I took a walk across the valley tonight, from my house to the old city. I’d just come in through Jaffa Gate when I noticed that something was going on. At first I thought it was a bomb scare – crowds of people were by-standing, and there was a unusually large number of police around, among the crowd and in the street directing traffic. But then one of the shopkeepers said that there was a movie being filmed – and that’s when I noticed the cameras, lights, etc.

…Yeah, shaddup. It was night. And they were unobtrusive cameras and lights, okay?

One of the extras (a Palestinian in a Border Guard uniform – took me a couple minutes to realize that no, the army wasn’t going quite that far with its affirmative action program) said that it was some kind of detective movie, which explained the presence of all the people in police uniforms. I approached one of the people who seemed to know what was going on. He turned out to be Israeli – a local crew member. Here is (more or less) how the conversation went:

Me: What’s it about?

Him: Oh, it’s a German made-for-tv adaptation of some book by Batya Gur *.

Me: Oooh! Oooh! Which one?

Him: Murder on Bethlehem Road.

Me: Squeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! **

Him: Do you know it?

Me: Omg yes I love it its my favorite book ever omfg I can’t believe they’re making a movie out of it!!!!!!!1!!111!!1 *** So… the policewoman at the table is… lemmee guess… Tzilla?

Him: Yes. And the guy next to her, the balding one – *points to middle aged, very German-looking guy with grey hair, and not very much of it either* – is Ohayon.

Me: … No, he’s not.

Okay, okay, I didn’t actually say it. But I thought it.

Let me explain.

Michael Ohayon is the protagonist of a series of detective novels by Israeli author Batya Gur. He’s a police inspector and a likable, complex character. He is also very, very attractive. (Let’s just say that if he actually existed, I’d be faxing in my request for a transfer from my wonderful hopefully-future unit to the Jerusalem police force like that. No, scratch that. I’d be camping out on the local recruitment office’s doorstep until they agreed to transfer me.)

Mmmmmmm.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Ahem. Anyway, Ohayon is, among other things, Sephardic (Moroccan, to be specific), which plays a part both in his character and in the plot of the books. In Murder on Bethlehem Road the point is particularly important, as the book’s major theme is the conflict between Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) and Sephardim (Jews from Arab countries). There’s some disgusting stuff going on here that doesn’t make the international news – lots of prejudice against Sephardim. That Jews should be racist, not just against, say, Arabs or Africans, but against other Jews is the height of hypocrisy. (Not to say that it’s worse than any other kind of racism, just more ridiculous.) It’s better these days, but still exists. And that’s what the book is ultimately about.

So it’s sort of a shame that they cast someone ethnically German (definitively Ashkenazi) as Ohayon rather than someone, well, darker – and in doing so lost a large part of that particular subtext.

Anyway, I hope the guy is a good actor because I am totally getting it on dvd whenever it comes out.  Because out of every movie it could possibly have been, this would have been my first choice, I love those books so much.  Can life get any more awesome than this – not only finding out that my favorite detective novel’s being turned into a movie, but to also stumble over them filming it?

I might even be in it. I was convinced to walk back and forth with the extras a few times… making me really wish that I’d thought to wear my nice jacket and to put my hair up. Oh well. My aura of unfashionableness didn’t stop one of the cute assistants from flirting with me and asking for my number, though. *g*

…

It’s a particularly odd kind of meta standing and watching an actor play a character, especially a character you’re attached to. A character in a book or a movie is a character, yes, and the actor is their own person – even if the two do share a face (or, in this case… don’t really). It’s relatively easy to keep the two separate.  But watching an actor be a character right in front of you… it’s a strange feeling.

* Probably my favorite Israeli author Evar. She wrote this series of amazing mystery novels, set right here in my hometown. Most of the action of this particular one takes place actually in my neighborhood.

** No, not out loud. Well, not quite.

*** Dialogue slightly embellished for dramatic purposes.

I hear that people in the US are suffering from election withdrawal.  I understand completely – you spend almost two years rooting for an underdog candidate, only to see him win by a landslide.  Total anticlimax.  The bastard didn’t even have the consideration to leave any suspense – no recounts, no fraud, not even any quibbles over the voting machines.

Thankfully, American voters do not have this problem here in Israel.  Our government has considerately arranged for a series of elections to gently wean us off our addiction.  Just today, for instance, I had the privilege of voting for a right-wing, secular thug over a right-wing, Ultra-Orthodox thug in the Jerusalem municipal elections.  And come February, I get to vote in the national parliamentary elections too.

(Yes, Tzipi, I know you say that you only had them call the national elections because you couldn’t bring the Shas party into the coalition.  But we know better, and we’re grateful.)

The future is looking bright and filled with plenty of fliers, graphs and opinion polls.

Ever since I moved to Israel at the age of nine, I’ve been wanting to go back home.

I can’t even begin to explain what a wonderful feeling it is to know that “home” still exists.

Authors Steven Brust (of the excellent Vlad Taltos series), Kit O’Connell and Reesa Brown, along with a team of co-contributors, are in the process of launching an alternate reality fiction project.

As with Shadow Unit, a similar project, the authors will be releasing pieces of fiction set in the world while letting readers interact with the characters online. But they’re going one step further than Shadow Unit and actively encouraging reader contributions (fiction, merchandise, related websites and more) to the world – which are accepted as canon if they fit the rest of it.

Since the project is released under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, other people can actually market and sell related content and merchandise that they create themselves. One of the creators’ goals is to figure out ways to make this project earn money for them and for the other contributors.

Right now the project is just starting. The first piece of fiction is slated to go online in a couple weeks or so, and the authors are planning to release a wiki of information about the world’s canon in a couple months. This is a great time to get involved in the project from the very beginning. You can already start talking to the characters over on the Port Outreach blog.

• The central site with out-of-character information, including a newsletter, is up at continuouslabs.com.
• The in-world blog is up here.

There’s also a related Twitter feed and a website for an in-world music venue.

19/10/08: Edited to clarify.

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.