When last we left Meryl’s Adventures in Neurology, she was in the hospital, undergoing zillions of tests on her brain and heart and carotid arteries, only to discover—nothing out of the ordinary. The numbness went away, and that was the end of that, except for taking Lipitor, for which she will always hate the doctor who prescribed it. If ever you want a medication that will completely destroy your digestive system in every possible manner, then by all means, take Lipitor.

In the intervening weeks, there were no return symptoms until—last week, when our intrepid heroine, working diligently at Large Company In Richmond, had to stand on her feet for much of the day cataloging the department’s library. And the numbness returned, only in a different place—Intrepid Heroine’s legs—and ignoring it didn’t make it go away. In fact, by this weekend, when Intrepid Heroine went to rock-climbing gym to reward the last of her former year’s students with an hour or so of climbing indoor rock walls, her legs were worse than they had been, and got worse as the day wore on, to the point where, first thing Monday morning, Intrepid Heroine called the neurologist for the follow-up she should have had some weeks ago.

Today was the exam, and the upshot is: Take another bunch of blood to be analyzed, but there are three possibilities. 1) Pinched nerve (there’s a fancy neurology term for it that I refuse to Google; pinched nerve was good enough for my parents, it’s good enough for me, dammit!). 2) Underactive thyroid. This is a possibility, which will be discovered by the bloodwork. 3) Plaque in the arteries. This too, will be discovered by the bloodwork.

However, judging from the fact that I have put on a few more pounds this year and am larger than I have ever been in my life, and the fact that the numbness disappears completely when I sleep and only returns when I am standing a lot or sitting in bad positions, I’m leaning (as is my neurologist) towards the pinched nerve. Which, he says, may well have gotten irritated due to the weight gain. Which also means that a simple diet and exercise program will suffice.

You know, I’ve been looking for a reason to really, really diet and exercise. I have failed in my many attempts these last six months. But this? It really sucks, this numbness in my leg, and if losing the weight I put on this year is the key, then damn, I think I can do that.

Of course, if all the above things turn out to be wrong, it’s time for another MRI of various spinal areas. But that can wait until we see if these things work. Anyway, I can still use that old joke that they took a picture of my brain and didn’t find anything.

Ba dum bum.

The flare-up around the interview Clinton gave to Chris Wallace is called a controversy for some reason. I strongly suspect that it is deliberately being made to look like one - to let the mass media have a field day. Meanwhile, left and right both claim a moral victory, and the mudslinging is at its peak.

The whole issue is not worth all the noise - it is admirably resolved by the main protagonists. Here is what Clinton says to Wallace:

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

So, a) a comprehensive anti-terror strategy was passed to Bush and b) Richard Clarke is the best guy in the country. Now let’s listen to the best guy in the country:

Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

Not that the above absolves Clinton’s heirs in the office of all responsibility in continued incompetence, bureaucracy and blindness. But it clearly shows that Clinton’s administration is at least as guilty of these sins as Bush. Taking into account that Clinton has 8 years versus 8 months given to Bush, the fingerpointing is at least senseless.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

I’ve been a little busy of late, what with the new job, a new year teaching Hebrew school, and other obligations. So my cobloggers, and especially Snoopy the Goon and Lair Simon, have really stepped in and taken up the slack.

But there’s a problem. Almost none of you are reading the bylines on the posts, and assuming that I’m writing them all. You keep on calling Snoopy and Lair Simon “Meryl,” and, well, they’re not.

They’ve been posting for months, and I expect by tomorrow or Friday Snoopy will have written his 150th post for Yourish.com. Lair isn’t very far behind him, at 129. In fact, Snoopy’s latest post is the 2,000th post since I went to Wordpress. That’s a milestone I gladly give him, because he’s working very hard to make my blog look better, and I’m not paying him one red cent. And now Lair Simon has offered to post the information for the Carnival of the Cats each week, an offer which may not seem very big, but is—it’s one less thing for me to remember to do for this blog, and one more thing many of my readers enjoy.

If you can’t tell the difference between our posts due to writing style (and that flummoxes me no end, as Snoopy and I have extremely divergent styles and Lair is Lair, and is unique on this earth), please take a moment to check the byline before preceding your comments with “Meryl, I think….”

Give credit where it’s due. These guys work just as hard as I to keep this blog interesting to you.

Let’s assume, for the purpose of the discussion, that you have written an article where:

• You declare that Israel today has “the purest Revisionist government in its history“. You forget to mention that the same people who are in government now supported the withdrawal from Gaza. That the same people supported that general you love to hate when he became the first Israeli PM supporting the right of Palestinians for a state of their own.
• You go into the pedigree of some of the current leaders, automatically ascribing to children the views held by their parents and grandparents. Guilt by association - some Stalinist exercise.
• You quote the revisionists, not mentioning that they were a minority in a largely socialist independence movement. And that it was Hagana that was the representative of the majority, not the Irgun.
• You bemoan the cruelty of the Jewish terrorists of Irgun who killed a few British soldiers, forgetting to mention that these were the soldiers of the same army that in cold blood has driven away thousands of desperate survivors of the unspeakable bloodshed who tried to find the promised land.
• You continue to carp on the wrongs on one side completely omitting the historic background. Imagine somebody describing the destruction of Dresden by Allies without mentioning the WW II and the Nazi atrocities.
• You put with obvious relish the following: “Only elements on the far left and some radical Islamists today care to call the Israeli government fascist. And yet…” Of course, your faithful crowd of Guardian regulars does not miss the opportunity to cry “Zionazis” and “Ziofascists” etc. Speak about elements on the far left…
• You resort to sentences like “There have indeed been outrageous and indefensible killings of Israeli civilians, but even that raises more questions than it answers.” and “It is a platitude to say that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Of course, it is not a platitude, it is just a deadly wrong crapola. But much abused by a certain category of “thinkers”.

So - assuming that you have written all this indeed, where do you get off and what does all this show?

Simply that you are one Geoffrey Wheatcroft - a thinker that for some reason is too shy to publish at Jewwatch or at BNP place, but otherwise - doing the Der Sturmer proud under auspices of Guardian.

As it was astutely mentioned (by a commenter JimmytheFox):

Bringing Mr Hecht into this Guardian article is masterly, by the way. Were Mr Hecht alive today, he might respond:

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock”.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews