Look what I just got in the mail!

It’s the prize from a contest / giveaway held over at Lucius Shepard’s blog a little while back. I’m very much looking forward to reading it - Shepard’s been one of my favorite short story authors for years.

Thanks, Lucius!

So.  I’m 18.

My primary achievement today* has been making other people feel old.

* Okay, yesterday, as of an hour ago.

I don’t like pouncing on stupid quotes that people make - mixups, mistakes, Freudian slips, mispronunciations - because everyone, no matter how smart, does that kind of thing every once in a while.  I do it.  You probably do it too. George Bush certainly does it, but there are much better ways to show what an idiot he is. Put someone on the record, all the time, and you’ll have more slipups than you’ll know what to do with.

But there is no way I’m going to let this one go. Either the guy is senile or he’s just clueless:

Obama pounces as McCain unsure of how many homes he owns (CNN)

(Emphasis added.)

Is this really the candidate who’s supposed to be “in touch” with regular Americans?

Haven’t updated in a while, I know. The dig barely gave me enough time to sleep, and writing a daily blog for it exhausted my blogging muscles. Now I’m back, after two days of rest (one of which was spent dying of a particularly nasty cold that I seem to have somehow caught from one of the Germans) and have been slowly catching up on internet stuff and various projects I’ve been meaning to get around to.

The dig was a lot of fun, but I’m sort of glad it’s over (because getting more than 5.5 hours of sleep a night is a lot of fun too). Digging in ancient Persian/Hasmonean/Assyrian crap is cool, yeah, but the thrill wears off a bit - or at least it did for me, partly because I live here - after the first week or so. What I really enjoyed was the exercise, which is something I did not have time for in high school. And luckily for me, I got assigned to C4 (motto: “the workout area”) which stayed at the pickaxe-and-shovel stage for all four weeks. We were the ones digging the western outer walls and the gardens outside them (all fill), so there was no delicate work at all.

I found more than my fair share of finds for my area - a couple Persian regional jar handle seals (reading YH for Judah), a gorgeous bronze Persian arrowhead, another jar handle seal with concentric circles - coincidentally the type my area supervisor is writing her (I think) Master’s on. Her reaction: “Next time you find one, put it back! Now I have to analyze 254 instead of 253! Do you have any idea how much work that is?” (I think she was joking.)

I also found a rare rosette stamp seal impression during pottery wash - only the eleventh ever found in Judah! So I’m not complaining - though a stash of Iron Age pottery from D6 almost made me defect…

The best part was probably getting to meet the people there - both fellow volunteers from all over the world and the Israeli staff. I hope to manage to keep in touch with several of them.

Be sure to check out the blog if you want pics of the dig.

* * *

I just started the novel in 90 challenge, and managed to write 812 words this evening (which is probably my daily record for this past year). Hopefully this will become a habit.

This is probably not going to come as news for most of you, but hey - it gets a lot easier once you get past the first 40 words of the session. ^__^

A Palestinian in a mechanical digger has rammed traffic in west Jerusalem, injuring at least 10 people before being shot dead, Israeli police say.

My little brothers are so used to foreign politicians coming to Jerusalem and shutting down whole parts of the city that they thought the roads were blocked because of Obama’s visit.

I’m hoping this doesn’t become any more of a trend than it already is.

I’ve been busy lately (you may have noticed) and it looks like I’ll be even busier over the next few weeks.  Since I’d like to get more than four hours of sleep tonight, I have only a few things to say:

1. I’m done with high school.
2. I just started volunteering at the Ramat Rachel archeological dig (near my house and not in the Jordan river valley, thank you Flying Spaghetti Monster).
3. I am running a blog for them.  Still haven’t decided exactly what to put in it (especially since my camera seems to have died).  They don’t want an official news blog, apparently for some academic political reasons I have not had fully explained to me yet.  Will think of something.
4. I am sore in places I forgot it’s possible to be sore in.
5. Free time is for wimps.

