Corner Vine & Louvre Window

A truly peaceful corner on my little apartment balcony. The ancestor of this vine lived by an apartment building on the other side of the neighbourhood. A few centimeters were transplanted into a pot where it lived indoors for a few years. Then it passed over to me. One of our cats pulled over and shattered the large clay pot in which it lived, and I retrieved a few lengths and started over in another, smaller pot. This photo shows the happy vine six or seven years later.

We never feed the poor thing, though it always looked good anyway, if a little slow growing. So one day we fed it. Too much. It died, except for a few last green centimeters. Which are now thriving in a jar of water, awaiting a new bed of soil and a clay pot.

Isn't that just like life? Heck if I know. But it does suggest that a) cats can be dangerous to house plants, and b) I need to take better care of them.

JACOB WRESTLING THE ANGEL

An artistic collaboration between myself and the City of Karmiel Gardens Department.

The municipality did some pruning and culling in the public greenspace by of our apartment house backyard. I grabbed a small chunk, and knocked away the soft, buggy parts, and a few odd protrusions. Next came the gritty sandpaper, then the fine. Then the oil rag, and a final polish. This is what greeted me. This is what was inside awaiting a new life as, well, art.

I think. But in any case, I like it, and it has survived multiple attacks from a tubby neutered fuzzball.

An antique olivewood walking stick

I was returning from a long walk outside Karmiel maybe 10 or 15 years ago. At the edges of the industrial park was some waste land, formerly part of an olive orchard. The trees were mostly dead, or diseased, as the land was not being worked at all. A considerable amount of old cuttings were laying about, half covered in damp, rotting leaves and soil. I thought I saw a useable length of wood, so I tugged at it and pulled it out of the half-buried pile within which it lay. I reduced it to a manageable two meters or so with my Swiss Army knife saw. And this is what eventually emerged from the gray, leaf-stained wood with trimming and polishing.

The stick is resting on the sheet music for the tune "Sir James MacDonald of the Isles," a very old Scottish Highland bagpipe tune, of the type called piobaireachd. Beautiful, well-aged things go well together. Too bad that we don't understand this for ideas as well.

The crown of Gaulantis

This is majestic Har Kheirmon (aka Mt Heirmon) in the Golan Heights district of northern Israel, anciently called Gaulantis, and Bashan as in the home of the giant king Og. Far from being a totured, twisted, desolate land, it ranges from green and lush orchards, to grassy meadows and fields. It is very open, and there are signs of ancient vulcanism. But it is no more of a wasteland than an English moor or the Highlands of Scotland. Very rural, but productive.

It may be of interest to note that the Golan Heights was included in the British Mandate of Palestine, and slated as Jewish land. There was a long Jewish history on those heights. The British loved cartography, sensible borders and a neat arrangement of geographical features. The Golan, including the Kheirmon massif, rivers and streams running down from its slopes, the Hula valley below, and Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) all make up a tidy watershed system. In 1923 the Golan was transferred from Palestine to the French Syrian mandate for a variety of reasons and trade-offs, without consultation with all parties concerned. Something to do with French-British plans well outside of the Golan area.

In the years between 1948 and 1967, before the Golan was brought back into the natural and agreed-upon scheme of borders, how did the Syrians use their "beloved ancient Syrian" region? The shelled Israeli villiages below, and tried to cut off the natural flow of water from the high ground they controlled. What has israel done up there since 1967? It has established a valuable agricultural community, including winneries, and a prosperous tourist economy.

There are any number of ways to look at border delineation between future states by colonial powers. But one thing is certain, the Golan Heights makes much more sense inside of Israel, was intended to be inside Israel, and the Syrians have a very brief and very thin claim based on Britain making a private backroom deal with France.

Vergeltungswaffe 2 -- Pox Germanica Today

Vergeltungswaffe 2. The children and grandchildren of those d-mn things are still plaguing us. Some even use a potent kim chee pickling liquid as fuel, or a soupy yoghurt raita.

Hitler may have been stopped in his attempt at destroying the Nation-of-Israel-in-exile in Europe, but the nasty spawn of those V2s are alive and well and threatening to drop in at any time.

OK, the Germans got the world out into space, and to the moon. Werner "Paperclip" Von Braun is essentially the father of the American space programme--with a lot of others pitching in. Fine. But it doesn't end there. Aside from American, British, French missile programmes, that d-mn V2 also went east to the Soviet Union, and the net result was a Ukranian premier shooting a Russian astronaut into space, with a German missile, from a launching site in Kazakhistan, and a Soviet military well-stocked with long-distance missiles. So from Germany, the technology went to the Soviet Union, then off to China, who along with the USSR shared or sold to needy others. Like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan. The consequences of actions taken in one year may take many more years to reach their maximum deadliness, and be quite unexpected.

The Persians are threatening Israel with that same V2 legacy today. Might there be a secret axis of North Korea, Iran, and maybe someday a more radical Pakistan? What of the Russians? Just what is the mix of business and imperial ideology in Moscow these days?

I suppose it must be said that our Jericho III owes something to the V2 as well. But then again, we don't need to talk about a Pox Judaica, as the world already views us as some kind of unsightly blemish.

I apologize now to the all Germans who of course had nothing whatsoever to with building the V2 as an offensive weapon to be used against civilian targets, joining the NAZI party by consent, supporting Hitler, going along with the anti-Jewish laws, willingly participating in prison cruelties or death camp executions, or regretting the demise of the 3rd Reich.

Signposts in Life

Photo taken on Har Bental, a volcanic cindercone hill on the Golan plateau. It is at about 1300 meters (4000 something English feet). There is a coffee shop up there, and a stunning view of Har Heirmon, still covered in snow though it is warm down below.

I am certain to have something to say about this later. Signposts in significant spots are intriguing. They invite comentary. The selection of some places, and the absence of others, is surely someone's commentary about something.

Purple Tree Season in Israel

This is a shot from my apartment balcony of Presidents of Israel Street, the main drag through Karmiel, and a nice view of the central parks area and beyond.