Introducing the Hardline According To
     ...Ofer Maimon

Woke up too late after 2 nights of insomnia, courtesy of the Cheech & Chongs of the world as well as my incapacity to discipline my living patterns. Got out of bed and felt completely out of it and went down for coffee and cigarettes and Ulpan, this day lead by the Director, Nissim, who speaks so fast and rushes through each new segment of the lecture it makes your head spin. One good things is that we spent the second lesson in the computer lab, which also serves as the Merkaz bomb shelter (we are in shooting distance from Gaza...), to work on the blessed Hebrew verb conjugations, and this time I successfully wrote down the the web address to the FREE online training site, hosted by Haifa University. On a note that I managed not to loose that is, so here it goes: http://mkm-haifa.co.il/ulpanim/ I strongly recommend it for anyone studying Hebrew. It gives you the opportunity to train all binyanim in all tenses, with gradually harder targilim. The day went on being one of thos...

So this day went straight to the dogs. Not one useful accomplishment. The night before I only slept for 2 hours so I had planned for an early night, and so went to bed at 10 PM. Was however awoken by roaring laughter and and hysterical screaming 45 minutes later, outside my bedroom door, inter-punctuated by the sound of someone sounding like he was coughing up his lunges. ”You serious maaaan?? You are coughin' yourself to death and now want  to smoke more??" "Hell, yeah, man! Let's light it up!" Later on, two Arnold Schwartznegger's, one with a high-pitched voice and another with a base vibrato, was battling it out, screaming orders to "Get ze hell out of hiere!" and "This ting is gaaana blooow!!". Accompanied by applause, shouts and whistles and someone sounding like a Formula 1 Car. The unbelievable ruckus continued until about 1 AM and by then I was exhausted, pissed off and doomed to another night of insomnia. At about 5 AM I got...

A recent FB debate forced me to formulate my views on a topic that is important to me. It started when a religious friend of mine claimed that Rav Ovadia Yosef , former Sephardic Chief Rabbi (he is actually not Sephardic at all, he is Mizrachi i.e. from the Arab world, but there is a tendency in Israel to call all non-Ashkenazi Jews Sephardic) and present spiritual leader of the Shas part, "the biggest hate preacher in Judaism today". I took issue with the statement and a debate erupted between a me and a few people. It should be noted here that I myself follow Eda Mizrachi , and I'm in no way neutral, and that the people I debated with are all Ashkenazim  (simply put, Jews who lived in Europe since around 1500 hundred years). Their statements about what interests me, meaning Ashkenazi-Mizrachi relations, pretty much boiled down to the following: 1) Rabbi Ovadia is the "the biggest hate preacher in Judaism today" because he has a lot of influence (he does), a...

So this morning when I hit the streets of my desert metropolis I actually wished I had put on a hoodie or something. It actually felt a bit cold, which obviously means it wasn't very cold, maybe around 18 degrees Celsius, but still. When the sun comes up it will probably be in the lower 30's, again, but the nights and mornings are slowly getting cooler. Then again they are predicting high 30'es again toward the end of the week, but the unusually heat for this time of year is not what has the people buzzing, but rather the draught, as Israel suffers from a chronic water deficit problem. Lake Kineret (The Sea of Galilee) is Israel's biggest water reserve, and this and others need to be replenished by rain. And it doesn't rain.....Beer Sheva hasn't seen rain in six months. Flowery drill instructor in in action Other than that I had a productive day yesterday, even though I overslept. So I went to Ulpan to encounter another subgroup of conjugations for irregula...

For those of you who don't know your pop history, or those who are simply too young or too old, may not know from where I've stolen the name of my blog. So - those of you who do know might elucidate the former group in the commentaries below. The elucidators may however not be aware that this artist's present legal name is ‏Sananda Francesco Maitreya. Sananda back in the day....

Spent Thursday in Tel Aviv, buying Swedish snuff and hanging out with Jonathan and Sanna. I also managed to snap a few pictures with my trusty old cell phone. Tel Aviv is messy, noisy and stressy, and it's architecture is a hysterical blend of Bauhaus, Neo brutalism, experimentalism and hyper modernity. More on Israel and it's architecture in a later blog post. For now, I'll leave you contemplating the pics.  TA Central bus station  Sanna Jonathan TA Philharmonics building Intersection Old and new TA Bus station, Lewinski street entrance

There is something special with musical crossover cooperations. When artists who have a very clear cut musical and semiotic identity have the guts to pick up a cover from somewhere completely unexpected or calls up a guest artist on stage from a completely different genre. The swedish folk punk band (think the Pogues) Traste Lindéns Kvintett used to do a Swedish version cover of Motorheads' Ace of Spades with guest guitarist from a Death Metal band, and Motorhead (Or rather their legendary dictator Lemmy Kilminster, inofficial coolest white man alive) themselves, are legendary for their fantastic covers of Metallica, Sex Pistols and a bunch of others. The "Classic" Motorhead setting actually broke because of Lemmys insistance of covering country classic Stand by your man - Philthy Phil took his heroine addiction and left in protest. A bunch of years ago MTV picked this up by making different artist "Mash up" a few of their best pieces. Most of these cooperatio...

