Tribute to Darwin

In many National Geographic programs I watch, carnivores kill and eat herbivores and sometimes steal other carnivores' prey. Although eating another animal while it is still alive (in one of the documentaries hyenas started eating a buffalo's behind while it was still alive) seems very cruel with my human eyes, that's how nature works. Carnivores have to eat other animals to survive, they can't eat grass.

On the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, we should reconsider telling childrens' stories that present carnivores as bad guys who eat the good guys. This stupid personification turns children judgemental, where no judgement needs to be applied. Wild animals just do what millions of years of evolution programmed them.

The birds on the treetop are programmed to soil my car parked underneath . Luckily cows can't fly.

Have you noticed my new tagline?

I changed the background color of the title to orange to draw attention to my new tagline.

Got to the end of the phrase and have to think about it? Here is the translation: nothing is constant, everything changes all the time. To notice the change, you just have to look long enough. How long is long enough? Depends what you want to observe.

To observe the decay of radioactive elements at the end of Mendeleyev's periodic table you only need a few seconds. To observe social changes, you need hundreds of years. For changes of rock formations, hundreds of thousands of years. So what if some observations take longer than a lifetime? Use fossils, archeology, written records, assumptions, predictions and simulations.

Just like time matters for observing change, mass matters for understanding the physical laws governing matter. Quarks behave differently from objects on Earth or from planets and solar systems.

Will one day be one theory to explain it all?

Caesar's Revenge

Years ago, while studying towards my BBA, one of the students, Michael, an accountant for Ceasar Stone, makers of artificial marble for countertops and alike, told me they've developed new glittering colors that include little pieces of mirror. 'But they don't fit your refined taste', he added. He was right. Not only didn't I like glitter, but I also didn't like artificial materials. Years later, as if they heard me, they developed the Concetto collection from semi-precious stones that look wonderful backlit.

With time, me and my taste became less conservative. Instead of dismissing glitter, I learned to combine it with opaques to get great design effects. So, when planning my new kitchen, I decided to go for white cupboards and red Ceasarstone countertop. Last week, when the man came to take measurements before cutting, he asked me what color I ordered. 'Red', I told him. 'The glittering red?' he asked in disbelief. 'Yes', I replied. 'What are you, Georgian or Bukharan?' came the "tactful" question. (The subtext for my non-Israeli readers: only Georgian and Bukharan immigrants like tasteless glittering colors, in this person's view.)

I wonder why people who don't even know me expect me to have what they call refined taste. They don't even know I'm a Virgo...

Between Dreams and Economic Playground

This morning while squeezing Hellmann's jalapeno sandwich spread on hard boiled eggs, I noted the "this is the time for real excitement" slogan on the container. I like food, I even enjoy it, but excitement sounds more like the brainchild of an avid copywriter than something I might feel when thinking of sandwiches or even caviar.

Yesterday night in a news item, elegant women claimed they are excited that now, because of the economic crisis, they can afford buying designer items they could only dreamt about until now. I like nice clothes and accessories, but dreaming about them is really not me.

Our dreams and aspirations, among other things, define who we are.

As a teenager in Romania, a Jewish American student tried to court me, but we had no connection. His dream was to buy his mother an exclusive shoe shop, a dream I could not relate to for different reasons. Being born and raised in a communist regime with no private businesses, I could not relate to a dream about any private business in general, and a boring shoe shop in particular. We were indoctrinated that real work produces a usually tangible something, buying and selling was considered parasitism.

Our dreams change during the years as we open up to new people, ideas, places, and experiences. Now I can at least understand such dreams, but not dream them. The transition is usually from one extreme to the other, until the pendulum stabilizes somewhere in between. When coming from a communist experience into a western economy, one usually embraces the political right and free market theory.

To understand where my economic pendulum stopped, imagine a sports ground with boundaries and rules defined by the state (laws and regulations), that also provides the referee (police and judiciary system), and players who play freely all sorts of games. No wonder in communism, where the state controlled all the games and winning or losing had no meaning, the players lost their motivation to play.

So what do I dream about? Affording a comfortable living.

Moments of Happiness

My own defitinition:

A moment you don't want to do anything else, but what you are doing, you don't want to be enywhere else, but where you are, you don't want to be with anyone else, but the one you are with, a moment you'd like to prolong.

Hypocricy

Thursday night.

Hairdresser salon.

Hairdresser: "Is your watch real?"

I wear an Omega Constellation.

Me: "Everything with me is real."

Except my haircolor, he is just dying it to hide the gray hair.

I'm a combination of vanity and hypocricy.

Dates

I love dates. I mean the food type, not the meeting type. The majhool species we buy dried is soft, sticky and sweet. Perfect dessert after dinner.

About 2000 years ago, some guy was eating a date in Masada, watching the Romans as they prepare for the seige of the fortress built by Jewish Roman King Herod the Great. The stones he spat were found by world-renowned Israeli archeologist and former army chief of staff, Yigael Yadin, in 1963 and recently sprouted by Israeli scientists.

The seed, nicknamed Methusaleh after the oldest person in the Bible, is now a ~1.5m baby palm tree.

Read the entire marvelous story here.