some words to not

the devil! on the very day that i put my hummus recipe online, someone just informed me that israeli star-chef eyal shani put his hummus recipe on haaretz.com.

greats mind do think alike. well, now you can choose. his is definitely more poetic:

here's the hebrew version

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curiously, the tahini will change color and consistency, becoming first stiffer and then softer. it also becomes firt darker and then lighter. whenever you feel like you're stuck, add a little more water. in the end you want an almost white, creamy consistency. definitely keep stirring and adding water until it's perfectly smooth. you should also add a little salt at this point, to take away the strong sesame taste.

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dating in boston must be fun.

and then people wonder why divorce rates are so high.

yes, people who would even think of replying after reading this list definitely sound like the traveling+exploring type.

more like the 'sign me up for a packaged vacation that is rated 4-out-of-5 on the exploration excitement scale' type.

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today is f.a.t, friday after thanksgiving, 'fat friday', 'black friday' (not because it's gloomy but because you get your books back into the black), 'day after thanksgiving', etc. in short, the biggest shopping day of the year in the u.s.

it's also buy nothing day if you're into that kind of stuff.

actually, dror sent me an even more convincing link - much better than the official propaganda, albeit only in hebrew.

as with my vegetarianism, i think the right way to change things that are wrong (if you actually believe they're wrong) is not by banning or stopping, but by partial change.

people don't like partial change because it's not as sexy as banning or stopping something.

but personally, i would prefer if everyone would eat only 10% less meat than they do than if 5% of the people who do eat meat would stop eating it altogether.

same here. i don't know what i think of 'buy nothing day' except for maybe its symbolic and educational value. i'd much rather if people would just buy a little less, and would think a little more when they do so every day than if they just didn't buy anything on a single day.

to quote andy warhol:

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nope, you can't get just one more thing done. and you can't pick up a bottle on your way to dinner, and you can't just grab a coffee, or just buy that 3/16'' screw you just remembered that you need.

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felt all 17 again today as i had to take my written learner's permit test. you have to answer 14 out of 20 questions right to get the permit.

here are two tips that might help you:

• if you're going for the regular and the motorcycle permit, it's best to do them together. first, if you're studying you don't have to study twice, and second - about half of the questions overlap, and they tell you the correct answer immediately, so you can use that when you're taking the second test. so instead of having to answer 28 questions right, you only have about 18 or so.
• always, but always, choose the most extreme answer. in all questions that i saw, the most extreme answer was the correct one. if they ask you how many feet clearance you need, 10, 20, 100, or 1000, it's always 1000. if they ask you how much alcohol is in something, 0.01, 0.05, 0.1 or 0.2, it's always 0.2, the one question where i violated that rule, was the one i got wrong. i could not believe that you can renew your licence a whole year before it expires. comes to show.

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i remember that playing with calculators as kids, we also liked the fact that the sqrt of 17 started out with 1,2,3,4 and had 5,6 closely followed. and if you sqrt again, you still have 2,3,4,5 in close proximity.

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oh america loves its rules and regulations.

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this simple site boils down what you really want to do with your life. it's probably a link you'll get forwarded a lot over the next month. so remember - you heard it here first.

and i heard it first on juliaset

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waiting for my laundry to dry, i'm snorting craigslist ads. read this one if you will.

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craigslist personals educate us that a young mit professor wants to get to know you.

if you're looking for mr. nice guy - you got the wrong dude. this one is pretty cocky, i must say.

but beware,

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saw an amusingly named company employing a huge crane outside m.i.t today, called 'death wish piano movers'.

the word of the day is 'things are working out'.

knock on wood.

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if you have more than one computer and more than one monitor on your desk and want to get rid of all the keyboards and mice, you absolutely need synergy.

this will make you very happy. i kid you not.

it's one of those 'wow' moments.

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while my more achievement oriented friends just counted how many chapters they had left to finish and what they could skip to get to the finishing line -- i insisted on understanding what we learned, even if it meant that i won't get to half of the material. eventually i did cover almost all of it, and when the exam came, it seemed very simple to me.

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beats me how she does it, but my roommate is getting everything for free. after an s.u.v (no kidding) it was a violin, and then an antique banjo. the latest addition to the collection is a 12'' powerbook and a digital camera.

how does she get people to give her stuff?

then, when i think of it, she sometimes misunderstands some of my offers and interprets them as me wanting to give her something for free. maybe that's how you do it.

it's a little like the difference between getting laid and not - maybe it's just being in the frame of mind that you are going to get the girl, so when an opportunity offers itself you just naturally take it.

coz it's not like the other person came to the table with a complete agenda, and maybe they just think you know what you're doing and they should go along with it.

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that's what happens when you still think that lending your r.e.m cd to someone who doesn't give it back is about the greatest loss you can imagine.

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robert malley was there and writes a rare (and short!) balanced view of the camp david failure (reprinted here).

this is probably the camp david account from the best-informed source you can get, since he seems to not only have been present, but - as opposed to barak and clinton - also have learned a thing or two before getting the job.

to this day i find it ridiculously sad how ex-p.m barak's ego has led him to popularize the 'no partner theory', a choice that - in my opinion - has sparked much of the bloodshed we're witnessing now.

barak, who still hasn't presented any maps, documents, or anything else to his people in support of his theory, prefers to stick to his populist, simplified, and sophomoric talkshow chatter so easily adoptable by the public.

and i heard he's running for re-election!

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the palestinian leader. balding as early as 1964.

