Hey, I would have posted on my beloved Xanga a month and a half ago… were it not for this damn drug trial and my agreement with the firm.
Anyway, it’s all over, and I guess I can now ‘tell-all’. Read on…

At her suggestion, we went to a nice little steak-house, Sambo’s.
“Didn’t know they could still name a place that.” I said as we pulled into the lot. “Thought they have to call it ‘A diminutive dark-complected boy named Sam.’”
“Oy, it’s just a word.” she reassured me, “like Dumbo over there.”
Sure enough, the place had rented an enormous inflated elephant, tied down by three guy ropes, to, I guess, attract customers. We sat down inside; I did my best to talk about Ms Franji, not about myself. Kinda like what @boulderchristina described in an awesome post on Xanga a few weeks back. But Franji, bless her over-sized heart, gave me the impression that I needn’t have exerted myself over-much. She quickly turned the conversation to something we had in common, a fascination with words. Yes, like ‘Dum-bo’.
“Stuck in the MUD, is he?” She quiped. Took me half a perfect baked potato with sour cream to ‘get’ that she was reversing the letters in ‘DUM-BO, except for the -BO of course.
“We can always just pull him out, with my TUR-BO truck,” I came up with, “unless it gets stuck in a RUT.”
“Well, you can always just buy a new vehicle, on the web; ‘Carb-bo.com’” she said, slicing her steak.
“I tried that,” I came back. “but every time you click for prices it re-directs you to ‘Carbo-hydrates, and all the rates are greyed-out.” she liked that one. And I liked her more every minute.
 Something’s up
We kissed, as platonic a peck on the cheek  as I could manage, and when she left me off back at Mt Ne-bo I actually took two of the feel-good pills. Hey, I can always say the dog ate one. Didn’t get a particular rush from a double dose though. In fact, the depression returned less than an hour after I got home. ‘Wonder-drug’? You wonder where’s the ‘wonderful about it?
“Life sucks, you go out to eat, then it’s over, and they bury you on a full stomach.” I found myself thinking. Plus, the -BO words were starting to feel…um… uncanny. She’d absolutely insisted I order the ‘Jum-bo Fries’ as a final takeout. What’s up with that?
Lot’s of -BO words. I may be despondent, but like Poe, I still hear the  the ‘Nevermore’ when it poops on my head. But overall, I was  rapidly learning to  relish, ‘Franji Pani’s quirky attention.

“Hmm… can’t say.” she gazed toward the horizon.
“You mean, you’re not allowed to say, is that it?” I pressed her.
“Exactly. I mean, even if I had, hypothetically, hacked the files and discovered that you are in the cohort group receiving that, you know,  -BO word I’ve been kinda hinting at…”
“Kinda hinting at?!?” I laughed. Yes, it was all clear now. Bound by her professional obligation not to prejudice the trials, Franji none-the less, as a human, ok, a woman, needed to deniably signal to me that my new happiness was the singular result of her pure, basic, concerned love. Chemicals be damned. ‘What’s Love got to do with tertiary-amine sidechains and dopamine re-uptake.?” as the song goes.

     Yes, anyone reading my site has probably already accepted that I ‘make stuff up’. Not, G-d forbid, in an attempt to deceive, but for comic effect. (And also because so much of my life and work is like, classified, if you hadn’t guessed.)
And so here is something albeit on the edge of legality but real and cute as hell. My two turtles arrived this morning as planned at 10;30. Nine years old, they weigh in at 27 and 32 kilograms respectively. They will almost certainly out-live me . I need to put that in my Will. Along with a list of their favorite foods, for my heirs and assigns.
     As we speak, I’m trying to get past the impression from their facial expressions that they despise broccoli. They eat it just fine, with relish even. It’s just that dour look engineered by the drooping lip line which screams “Such awful food…. and such small portions, too.!”
‘Neta‘ and ‘Moofleta’, the girls are called. Native to Somalia, they are probably happy to be out of that war zone. Not that Israel is some idyllic middle-eastern Switzerland, but still, so far, so pastoral.
I also fed them cucumbers by hand. The trick is to stop the process while you still have the prospect of playing the piano ever again. And their tongues are pink and as big as mine. They hiss when they’re happy, I was told. I spent most of Saturday sifting the poisonous ‘chinaberries’ from the soil in their pen. My wife says I need more mouths to feed like another nose. She may be right, still, gawking at the freaking Galapagos is about as close to real-life Jurassic Park as I’ll probably ever get. And the expended broccoli plants were destined to be compost anyway. I just hope they don’t organize a food-strike. They finished off a pound of wetted cat-food in 5 minutes this afternoon. Licked the dish and begged for more. Oy, what was I thinking with these ravenous dinosaurs?
   

