Misc. Monday (something for everybody!)

Too many things on my mind for a cohesive post this morning... just bits and pieces that are circling the drain:

1.  To everyone who has commented over the past few days... please accept my apologies for my silence.  I have been crazy busy with family, friends and work.  I have now gone back and responded to your wonderful comments.

2.  I find it interesting that Public Security Minister Avi Dichter suddenly found his voice (and even a fair amount of outrage) only after Ketyushas began exploding near his home in Ashkelon.  [sigh] Yet another self-interested, principle-less Kadima hack who lacks a shred of accountability to anyone... except to himself.  Where has this 'Public Security Minister's' outrage been for the last few years as Sderot has been literally pounded into submission by literally thousands of rockets???

3.  And while were on the subject of Ashkelon being bombarded by dozens of powerful Ketyushas over the past week... now that Shimon Peres is supposed to be 'above' partisan politics (and virtually immune from political reprisals), is it too much to hope that our President might finally come forward and, in an uncharacteristic act of contrition, apologize to the political right for suggesting that pre-disengagement warnings of Ketyushas falling on Ashkelon were nothing more than "Likud scare-mongering".  I'm not asking for him to resign or face charges.  I'm not even asking him to say that the disengagement was entirely wrong.  I'd just like to see the top person in Israel's political hierarchy set a personal example and say that, in retrospect, he was wrong to have ridiculed what turned out to be justified warnings about the security concerns associated with a headlong, uncoordinated exit from Gaza.  Is that too much to ask? Am I being totally naive to expect our leaders to take ownership of their words once in awhile??? 

4. My parents attended a lecture in Jerusalem the other day.  The speaker (not surprisingly) touched on the current 'situation'.  At one point a woman in the audience stood up and said [I'm paraphrasing from my recollection of what my father related]; "Hamas has publicly asked Israel for a cease fire... so why hasn't Israel accepted?  Do we want peace or do we want to keep on fighting?"   Several people tried to shout her down but the speaker held up his hands and said that he wanted to respond.  He said, "First of all, there are several words for 'peace' in Arabic... but Hamas isn't using any of them.  What they are asking for is a temporary cessation of hostilities which is entirely in their interest and doesn't serve Israel's interests in the slightest.  I think I speak for the government of Israel when I say that the instant Hamas stops firing rockets into Israel there will be an immediate cease fire."   This is fairly obvious to me... so why doesn't anyone outside of Israel seem to understand this??? 

[Update:  Hours after Israel completed what it termed 'the first stage of operation Hot Winter' and withdrew its troops from Gaza, Hamas issued a statement saying that "Israel's defeated soldiers have retreated from Gaza".  So, besides my initial urge to want to squeeze the Hamas spokesman's head like a grape, I have to wonder why it is that whenever we stop shooting at these scumbags they inevitably declare victory?  Perhaps the lesson we need to take from this is to keep shooting until they surrender... or until there is nobody left to shoot.]

5. In my younger days I used to work two, three or sometimes even four nights a week as a professional musician.  Mind you, this was after putting in a full day of work at my 'day job'.  Many times we would finish playing well after midnight and then head over to one of the shwarma joints in Brooklyn (remember Steakiat Dizengoff near the old Aperion?) and eat copious amounts of  grilled meat and fresh baked pita until 2 or 3 in the morning!  And then I'd go home, sleep for a couple of hours and get up for work the next morning to do it all over again!!!  Last night I went out with an old musician buddy of mine who is visiting from the states.  We arrived at my favorite Jerusalem grill joint (Sima's on Agrippas) around 11:00PM and I didn't climb into bed until well after 1AM (relatively early by my musician-days standards).  I woke up this morning with what felt like a lump of lead in my stomach and the vague sense that someone had been beating me with a heavy stick all night.  In the immortal words of Sgt. Roger Murtaugh (played by Danny Glover in 'Lethal Weapon'); "I'm gettin' too old for this sh*t!"

6.  I would like to invite any of the budding mathematicians out there to create a formula and/or graph to describe the value/percentage by which a puppy's cuteness diminishes for each day it stubbornly resists all attempts to housebreak it.  Ideally the formula/graph should indicate the point of diminishing returns at which the puppy is 'sent off to live on a farm upstate' (a lie we tell the kids euphemism for being fed to the town's feral cats).  Oh yeah... extra credit for factoring in a randomly occurring event which can be labeled 'puppy eats own poop' (PEOP).  The winning submission - and any interesting runners up - will be posted here.   Please show your work.