The results are interesting enough to sap at least a half hour of anyone’s time.

Could you have guessed, for example, that “The Holy Bible” is considerably dumber than “The Bible” and that both of those are dumber than “The Book of Mormon” (!!!!!)? I wouldn’t have – but I was not surprised that all three of those are dumber than “Atlas Shrugged.” I also love that “I dont read” is smarter than a good several books, including “Fahrenheit 451″ and a few in the “African American” category that I’ve never heard of.

On the music side, “Beethoven” is way smarter than “Classical,” which I suppose means that it takes a bit of brains to name even a single classical composer. Also, “Rap” is smarter than “Hip Hop,” but “Oldies” is dumber than “Rock.” It’s pretty cool also to break things down by genre. I am amused at how much smarter “Outkast” is than “Lil Wayne,” and also intrigued by the gradual shift in intelligence by genre from Hip Hop toward Indie.

This is totally fun and I could spend a day on it. Maybe I will some time.

Making yourself dumb is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

From: jesuschristbethlehem@live.com
Subject: Nat(h)an Gesher of the USA and now Tel Aviv!!!
Date: 26 May 2009 9:45:01 PM GMT+03:00

Dearest Nat(h)an,

Since I have always been a service to others, verily, verily I say unto thee:

What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?

Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

Yes I am with you always, until the very end of time.

You may turn your back. You may choose to ignore me with scorn in your gleaming eyes.

But I shall remain, for my middle initial is Z. If Z is taken away, then the bookholders
that consist of the letters A and Z will only have A, and people’s books will not be able to stand.

A culture of ignorance is not what I wish to promote. If I had have read further instructions on how to
carry a cross better, maybe I wouldn’t have almost been kicked out of the parade. Or maybe I should
have been kicked out and then I wouldn’t have died. SHIT!

Jesus Z. Christ
- Because I am the FINAL letter of the law.

What does this mean? is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

You might be a redneck if… is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOSES! is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

There are situations, however, when honking is very, very underused. For example: at an intersection near my parents’ home, there’s a right turn-only lane that, after the light, is continued by a left-merge lane. The idea is that one lane of traffic only will line up and go straight through the intersection. During rush hour, this situation is regularly abused by a small group of assholes who go straight in the right-only lane, cutting in front of the civilized people who played fair and followed the rules. Then they get into the left-merge lane and easily pass by 50 people waiting in line. The worst part is that the maneuver is only visible to very few drivers at the front of the line; almost everyone who’s been victimized is way too far back to see it. Whenever, from the back of the line, I used to see someone pull into the right-only lane and pull this sneaky trick, I would honk. But I’d not only honk, I’d do it loud and hard, and most importantly, I’d point a finger directly at the offender, so that all the other drivers could see who was getting chastised. I like to believe I helped to slow the decivilizing trend of traffic abuses in this way, and wished that other drivers had joined me in socially ostracizing the cheaters. Unfortunately, very few did.

Part of this, and part of the reason why a lot of people don’t honk when they should, is that honking is actually neutral. There are a lot of different causes for honking: honking to prevent a collision; honking to express general dissatisfaction that traffic isn’t moving; honking to express direct dissatisfaction with a particular driver’s behavior; honking to thank another driver for a favor; honking at friends in another car; and rhythmic honking.

What, you may ask, is rhythmic honking? It’s my name for this: honk, honk, honk-honk-honk, honk-honk-honk-honk, honk-honk. This practice is usually done immediately after a major sporting event, by men in their 20s or 30s who are too drunk or too stupid to be driving anyway, in a vain attempt to extend to the street the great feeling they experienced in the stadium while their team was winning. Rhythmic honking is so annoying, and the people who do it are so antisocial, that I think rhythmic honkers should all probably be castrated.

Anyway, back to the inherent neutrality of the honk. Honking isn’t always good or always bad. It’s almost always impossible to tell right away who honked at whom, and why. Moreover, a honk lasts less than a second, so a driver who’s just cut off 30 people and gotten honked at 30 times for it only has to drive another block to escape the unpleasant feeling of everyone else’s angry glares. That’s why, even though I think a car horn is a good evolutionary step away from actual violence and towards solving problems nonviolently, I think cars should have their horns removed and replaced with paint ball guns.