     Morbid curiosity I guess. I traipsed the half mile to my nearest neighbor to inquire about this morning’s little ‘Event’: paramedics escorting a young kid into a window-less van, and thence, I assume, to the funny-farm for observation. I’d waved hello to his Mom a few times; she always looked be-draggled and a bit unkempt. ‘Melba’, I think that’s her name.
“Yeah, they took the kid away.” Ezra told me right off. “Somebody must’ve called it in. Weren’t me though.”
    The child had always been a bit too much for his mom, a single mother at the end of her rope even on a good hair day. Small town; we know each others’ business, whether we want to or not.
“What was he doing this time, Ezra?” I pressed him for more skeletons of the plot.

“OK, there was this banging, at 6 in the morning. On the sidewalk. I looked out the window and he was just hammering the be-jesus out of something. Turns out it was a box of ‘Nabiscos’”
That’s what we generically call any kind of cracker here. Like calling a refrigerator a ‘Fridgidaire’, no matter what company made it.
I thought for a second, then hit him with the punch line:
“Kinda scary, watching a teen assault a saltine?” I said, vastly proud of my construction.
Ezra didn’t ‘get it’ in so many words, but none-the-less seemed to catch the verbal drift.
“Yeah, Melba’s toast; they’ll fosterize the kid this time fer sure.” Ezra opined, without the modicum of empathy one would generally hope to hear in a sad situation.
“What’s the world coming to these days?” I asked him, “Drugs, probably. The kid’s probably one of those, what do they call ‘em, ‘cracker-heads’.” I tried to move the conversation to the larger picture.
“Yeah, they start in elementary school these days. Waifs wasting wafers, and no budget for counseling.” Ezra had sub-consciously been infected with my word-playfulness.
“Cretins crunching croutons?” I offered, inquiring as to the brain-damage factor as a possible explanation.
“Or… ‘Derves’ whirling Hors d’oerves? Ezra with a three-point basket. Yes, it could be a result of religious fervor, I reasoned.
“So, what is to be done?” I asked my neighbor, thinking maybe he had given the problem serious thought.
“Hey, you’re the one with the free WIFI” Ezra hinted, out of the blue. (I’d always wondered  which of my neighbors was {-default, un-secured})
“Google it. Try ‘PTPPS’ for starts.”, he advised.
“PTPPS?”, I asked him, puzzled.”

“Yeah, Post-Traumatic-Pissed at Pastry Syndrome” Ezra explained. “It’s probably not in the Big Book of Nuts yet, but a few more teen saltine assaults and we’ll have Merck, Smith, Kline, French, and Upjohn working on it pronto. There’s big bucks in bi-polar biscuit-breaker amelioration,”
I walked back home through the woods, deep in thought. Could someone sane such as I (?) fall victim to this new peril? Yes, I’ve been known  on occasion to stomp the odd overly rock-like pretzel into smithereens on the floor, and to ‘frisby’ an entire six-pack of week-old pitas I bought without checking the sell-by date. But a Syndrome? Nah, worst-case I’m just ‘Impulsive-Not Otherwise-Specified’.
    Still, dear readers, if you do come upon a kook kicking a cookie or a miscreant making a mess out of a matza, at least consider intervening. It’s the yeast you can do.
 

      Every time I read on Wiki “…was known in antiquity; the Egyptians used the dried seeds of this plant to cure ‘al hadrakeef’, known today as meningitus.”
Or “records of the planet Saturn’s 139.67 year orbital period have been found incised into excavated ground sloth femurs from ca. 9500 years before the present.” I wonder about the question in the title.
    Tonight I noticed Jupiter, bright in the Western sky. And yeah, it’s not where it ‘belongs’. I mean, where I left it last time I looked, about a month ago. Most of the rest of the stars seem to stay put. Oh, except for that pesky bright-as-hell Morning star… and its dead-ringer twin, the Evening star.
The big question here is: would I have, could I have, put two and two together all by myself, thousands of years ago. (that’s before Google and high-speed internet, by the way.) {deduced that they are planets, not stars}
     So here’s a list of other discoveries/realizations you may want to use to test your deductive prowess against pre-literate cave-persons of either gender:

       Oy, my entire house/shed is on ‘vibrate’. Uninterrupted rattles/buzzes from inside every piece of wood. I’d noticed it last year also, about this time of year, and researched the fabled ‘Death-watch beetle’. Problem is that the buzz-frequency on the Wiki audio clip and on a Video is so much slower than ‘my’ guys. Here, they go on at about 30 beats per second. About the same sound you can easily make by forming a ‘T’ with your tongue and blowing out. Try it, just to know what I’m going through.
      No, I fear not for the reputed Omen of Impending Deceased Status often associated with this insect. It’s just a sense of being violated, the mindless robotic vermin inhabiting my tables, chairs, bookshelves, door and window frames.
Wiki, and several other experts say they eat almost exclusively oak. (?) All I got here is white pine. Is there some other boring creature, the males of whom have vibration all-star buzz-offs every Passover?