Woke up late today, meaning around 8 AM, with a clear idea in my head: I need to stop waiting my time discussing religion and politics with people who don't understand even the basics of either. There are libraries and there are books. You can either read them of not, but I will no longer try to explain the history Israel and it's conflicts, the evolution and content of ideologies, plain empirical fact or the nature of rational argument, in Facebook commentaries. And speaking of commentaries, I'd love it if you'd leave them here rather than on Facebook as many of my readers aren't on said social media. Quite naturally I will break my promise of not participating in FB debates, but let's see how long I can keep it up;-) Other than that an eventless day so far so not much to report. We had a grammar test and I was once again reminded that my knowledge of temporal conjugation of hebrew verbs is a joke. Spent the break discussing the politics of war with Jochana...

So, after a bad nights sleep I miraculously managed to get up at 5 AM to go to Shul. Night owl as I am, you still gotta admit that there is something special about early mornings, before the sun has rose above the horizon. A cool stillness, empty streets, already warm but not yet hot, the day waiting to kick in. Merkaz Klita Yeelim, 6 AM After Shul I went to the usual coffee shop for my morning cup of cafe afuch (literally backwards coffee, basically a latte) at the coffee and tobacco stand. The owners are two olim from France who have been here for 15 years. They are very nice people and at Ulpan break a line of coffee abstinent students form a line here, but at this early hour the customers are far between. The nice lady who makes my morning afuch Today was the 12th of the Jewish month Cheshvan and the 15th anniversary of the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. A lot of people nowadays, while commemorating his death, write off the Oslo process as a historical p...

So yesterday went by fairly uneventfully. In keeping with my self-diciplinary ideas I cooked my own dinner instead of going for Schwarma, and then ate it with Quentin. I also managed to spend large part of my post Ulpan day in the company of the future tense verbs of binyan Paal. And I'm starting to grasp them which means I'm back where I was the last time I took my Hebrew studies seriously, 5 years ago. I also waisted my time debating a fairly nasty letter that the NGO Women at the Wall had directed to the Israeli government and the general public. They were basically describing Orthodox people as a screaming, feces-throwing mob, while disingenuously seeking monopoly for their own brand of Judaism. I fail to understand why feminist Reformniks, who make a point of breaking every Hallacha they come across, feel it absolutely necessary to imitate prescribed Orthodox and male behavior in the one place in the world where it will be seriously hurtful - the Western Wall. Then again...

....is something I've been drifting out of during Chagim, basically a result of having no fixed schedule except for eating absurd amounts of food and being in Shul. But now that the Ulpan has started i dearly need to get my shit together. Work, work, work! Last night however, the rather rowdy apartment gang stayed late, and Noddy showed off is skills at impersonating colored South Africans (apparently "colored" is the politically correct term for the mix between blacks and whites in South Africa) and Arnold Schwartznegger. "Daaemn" Wee gatta giet auta hier, die ting iz ganna blooooow!!" All this to thundering laughter and Tweety said she started to feel her place as court gester/impersonator threatened. I suggested a division of labour - Noddy would do the famous peeps and she would stick to the local Merkaz characters. In any case it was difficult to get any home work done. Bad excuse. Discipline, like I said. Noddy impersonating a Gremlin Went ...

So, basically I spent Friday in TA and Shabbes in Ramat Beit Shemesh with Richard (visiting from Sweden) and Yehuda and his family. We had a nice time, went to the beach in TA, ate, prayed, drank good whiskey and wine and well, I snapped a few pics: On our way to the Mens only beach... Ramat Beit Shemesh.... Yehuda emerging from the Mikveh Birra Motzei Shabbes.... Chaya-Mushkas post shabbes dance... Rev Yehuda....

Action shots * Landed on Ben Gurion and as I started to walk out of the place a see a woman holding a sign with my name on it. She takes me through customs, a few corridors and sits me down in front of a very thin greyish file clerk who looks like a depressed Russian. The Clerk gives me a bunch of papers and 1200 shekels in cash and a Taxi voucher. * First Shabbes. Quentin takes me to Shul and I meet Rabbi Nissim for the first time. Pavlova sits across from me at the Shabbes table and gives me dirty looks and asks his son in Spanish whether he believes I'm Jewish or nor, and whether I'm Ashkenazi or not. Then he starts on a monologue of how everyone in his family are Jewish, Sephardi, except his former wife who is Ashkenazi. When we walk home he tells me in Spanish that dressing white and black for Shabbes is not a Jewish thing: "You have no idea why you do that!! You understand nothing! You think you so religious, you think you are better than me??? I'm Sephardi, ...

The weeks leading up to my immigration to Israel, the most common commentary was that I should keep a blog over ensuing events. No such has so far happened, mostly because I've either been idling around, celebrating the exhausting string of Jewish Holidays that plague autumn (a period referred to plainly as "chagim - holidays), or running around in general. And as I don't have the time to chronologically relate everything that been going down in almost 2 months, I'll simply try to make a quick sketch of the places and persons in the coming days: Merkaz Klita Yeelim Home, sweet home...... Is a dump, fair and square. it's some 350 meters of grey concrete times 4 stories high, and on the website they brag about it being the longest building in the Middle East. It looks like a Soviet suburb. It is only the only building in Beer Sheva without A/C. And seeing Beer Sheva is smack in the middle of the Negev desert, there is a reason why all the other houses do ha...