Reality – Oh Your God

Tourist sign at Banias

This is a sign for tourists that explains about the Banias archaeological site in the Golan Heights. Take a closer look here:

GOD corrected to gOD

Notice that someone vandalized this sign and corrected “GOD PAN” to “gOD PAN”. My guess is that it was a person who found it offensive that a Greek god is called a “God” with a capital letter and he wanted to tell that it’s just a meaningless pagan lesser god. The text is in all-caps, so capital and small letters are not supposed to be different, but they did matter to that vandal in some way.

By a coincidence—or maybe not?—this is similar to the name of the band dEUS, whose recently released new album “Vantage Point” is surprisingly good.

Reality – June 06

These stickers have become quite common lately on walls and cars:

עד מתי יוני 06?! ג. שליט

“Till when June 2006?! G. Shalit”. It refers to a graffiti which is common in public toilets in Israel as well as at military bases. It expresses the frustration of a draft soldier that wants to get demobilized, although the date in such graffiti is usually the date he started his service. Shalit’s draft date is July 2005 and indeed, his friends were demobilized a few days ago. June 2006 is the date Hammas kidnapped him.

Reality – Forbiding

Swimming Forbiding

Well, at least it’s not forboding.

Reality – Tel-Aviv – Vegas

I’m liberal, but Tel-Aviv is bad enough without becoming a cheap Vegas knock-off.

Cats on the Wing 1

“Nini doesn’t go into the bedroom when we’re not home”.

Hadar, who has a Master’s degree in physics, has solved Schrödinger’s cat paradox.

Reality – The Brand, part 2

“Elite. Institutional cocoa.”

Sometimes branding is funny. And sometimes people just give up on branding completely, although i thought that it happened only in Soviet Russia.

Reality – The Brand

Thanks for buying one of Hamutag’s products – a line of products from the best manufacturers in Israel and in the World.

I am seeing these quite a lot lately. Own-brands are not so new in Israel. The funny thing about this one is that the word Hamutag simply means “The Brand”.

Hidden Mickey

Find the Hidden Mickey.

Reality – Nikolai

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol in form of graffiti in Jerusalem.

Reality – Alone Alone

Assaf Amdursky – Alone Alone

Together with Karni Postel

Assaf Amdursky is a successful Israeli singer. In the last few months he is doing an intimate solo acoustic tour, which he calls לבד לבד – Alone Alone. For the linguistic-minded readers: Yes – it’s a use of reduplication in Hebrew.

Karni Postel (or maybe Fostel – i’m not sure) is mostly a cello player and also a singer. She is very talented. I once dreamt that we’re making love in a desert.

If you can read Russian, see something very similar at Art. Levedev’s Idioteque.

Wedding Pictures!

I got married to Hadar on 2006-10-04.

Now i finally uploaded all the photos.

They can be accessed here: Amir Aharoni’s photos on Zooomr.

Feel free to browse. I wrote comments on some of them – you may leave your own!

A comment tor the technically minded: Each of the famous photo-sharing service – Flickr, Picasa, Yahoo photos, and ImageShack – had something that bugged me. Finally i found what i wanted – it’s the new “bad boy” Flickr competitor Zooomr. They have some technical glitches, but they admit that they are beta-quality. They are good enough for me now.

Beach party tonight (actually on 2006-07-29)

See, that’s a band. Nothing special.

See that geek in a BitTorrent t-shirt playing piano on the right? That’s Aharoni, ya mama.

The lighting died the moment we connected it. We asked our friends to bring any lamps they can find.

Miron celebrated his birthday and his second-birth-day – a year since he nearly died in a work related accident. On the morning of the show he had another work related accident – he cut his left hand and he needed stitches. He played guitar anyway. He said that the nurse told him not to remove the bandage if the hand is bleeding. It bled, but in the middle of the show he removed it anyway. Guitar hero.

Eli, the new guitar player really tied the band together. He had some feedback problems, but handled it gracefully.

Playing on the sand was not that bad. It even didn’t destroy the instruments too much.

Elad is a show man. This bass is actually black blue, but it looks blue black in some pictures.

My old cheap and cranky 700-channel mixer and a couple of brandless amplifiers actually worked as monitors.

And i played some piano. Miron was happy and didn’t yell at me for playing too loud.

This is Rock Action, ya mama.

I was there.

There’s a songbird who sings

I dreamt that a friend of mine took a piece of cake i was eating and threw it to the trash. I got unbelievably mad and tried to explain to him that let alone the robbery, i totally hate throwing food to the trash. He was quite indifferent and said that the cake was disgusting. I had to make a point, though, so i spilled a little water on his head. The funny thing is that a similar thing actually happened once – i spilled a little beer on a friend who was pissing me off (no, i didn’t drink any beforehand).

When that didn’t help, i turned to the Internet. The Internet always helps, doesn’t it? I’ll show you how bad it is to throw food away, i thought! So i started using a very old version of Netscape Navigator on a Mac. It was very annoying, not because the version was so old, but because it was configured in such a way that with every key i pressed, the computer played an annoying sound. I tried to turn it off, but couldn’t find where. Then i found out that it’s not even Netscape Navigator, but Konqueror. After a couple of minutes i started realizing that even when i don’t press any keys the annoying sound goes on. It was a nasty fucking bird outside the window.

Ця-ця-ця-ця-ця-ця!!!

You probably know this lovely little poem:

I woke early one morning,
The earth lay cool and still
When suddenly a tiny bird
Perch on my window sill,

He sang a song so lovely
So carefree and so gay,
That slowly all my troubles
Began to slip away.

He sang of far off places
Of laughter and of fun,
It seemed his very trilling,
brought up the morning sun.

I stirred beneath the covers
Crept slowly out of bed,
And gently lowered the window
And crushed its fucking head.

I’m not a morning person.

حنتولي

Well, i tried to take a picture of it instead, but it flew away, so i took a picture of another one, who looks quite the same, but not as annoying. Exhausted, i lay on the grass and took a picture of my cat Hantouli, which is the last thing that this blog was really missing.

P.S.: Blogger’s spell checker doesn’t recognize the words “fucking” and “blog”.