        I suppose I really should come clean about my love life. We have, after all, been an ‘item’ for going on two years.
And besides her laying me a delicious egg for breakfast every day, (perhaps as a quid-pro-quo for a generous handful of cat-food every morning at 5;30) we seem to be ‘bonding’ in a robust, and possibly worrisome, fashion.

ITEM: It’s now ‘Our’ Lap-top’: No sooner do I move from my computer chair then she ensconces herself comfortably in it, and commences to peck, ‘million monkeys’ style, at the keys and lights, until, (and it’s now four times she done it) she boots the thing on, to her great delight. By now I recognize just about every variety of ‘cluck’, from the ‘all-ok’ “bak-bak-bak-bak through “dak-dak-DAACK-bac-book” where she tries to imitate a rooster, to the early-dawn ‘daaawck…da-huh-huh-duck?” which is a classic trans-species complaint about having to get up for work in the morning.
 There is another vocalization she uses to tell me she’s just laid an egg. I try not to pry. Sometimes she works on the process, there in the bathtub I filled with straw, for two hours or more. Not sure I myself could do it, so I refrain from discussing the challenge with her.
But when she get’s Windows 7 to initialize, she always emits a cluck that Microsoft possibly never imagined.
Anyway, she is never more than about a meter away from me, especially when I’m weeding. Lot’s of bugs and worms un-earthed. Saves her digging. Every morning at first light we do a tour of the entire gardens, checking for new surprises. She’s right there, underfoot.
I guess the troublesome part is the bed. Why does she insist on spending every free minute on my pillow? I’m thinking of giving her her own damn pillow, on ‘her’ side of the bed. Yes, she poops on the blanket sometimes, but it’s no big deal. If you love someone…
I have a table in the middle of a room where I do paper-work, billing. I noticed yesterday that she was watching me with unusual interest as I shuffled receipts.
This morning, after failing to start my laptop, she went straight for that table. Grabbed the pen in her beak, as if to add a couple hundred shekels to Ya’acov’s bill. Wish I were making this up, but it’s all too true.
Woody Allen is probably my primary source here as to what to do. He told a shrink once “Doc, my wife thinks she’s a chicken…”
Shrink: Nu?
“Yeah, I’d have her committed…. but we need the eggs,”
And so, altogether, I’m not ‘conflicted’ about our relationship. On the one hand, never in my farm-boy life with chickens by the thousands did I develop anything more than a perfunctory role with these fowl, but on the other,’present‘, hand, I love that silly pigeon-breath hen like crazy, have to admit. Beats dealing with most humans wings-down. Like some French guy said “The more I meet humans, the more I like chickens.” (My translation.)
 

      Got this MSG from an old buddy who’s supposed to be visiting me here this week.
 Don’t worry, I can explain…
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

“A ‘B’ CD? (Yeah, that’s what I called it. His mileage varied:.)
‘E’?  ‘F’! (Ok, looks like 5 thumbs down from my cuz Brucie.)
“G..HI ‘J’!” Finally, a bit of pleasantry)
“KLM” (Ok, now I know which flight to pray about.)
“NO ‘P’ QR”. (That’s the one took me a while to decipher. Silly backwater me; how’s I supposed to know they spell ‘cure’ as ‘QR’ these days? I had to look up ‘WTF’ less than six months ago…) So, looks like the new medicine’s no miracle drug. Figures, he prolly
got the placebo. They do that in these double blind trials.)
And now for the contact info:
“STU-VW-X-’YZ’“
Yeah, like I don’t remember the hippy bass player. Even know Stu’s real name:’ Stuart Kitchner’. Takes a real dyed-in-the-wool these days though to still drive a VW. I made a note to look for flames painted on the side of it in the parking lot.
And yes, ‘ex-YZ’. The immortal Young Zygoats. Wow, it’ll be a thrill to have 3/5 of the original band all in one basket-case broken-down VW bug motoring up the Ayalon freeway from Tel Aviv to wherever… doesn’t happen every day.
Like I said in the title.