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"If one candidate's trying to scare you and the other one's trying to get you to think, if one candidate's appealing to your fears and the other one's appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope."
- Bill Clinton, Philly, Oct 25

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the last image i saw before waking up today was me walking down a pier towards an oilrig. someone unknown to me was standing on a small float in the bay and shouting towards a larger ship, on which my good friend was standing. he was using israeli army jargon that is impossible to translate.

lately i've been consistently waking up 5 minutes before my alarm clock.

i also had other, sadder, dreams. dreams that are better forgotten.

much to write about these last few days, and no wish whatsoever to do so.

with that i am signing off, at least for a while, 8 months and two days after my first entry.

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the halloween shopwindow dressing has hardly given way to the thanksgiving spending extravaganza, with some bold christmas decorations rare and far between - and yet first snow fell today in boston. i caught it on my bike from m.i.t home, right on the border of cambridge and somerville, and although it wasn't much of a snow, anyone still hoping for a short-sleeved day this season should adjust his expectations.

well i wasn't really on my way home, but to a bar.

but i have my drinking under control.

really.

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i've been starting to use my cellphone screen as a flashlight lately.

also i've been wondering whether people are writing retro emulators for old skool phones running on the funky new ones.

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read this brilliant story on cnn, before it's archived.

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ok, sorry for the geeky title, i just spent a few days running algorithms in java.

anyway, the onion - once more - had it right when it called what happened two days ago as an 'attempt at democratic elections' european election monitors are appalled, and i hope nobody thinks it's beyond this administration to cheat their way through the elections.

but cheating or not cheating apart, by far my favorite story so far is that of the e-voting machine losing 4500 out of 10500 votes because it was running out of memory.

it's nothing new that this is not a very technology-savvy country, as i've noted a few times, but what kind of storage system did they use that can only store 3,005 (!) votes? an atari 2600? or maybe every vote was stored as a 100M movie file?

and there is no backup for the votes that were lost? hell, i back up papers that i write every night on two machines.

and the machine didn't stop accepting votes when the memory ran out? it just overwrote the old votes?

god. some programmer should be put in prison for malpractice on that one.

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a friend of mine called from israel and asked whether we're aware of the whole arafat crisis. i pointed out to him that arafat is on top of google news for a few days now, interrupted for about 24 hours with election news, and now, the day after the elections he's back on the top headline.

i have no idea why he is so interesting to the world, for someone who has been declared 'irrelevant' so long ago.

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the u.k, home of most reality tv ideas, is going another step in the right direction. after driving people insane with sleep deprivation, now channel four is planning to run a documentary following the decomposition of a human body after its demise.

sweet.

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them liberals here at m.i.t look hazy-eyed over to canada. the more laid-back types eye mexico. they all note the well defined border between the blue states and the red states, and it's almost like secession is in the air.

looking at the map, an unnamed democrat here said: 'see all those blue states? what we should do is adjust the tax laws so that we pay less federal taxes and all those red states will starve and maybe then they'll find out that they're actually depending on us democrats to survive'.

i never understood why the north didn't let the south secede in the 1800s, or as udi once said 'i thought the union was a voluntary thing'. maybe now is a good time to reconsider.

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the onion says it best, of course, in its recent street poll about the red sox breaking the curse:

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got hit by about 150 comment spams tonight promoting cialis. i just hope it's not from a real ex-girlfriend of mine or something.

i had to manually remove them from my files, which was a royal pain, and i reverted to some scripting. if i deleted one of your comments in the process, please accept my deepest apologies.

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in an unrelated story, a kind spirit bought me something called a floor rag, imported - no less - from israel. for my american readers, it's a piece of cloth that is aimed to collect the dirt from the floor with the intention of actually cleaning the room, instead of just wetting it, moving the dirt around and obscuring it with fragrance.

floor cleaning is not a big favorite here, and floor rags are a piece of household equipment almost impossible to obtain in the u.s of a.

you know, i've always wondered why shower-happy americans love to make fun of the french for just using perfume instead of washing the scum off, when that's exactly what they do with all their other clearning chores: wet, disinfect and distribute.

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since nobody really gives a fuck what i have say on the topic, i will now announce that 'some words to not' calls the 2004 presidential elections for incumbent president and republican nominee george w. bush.

with florida gone and ohio nothing more than wishful thinking for the dems, it's safe to say that we are looking forward to another four years of great comedy in the white house.

there sure were some long faces on the t tonight. people were not very happy.

i know that there are supposedly some 1,000,000 uncounted votes in florida, but hey - i think it's over.

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and it's the home of democracy (as another subway poster says). too bad that they're short 500,000 volunteers to staff the voting booths, because presidential election day is not a paid vacation day. for a country spreading freedom and elections all over the world, one would think that they would encourage people to attend their own elections. but that would be too much to ask.

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if you ask me people should dress up for every party. it's just so much fun. there's always something to talk about and you are smiling like an asshole even before you had your first drink. not to mention what being dressed in a miniskirt riding the t does to your sense of self consciousness.

also girls seem to really embrace the holiday to dress down and dirty for that occasion. it's almost like the alcohol excuse - as if the high boots and sexy top are not really 'they', it's just a costume innit?

in general my anecdotal observation finds that guys try to dress up funny whereas girls really try to walk the boundary between having a recognizable costume, but still looking sexy. you don't see many of them dressing up in baggy bunny costumes, or covering their faces.

it's one of those lovely american things, where prudence and decadence fight it out. as long as it's a costume, it's fine. anything for the holiday spirit.

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my one true love didn't like the market when we started dating. she couldn't get over the fact that you had to pay each and every one of the sellers separately, take out money and count it for tomatoes separately, and for basil separately and for cheese separately. she also didn't like that some of the sellers tried to cheat you all the time. and the fact that there were so many people crowding the place like a guns-and-roses concert, when axl rose was still hot.

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