitan is on yearly active reserves) - so I'm not totally unprepared. But still.

Saarya spent the last two years in yeshiva as part of the Hesder program, which combines study and army service over a five year period. The bulk of the student body of the second year of his yeshiva entered the army today or will soon. Saarya will serve in the Golani together with around 16 of his friends.

He feels great and he's looking forward to it. I don't want to put any pressure on him, but if he performs as well as he did in yeshiva, and as he does in so many other areas of life, I expect him to not only serve successfully but to have helped his entire platoon along the way.

God willing, all of our residents and neighbors will lay down their weapons, justice, compromise, and peace will prevail, and there will be no need for him to complete his service. Barring that, may God keep him, all of our soldiers, and all of our country safe from harm.

Saarya and his parents

Yehuda

Homies

It's tempting to leave the "lesbian" post up as the last post a little while longer, but I have to keep my hand in, after all.

My country is 64. I went to a bar mitzvah at the hall in Mitzpeh Yericho, a yishuv on the edge of a cliff overlooking the steep rolling hills and valleys that lead down to the Dead Sea. The view is bare but beautiful. With friends around, good food, health, a beautiful land, and the freedom to be Jewish, I felt lucky with the time I live in. It's not always perfect, but it's better more often than it's worse when I think about it.


I did a lot of dancing at the bar mitzvah, which reminded me how much I love to dance and how much I miss it. I need to crank up my music at home and dance more.
I am spending shabbat with my old community in Talpiot (Jerusalem), after spending Independence Day (yesterday) with them hiking, bbqing, and at the bat mitzvah. I do love them, and I feel so much at home with them; I don't have that feeling in Raanana yet.
Obgames: I played 1.5 games of Scrabble on the hike/BBQ. I played both Troyes and El Capitain last shabbat when Nadine was around. I've also learned to play Vikings, Hanging Garden, Thunderstone, and Luca online at yucata.de . Vikings is a good mid-weight filler when played with the basic tiles. The expansion tiles might make it better. Hanging Gardens is pretty flat for me without much in the way of strategy. Luna is fiercely difficult to understand from the rulebook; we're in round 5 out of 6 and I'm starting to understand some of it. Thunderstone took me a few games but I feel like I have the hang of it now. It's a fun game, as good as Dominion. The monster queue is problematic in some respects; otherwise no complaints.

Maybe I'll give them longer reviews in the future.

Flowers of Haifa

Tal, Saarya, and I took a mini-vacation to Haifa last weekend. We vacation before Pesach, rather than on Pesach, because a) places are more crowded on Pesach, and b) it's harder to get kosher l'Pesach food (not hard, but harder).

Why Haifa? Because neither of my kids had ever been there and the price was ok.We've already vacationed in the Golan and Galil, Tiberias, Tzfat, Tel Aviv, the center, the Dead Sea, the Negev, and Eilat.

Saarya and I started out on Thursday afternoon with a few divrei torah at an annual Pesach yom iyun in Raanana. My Hebrew isn't that good, but the speakers were good and you can't beat the price (free).

The Hotel

We picked up Tal from work and make it to the Theodore Hotel without much difficulty. I made the booking using Agoda.com. The Hotel is named after Theodore Herzl and is located on Herzl St. It's smack in the middle of a lowbrow consumer area and right next to a haredi area. The road is under construction and the only parking was in a parking garage located in the bottom of the hotel but run by some other company (20 NIS a pop to park for any length of time). It's nowhere near the coast, but it's a 5 minute walk to the science museum and a fifteen minute walk to the German colony and the bottom of the Baha'i Gardens - you can't do much at the bottom of the Baha'i Gardens. You have to walk up about 600 steps and around the outside of the Baha'i Gardens to get to the inner gardens and the shrine.

The hotel towers over the neighborhood and the view from the top is expansive. It's pretty at night with the lights of the city around, but in the day you get to see Haifa, which is a port for container ships and not that pretty.

The room was clean and small, with basic amenities: a TV with 21 channels, a safe, free WiFi, one tea bag, instant coffee bag, and sugar packet per person. Tal had a less-comfortable looking fold out bed, while Saarya and I took the double. Each floor has a small bookshelf in the corridor outside the elevators. I looked in all of them and found one book that seemed like it might be readable and a copy of Angela's Ashes, which I read all but 100 pages of over shabbat (it's depressing).

Breakfast came with the reservation and it was neither lavish nor pitiful, but ok. Cheeses, vegetables, an egg/vegetable thingie, burekas, cereals, fruit fresh and canned, instant coffee and plain tea (like in our room). Dinner and lunch on shabbat were actually very good and we paid very little for them because they slipped us into the group rate for the group that was staying in the hotel over shabbat. Unfortunately, the hotel was ill-prepared for the group. There were not enough tables for dinner so we had to stand around waiting, and it was incredibly loud the whole time. The hotel lobby and dining area rapidly turned into a disaster area by the middle of Friday evening and stayed that way the rest of shabbat.

The service for the room was quick and helpful: once to bring more towels and once to help with the room safe. The desk service was also helpful. The management service was not. The manager was suspicious of us when we came for meals on shabbat, couldn't find out names on the list (even though we had their coupons which they had given us before shabbat) and looked like he was going to try to charge us twice for the meals. This was eventually straightened out.