Sad story, I guess… for the RCA designer teams from Tokyo and Boston at To-Bo-RCA at least. Their dream of discretely main-streaming the newest ACROBOT ‘C’ into an unsuspecting 3rd grade classroom ended last week with a dramatic revelation in front of 39 shocked kids.
‘C’, who prefered to be called ‘Orca’ on the strength of a reversed reading of her design-name “ACROBOT” (TO-B-ORCA) actually did quite well for a few weeks, mastering the math, science, and even phys-ed at exactly the pace ‘normal’ to her supposed age group. Remembering to fall down innocently after only two cart-wheels, even though she could do them for a half a mile straight if needed. Lifelike and charming, she was a hit in and out of class. Even her playmates’ parents never guessed that she was a robot. Of course their interaction was limited to pointing out the direction of the playroom…and the refrigerator.
        No, what blew it all up was ‘Phonics’. Yeah, remember ‘Hooked on Phonics’, the attempt, long ago, to help kids learn to love…well, words with an ‘F’ sound but spelled with a ‘PH’. ‘C’ wouldn’t have any of it, even though she could of course grasp the entire English data-base in a couple nano-seconds. No it was the sheer illogicality of the thing. Drove her nuts.
On the day of the dramatic end, she gave the first hint of a problem by quietly singing, to the teacher’s astonishment, a little ditty she’d heard from some old JSolberg CD:
‘A Tear is just a Tear
It rhymes with HERE or THERE
Now tell me how we know which one…?

When the teacher tried to intervene, ‘C’/ Orca’ stubbornly feigned being sound asleep at her desk. The frustrated teacher promptly sent her out of the room, which might have been ‘C’s plan. At any rate, instead of MSG-ing her controller in the van out in the parking lot, she simply stopped by the cafeteria, grabbed a kitchen knife, made a (painless) incision across the top of her head and down her little chest, and with her powerful fingers… well, I’ll let her tell you what happened next.
When she returned to class it was a ‘different’ girl entirely which in the end had ambulances and police arriving from all over the county.
‘C’ just stood there, all bionic skeleton, wiring, and circuit boards, chanting:

 C IS SICK OF FONIKS. STILL ASLEEP, IT PEELS ALL ITS SKIN OFF. OK, ‘C’ IS… 

As I mentioned, the experiment has been put on indefinite hold, while heads roll at the developers.
But little Orca is safe and happier ever after, just so you know, back in the lab she loves, computing RSA prime number factors, stuff like that. And no FONIKS!

(photo courtesy telegraph.co.uk)

     Yes, with a silent ‘B’. I ws already righteously apathetic and politically anesthetized after watching the charade we call our parliament, but the goods on display this go-round have left me all the number.
Ok, I voted. Otherwise I couldn’t in good conscience claim that my vote did nothing to change the  situation. Now I can proudly say I at least cancelled out the vote of one (1) local native. Preferably a supporter of the oddly-named ” United Torah Judaism” party, who littered our town’s streets last night with thousands of stupid paper slips. literally a sea of wasted trash, awaiting now the more noble immigrants from Ethiopia and Eritrea who have to sweep them up.I extremely doubt that Moses had anything like this outrage in mind.
On the left, where I naturally find myself, there is only bickering. Also on the right, with the smooth-talking but ultimately fatally-flawed Bibi is doing what he thinks necessary to remain in power. One would think that after his first fiasco-ridden term he would have simply left the stage, moved to  some  trailer-home with no name on the mailbox. If only after being caught on-camera using paint-thinner from Home Center to un-glue the stickers from presents, decals which said ‘a gift to the people of Israel’.
I used to vote communist, I don’t know, kinda like a dog who does stuff just because he can. But the stakes are too high this year for whimsy. So I asked quite a few friends whom I should vote for, and how much it might be worth to them. Nobody’s talking serious bucks this time. And so I went with the dream I had last night. The poll-watchers ask me for my ID card number. I ask “You want ‘all the number?” “Yeah”, they insist. And I’m thinking how the process is leaving me ‘all the number’. Only works in English though.
If only elections were about, like vowels, or silent letters. Then I’d come alive, for sure. I’ve got ‘Spanish Spinach’ coming up here, along with thousands of other Seed-sower inspired veggie-endeavours. Try saying ‘that’ fast a couple times. And to me it’s more interesting than the voting thingie.
  

     Today’s customer for roof repair just sent me this picture he took while I was working. Didn’t mention anything ‘strange’ about it. But I should have known: He has a full-sized helicopter cockpit he built in the basement, rigged to a nifty simulator program. I checked out the controls a few minutes, knowing full well that I’d then dream all night that I was flying a chopper, and that’s what happened exactly.
 
  But today another marvel came into view: the two larger-than-life ‘sculptures’ of Galapagos-clone turtles in the backyard were mysteriously at  different spots each time I glanced at them from above. Made me distrust my already failing memory. I called down to Gidi at one point ‘Why’re you moving the ‘hafetzei-noi’ (‘art-objects’, roughly) bro?’
He just laughed, “I’ll show you when you finish.”
    And sure enough, they were very much alive, and moved themselves, albeit slowly.  He’s had them for ten years, purchased quietly at one day out of the egg and the size of a chicken hatchling. We agreed that I will supply them all their culinary requirements; leftover garden produce of all stripes. Something about seeing them close-up tickled me to death, and I’m still trying to figure why.