The Bravery of Being Out of Range

I did not want to get married for a long time. I wanted to be married but always in some distant future. I’ve thrown away several possibly rewarding relationships because they were too serious for what I wanted at the time. I wanted to experience as much of life as I could before I settled down to washing dishes and changing nappies. It took me a long time to fully realise that having a husband and children are a major life experience. And there is no law that says I can’t travel to exotic places with children or have wild uninhibited sex with a husband. It just takes more effort.


With immodest shoulders.


Swimming naked as the day is short.


I would marry me.

Long Time Gone

I am flying the Sikorsky S-70, what the Americans call black hawk and we call yanshuf, best known for going down in a Ridley Scott movie. Fortunately I am a better pilot than Ewan McGregor. I went from the Education and Youth Corps under a ta’al to the Helicopter Air Group under an aluf. That the current branch is led by a higher rank should tell you something about what the people in charge think of my former department.


© Columbia Pictures

New Year’s Resolution

But this year I’m making a resolution. I will meet my future husband. Not necessarily get married. I know that it takes time to develop real relationships. It is unlikely that I will meet somebody tomorrow and be ready to marry by the end of the year. Especially with my schedule. And I’ve reason to believe that my sister might get married this year. I don’t want to take anything away from her. I have no tangible evidence to back up my claim. It is more a suspicion than anything else. But I am willing to put money on it. Any takers?

新年快樂

Before the festival begins, houses are supposed to be cleaned and doorways are decorated with red phrases and poems. Red is the luckiest color and symbolizes good fortune and happiness. During the festival, red envelopes with money are given to younger family members. It is supposed to be money for suppressing the evil spirits but it usually ends up spent at 7-11. The amount of money given in the red envelopes should be lucky. Odd numbers are bad. Even numbers are good. Except four. Four is very unlucky because 四 [four] sounds like 死 [death]. Children will literally beg for these red envelopes and it is unlucky for the parents, aunts, uncles to say no.

Walk Like an Egyptian

There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it; always.

Mahatma Gandhi

God Hates Sailors

Statement of Principles on the Place of Jews with a Homosexual Orientation in Our Community

We, the undersigned Orthodox rabbis, rashei yeshiva, ramim, Jewish educators and communal leaders affirm the following principles with regard to the place of Jews with a homosexual orientation in our community:

1. All human beings are created in the image of God and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect (kevod haberiyot). Every Jew is obligated to fulfill the entire range of mitzvot between person and person in relation to persons who are homosexual or have feelings of same sex attraction. Embarrassing, harassing or demeaning someone with a homosexual orientation or same-sex attraction is a violation of Torah prohibitions that embody the deepest values of Judaism.

2. The question of whether sexual orientation is primarily genetic, or rather environmentally generated, is irrelevant to our obligation to treat human beings with same-sex attractions and orientations with dignity and respect.

3. Halakhah sees heterosexual marriage as the ideal model and sole legitimate outlet for human sexual expression. The sensitivity and understanding we properly express for human beings with other sexual orientations does not diminish our commitment to that principle.

4. Halakhic Judaism views all male and female same-sex sexual interactions as prohibited. The question of whether sexual orientation is primarily genetic, or rather environmentally generated, is irrelevant to this prohibition. While halakha categorizes various homosexual acts with different degrees of severity and opprobrium, including toeivah, this does not in any way imply that lesser acts are permitted. But it is critical to emphasize that halakha only prohibits homosexual acts; it does not prohibit orientation or feelings of same-sex attraction, and nothing in the Torah devalues the human beings who struggle with them.

5. Whatever the origin or cause of homosexual orientation, many individuals believe that for most people this orientation cannot be changed. Others believe that for most people it is a matter of free will. Similarly, while some mental health professionals and rabbis in the community strongly believe in the efficacy of “change therapies”, most of the mental health community, many rabbis, and most people with a homosexual orientation feel that some of these therapies are either ineffective or potentially damaging psychologically for many patients.

We affirm the religious right of those with a homosexual orientation to reject therapeutic approaches they reasonably see as useless or dangerous.

6. Jews with a homosexual orientation who live in the Orthodox community confront serious emotional, communal and psychological challenges that cause them and their families great pain and suffering. For example, homosexual orientation may greatly increase the risk of suicide among teenagers in our community. Rabbis and communities need to be sensitive and empathetic to that reality. Rabbis and mental health professionals must provide responsible and ethical assistance to congregants and clients dealing with those human challenges.