How would paint ball guns be better than horns? Mostly for two reasons:

1. A paint ball stain lasts far longer than the sound of a horn. So if you’ve been paint balled for being a bad driver, everyone is going to know it for at least as long as it takes for you to apply a new paint job.
2. A hit with a paint ball causes actual cosmetic damage to a car, which translates to money. This means that, if you want to keep a nice paint job on your mobile investment, you’d be wise not to treat other drivers poorly.

Obviously there are plenty of reasons why paint ball would be problematic, but I’m confident that they could be deployed safely and fairly, and that they’d be far more effective than horns.

Of course, all of the above should be applied only to societies that are basically civilized and not to a place where, perversely, drivers actually want to be honked at. What? Is there such a place? Yes, and I live in it. Here in Israel, the main aim of every person, at all times, is not to be made into a frayer. Because the only way to be sure that you’re not the frayer is to make sure that someone else is the frayer, it’s customary for average people to treat each other like trash and not to feel bad about it at all. This is why, as Ari, my first roommate in Jerusalem, explained to me, honking in Israel is never a good idea: bad drivers who elicit honks from other people are proud of it instead of ashamed. This is also why replacing horns with paint ball guns would be an even worse idea here. And … I have no solution for this problem.

On Honking is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

It’s too bad they didn’t ask him why the stock is down so much – I happen to think it’s underpriced – or about some of the more colorful questions posed to “spiritual readers” on the network. My favorites were always the daily barrage of Who my babby dady and Does he love me and Will my ex go to jail.

“Quackery? Whatever.”

Oh, Psychics! is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

World's first PORTABLE bible! is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

That joke is from the Borat movie. Pretty funny, eh?

Ok. Since Ynet is making some dubious claims about Israeli restaurant habits, I’m going to set the record straight.

Claim: “A majority of Israelis eat out at least once a month, and most of them leave a generous tip to their waiter, a survey conducted by the REST website among 1,476 respondents revealed.”

Fact: Wait a minute here, a popular restaurant menu website conducted a survey about the extent to which people eat out in restaurants, and treated the result as a representative sample of Israeli society? Come on!!!

Claim: “A third of the respondents said that they go out to eat once or twice a month, while 29 percent stated they eat out at least once a week, and six percent replied they could not afford eating in restaurants at all.”

Fact: I grab a falafel on the way to work twice a week. Does that put me in the top decile of Israeli restaurant patrons?

Claim: “Most of the diners are apparently very generous towards their waiters. Some 40 percent leave a 10 percent tip, while about a third give a 12 percent tip and 15 percent choose to give 15 percent or more. Only 0.2 percent do not leave a tip, and 1.7 percent tip only if the waiter has been extremely nice.”

Fact: Wow, this is pathetic. This is worse than pathetic, this is awful. 10% is not generous. It is highly inconsiderate to tip less than 15% without a reason (viz, poor service). 15% is the standard and we should all be tipping more for excellent service. I have found time and time again that Israelis are terrible tippers and they simply don’t know that it’s appropriate to use 15% as a standard. In Israel, many of the waiters earn very little money as their base salary, and many restauranteurs do not step in to make sure that their employees earn above the minimum wage, which comes out to roughly $4.25/hour. I can’t count the times that I’ve been in restaurants with Israeli friends and peers, or ordered food to be delivered, and my colleagues have been prepared to leave a tip of around 10% or less. It must be made clear to these people that the tip is an undeclared and informal – but very necessary – aspect of the price of prepared food and service in a restaurant and that they must take this into consideration when deciding where, and whether, to eat out.

Claim: “However, it seems that the costumers’ generosity is not always in line with the level of service they receive. Some 40 percent claim that the service in Israeli restaurants is mediocre, and only 8 percent believe that the service is ‘wonderful and courteous.’”

Fact: I don’t know about “wonderful and courteous,” but I have found that the service in Israeli restaurants ranges from good to bad, very much like in American restaurants. Although the service in Israel is in general far worse than in America, I’ve found that in restaurants it is unfair to say that the Israeli service is worse. Certainly restaurant service here is not at a 10% tip level.

