Friday Fotos - You Might Be A Redneck...

...if your satelite dish is bigger than your trailer.

This nice little setup is located just outside of town, SOUTH of Nazareth, Israel.

Friday Fotos - I Call It Thistle

I call this thistle.

The flower guide book* identifies it as Tragopogon Coelesyriacus Boiss (Compositae [family]). The book describes it as a "perenial, 30 to 70 cm, glabrous or with scattered tufts of hair and an erect, unbranched stem. The lower leaves, arranged in a rosette, are widened at the base; the caulene leaves are lanceoate with acuminate tip. The rayed florets are grouped in flowerheads surrounded by bracts; the external bracts are long and triangular-acuminate, and much longer than the rays; the flowerheads are dark pink on the outside tending to purplish-brown centrally. Flowers in March and April."

Does that mean it isn't a thistle?

* Flowers of Israel. Boneichi & Steimatzky, Firenze, Italy, no date, pg. 59.

Friday Fotos - Land Rover Ad

This is a picture of my truck, which appeared as a Land Rover advertisement in a major outdoor magazine*.

For those interested in the details: 1995 Land Rover Defender 110. It has 400,000 km, a 2.5 litre diesel engine, factory air conditioning that doesn't work, seatbelts for 9 (licensed for 7 pax) is fulltime 4 wheel drive and gets about 18 miles per gallon. It currently has no GPS system, trusting solely on the navigator's map-reading abilities and has traveled Israel from border to border – north to south and east to west.

* Just kidding about the magazine advertisement, though I think this foto would look nice on slick magazine paper.

Sumo in Israel

A group of 15 Japanese sumo wrestlers are planning to come to Israel in June. They are part of an effort to boost Japanese tourism in the Holy Land.

Being a people watcher by nature, this is definately a group I would like to follow around. They are supposed to do the regular tourist route, including the Dead Sea. Now, that will be a sight: Fifteen sumo wrestlers floating on the Dead Sea!

I'm So Lucky!

I'm so lucky. Over the last few weeks, I have been offered the opportunity to help several people from different parts of the world. I know that there are always people around who need help, but these people are different.

What makes my recent opportunities so different – so "lucky” for me - you ask. I’m not sure how much I should reveal on the Internet, so I’ll only say that I have received confidential letters from Eastern Europe, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and South Africa written by the widows or children of recently deceased, wealthy businessmen whose wealth is currently tied up in and about to be lost to bureaucratic red tape. (Having traveled a good bit outside the USA, I understand what these poor people mean by red tape.) The stories are so compelling: One man was a diamond merchant who was murdered while on a clandestine meeting with his business partners who have yet to be found; another man, a widower, died from an apparent broken heart; and another died from an undetermined medical disorder that kept him in a degenerative, vegetative state for nearly a year, all the while unable to communicate more than a faint sparkle in his eye.

In all of these cases, multiple millions of dollars are at stake and the rightful heirs are soliciting my help in getting their money. While I don’t understand all the reasons of why they need a foreign bank account to get the money out of the red tape mess, each of the letters offered me half of the money for my assistance. The way I figure it, even if they don’t give me all they promised I should still be a multi-millionaire by the end of the year.

As if this isn’t enough, I received an email today announcing that my “email address has been selected as one of the lucky email addresses in the category ‘B’ of the online lotto conducted by EURO MILLIONS INTERNATIONAL.”

The long and short of it is that I am “entitled to a prize money of 466.812,79 Euros (Four hundred and sixty-six thousand, eight hundred and twelve euro, seventy-nine cent) only.” So, as soon as I send them my bank details and a little more personal information, I’ll be $594,917.65 richer.

Why do all these good things keep happening to me? Oh, this just in: I just got an email telling me that a finance company will loan me any amount of money I want, and they aren’t interested in my credit rating. Can you imagine? Too bad, I won’t need their services. After all, I just won $594, 917.65. Can anyone tell me if this money will be tax free and/or why I'm so lucky?

Friday Fotos - Do You Remember When...

This farmer is from a generation of farmers who plow the "old fashioned" way: behind a mule. Don't be fooled, this foto didn't come from an old book. I took it earlier this week.

We met this farmer whose name is Na'am, in a small field outside of Shechem. Mr. Na'am was very friendly when we stopped and asked if we could take his foto. He was happy to speak with us, though I couldn't understand much of what he said. My Arabic skills are fairly thin and he couldn't speak English.

Unintentionally, I demonstrated the cultural divide when I asked the name of his mule. He did a double take and looked at me as though I had just parachuted in from Mars before answering, "Mule." I guess Arab farmers don't name their animals.