7. Jews struggling to live their lives in accordance with halakhic values need and deserve our support. Accordingly, we believe that the decision as to whether to be open about one's sexual orientation should be left to such individuals, who should consider their own needs and those of the community. We are opposed on ethical and moral grounds to both the “outing” of individuals who want to remain private and to coercing those who desire to be open about their orientation to keep it hidden.

8. Accordingly, Jews with homosexual orientations or same sex-attractions should be welcomed as full members of the synagogue and school community. As appropriate with regard to gender and lineage, they should participate and count ritually, be eligible for ritual synagogue honors, and generally be treated in the same fashion and under the same halakhic and hashkafic framework as any other member of the synagogue they join. Conversely, they must accept and fulfill all the responsibilities of such membership, including those generated by communal norms or broad Jewish principles that go beyond formal halakha.

We do not here address what synagogues should do about accepting members who are openly practicing homosexuals and/or living with a same-sex partner. Each synagogue together with its rabbi must establish its own standard with regard to membership for open violators of halakha. Those standards should be applied fairly and objectively.

9. Halakha articulates very exacting criteria and standards of eligibility for particular religious offices, such as officially appointed cantor during the year or baal tefillah on the High Holidays. Among the most important of those criteria is that the entire congregation must be fully comfortable with having that person serve as its representative. This legitimately prevents even the most admirable individuals, who are otherwise perfectly fit halakhically, from serving in those roles. It is the responsibility of the lay and rabbinic leadership in each individual community to determine eligibility for those offices in line with those principles, the importance of maintaining communal harmony, and the unique context of its community culture.

10. Jews with a homosexual orientation or same sex attraction, even if they engage in same sex interactions, should be encouraged to fulfill mitzvot to the best of their ability. All Jews are challenged to fulfill mitzvot to the best of their ability, and the attitude of “all or nothing” was not the traditional approach adopted by the majority of halakhic thinkers and poskim throughout the ages.

11. Halakhic Judaism cannot give its blessing and imprimatur to Jewish religious same-sex commitment ceremonies and weddings, and halakhic values proscribe individuals and communities from encouraging practices that grant religious legitimacy to gay marriage and couplehood. But communities should display sensitivity, acceptance and full embrace of the adopted or biological children of homosexually active Jews in the synagogue and school setting, and we encourage parents and family of homosexually partnered Jews to make every effort to maintain harmonious family relations and connections.

12. Jews who have an exclusively homosexual orientation should, under most circumstances, not be encouraged to marry someone of the other gender, as this can lead to great tragedy, unrequited love, shame, dishonesty and ruined lives. They should be directed to contribute to Jewish and general society in other meaningful ways. Any such person who is planning to marry someone of the opposite gender is halakhically and ethically required to fully inform his or her potential spouse of their sexual orientation.

We hope and pray that by sharing these thoughts we will help the Orthodox community to fully live out its commitment to the principles and values of Torah and Halakha as practiced and cherished by the children of Abraham, who our sages teach us are recognized by the qualities of being merciful, modest, and engaging in acts of loving kindness.

Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot
Chair, Departments of Bible and Jewish Thought at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, New York
Rabbinical Council of America

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper
Dean, Center for Modern Torah Leadership, Boston

Rabbi Yitzchak Blau
Rosh Kollel, Yeshivat Shvilei Hatorah, Jerusalem

Blast From My Past

Aside from all the pictures and masturbation, but not necessarily pictures of masturbation, it is very interesting to read what I had to say years ago. To me at least. Even reading these old posts from this blog is more interesting than anything I have posted lately. I wish there was some way to read all those old chat room conversations from university. It is also a great way to remember little stories I forgot about. It is like looking at a photo album. Not those folders on your computer. Back in the last century we had these big books filled with pictures. No electronics required. Does that show how old I am?

Another Decade Over and a New One Just Begun

2001
Zhang Xueliang (100), Anne Morrow Lindbergh (94), Balthus (92), Stanley Kramer (87). Laurent-Désiré Kabila (61), King Birendra of Nepal (55), Queen Aiswarya (51) were all assassinated. Prince Dipendra (29) killed himself after murdering his family. Sabiha Gökçen (88) and Douglas Adams (49) had heart attacks. Aaliyah (22) died in a plane crash.