Israelis tip well. is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Much of college hasn’t changed from however long ago. The administration, the faculty and the students, for example, are still all full of shit. My classmates are an interesting group, and I mean that in a good way and in a not-entirely-good way. Some of them seem to love learning and some seem to be passionate about the subjects. It is a very mixed group, with a lot of people from Europe, southern Africa and North America, as well as Israelis. Almost everyone is younger than I am – the students from America tend to be 18-19, the students from Europe maybe 19-20, and the students from Israel about 20-22. They probably did not get a good high school education like mine, which makes me feel bad for them because, depending on the seriousness of this program we’re all in, doing a BA in three years could require a lot of work. I’m quite a bit unimpressed that many would have pursued a bachelor’s degree in Business, but were turned away by that program’s math requirement, and ended up in the Government program because it’s considered easier. On the other hand, I think the general consensus is that the student body at IDC is the most physically attractive group of people in Israel, which to me means eye candy, or another reason to attend classes in which attendance is not required (note: I enjoy the subject material of all my classes except for one, so I would attend class anyway).

On the other hand, some aspects of college in 2006 are totally different from what I experienced in 1999-2002. Remember hearing 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago about something called “the paperless office”? Today, IDC is doing everything possible to achieve “the paperless campus.” Every course in which I’m enrolled has a website that’s accessible by signing into the university’s website. On the course websites, I’m expected to locate the following:

• my course syllabi. They are not printed out and distributed on hard copy in class, which means that when a professor jumps immediately into a confusing (for my classmates, not for me) lecture on the very first day, no one even knows where we are.
• weekly readings for class. What ever happened to buying the book in the bookstore (or online to save money) and picking up a copy of the coursepack in the printshop? IDC’s bookstore contains school supplies and about five different books; there is no printshop. This means it is suddenly my own responsibility to print all the readings – if, that is, the professors actually want me to read them.
• a PowerPoint presentation for each lecture. Back in the day, we would read what we were supposed to read (or not read it), then come to class and listen to a professor lecturing and occasionally writing notes on the board. We’d write down what we considered important, and anything that was covered both in the reading and the lecture would definitely be in the test. Now, the professors post their atrocious visual lectures online before class. We’re supposed to download them and open them in our laptops during class, and type notes into the individual PowerPoint pages as the pages are displayed on the projector. What is wrong about this system? Only everything. I won’t go here into why PowerPoint is totally evil, but I will point out that an entire generation of college students is being trained not to take notes – not to know by ear what’s important, not to know how to write it down – and not to study for tests. And at the same time, professors seem perhaps to be losing their lecturing skills – one of the things that PowerPoint does to people is atrophy their ability to improvise.
• announcements for class. Did the classroom get changed arbitrarily by the administration? Is class canceled next week? You won’t know unless you log into the site.
• assignments.
• and more! Want to contact the professor at his or her email? The address is on the site, since there wasn’t a syllabus… too bad the address on the site might not work!

This probably would not be so bad, except: IDC’s network and website absolutely, positively suck. Starting with the network – it is accessible only in certain buildings and, in those buildings, only in certain classrooms. In some cases, my computer can see the network to join it, but the network is not connected to the internet. In other cases, the network is invisible (ie, out of range) or only momentarily visible. Only in a minority of classes can I actually get onto the internet to access the course website, where I would find everything for the class. If the problem with IDC’s network is that I can rarely get onto it, the problem with IDC’s website is that I never want to get onto it: without a doubt the most poorly designed website that I’m unfortunate enough to need to access regularly, its programmers violated virtually every rule of decent, sane site design in its construction. It’s super graphic-intensive, which means it takes a long time to load every page. Everything is in frames, and opening in new windows when I don’t want it to. It doesn’t work on most web browsers. All the actual information is stored on the site not as text, but as numbered .doc files that need to be downloaded, opened and immediately retitled because nobody thought to give them proper titles in the first place – or how about saving bandwidth, server space and years of man-hours by just writing the information where I want to find it? Oh, what else? I’ll tell you what else: on the first day of school, I signed into my brand new IDC email account and immediately discovered that it was overrun by spam! Since then, I’ve been getting near-daily spam reports from the piece of crap spam filtration system that the university installed. And the reports are, of course, html emails that are practically unusable. Idiots!

