Carnival of the Cats #136 is celebrating Halloween with a spooktacular roundup brewed in the kettle over at Watermark, which based on the Poet’s excellent track record I’m thinking out to be the go-to place for all holiday editions at this rate.

Don’t you agree?

So who is the Catmodel of the week this week?

It’s the wonderful cat reporter KC, glad to be a former feral over at Missy, KC and Bear.

The Robert Spencer two-parter on Shire Network News is over, but the reports on Jew-hatred continue with tales of the anti-Semitism at UC-Irvine, also featured at CampusJ. UC-Irvine, where the president of the university said—yes, really—”One person’s hate speech is another’s education.”

Listen, link it, send the link to your friends. I’ll post my contribution later, because I’m just that masochistic that I want yet another crazy discussion in my comments about it. Plus, I’m rewarding those of you who actually listen to the podcast. You get to hear me there first. Hey, this week I played with the echo effect in Audacity. I think it came out just fine.

Earlier this year, the first of my first class of fourth grade students began having their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. There’s a post sitting in the spike file of my thoughts from the first Bar Mitzvah, because I couldn’t get it to work. In the meantime, next Saturday two of the last three (they’re twins) are having their Bar and Bat Mitzvah (they’re boy-girl twins). I’ve been helping them a bit with some of the Shabbat service prayers, mostly because they felt unsure and partly because they needed to attend more Shabbat services. But they’re kids, and kids absorb knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. I have no doubt they’ll do extremely well next Shabbat.

The last Bat Mitzvah will be sometime this spring, and then all of my first class—whom my ex-student M. calls my “lab rats”—will have achieved this milestone. They will have led the congregation in prayer, which is actually something that I have never done. I’m doing that in November of 2007. I’ve let a few people know to save the date, like Judith Weiss, and I also know that she can chant Torah, so I asked if she’d be interested in doing one of my Torah portions. I don’t think I”m up to doing seven. She said yes so quickly, I began to wonder who else I could get to help me. So at the latest Bat Mitzvah (last week, in fact), I asked M. if he’d be interested in learning one of my portions. I told him I wouldn’t be at all offended if he refused. He said yes. Then the kids started volunteering. A. asked if he could do a portion. A new boy, S., said he’d be interested. Another one just volunteered today, asking if any portions were left.

I cannot think of a better way to celebrate my adult Bat Mitzvah than to have my former students taking part in it, but I didn’t expect this degree of participation. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to rescind Judith’s invitation and give her portion to another student. Somehow, I don’t think she’ll mind.

Four years ago, when I said yes to the question, “Do you think you could teach Daled class in our religious school?”, I had no idea that I would fall in love with teaching as much as I have. And when my students do something like this, four years after graduating from my class, it makes me love teaching even more.

Like I told my A. last week: That first class taught me how to teach. Every class teaches me something new and different. But one thing they all have in common: They make me love teaching, and children, all over again.

They can be so funny, too. Last Tuesday, I was explaining the difference between patrilineal and matrilineal, trying to explain the laws about passing your Judaism on to your children. The students found much of it profoundly unfair, and at the end of the discussion, younger A. said, “Boys. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.”

She’s not quite nine yet.

I didn’t laugh then, but boy, did I laugh when I relayed that anecdote to a friend.

Kids are great. Teaching is a blast, most of the time. I’m so glad I was dragged into this.

The AP sent out an article that describes a good dividend of the Hezbullah war, and it will probably not be running in your local paper.

On Israeli border, a surprising optimism
METULLA, Israel — For years, whenever Asher Greenberg left his home in this frontier town to work in the orchards along the Lebanon border, he took his M-16 rifle in case Hezbollah guerrillas attacked. Since Israel’s war with Hezbollah ended in August, Greenberg’s rifle hasn’t left his closet once.

At Zarit, a nearby farming village where chicken coops and red-roofed houses hug the border fence, farmers are beginning to return to orchards they abandoned during the years when Hezbollah guerrillas controlled the Lebanese side of the line.

More than two months after the war ended in stalemate, many Israelis have come to see it as a costly failure. Those who live closest to Lebanon, though, say it altered their lives dramatically for the better.

