BabbleFest

Well-known and well-liked in the neighborhood, he is nevertheless literally all alone for the Yom Kippur holiday in Kabul:

Zebulon Simentov, the last Jew in Afghanistan, is once again marking the Jewish holy day of fasting in solitude, in a deserted synagogue in the capital of a devoutly Islamic nation.

“I have everything I need for the 24 hours of praying and fasting,” Simentov tells AFP before the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at sunset on Friday.

Around two decades ago, there were still about 20 Afghan Jewish families living in Kabul, although all were from Herat — the largest city in northwestern Afghanistan near the border with Iran.

Through the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the subsequent civil war and the Taliban’s 1996-2001 regime, all went to Israel or moved to neighbouring former Soviet republics — undoing a Jewish presence built up from the seventh century.

Only Simentov has been left behind, becoming by default the guardian of Kabul’s empty synagogue.

The synagogue’s former keeper died of illness two years ago, Simentov’s wife and children are in Israel, he has special permission to slaughter his own kosher meat – normally done by a specially trained rabbi – and the Taliban stole the synagogue’s Torah, thinking it was valuable and could be sold.

But Simentov stays on, praying alone, the last Jew in Afghanistan.

I’m not sure how you get sanctioned as a World Burrito Eating Championship event, but for what it’s worth:

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine - A day trader and aspiring pizza chef known as “Eater X” munched through 10 3/4 burritos in a dozen minutes Saturday to win what was billed as the world burrito-eating championship.

10 3/4 burritos in 12 minutes? These are “professionals”? They’ve obviously never seen my teenage son eat burritos. The $3,000 prize money wouldn’t cover his Taco Bell tab for the month.

I just noticed we’ve had some issues over the last few days with posts not appearing when posted. We’re down to one error on the page now, and I’ll be inserting the missing material in the order it should have originally appeared. It’s not your imagination, and it’s not the time travelling space aliens that provided the computer and copy of MS Word for Dan Rather’s memos, there really are entries from before today suddenly appearing today.

Did You Know . . .

Once upon a time, the garage  organizers were meant to sort out the garages only. That meant figuring out storage arrangements etc.  Now, the concept of organizers has broadened to include things as mundane as a medicine cabinet. The cabinet organizer is responsible for  everything from the cabinet  knob to the arrangements. With advanced technology, we also have organizers for data storage systems. These organizers basically make sure that everything in the data storage systems is in an orderly fashion. There are organizers for the entire home storage line as well.

At least, that’s what the Russians announced, according to something I heard on the radio. Russian military officials have declared that the Peruvian meteorite strike was actually a U.S. spy satellite used for spying on Iran. It was shot down by missiles launched by the secret the U.S. “Space War” force stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in order to provide provocation for the U.S. attacking Iran.

The Russians also announced this week that soil samples prove they own the North Pole.

Russia’s defense ministry stated that any attempt by Santa Claus to bring his workshop under the U.S. missile defense shield will be treated as an  invasion of Russian territory.

O.K., I made up that last paragraph, but it does fit right in with the other stuff, don’t you think?

Velociraptor, the smart, pack-hunting man-eating dinosaur made famous in the film “Jurassic Park” may actually have been covered with feathers.

A close study of a velociraptor forearm found in Mongolia shows the presence of quill knobs, bumps on the bone where the feathers anchor, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The feathers may have helped regulate body temperature, attract mates or intimidate adversaries, but the bone structure of the animal makes flight out of the question.

“Jurassic Park” just wouldn’t have been the same with the humans being hunted by a toothy version of Big Bird, but it gets even worse:

The velociraptor the researchers studied was about three feet tall and weighed about 30 pounds. The size of these animals was exaggerated in the movie.

Imagine “Jurassic Park” with the humans being hunted by a trio of ferocious meat-eating chickens the size of kindergarten students. Somehow it just doesn’t have “blockbuster” written all over it.

The latest round of six-party talks between North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia, Japan and South Korea was cancelled by North Korea, touching off some speculation that it had something to do with the alleged North Korean-Syrian nuclear connection suggested after last week’s Israeli airstrike in Syria.

I’m skeptical about whole nuclear connection theory in the first place, and I suspect the reason Pyongyang cancelled this round of talks is probably what the South Koreans have suggested: China has failed to deliver 50,000 tons of aid supplies promised in February, and North Korea is a bit miffed.

It seems some are doubtful of Russia’s claim to have detonated “the world’s most powerful conventional weapon.”

At least one retired American general, now a consultant and expert TV talking head, is of the opinion that the U.S. arsenal already contains a conventional “bunker buster” or penetration type bomb that is actually more powerful releasing more destructive force, than what the Russians claim to have detonated.

And a German analyst is skeptical of the Russian claims in their entirety, suggesting that the video released by the Russians not only doesn’t show what it purports to show, but is actually spliced together from more than one source and shows no signs of any destroyed buildings, as claimed by the Russians.

Could this simply be empty Russian boasting, like Khrushchev’s claim that Russia was “cranking out missiles like sausages”‘?

Already some on the far right are carping about Bush’s nomination of retired Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. Apparently, some are not sure he’s “conservative” enough, and most, whether they admit it or not, don’t like the fact that he’s not Ted Olson, who would have beeen their choice. Had Bush nominated Olson, and the left started screaming bloody murder because he’s “too partisan”, the first response of the right would have been to begin shouting that the President, because he’s President, gets to pick who he wants, that the only criteria should be competence, not partisanship.

So let me remind the right wing:  the President, because he’s President, gets to pick who he wants, and the only issue should be competence, not partisanship.

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AARP, the American Association of Retired People, started as an interest group for retirees when that group consisted almost entirely of the WWII generation. By progressively dropping their eligibility age, the organization’s ranks have been swelled by post-war adults (those too young to have participated in WWII, but born before the “baby boom”) and baby boomers.

The group now rakes in big bucks pushing insurance and such things as living wills, trusts and estate planning programs through various third parties. My father has been called several times and solicited to buy this kind of stuff. Whoever is running AARP, they channel an awful lot of money into lobbyists and political agenda advertising.

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We have a nice image gallery script running, much like at the original site, but including a sidebar slideshow. More about that later.

We have some preventive measures in place to try to keep the spammers at bay, so we’ve gone back to our original “open comments” policy, which we’ll stick with as long as we don’t end up buried in spam again. More about this later, too.

We have site stats up. With the old platform, some pretty sophisticated site stats were integrated in the core script. We don’t have that here, and we’re still looking at options, but for now at least we have a counter/stats block.

So I’d say things are coming along nicely. We’re still looking at themes. We really like this one, but the title block has fixed dimensions and longer titles don’t display well. Geo is threatening to start digging through the code to fix that. But Geo spending all his time fixing stuff in the code was why we changed platforms in the first place. So don’t be surprised if you stop by for a visit and the site’s appearance has changed completely, maybe several times, as we experiment with different looks.

… something went boom.

First reports came as Syria complained that Israeli jets had violated Syrian airspace. Syria said they had fired on the Israeli planes, but didn’t claim to have shot them down. That surely means that, if they actually fired, they didn’t hit anything. Had the Syrians shot down an Israeli warplane in Syrian airspace, the wreckage would have been promptly put on display and Syria would be claiming it was the wreckage of 15 planes. (continue reading…)

Russia has apparently test-detonated a massive non-nuclear bomb, dubbing it “the father of all bombs” and announcing that it is “as powerful as a nuclear” explosion.

But it’s really nothing new, just an overgrown version of a well-known type of weapon called a vacuum bomb. This type of bomb detonates above ground level in two stages, a small blast that disperses a cloud of explosive fuel, which then detonates in the air with tremendous explosive force, generating a pressure wave and literally consuming the air, creating a partial vacuum that causes even more damage. (continue reading…)