Anthony Quinn (86), Harry Secombe (79), Jack Lemmon (76), Poul Anderson (74), Donald Woods (67), George Harrison (58), Joey Ramone (49) all died of cancer.

2002
Margaret Booth (104), Billy Wilder (95), Stanley Unwin (90). Spike Milligan (83) liver failure, George Roy Hill (81) Parkinson’s disease, Ian MacNaughton (76) car accident, John Frankenheimer (74) stroke, Dudley Moore (66) progressive supranuclear palsy, Linda Lovelace (53) car accident, Nozomi Momoi (24), stabbed and immolated. Chuck Jones (89), Antonio Margheriti (72), Lonnie Donegan (71), Erachaim ben Eliyahu (59), John Entwistle (57) all had heart attacks.

Milton Berle (93), Thor Heyerdahl (87), Rosemary Clooney (74), Richard Harris (72), Stephen Jay Gould (60) all died of cancer.

2003
Bob Hope (100), Katharine Hepburn (96), Elia Kazan (94), Wendy Hiller (91), Gregory Peck (87), Art Carney (85). Leon Uris (78) and Idi Amin (78) died of kidney failure, Noel Redding (57) liver failure, Maurice Gibb (53) bowel obstruction, Howie Epstein (47) drug overdose, Carlo Urbani, the doctor who discovered SARS (46) SARS, Elliott Smith (34) stabbed, Rachel Corrie (23) crushed by a bulldozer, Dolly (6) euthanized. John Schlesinger (77) and Michael Kamen (55) had heart attacks.

Leni Riefenstahl (101), Hume Cronyn (91), Conrad Hall (76), Alan Bates (69), Gregory Hines (57) all died of cancer.

Colonel Rick Husband (45), Commander William McCool (41), Lt Colonel Michael Anderson (43), Lt Ilan Ramon (48), Captain David Brown (46), Captain Laurel Clark (41), Kalpana Chawla (40) exploded on American space shuttle Columbia.

2004
Fay Wray (96), Donald Trumbull (95), Henri Cartier-Bresson (95), Ronald Reagan (93), Julia Child (91), Uta Hagen (84). Robert Lees (91) decapitated, William Manchester (82) stroke, Peter Ustinov (82) heart attack, Marlon Brando (80) heart attack from pulmonary fibrosis and cancer, Janet Leigh (77) vasculitis and peripheral neuropathy, Hans Gmür (77) surgical complications, Yasser Arafat (75) liver failure, Spalding Gray (62) suicide, Christopher Reeve (52) heart failure from septicemia, Neal Fredericks (35) drowned in plane crash while filming.

Elmer Bernstein (82), Jerry Goldsmith (75), Naomi Shemer (73), Ray Charles (73), Jerry Orbach (69), Johnny Ramone (55) all died of cancer.

2005
Simon Wiesenthal (96), Efraim Reuytenberg (91), Geraldine Fitzgerald (91), Saul Bellow (89), Ernest Lehman (89). Peter Malkin (77) stroke, Ismail Merchant (68) surgical complications, Hunter S Thompson (67) suicide. Robert Wise (91), Arthur Miller (89), Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II) (84), Dalene Matthee (67), Richard Pryor (65) all had heart attacks.

Anne Bancroft (73), Bob Denver (70), Cyril K Harris (68), Debra Hill (54) all died of cancer.

2006
Gerald Ford (93), Augusto Pinochet (91), Glenn Ford (90), Pieter Willem Botha (90), Richard Fleischer (89), Betty Friedan (85), Shoshana Damari (82). Maureen Stapleton (80) obstructive pulmonary disease, Saddam Hussein (69) hanged. Jeane Kirkpatrick (80), James Brown (73), Slobodan Milošević (64) all had heart attacks.

Robert Altman (81), Peter Boyle (71), Masumi Okada (70), Syd Barrett (60) all died of cancer.

2007
Michelangelo Antonioni (94), Avraham Shapira (93), Ingmar Bergman (89), Kurt Waldheim (88), Fernando Fernán Gómez (86), Norman Mailer (84), Marcel Marceau (84), László Kovács (74). Deborah Kerr (86) Parkinson’s disease, Kurt Vonnegut (84) brain injuries from a fall, Benazir Bhutto (54) assassinated.