“The war erased a threat we lived with for years,” Greenberg said. “We aren’t afraid of snipers or kidnappings anymore. We can breathe.”

Today, he said, he sees more U.N. peacekeeping troops and, for the first time, Lebanese soldiers, 10,000 of whom have been deployed in south Lebanon since the war ended with a cease-fire on Aug. 14.

It goes on to add even more positives—for Israelis.

The mood is similarly upbeat at Manara, a kibbutz to the east. In May, its vulnerability was felt when a soldier in the kibbutz was wounded by a Hezbollah sniper.

The situation is different now. “I think the war critics are right in many ways, but they have created the impression that we lost,” said Shabtai Mayo, the kibbutz’s secretary general. “There were mistakes, but from here this looks very different from a defeat.”

Lt. Col. Ishai Efroni, a senior army officer in an Israeli border unit, said his men along the fence also feel a marked change for the better, now that Hezbollah men with grenade launchers are no longer a few yards from Israeli tanks.

Efroni said Israeli soldiers trade pleasantries with UNIFIL troops along the border, and that even the Lebanese soldiers sometimes wave. “They’re still hesitant _ this is new for them,” he said.

The army sometimes has to deal with Hezbollah supporters throwing stones over the fence at soldiers, but Efroni said he only has to call a U.N. liaison officer and “within half an hour” U.N. or Lebanese troops arrive.

The reasons you won’t see this in too many papers? Let me count the ways.

1. It’s good news about Israel. The mainstream media is uninterested in good things happening to Israelis.
2. It shows that Israel was right to go after Hezbullah. The mainstream media has been bashing Israel over the Hezbullah war since the second it began.
3. No palestinians were harmed in the making of this news article. What? A story where the Israelis are the victims? Sorry, but those racist, neo-colonial, imperialist, Zionist stooges of the United States can never be victims.

Feel free to add your reasons in the comments.

Say hello to Peekaboo Gracie, all happy in her tissue-paper nest. (Tissue paper compliments of Sarah a.k.a. the Pumpkin Goddess.)

She ate and ate and ate Saturday. It took a few hours for the steroids and anti-emetic to kick in, but when they did, hoo-boy, did she eat. She decided that she likes the Fancy Feast tuna flavor, and I will be buying more of those on the way home from religious school. Many more, as Tig hogged as much as he could.

She wasn’t eating much at first, but every time she went to the food dish, I sat with her and encouraged her. Hell, I got a spoon and spoon-fed her, that’s how she decided she liked the Fancy Feast. She ignored it when I put it in her food bowl, but when I put some on a spoon and gave it to her, you could see the “Holy cow, this is GOOD!” look on her face. Better for her than tunafish, too.

Tig’s been a brat to her all day. He slapped at her, and then he slapped at me when I yelled at him. Then I slapped at him, so we were even all around. I don’t really understand him. He and Gracie were six inches apart in my bed two nights ago, and she’s been back from the vet’s for quite some time. He needs to come around, because he’s trying to stop her from eating, and that is unacceptable. I threw him out a number of times today.

In any case, Gracie ate and ate and ate, and I’m extremely happy about that. I have pictures galore from Saturday. We stayed home all day together. I even have pictures of Gracie as Frankenkitty (Lair Simon’s moniker for her). She has a row of staples on her shaved belly. I can’t decide whether or not to post it, for fear of frightening the children. But I have a great Tig picture for Tummy Tuesday, one of the funniest ever, so I may put Gracie’s Frankenkitty tummy up that day.

This ailment is starting to seem more and more like feline inflammatory bowel disease. I will be calling a new vet on Monday to see if I can get an endoscopy performed, or if I should continue to treat Gracie like she has it. I’m not willing to have her opened up again. It’s going to cost a few hundred dollars more, but again—not really trusting my current vets any more. In fact, it’s highly likely I’m going to switch to a new vet. Lucky for me, one of you cat people out there lives in Richmond, and has made a recommendation for a new vet.

Gracie ate and ate and ate, and annoyed the hell out of me when she wasn’t eating. Things are getting back to normal around here.