במרשמי מ"ה, תהליך זה אורך מספר ימים
One of the things I did during my three-month blog hiatus was to make a two-week trip to Israel. The trip was enormously fun and the Israelis were surprisingly warm and open. I say surprising because my previous extensive interaction with them was through dealing with camera salesmen in Brooklyn, and I now realize that they were a special breed of their own and it was utterly unfair to judge an entire nation and people by their actions. It would be like saying that all New Yorkers behave like their taxi drivers, which is not true. Maybe a bit true, but not entirely.

The other surprising thing is that this is a country constantly surrounded by old wars and new conflicts, and I was expecting that most people would be reserved and suspicious of strangers. But, I found that everyone was uniformly welcoming and friendly. In this case, not unlike the New Yorkers.

But this post is not about Israel, but about my flights there and back. The trip over was on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv. Most of the passengers were Israelis going home (perhaps they came over to buy cameras too). For 13 hours, I felt like I was getting an early introduction to the country, except that no one offered me a very special deal on an excellent Nikon, very cheap, “just for you my friend.” But everyone spoke in Hebrew, argued in Hebrew, sang in Hebrew and read stories to their kids in Hebrew.

Even many of the flight announcements were in Hebrew. Since this was an international flight, the flight attendants would speak first in English, then repeat presumably the same thing in Hebrew. Except that the English part would be one sentence short, and the Hebrew announcement was several minutes long each time, and that made me very nervous. I was wondering, what was it they were telling the other passengers that they were not telling me?

The same thing happened the last time I visited Japan when I took the bullet train. They were also telling the natives a lot more than they were telling us foreigners. Sure we knew that the next stop was Hamamatsu, but was everyone getting a refund on their train tickets, or were they having a buy-one get-one-free sushi sale in the dining car? The only consolation was that most of the Japanese seemed totally uninterested and just sat there slurping their noodles, so I knew I wasn’t missing out on anything much. A friend later told me that the announcer was simply reminding passengers to not forget their umbrellas on rainy days, and telling them that the exit at the next stop would be on the right side or left side. And you’d want to know that well in advance, because each stop was only for a few nano seconds (it’s a bullet train, remember?) and if you hesitated, you’d be off for another hundred miles. No wonder I met so many foreigners on Japanese trains – they just didn’t know how to get off.

But, I digress. Unlike the Japanese on the bullet trains, the Israelis on the Delta flight were very alert and paid close attention to the announcements. And many of my neighbors often got up and went to the first class section for long periods of time, and came back smiling and refreshed. I imagined there was an open bar in the front, and I was not invited. And it was no bar Mitzvah either, although apparently many gifts were exchanged. For the rest of the flight I just sat there feeling sorry for myself, probably the only unhappy passenger on the plane while everyone else had a grand party.

They also celebrated when the plane landed, with a big round of applause for the pilots, the flight attendants and each other, happy with the free drinks or the excellent camera deals everyone got. I remember one time the pilot getting congratulated after an unusually turbulent flight to Denver on a stormy day. But this time the flight was completely smooth and uneventful, so I didn’t know what was the big deal. Certainly nobody applauded on the return flight when we landed. Maybe that had to do with the fact that we came back to Atlanta, but still. At least nobody got out to kiss the ground or scoop up a bag of dirt for souvenir. And that’s another way where the Israelis are very different from the Pope.

And speaking of the Pope, Merry Christmas everybody, and Happy Hanukkah to you Delta fliers.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 12:15 PM 27 comments

 
I’m Back
Hello again everydog and loyal reader (yes, both of you). Sorry I’ve been gone for a while without much warning. So that nobody worries, I should tell you now that everyone is fine. The dogs are doing great, and the people are OK too, just a little weird as usual, but what do you expect? I can make up some story about how I discovered a whole other world out there beyond mushing, eating, sleeping, howling and blogging, but that wouldn’t be true. Instead I’ll just say that I’ve been in rehab, for something much more insidious than alcohol and anti-depressants, and if I work up enough courage, I’ll tell you at the end of this blog.

So what happened while I was gone? Well for one thing, people and dogs kept reading the blog reruns and my reader count went above 33,000. Quite an honor, I have to admit. But I kept asking myself, if I had been more diligent with the blog, perhaps we could have gone over 100,000. That certainly would put me in elite company, with people who are much more witty and certainly do a much better job of writing every week. If I did it, if only I did it! Nah, that sounds too much like the title of a book that might never get published.

One other thing that happened – and this is a honest-to-goodness true story that was in the news this week – is that they discovered that the upscale department store Macy’s has been selling winter coats lined with dog hair. They have been advertising the jackets as “faux fur,” but it turned out that the fur in fact came from a dog indigenous to parts of Asia and Siberia, perhaps, you know, like Siberian huskies? This is now making me very suspicious of the people who have been saving bags and bags of my fur in the garage. Here I was thought they were being nice by brushing me and saving the fur to make warm blankets for the children of Katrina (or Darfur, I forgot which), but it now looks like they’ve been selling it to Macy’s. Does it ever cease, the so many ways dogs are exploited? They toil away at blogs, and even their fur is harvested for profit. Just unbelievable.

There is one more thing I should tell you. For Christmas the people bought a nice digital camera. Probably with the Macy’s money, now that I think of it. The camera is a Canon SD800 IS, an superb shiny little thing, very compact so it can be taken everywhere, unlike the 10-year old brick they used to carry. But perhaps the nicest feature of this camera is face detection capability. Basically it scans the picture for faces and automatically adjusts focus and exposure conditions to best capture the subjects, so they don’t come out too dark indoors or too bright when a flash is used. It might sound like a gimmick, but in reality it comes in very handy, and for these people it is just about necessary – until now everyone in their pictures looks remarkably like the unfortunate children of Darfur.

So how does well does this face detection work? It is amazingly effective, I must say. It works best when you look straight at the camera. Using little focus boxes on the LCD screen, it tracks faces when they move or when the camera moves. You can fool it by turning sideways, but partial sideways is still OK, and it kept going even if you put on a hat or headphones. It even works with pictures in magazines and on computer screens. The ultimate test was that it had no trouble detecting doggy faces like mine (naturally. I would have made them return it otherwise), but it failed to recognize our dear great leader George Bush. As I said, an incredible little camera. The people had so much fun playing hide-and-seek with it they almost forgot to take pictures. I had to bite them before they snapped out of it.

OK, so you ask what was the addiction that sent me away for three months? It was thoroughly embarrassing but now is the time to admit it. My name is Woofwoof, and I am a cataholic.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 10:39 PM 11 comments