By the way, this is also the method the RRIS administration chooses for communicating directly with students. When they need to tell me something, they send me an email. But instead of writing the one line of relevant text in the email, they write it in a MS Word file and attach the file to the email, and the content of the email is just to let me know that there’s a file attached. Unbelievable!

For first year students in my program, seven classes are required: Introduction to Government, Introduction to Modern History and the Growth of Zionism, Introduction to International Politics, History of the Modern Middle East, Globalization and International Political Economy, Microeconomics, Communication Skills in English. I was exempted automatically from English on the grounds that I studied for at least one year in a university where English was the language of instruction, which is a bit of a relief because my understanding is that I might have exploded if I’d been compelled to attend even one of the lessons.

Regarding the other classes, I have run into a bit of difficulty. Obviously every single one of the remaining six classes, with the lone but obvious exception of Microeconomics, is fascinating, entertaining and enjoyable to me. And yet, can I really be expected to sit through courses that are in three cases (Microeconomics, Modern History / Growth of Zionism, Modern Mideast) exact replicas of courses I’ve studied elsewhere, and and in another case (Government) a very close approximation of several classes combined? I think not – to do so would be unfair to me, unfair to my classmates and unfair to my professors – and therefore I need to get myself exempted from them. The school, however, has implemented a ludicrous policy of requiring both transcripts and syllabi from the earlier classes in order to apply for exemptions.

What does this mean, practically? If I’d taken the earlier classes in Israel, the syllabi would be on file at the university. In America, however, universities and colleges do not keep syllabi and make them available. So I have to go through box after box of papers in a country that I don’t live in, in order to find the documentation for classes that I took years ago. Thanks, RRIS; in the mean time I am attending all the classes from which I’ll eventually be exempted.

Here are some more of my least favorite things about IDC:

1. Suppose a professor assigns a paper in class. This is normal and natural. What is neither normal nor natural is that we the students don’t turn in the assignment to the professor. We turn it in to someone in an office at the other end of the campus. This is the Heder Avodot, or Assignments Room. That person then submits our work to the professor, who gives it to his TA, who grades it and then reverses the process for us to get it back. Sounds really smart!
2. Some of my professors actually take attendance during class by passing around a sign-in sheet. IDC has a policy of excused absences and unexcused absences. Wow! So what happens when my mother and brother come to visit and I want to go meet them at the airport? That’s an unexcused absence! And what happens when I have medical tests that last an entire day? That is an excused absence, but of course the professors don’t handle the bureaucracy of excused absences themselves – students are responsible to take notes from the doctor to another university office and give them to another university bureaucrat.
3. I live in central Tel Aviv, work in Ramat Gan and go to school in Herzliya, which means I need to spend a great deal of time and money waiting for, and traveling on, trains and buses. The bus from Tel Aviv to Herzliya takes a ridiculously long amount of time and I’d still need to walk 15 minutes from my house to it, and another 15 minutes from the stop to the university, so it’s out of the question, and I’m consequently taking the train every day. But the train station in Herzliya is about two miles from the university with no bus service and the only way to get to the university from the train is to take a private cab, which costs NIS 20, several times the price of the train itself! Fortunately, I’m usually able to find someone else and split the cabfare, but this situation is absolutely moronic and it must be ended. I can’t figure out why the University hasn’t gotten the idea to run a shuttle back and forth from campus, charging NIS 10/person. They could make a huge profit off of us commuters. On a positive note, tremping (ie, hitchhiking) out of the university back to the train station, or to work in Ramat Gan, or to home in Tel Aviv, is very easy.
4. What else? I don’t have a student ID card and no one seems to be able to tell me when I’ll get one. Apparently, they send students’ photos in batches of 50 to a place in Tel Aviv to have the cards made, and therefore it can take three weeks, a month or maybe even longer. So why doesn’t the university just buy an ID card making machine? NYU had one and it resulted in me getting my ID card within three minutes.
5. There’s more to complain about; I just can’t think of it all right now.

college (part deux) is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Here’s a random Gallatin concentration that I heard about today: “legal and cultural studies of oppressed and marginalized peoples.” Yes, someone actually has a BA in that.

Something short is a post from Lines Writing Lines.