Luciano Pavarotti (71), Michael Brecker (57), Dan Fogelberg (56) died of cancer.

2008
Richard Widmark (93), Kon Ichikawa (92), Jerry Wexler (91), Arthur C Clarke (90), Mel Ferrer (90), Edmund Hillary (88), Suharto (86), Cyd Charisse (86), Charlton Heston (84). Isaac Hayes (65) stroke, Bobby Fischer (64) kidney failure. Miriam Makeba (76) and George Carlin (71) had heart attacks.

Paul Newman (83), Harold Pinter (78), Sydney Pollack (73), Neil Aspinall (66), Michael Crichton (66), Dith Pran (65), Richard Wright (65), Stan Winston (62), Anthony Minghella (54), Jeff Healey (41) all died of cancer.

2009
Karl Malden (97), Jack Cardiff (94), Les Paul (94), Walter Cronkite (92), Helen Suzman (91). Allen Klein (77) Alzheimer's disease, Claude Berri (74) stroke, David Carradine (72) autoerotic asphyxiation, John Hughes (59) heart attack, Marilyn Chambers (56) cerebral hemorrhage, Michael Jackson (50) drug overdose, Natasha Richardson (45) skiing accident, Brittany Murphy (32) pneumonia and anaemia.

James Whitmore (87), Bea Arthur (86), Ted Kennedy (77), John Updike (76), Corazon Aquino (76), Dom DeLuise (75), Farrah Fawcett (62), Ron Silver (62), Patrick Swayze (57) all died of cancer.

2010
Hizkiah ben Nachum (93), Lena Horne (92), JD Salinger (91), Dino De Laurentiis (91), Éric Rohmer (89), Luis García Berlanga (89), Arthur Penn (88), Blake Edwards (88). Tony Curtis (85) heart attack, Claude Chabrol (80) anaemia, Qian Yunhui (53) crushed by a truck.

Patricia Neal (84), Jean Simmons (80), Dennis Hopper (74), Lynn Redgrave (67), Jamie Gillis (66) all died of cancer.

Progress

A man wakes up from a coma after 20 years.

Coma Man: So what’s changed in the last 20 years? What wondrous marvels are there for me to discover?
Doctor: Oh, you won’t believe it.
Coma Man: Are there flying cars?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Cars that run on water or air?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: How about anything besides oil?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Have we cured cancer?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Alzheimer’s? Parkinson’s? Heart disease?
Doctor: No, no and no.
Coma Man: Is there peace on Earth?
Doctor: (Laughs) No.
Coma Man: Is the global environment better?
Doctor: Worse, actually.
Coma Man: Is the global economy better?
Doctor: Worse, actually.
Coma Man: Have we eradicated poverty?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: How about racism?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Have we put a man on Mars?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Do we have stations on the moon?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Can we time travel?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Do people have robot servants?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: Clones?
Doctor: No.
Coma Man: So what’s changed?
Doctor: There’s a website where you can tell everybody what you’re doing in 140 characters or less.

Mia’s Annual Christmas Message

Hanukkah has been around a lot longer and is observed by a lot more people but it is not nearly as important as Christmas. It is a minor festival. We light candles, say prayers, go about our business. There is no reason to artificially inflate its importance just because it is usually at around the same time as Christmas. Our most important days are usually around September or October. It is ok if you don’t know what they are. We do not need everybody to go crazy over them.

Profiles in Courage

American airports can have very long lines at the check in counter. If you want to kill Americans gathered in large groups then this would be a good target. The queues in Israel are spread out and staggered. It seems like nobody has to wait in a long line. And when you check in you are asked simple questions. They also do this at American airports. The difference is that the Israeli agents are actually paying attention to what you say and how you say it.

All luggage in Israel is scanned at the check in counter in a screening area that can withstand a large blast. There are also metal boxes that can house bombs if necessary and a decompression chamber. If something suspicious is found it is dealt with immediately. If something suspicious is found at an American check in counter they will evacuate the entire airport and wait for the bomb squad.

