Excellent.
I'll give it a look when I'm not at work...

I just don't dig on swine...

Jeff @14:

Israel's hardly the only country with mandatory military service. The UK used to have National Service, and Germany has some form of conscription, IIRC.

(Hell, the US used to have a draft, once upon a time...)

An old friend of mine from high school just had his second cochlear implant put in, as a follow-up to the first implant he had done ten years ago.

He'll be ready for stereo once they switch it on. :-)

As a voc-tech school, it could work. Most of those positions are straight up emergency personnel (paramedics, firefighters, emergency dispatchers, etc), I don't see anything wrong with those (except for prison guard and SWAT, but those are still necessary jobs...).

If they start training for positions in "information extraction technician," or waterboarding specialist, I'd get nervous.

You mean, at some point I might not need to securely delete most of the files from my laptop, then encrypt it using filevault before I travel, then restore everything from a backup when I get back? Amazing!

@17

Turtle-modders will take on a whole new meaning once genetic engineering becomes a homebrew industry. :-)

@ Pipenta:

RFID chipped passports have a little microchip-esque icon on the front cover. (see here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_passport)

Snrky cmmnt tht gts cnsrd by th mds at Bng Bng.

Hw vry mt.

When I was a senior 11 years ago, over the course of one day we:

-Broke into the school building overnight and barricaded the library with a fake brick wall inscribed with the phrase "a gift from the class of 1997."

-Filled the dean's office with helium balloons. Emptying it out was the most fun he'd had in months.

-Rearranged a classroom vertically. (We actually took it down before class began. The teacher who used that room was 7-8 months pregnant at the time, and we didn't want her to get hurt.)

-Replaced all of the trophies in the school trophy cases with stuffed animals.

-Skipped first period and hosted a waffle and pancake breakfast for students and faculty.

and nothing happened!

Four years ago, my brother was a senior. To protest a change in the school's detention policy, he and his friends staged a sit-in in the cafeteria. Before class (during breakfast), they sat in front of the office, sang 60s protest songs and read from "On Civil Disobedience."

*they* got a 24-hour suspension.

As my mom put it, "they misbehaved, so the school rewarded them with a day off."

Alternate title: Mommy has Two Implants

@23:

While some kibbutzim are religious in orientation, most are secular. Further, as someone mentioned earlier, the kibbutz movement was initally a socialist, secularist movement.

Of course, they're in *Israel,* and everyone knows that place is full of religious whackjobs...

*eyeroll*

Happiest of happy birthdays!

I had a great-grandmother and great-grandfather that lived to 106 and 107, respectively. They passed away before I was born, though.

My aunt Ethel lived to be 102, and if she'd lived six more months, would have lived in three centuries (she lived from 1899 to mid-2000).

Aunt Ethel lived on her own in her own apartment in the Bronx. Twice a week, she would take two buses and a subway to visit her little sister, my Aunt Ruth, who lived to 99. Aunt Ruth had Alzheimer's disease, so Aunt Ethel would go over to do some cooking and let the live-in home health aide have the afternoon off.

Aunt Ethel (and Aunt Ruthie, too) kicked lots of ass.

(one grandma just turned 80, the other's almost 89, I wouldn't be surprised if both make it into their hundreds)

I miss Penn Radio, I only caught on just before the show was cancelled. Too bad they don't seem to be preserved anywhere.

After my grandfather passed away, my grandmother made a copy of a recording his voice off of the answering machine greeting on their phone line.

@26:

Did you mean "Jews" or "Juice?"

Either way, you spelled it wrong.

That's it? Sheesh.

Would anything remarkable actually happen if you mixed Tang and hydrogen peroxide?

So, how does that work?

Let's say Bob defaults on his mortgage, and the bank forecloses, but chooses not to take ownership of the home. Who owns it?

If I come along and decide to buy the house/property, who do I buy it from? I doubt I could just move in and assume ownership.

@codesuidae in #2:

Neighbors to the south?

Are you from Michigan or Canada? Those are the only northern neighbors Ohio has...

Aww, kitty!

#2.

I had the opposite happen, once. I was picking up a dresser from someone, and they kept offering extra stuff I didn't need.

Technogirl @11:

Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs...

I lived in Jerusalem in the late nineties. RC cola's motto at the time translated as "the taste that turns America on it's head!"

People had a hard time believing me when I explained that RC (which tasted far better than the Israeli versions of Coke and Pepsi) was a far distant third in the cola wars.

The full 7-8 minute Food Fight short is excellent.

WRT the captions you use, I think I spotted an error. The bit labeled "Intifada" I thinka ctually represented the Scuds that Iraq launched into Israel during the 1991 Gulf war (the kebab-launched projectiles didn't damage the Israelis-cum-bagels/matzah, the same way that the Scuds launched by Iraq didn't cause any Israeli casualties. The same kebabs are then attacked by the US-burgers. The Intifada seemed to be represented by the felafel that blew itself up in the middle of the Israeli foodstuffs.

Anyways, brilliant stuff.

"Your droids. We don't serve their kind here, they'll have to wait outside..."

Anyone have an idea about how things are at SFO? I'm headed there next week.

Bear in mind that before Gitmo began serving as a semi-legal prison camp for "unlawful combatants," it was a plain-old military base. The fact that it has a McDonalds and commisaries and the like isn't really all that surprising.

That's like... barring counterfeiters from using money.

Make Kosher toaster bacon and we'll talk...

Fantastic.

I had a few of these sets as a kid, and had a blast with them.

They should re-issue the directions sometime, or sell the old sets again. I miss my Space Police!

If you watch the video linked to in the article, it's narrated by Colin Baker, the sixth actor to play Doctor Who in the TV series.

(and honestly, it's not that bad to watch, it just looks like ambulatory pasta covered in snot.)

@38

You've got happy slapping, a bit of idiocy that, AFAIK, hasn't yet made its way to the US.

Mazal tov to the lot of you!

Best of luck!

I had the Ms. Pac Man game as a kid.

No marbles, just little plastic dots. Ms. P had a spinner built in that determined how many spaces she'd move.

They really need to reissue some of these.
I miss the old Space Police sets.

I'm in the US, and wasn't born until well after bills over $100 were phased out.

Higher denomination bills seems so... risky to me. Lose one slip of paper and you're out a significant amount of money.

I want that shirt.

Currywurst?

Woolie:

I'd say mistake #1 was downloading child pornography in the first place.

I had an aunt who almost made it. She was born in 1899, and died in late 2000.

In Soviet Union, vodka chugs you!

Damn, that's sad news.

This reinforces my decision to buy Terry's works rather than take them out from the library.
NHS or no, his care needs will become rather expensive and he'll need every bit of royalties that he can get.

It's a phone with a lamp, alarm clock and cigarette lighter built in, and people think cellphones have a lot of unneeded gadgetry built in? :-)

My folks have a similar book, Little Otto's First Air Raid, that used to belong to my great-uncle. If folks are interested, I could look into scanning it and posting it on flickr.

It dealt with prepping for an air raid in a large urban area, along with other approved homefront activities, in a manner that a small child would understand.

(My uncle was probably around eight or nine when he got the book. His brother, my grandfather, was serving in the South Pacific at the time)

Link doesn't seem to work...

This reminds me of a book at my folks' house that my mom got from her uncle.

It's a WWII-era book, printed for kids living on the homefront.

Little Otto's First Air-raid.

Surprisingly jingoistic, but cute, all at once.

If I had scanner, I'd probably flickr it.