“Paradise Now” did NOT win the best foreign language award.

Going to bed now.

Not that I was staying up for it, just that I turned on the tube when it came on.

Woke Tig up with my “YES!”

So, I guess we can say that the Academy said that suicide bombers are losers.

It’s time for the Carnival of the Cats, and the Haveil Havalim, the Carnival of the Jews. Go. Read. Look. Enjoy.

Fine. Blackmail me into posting a CoTC picture, using my very own weblog. See if I care.

It took me over an hour to get this shot. Gracie was facing away from the camera most of the time she was sleeping next to Homer, then Tig was, then, finally, I got them both at least partly looking towards the camera (or, in Tig’s case, sleeping towards the camera).

This one goes on the birthday card I’m sending my brother.

See, here’s why I’m not publishing pictures. This sucker is 36k. It shouldn’t be, but I don’t own Photoshop, and have a very old copy of Fireworks, and now can’t even access the one I have what with my old Sony VAIO having serious Windows problems. I don’t have a spare $200 to buy Fireworks, and if I did, I’d spend the $400 to buy Macromedia Studio, because now they throw in Flash, and it’s silly not to buy the whole megillah. But again, not in the budget at the moment.

If anyone with a real image editor (HP Image Zone does a lousy job compressing photos) would like to download my picture and save it (same size) in a real image editor, it’d probably drop 20k off the file size. Or maybe you could suggest a shareware image editor that I can use while I’m waiting to get Macromedia Studio. Or Photoshop. I got really fond of Photoshop again while working for Large Financial Company in Richmond. How much is that going for these days, anyway? Never mind, holy crap, $650? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Does anyone out there use Elements? Has it got a good compression/photo editor? There’s a Costco near where I work; I could get it tomorrow.

Anyway, there you go, Lair. Your blackmail worked.

Says tireless Aljazeera.

The Palestine Economic Development Company (PED) says repeated Israeli closures of the export terminal at al-Mintar (Karni) is jeopardising the livelihoods of 4000 Palestinian workers and their families.

Israel, on the grounds of security, regularly closes Karni, which was on Thursday closed for the ninth consecutive day.

On Wednesday, Palestinian officials said they had been told by Israel that the crossing would reopen on Thursday. Later, Israel said it would not reopen because Palestinians were still firing rockets toward Israeli points in the area.

Palestinian resistance fighters frequently fire homemade rockets towards Israel, but they rarely cause any casualties.

(Is it only my personal hypersensitive nose that smells disappointment oozing from that last sentence?)

I have a novel idea for our Gazan neighbors: stop trying to kill us - at the Karni checkpoints, by Qassam rockets or in any other way. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Will they listen - for a change? It’s your guess.

P.S. The answer given today to the question above:

Six Qassam rockets fired at Israel, no injuries or damage

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

As more information comes in on the Ilan Halimi case, it turns out that a lot of people knew what was happening — and did nothing, because he was a Jew. It’s an anti-Semitic twist on the Kitty Genovese case.

“I knew they had someone down there,” said a young French-Arab man, loitering in the doorway of a building adjacent to the one where Halimi was held. He said he lived upstairs from the makeshift dungeon, but would not give his name or say whether he knew then that the man was a Jew.

“I didn’t know they were torturing him,” he said. “Otherwise, I would have called the police.”

But it is clear that plenty of people did know, both that Halimi was being tortured and that he was Jewish. The police, according to lawyers with access to the investigation files, suspect at least 20 people participated in his abduction and the subsequent, amateurish negotiations for ransom.

Then there’s this, to the people who insist that Ilan’s Jewishness had nothing to do with what happened to him:

His captors told his family that if they did not have the money, they should “go and get it from your synagogue,” and later contacted a rabbi, telling him, “We have a Jew.”

And then there’s this:

By 2004, the police allege, Fofana tried extortion, aiming at prominent French Jews. When that failed, the gang apparently turned to kidnapping, using young women as bait.

The Barbarians are alleged to have been behind six attempted abductions, four of Jewish men, before succeeding with Halimi.

In a case in early January, a woman tried repeatedly to get a Jewish music producer to meet her on the outskirts of Paris, finally managing instead to persuade his father to come to a suburban parking lot, on the pretext that she had music CDs that belonged to his son.

Several men met the father instead, beating him senseless when he resisted their attempt to force him into their car.

No, that’s not evidence of targeting Jews. Nor is their statement that they went after Jews because “all Jews are rich.” Of course not. There is no anti-Semitism in France. French Jews are making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it’s not like French Muslims have ever burned French synagogues, attacked French Jewish teens on soccer fields, stoned French Jewish schoolbuses, and desecrated French Jewish cemeteries.

It’s not like French Jews are bomb-proofing their schools.

Oh, wait. They did do all those things.