Imagine No Imagination

My parents enjoyed talking to their children. We were not seen as a distraction. But I’m sure we were more than annoying from time to time. There was a period of what seemed like forever when Ellie and Dara did nothing but argue. Dara’s voice especially could get very high when agitated. When I was old enough they would gang up on me. But from what I remember I always held my own. I was born with the ability to laugh at people who tried to insult me. This is almost never the reaction people hope for. Eventually Ria and I reached the stage where we argued a lot but our arguments were always silent so they never had any effect on whoever was driving.

How to Build a Mediocre News Outlet

[Picture © Yoko Ono]

A woman who once interviewed John inflated her own importance. She also said that the interview took place just minutes before he died, which goes against everything we know about his last day. And they played a snippet of the interview where John said that he will be turning 40 soon and Sean will be 5, future tense. John and Sean were both born on 9 October. If the interview took place on 8 December then they would already be 40 and 5, present tense. John may not have been the most educated person in the world but he knew English well enough to properly use verb tenses. Either the interviewer is full of kak or CNN played the wrong interview.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
John Lennon

Haifa Fire

All is well here.

I’ll say more about it later as time permits.

How to Make a List

Kylie posted a list from the BBC of books they think everybody should read. They also claim that most people have only read 6. That seems a little pretentious to me but that’s the BBC for you. The list is also very anglocentric.

BBC List
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



I prefer this list. It’s far more international and has more great literature than pop trends. They also don’t number it because only somebody with serious problems would put Da Vinci Code above Hamlet.

Norwegian Book Club’s 100 Best Books of All Time
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Fairy tales – Hans Christian Andersen
Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous
Book of Job – Anonymous
Mahabharata – Vyasa
Njal's Saga – Anonymous
One Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, a trilogy – Samuel Beckett
The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Poems – Paul Celan
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Stories – Anton Chekhov
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Possessed – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Medea – Euripides
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Goethe's Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands – João Guimarães Rosa
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Iliad – Homer
Odyssey – Homer
A Doll's House – Henrik Ibsen
Ulysses – James Joyce
Stories – Franz Kafka
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Castle – Franz Kafka
Shakuntala – Kālidāsa
The Sound of the Mountain – Yasunari Kawabata
Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis
Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Poems – Giacomo Leopardi
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
A Madman's Diary – Lu Xun
Children of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Essays – Michel de Montaigne
History – Elsa Morante
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel – François Rabelais
Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
Masnavi – Rumi
Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
Bostan – Saadi
Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
Blindness – José Saramago
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
King Lear – William Shakespeare
Othello – William Shakespeare
Oedipus the King – Sophocles
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Confessions of Zeno – Italo Svevo
Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Ramayana – Valmiki
Aeneid – Virgil
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar



Then there is this list. Very French but it has some great books that the BBC thinks are worse than the Da Vinci Code.

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
1 The Stranger – Albert Camus
2 Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
3 The Trial – Franz Kafka
4 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5 Man’s Fate – André Malraux
6 Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
7 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
8 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
9 Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
10 Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian
11 The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
12 Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
13 Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
14 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
15 The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16 Paroles – Jacques Prévert
17 Alcools – Guillaume Apollinaire
18 The Blue Lotus – Hergé
19 The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
20 Tristes Tropiques – Claude Lévi-Strauss
21 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
22 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
23 Asterix the Gaul – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
24 The Bald Soprano – Eugène Ionesco
25 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
26 The Abyss – Marguerite Yourcenar
27 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
28 Ulysses – James Joyce
29 The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
30 The Counterfeiters – André Gide
31 The Horseman on the Roof – Jean Giono
32 Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
33 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
34 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
35 Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac
36 Zazie in the Metro – Raymond Queneau
37 Confusion of Feelings – Stefan Zweig
38 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
39 Lady Chatterley's Lover – D. H. Lawrence
40 The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
41 Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
42 Le Silence de la mer – Vercors
43 Life: A User's Manual – Georges Perec
44 The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
45 Under the Sun of Satan – Georges Bernanos
46 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
47 The Joke – Milan Kundera
48 A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
49 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
50 Nadja – André Breton
51 Aurélien – Louis Aragon
52 The Satin Slipper – Paul Claudel
53 Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello
54 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht
55 Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique – Michel Tournier
56 The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
57 If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
58 The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
59 Les Vrilles de la vigne – Colette
60 Capitale de la douleur – Paul Éluard
61 Martin Eden – Jack London
62 Ballad of the Salt Sea – Hugo Pratt
63 Writing Degree Zero – Roland Barthes
64 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
65 The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
66 The Order of Things – Michel Foucault
67 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
68 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils – Selma Lagerlöf
69 A Room of One's Own – Virginia Woolf
70 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
71 The Ravishing of Lol Stein – Marguerite Duras
72 The Interrogation – J. M. G. Le Clézio
73 Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute
74 Journal, 1887–1910 – Jules Renard
75 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
76 Écrits – Jacques Lacan
77 The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud
78 Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
79 Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
80 Moravagine – Blaise Cendrars
81 The General of the Dead Army – Ismail Kadare
82 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
83 Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
84 The Strange Case of Peter the Lett – Georges Simenon
85 Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet
86 The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
87 Fureur et mystère – René Char
88 The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
89 No Orchids For Miss Blandish – James Hadley Chase
90 Blake and Mortimer – Edgar P. Jacobs
91 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke
92 Second Thoughts – Michel Butor
93 The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
94 The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
95 The Rosy Crucifixion – Henry Miller
96 The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
97 Amers – Saint-John Perse
98 Gaston – André Franquin
99 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
100 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

