I wore it just for you, honey
So this morning as I'm sitting on the bus to J-lem, minding my own business, lost in my own world of listening to tunes on the headphones and soaking up the unusually warm weather and brilliantly clear blue skies, contemplating life while the beautiful Judean Hills roll by, my entire blissful experience was shattered by the arrival of a female passenger who selfishly couldn't find time for a decent shower, yet somehow managed to swim a few laps in her very own Olympic-sized bottle of perfume. Of course she chose to sit directly in front of me, and anybody who knows me is aware of the fact that I have an unusually strong olfactory system, and as such, will understand when I say that from the moment this women got within a half mile of the bus, nothing else mattered except for the overwhelming dominance of the lingering scent which emanated from every inch of her body.
The sense of smell is one of the seven senses of the human body, all of which are quite amazing. And while at times we may take these senses for granted, we seem to become acutely aware of them when things go awry. And this morning I was reminded of all the bad that can come from the incredible blessing of being endowed with these amazing, and also critical, sensory functions.
Just as passengers tend to be bothered by groups of hoodlums playing ear-shattering music from a three-story boombox, just as we tend to be acutely aware of the annoying little twirp screaming at his mother on the cellphone, just as most of us are understandably sensitive to the shared-seat partner rubbing his/her leg against your own, and almost as intrusive as being given a front-row seat to a teenage couple's championship tongue-wrestling match, I feel that thirty minutes exposure to someone else's pungent odor, whether it be leftover gas from Thursday nights casserole or a dousing in Calvin Klein's "Turniquet of Death", is simply too much for the sensory system to process at 7:30 in the morning.
Is it too much to ask of all those leaving the privacy of their own personal dwellings for a venture into the public domain to have a little consideration and refrain from forcing the entire world to be an active participant in their daily selection of stench?
Please, for the love of G-d, let me be.
Hit a bump in the road?
"Do what you can with what you have where you are."
- Theodore Roosevelt
Fact or Fiction?
The city of Eilat has the highest percentage of female taxi drivers in the world.
- Sheik Ibrahim
Can someone please explain to me the wisdom of setting up rushhour, roadblocking, traffic stopping, anti-disengagement protests in the middle of the busiest highway in Tel Aviv? Do these people really think they are gaining any goodwill or winning over the minds of the very same people whom they are preventing from getting home to see their husbands, wives, and kids after a long days work?
Do you really think this is going to win support for the already isolated messianic dreamers willing to kill their own children in Gaza?
Not quite as bad as the Holocaust badge, but still another desperate gaffe in calculations by a very stiffnecked group of people.
Vegetarians need not apply
The other day I was searching for a recipe (don't ask me why) and I came across a fascinating cook book by Adelaide Hollingsworth, The Columbia Cook Book, written in 1893. In it I found such complelling recipes as scrapple, ox cheek, baked calves head, tips for the preparation of racoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and "how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel."
But wait, there's more. It seems this is much more than just a cookbook. To cure "offensive feet", one should "take one part muriatic acid to ten parts water; rub the feet every night with this mixture before retiring to bed." To rid your mouth of the odor of onions, drink strong coffee. To keep milk sweet longer, add horseradish.
Hollingsworth also added sage medical advice - "don't sit between a fever patient and a fire" - and provided various techiniques for dealing with medical emergencies, such as accidental poisoning. Among the list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: "Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem."
Hope this is helpful.
So far everything's going smoothly toward peace and mutual understanding in the region.
"On Monday, PA forces in Tulkarm stepped up preparations for assuming control. Dozens of troops marched in formation, jumped through flaming hoops and performed martial-arts exercises.
At one point, the soldiers formed a human pyramid and cried out, "Jerusalem is ours!" Later, the soldiers sprinted and jumped headfirst through a hoop lined with a flaming cloth." - Jerusalem Post 08 March, 2005
You don't think the Jerusalem thing's gonna be an issue do you?