The Tea Incident

Worse was the tea incident. They served tea during dinner and I had three teabags in my room. I skipped tea during dinner because I wanted to clear out quickly to give other people a chance to eat. After dinner, the dining room still had a shabbat water urn running, and my room didn't. I was on floor 15 and didn't really want to go get a teabag from my room, so I asked them for tea and they wanted to charge me for the teabag. It took ten minutes of arguing with them that I could simply get the plain teabag from my room but I would rather not have to take the shabbat elevator up 15 flights to do it and it's just a stupid plain teabag. They eventually relented and gave me hot water and a teabag, but when I asked for a packet of sugar they said they would have to charge me for the sugar, at which point I gave up and drank it without sugar.

German Colony

Thursday night we walked to and then down the German Colony, eventually reaching the port. The German Colony is a pretty row of restaurants right below the Baha'i Gardens. None of them are kosher, but it was nice to look. We were there late on Thursday night and there were very few people around, which seemed to me to be very odd; a similar stretch of restaurants on Emek Refaim in Jerusalem is generally packed with people on a Thursday night. maybe there were better places in Haifa to hang. We walked back a different direction, reading some of the ubiquitous historical plaques about the War of Independence on the way.

Movies

We watched two movies: My West is a silly Western with Harvey Keitel and David Bowie. Bowie is the leader of a gang that looked like the Harry Potter villains. It was cute. Raise Your Voice is a Hillary Duff puff piece, very predictable cross between Fame and Dirty Dancing, but nowhere near as rich as either of those (more like a TV episode). It had its moment.

Madatech

Friday morning we walked to the National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space (aka Madatech). Other than the hotel it was the most expensive part of the trip, and that was even after the 50% soldier discounts Tal and Saarya received. It was a fairly interesting hands on museum with things to push, pull, and wave. But the descriptions of each exhibit required some revisions; they often forgot to relate exactly to what the exhibit was doing, which sometimes made it difficult to understand. We saw a nifty basic 3D movie about the universe. We skipped out on the sports science exhibit because Saarya was getting restless.

Hiking

After some false starts we found a beautiful place to hike just past Haifa University. It is the right season to hike, with flowers blooming all around and lovely views of the valleys. I got the kids to sing me some Hebrew songs during the hike, which was cut short because Tal was getting restless.

 

 

Baha'i Gardens

Shabbat morning we hiked ths many stairs to see the inner gardens of the Baha'i Gardens of Haifa and the shrine of the Báb. The Báb is the messenger who came before the Bahá’u’lláh, and you can read all about it on their site. It was all very Reb Nachman. Pretty gardens and trees. It's supposed to be peaceful, but there are way too many tourists (like us) marching through it to achieve any peace. No wonder they kick everyone out by noon every day.

Sorry no pictures, since we visited on shabbat.

Nof Hotel Chinese Restaurant

Saturday night we stopped for only bowls of soup at this restaurant before heading back home. Judging from the soups, the restaurant is worth a visit next time we're in the area.

Segways and Sakharof

Yesterday I rode up and down the beautiful Tel Aviv coast on a Segway. Now that I've been on one, it has given me new sensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate non-Segway riding population in our midst. I feel for you poor unfortunate souls, and I encourage you to remember that there are still valuable roles in society that your kind of people can fill. Fixing Segways, for example, or leveling roads and clearing away the debris from in front of my Segway.

Me (trenchcoat) and coworkers at Shlomo Lahat Promenade in Tel Aviv

If you want to know what it's like to ride a Segway, just imagine it: it's pretty much just like that, except less bikini-babes (what's wrong with you?) and you can't do jumping tricks with it like you can on a bicycle. You get to high-five random strangers as you float above them, however. After a minute with my robotic extension, I knew that returning to my previous human powered ambulatory legged-life was going to be a letdown, a momentum remundanity. Sheesh, I have to walk? This sucks.

We didn't do much other than ride up and down Tel Aviv's main coast, but the sun was shining, the waves were high, and the rocky promenade was gorgeous. It got chilly.

Sunday evening I had food and drink at Jem's beer factory, one of a number of new Israeli micro-breweries. This one was co-founded by a guy in my synagogue, but he wasn't around for me to greet. The evening's entertainment was an intimate performance by Berry Sakharof, whose name I was not familiar with but whose songs I knew from the radio. There's nothing like a professional performer closeup. Unfortunately, it's not my usual musical style; I would have enjoyed it more with either my daughter or step-daughter, who are familiar with him and Israeli music in general, to enjoy it with me.

Berry Sakharof at Jem's microbrewery in Petach Tikveh

That's two work-related outings in a week, which is two more than typical.

I Recommend Handyman Tzvi Lefkowitz

If you live in the Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh area, I've used Tzvi Lefkowitz (aka Handyman Tzvi) a few times now and I highly recommend him. He is that rare combination of honest and competent who goes above and beyond what is asked for and yet still charges reasonably. He has come in especially from Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem to fix various electric issues in my apt (a/c, dud chasmal) and he always knows exactly what to fix and how. He is also such a sweet guy!
 
Phone: 0544985298

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated or related to him in any way. Just a happy customer.

Raanana and Jerusalem Session Reports

Raanana by Ellis: Power Grid.

Jerusalem by Nadine: El Grande.

I lost at both. I also lost a two-player game of Ticket To Ride + 1910 Expansion I played on shabbat with my host in Beit Shemesh. I did well on the board, but he had more filled delivery orders, which also gave him a 15 point bonus.

I attended the 6th annual Techshoret technical writing/markcom conference in Jerusalem on Thursday. I promised Paula that I wouldn't blog about it (or, at least about the bad parts), so I will just say that it was good to see and be seen by others in the technical writing field and I enjoyed two of the lectures I went to (Revuven Lerner on HTML5 and Katriel Reichman on using Markov chains as cost/benefit analysis for new technologies).