The Whole Week Feels Like Saturday (”kol ha-shavua margish kmo shabat” - sounds better in Hebrew) is one of the year’s most popular singles, from one of the year’s most popular disks.  Surprisingly enough, considering average Israeli taste in music, it’s also one of my favorite songs.

Note the Tel Aviv backdrop to the video.  This whole song is practically an Israeli (and more specifically a Tel-Avivian) manifesto.

Kol Ha-Shavua Margish Kmo Shabat (The Whole Week Feels Like Saturday)
Boaz Banai

Big dreams
Miserable moments
It doesn’t mean anything to me
Just like serving
A life sentence
For a murder that never happened

Can’t find the words
Star of silent films
If only I could
Act a little differently
The thought police
Need to do a search of my head

Chorus:
And I don’t care
The whole week feels like Saturday
I continue in the game

Father is a general
Stands on the tower
Sees everything around
Not from below
Snakes climb
Mother closes all the shutters

Big dreams
Miserable moments
It doesn’t mean anything to me
Just like serving
A life sentence
For a murder that didn’t happen

And I don’t care
The whole week feels like Saturday
I don’t torment myself
Over what doesn’t work out

Big dreams
Miserable moments
It doesn’t mean anything to me

Chorus

Lyrics in Hebrew

*tries to convince self that no, learning Assyrian cuneiform right now would not be a good idea*

*fails miserably*

Bulldozer plows into crowded bus on Jaffa Street
Three dead, dozens hurt in Jerusalem terror attack

For the past two years I’ve gone down that stretch of road twice a day, almost every day. When I went down it again the day after the attack it looked the same as always. Life moves on quickly here.

It’s hard to know what to say, because I don’t know what’s going to happen. Israel is juggling so many different things right now - negotiations with Syria, the truce with Hamas, hostage negotiations with Hezbullah and Hamas, the Israeli government itself, which is on the brink of collapse… one slip and it’ll all blow up in our faces.

What I can say is that this attack, and the murders at the Mercaz Ha-Rav yeshiva, are certainly bringing out the worst on the Israeli side. Taking revenge on the innocent families and neighbors of the attackers is absurdly unjust and obviously counterproductive, yet few people here so much as blink over it.

This is no different from the Jewish settler who opened fire on Arab civilians, murdering four of them, back in 2005. I don’t remember anyone demanding that his home be torn down and his family deported and deprived of social benefits.

Today is the centennial of the Tunguska event.

On June 30, 1908, a huge explosion occurred in the middle of Siberia, apparently the result of a meteorite or comet exploding in midair as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. It’s thought to be the largest recorded impact event in recent history - the energy released in the impact is on a scale with the largest of nuclear bombs. It caused an earthquake that would have measured about a 5 on the Richter scale and it affected weather all over Europe.

There’s a lot of mystery over the event, and speculation over it has appeared in many thrillers and science fiction books, not to mention movies and tv shows (such as the X-Files) and, more recently, the new Indiana Jones movie.

Coincidentally, I just - yesterday! - reread Storming the Cosmos, an excellent short story by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker that describes a fictional Soviet expedition to the impact site and attributes the 1960 Nedelin disaster to alien technology found there. The date was actually mentioned several times in the story, as the expedition was meant to correspond the the 50th anniversary of the event, but it flew right over my head. (This is a pretty big coincidence, as I’ve only read it once before about four years ago - though it did make a significant impression on me - and picked up the issue for other reasons.)

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t seem to be up on the net anywhere. It’s published in the 1985 mid-December issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and in Bruce Sterling’s collection of short stories, Globalhead (which is worth buying anyway, because hey - it’s Bruce Sterling).  ETA: You can also find it in Rudy Rucker’s collection Gnarl (thanks, Rudy!).

Thanks to Edward Willett for his post mentioning the centennial - without it I’d have missed the date completely.