The Degeneration of Toon Town

[All pictures copyright somebody]

It’s Gedding Bedder All thuh Time

All of my classes at university were in English. Though I had an Indian professor who was sometimes difficult to understand. English is the official language of California. Xenophobes say that most people in California speak Spanish but it is really something like 25%. English is the de facto language of the US. They have no official language though xenophobes will tell you that it is English. They also claim again that most people speak Spanish but it is closer to 10%. I am not sure what they have against the “Mexicans”. Anybody from anywhere south of the US is Mexican apparently.

What the World Should Know About Israel

The convoluted answer is that Israel is the big bad guy while Palestine is oppressed. If that is true then why don’t I ever see complaints against Jordan, Syria, Egypt and other countries that are oppressing Palestine? Why are there no protests against Egypt’s blockade against Gaza? Or even Palestine’s blockade against Gaza? If a blockade is a great humanitarian catastrophe, why is it not a catastrophe when other countries do it?

The International Community has complained many times that Israel has troops in Palestine but they have never complained that the Arab League will not let Palestine control itself. Iran and Syria have had troops in Lebanon and Palestine for decades. Why is that not on the BBC?

And even if the talking points were accurate it would not explain why Israel gets more coverage than China, Russia, Britain, Spain or other countries that oppress smaller neighbouring territories. In what parallel universe is Israel a bigger human rights violator than China?

I Went to California But I Forgot to Blog About It

Another great thing about school reunions is how reality just klaps you in the face. When we were young we were all going to be the great movers and shakers of our generation. Every single one of us was going to do what we loved and excel at it. Ten years on most of us were nowhere we thought we would be. There were no household name directors, movie stars or celebrities at this reunion. None of us are president of any country or major corporation. Nobody won any medals for curing diseases or invented the next big thing. Most of us are just regular people living regular lives. Some have died and some are probably homeless or junkies living in seedy motel rooms but they did not come to the reunion. Most of the people who showed up seemed to be relatively satisfied with their lives.


Downtown Los Angeles from Griffith Observatory
That is not a problem with the lens. That is the smog.


The Hollywood sign from Griffith Observatory
Most large cities have a large tower with great views. Los Angeles has Griffith Observatory.


Capitol Records
This is where old men in suits butchered Beatles albums. I don’t think the Beatles ever set foot in the building but their Walk of Fame stars are here.


Sunset Blvd
The street changes dramatically from Los Angeles to Beverly Hills.


Powell Library
With comfortable chairs and 8 million books you could easily spend a lot of time here.


Royce Hall
The steps may not look like much but on a hot summer day they can give you a good workout.


Queen Mary
Now a hotel and museum. I’ve no idea why there is a Russian submarine next to it.

All the Leaves Are Brown

When we were in school we were young and idealistic. We wanted to save the world. Or at least change it. None of us saved the world as far as I know. I’m not sure if anybody changed it. Everybody was going to be the next Spielberg. Nobody in my graduating class is anybody you have ever heard of. A few are working in the entertainment industry but they are not famous. I went to school at the same time as a few people who are now marginally known but they probably do not have Tom Cruise on their speed dial.