Dear Reader (and winners of the Guess What’s in This E-mail Contest),
Like a peckish zombie having a nosh, I was picking the brain of an Israel expert the other day, as part of my prep for what turned out to be a fairly mediocre Fox News gig on Tuesday. Anyway, he was getting all revved up about how good Israel’s enemies have gotten at public relations. According to my friend, Israel’s foes in Gaza and around the world are increasingly clever at staging protests, photo-ops, and the like. Meanwhile, the Israelis have a thumbless grasp of international public opinion.
This has become something close to a consensus position among Israel supporters of late. And while I’m sure there’s some truth to it, I think the whole discussion misses the more important point: A whole lot of people have gone bat-guano crazy when it comes to Israel.
The argument that it’s all a P.R. problem presupposes that there’s an audience out there eager to hear both sides of the argument, if the BBC were willing to provide them. But that’s not the case. It seems a lot of people are willing to believe stuff about Israel they wouldn’t believe about any other democracy. They’re eager to hold Israel to a standard they won’t hold any other to. To date, there’s still been more outrage over this flotilla fiasco than there was over North Korea’s deliberate attack on a South Korean vessel. And going by Turkey’s rhetoric about the incident and its undying love for the nation-deprived Palestinians, you’d have no idea that the Turks have been killing nation-deprived Kurds for longer than Israel has existed, and have treated them with far more cruelty than Israel would ever dream of doing.
Israel is supposed to be guilty of deliberate murder and a massacre. If that’s the case, why’d they kill only nine “humanitarians”? Indeed, if Israel is bent on the “genocide” of the Palestinian people, why is Israel so bad at it? These sorts of obvious questions don’t seem to penetrate the craniums of people around the world. They’ve simply anathematized Israel into some kind of demon state about which no charge is too outrageous. The idea that you can fix that with more clever press releases or by equipping commandos with paintball guns is just plain stupid.
Hey, I think I’m going to write a column about this, so I’ll stop here and turn to the more pressing issue of . . .
When Doves Cry
So I had a Dove bar last night (“Just one?” – The Couch). We usually get them for my daughter, but sometimes she must be punished, so I will eat her dessert in front of her while laughing my moo-ah-ha-hah evil laugh. Just kidding. But they are really, really good. I have no doubt that when Saudi sheiks fly the entire Saturday night shift from the Spearmint Rhino out to Riyadh for a spread-the-faith seminar, they shower the girls with krugerrands and Dove bars. They are just that good.
In fact they are so good, you are immediately swarmed with guilt after eating one, because you know that, short of whale blubber, seal loin, or Christopher Hitchens’s liver, you’ll never have something so rich. And that’s why I find the Dove bar popsicle stick so hilarious. My wife was the first one to point this out to me: Unlike normal popsicle sticks, which tend to have kid-friendly jokes on them (“What kind of sandwich do fish like to eat? Peanut butter and jellyfish!” – ha!), each Dove bar stick has a life-inspiring, female-empowering, and Dove-bar-snarfing message submitted by a female Dove-bar fan somewhere in America. The one I got last night read: “Be proud to just run the race no matter the finish.”
It’s great advice metaphorically. But you can be sure it’s even more apt literally, if Dove bars are a regular part of your diet.
Spell! It’s that time of year again: The annual Scripps Howard Spelling Bee is in town. I love this event for a bunch of reasons. First, it’s classic American goodness. Second, the press famously hates to cover it but knows it has to, because normal people think it’s great. Third, every year it shows that homeschooling produces some really impressive kids. My only complaint is that you never get any of the real color and back story. For instance, while all the cameras are watching the action on the main stage, the big excitement is in the practice rooms, where booze, Pokemon cards, and cash flow like stuff that flows a lot. That’s where the real money is made. Why, last year, I put ten grand on a homeschooled kid from Sri Lanka who successfully spelledabyssopelagic while stubbing out a cigar in the palm of his hand.
Speaking of Abyssopelagic Matters
I’ll probably write about this more later, but for now I think I should at least admit I was wrong. The Deepwater Horizon disaster really does demonstrate that the technology isn’t fully ready for deepwater drilling. Yes, we know how to do it pretty well when everything goes right. But when things go wrong, the last couple weeks clearly show that we don’t know how to get them right again. I am still very much for domestic oil exploration, in part because, if we don’t drill more here, there will be more spills in the ocean (tankers are still more dangerous than rigs). But I can’t argue with the folks who want a moratorium on deep drilling until we have a serious accounting of what we know how to do and what we don’t.
In Coprophagic News Vital news story of the day: “NJ Teen Admits Defecating In Classmate’s Soda.” [BROKEN LINK]
AP has the scoop: “His lawyer calls it a foolish prank, but a judge isn’t laughing. A 17-year-old high school student from Haddon Township admitted in family court Thursday that he defecated in a classmate’s soda during an auto-shop class. Prosecutors dropped an aggravated assault charge in exchange for the boy’s guilty plea to a charge of tampering with a food product.
“Authorities said the victim sipped the soda, then spit it out as his classmates laughed on March 29.
“A judge ordered the boy to serve probation, serve 200 hours of community service, write a letter to the victim to apologize – and to write a 1,000-word report on why it’s unhealthy to ingest fecal matter.”
Man, if I had a dime for every time Lowry has made me write an essay like that (“The more they read this ‘News’letter, the more of your readers might want to put pen to paper too” – The Couch.)
That’s a Big Hole
The other day I posted an item in the Corner [BROKEN LINK] about that massive sinkhole in Guatemala. And then I asked: ”Has a Hellmouth opened in Guatemala? Did a massive horta emerge in the dark of night? Are the molemen about to invade?”
For the next 24 hours, readers sent in scads of suggestions of other fictional threats from below. (Note: I said fictional, so Bill Clinton’s pants don’t count.)
It could be a new Great Pit of Carkoon, in which lives the all-powerful sarlacc.Though, of course, the Guatemalan pit is actually considerably bigger.
It could be the point of egress for the Underminer, from the Incredibles. The Underminer had one of the great intro lines in film history: “Behold, the Underminer! I’m always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me! I hereby declare war on peace and happiness! Soon, all will tremble before me!” If only some politicians were as honest about their sales pitches.
Anyway, this seems like a good cubicle discussion topic: List all of the creatures and phenomena in fiction that created giant holes in the ground.
Meanwhile, back to Guatemala, as I used to say when I was a fugitive. It seems that this wasn’t the first time the Stygian depths yawned open in Pais de la Eterna Primavera, or “Country of the Eternal Spring.” It seems massive creatures have been eternally springing out of the ground for a while down there. Here’s a sinkhole from 2007.
My real hope, however, is that these are in fact burn holes from clandestine airborne-laser volcano-lancing tests. But that’s a subject for another day.
Photo of the Day
He will be furious with me for posting this, but Cosmo has come to realize that until his leg gets better, he needs help policing our neighborhood for bears, vampires, skateboard punks, and government workers of all stripes. And so, lacking a proper lieutenant to train, he’s using what he’s got. He can be seen here on what passes for our front porch (which he calls “Sentry Point Alpha One”) with his trainee. That expression on his face says, “We need to talk about talent recruitment.”
