Thursday, April 30, 2009

Feral Cats: Complaining and Preventing Solutions


Israel has an enormous population of feral and quasi-feral cats (there are also indigenous species of felines in the uninhabited areas of the country).

Israelis complain about the problem. They have the govt issue reports and form task forces which issue guidelines and regulations that almost nobody follows.

Israelis also prevent solutions. A 1999 law makes poisoning cats illegal. People feed feral cats (some of the feeders of cats are tourists so its not all the fault of Israelis). My daughter had a friend who was offered a job killing cats who had been captured by the animal control force. She quit it after a few days. It may be because cats as so cute.

An article on the problem by the Israel Minister of the Environment is
here. The image is from that site.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Honking before green (according to Israelity)

According to the blogger Israelity who has a "Stuff Israeli people like" blog post, Israelis like honking before the light gets green, pondering traffic circles and magenta hair.

http://israelity.com/2008/04/17/stuff-israeli-people-like/

Reverse and Inverse Name Dropping


Many American self help books (how to be interviewed, how to sell yourself, how to make a positive image, etc.), suggest name dropping as a technique. Someone who hopes to impress the interviewer will say something like, "as X said to me last week when we were at X's house for..." or "I recently was talking with X and I mentioned my idea and X said that he had heard that my idea is very good." (where X is an important, rich and/or famous person).

Israelis modify this technique. They will say, "well Y met with X recently and they agreed that..." (where, in this case, X is known to be an infamous person or will in a subsequent part of the conversation will be shown to be a bad person.

Salads For Breakfast


Amazingly, there will be two or three or more salads available for breakfast in Israel (in restaurants). At breakfast in an Israel Hotel, for example, they will have a buffet which typically includes salads (a salad with small pieces of tomatos, cukes, onions and spices is sometimes called an "Israeli Salad" - that's what the image is on the left). If they have a buffet for lunch and dinner, the salad choices may even increase to 7, 8 or more types of salads. Lots of Israeli salads have tomatoes as a component. This may be because the tomatoes are pretty good. One person I know said he had a friend that emigrated to Israel because of the tomatoes.

One of my son's teachers hypothesized that Israelis make salad as a type of therapy - something like the role that gardening has amongst the English.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Creating Opportunities For Criticism


We (my wife and I) were once looking for a restaurant and asked someone if they knew where it was (not the restaurant in the image which is from Elunakosher blog).

The young man whom we asked used the opportunity to criticize not only the restaurant about which we asked but also the general quality of the restaurants in that neighborhood (they all had bad service, bad food, bad prices and a few other negatives).

Giving Unsolicited Advice


Once when we were on the train near Jerusalem (according to the map the train doesn't go to Jerusalem which is strange because it does), I was looking at a schematic map of the system that was on one of the walls of the train car. A woman came over and explained to me that I should not pay much attention to the map since it was out of scale and obsolete (and I also noticed it wasn't even directionally true - that is north wasn't north). Of course she was correct.