Because you know you want it.

I spent much of the last ten minutes yelling at the television. While sitting on the edge of my seat.

I love this show.

Loved most of the finale. Not all. Just most.

Actually, it should be the thirty-second rule.

Working under the supervision of assistant professor Anne Bernhard, the two cell-and-molecular biology students experimented with samples of wet food (apple slices) and dry food (Skittles candy); food samples were left on the floor for various intervals, then analyzed for contamination, the college said.

According to Goettsche and Moin, the results of their research showed that people can wait as long as 30 seconds to pick up wet foods and even longer for dry foods.

Another potential finding perhaps: Either rogue bacteria don’t particularly like Skittles or the candies are impervious to their immediate depredations; in the students’ research, nearly five minutes elapsed before Skittles on the floor showed a bacterial presence.

Huh. Wonder how M&M’s would fare.

In any case: Cool! Thirty-second rule. Eat that floor food, folks!

Via Solly.

My dear readers, all five or six of you: I must apologize for a post that was published an hour or so ago, while the ink is still drying.

In this unfortunate and unforgivable post, titled “Hamas - redefining chutzpa”, I have tried to show that Hamas is the leader in the chutzpa business of our days. And I could not have been more wrong.

And this, I have to confess, comes from my laziness and lack of attention to the Guardian, my favorite source of adrenalin. And here it comes - pure, unadulterated chutzpa, the likes of which are not yet discovered by the eggheads:

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, today urged the US to ask Israel to halt its military escalation. Mr Abbas made his appeal as Israeli aircraft struck Gaza for a second day running. The Palestinian Wafa news agency said it had come in a phone call to the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. He was quoted by Wafa as asking Ms Rice “to stop the Israeli military escalation against our people and continue their efforts to push the peace process forward”.

Do you see now how wrong I have been? And I must offer my profuse apologies to the good folks of Hamas.

…

But… on the other hand… let me have another take…

After all, what is Mr Abbas saying? Only that the cruel Zionists interfere with the birthright of his Hamas brethren in Gaza to lob Qassams at their neighbors on the other side of the border. Doesn’t it make sense? Let’s read this again: “to stop the Israeli military escalation against our people and continue their efforts to push the peace process forward“. Doesn’t it mean, in fact that we, the Zionists, are hindering the rocket scientists’ effort to push the peace process forward?

I believe that I must apologize before the good old Mr Abbas too. It is the IDF, the bloodthirsty IDF that interferes after all, and not Mr Abbas who does not give a flying donut about the Qassams, if truth be told. Now it is crystal clear to me.

Or is it?

After all, IDF does what Hamas wants it to do, namely providing Hamas an opportunity to play out the Green Helmet scenario in Gaza and to show to the world that unspeakable cruelty of… but we have been there already.

So - my apologies are extended to IDF as well. But I am in a quandary now. Aside of me, Hamas, Abbas and IDF, who is left to blame? Could is possibly be me?

It could, I am afraid, but I shall leave it for now and go get a nap. It will be another day tomorrow.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Hosni Mubarak told Ha’aretz that Hamas will never make peace with Israel, and that Egypt is working to end Hamas’ control over the Palestinian Authority.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak expressed great concern over the increasing strength of Hamas in talks with senior diplomatic officials on Wednesday, declaring that the organization will never sign a peace agreement with Israel, Haaretz has learned.

He said that the Egyptian government is at a loss regarding the future of the Gaza Strip. However, he also proclaimed that Egypt is making great efforts to end the Hamas government and support Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

“With Hamas no way,” he reportedly said.

And it looks like he’s serious about it.

Mubarak painted a dark picture of the situation with Hamas and said there was no chance for peace with the organization. “Hamas will never sign a peace agreement with Israel if it stays in power,” the Egyptian president said.

Mubarak also said that Egypt did not accept Hamas in power, especially in light of its growing ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, which leads the opposition in Egypt. Mubarak sees the Brotherhood, which gained considerable power in Egypt’s last parliamentary elections, as a threat to secular power.

Egypt has begun barring senior Hamas leaders from entering Egypt due to concerns over their contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Meantime, a Saudi diplomat actually said the Palestinians need to stop attacking Israel. (Yeah, I did a double-take, too, when I first read that.)

Saudi diplomat Turki Al-Faisal Al-Saud on Saturday urged Palestinians to stop shedding each other’s blood, and also called on them to stop directing their weapons towards Israel.

“Our Palestinian brothers have to stop fighting not just with each other,” al-Saud told reporters at the Jordan-based World Economic Forum.

“I would also call them to stop fighting Israel with military methods.”

Put me in the “Not buying it” category over this one. And the “I’ll Believe It When I See It In Arabic.”

Noun: chutzpa

(Yiddish) unbelievable gall; insolence; audacity

This word is used quite widely in United States, and usually quite correctly. These days Hamas is giving this word a dimension of its own, pushing the envelope in a way hitherto undreamed of.

It was easy to see the first goal Hamas pursued by starting to pummel Israel by Qassams nine or ten days ago: turning attention from the internecine feud and killing. Instead of being seen by their own and by the whole world more clearly for what they are, which is bloody gang of murderous fanatics, Hamas has decided to switch the attention to the trick they do best, which is a) provoke Israel into action and b) start playing victims.

Hamas already succeeded in the distraction exercise, it is not for nothing that their regular cheerleaders of Indy have to mention this:

Other recent truces have been short-lived but Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said he expected this one to stick because of Israel’s military action. “No one would accept to fight one another while the Israelis are shelling Gaza,” he said.

(As a side remark, the article that is the source of this quote is titled Israeli jets strike ‘Hamas targets’ in Gaza. Notice the quotation marks - after all, it is known that the only target these bloodthirsty Israelis have is little defenseless children…)

Now the next step of Hamas leaders is to heat up the rhetorics in the hope that the other side will get sufficiently mad to step up the attacks. See how it is done:

A senior Hamas figure in Gaza was quoted Monday as urging Palestinian factions to “continue to fight the Jews until the last of them is gone from Palestine.” In an interview with Hamas Television quoted on Israel Radio, Nizar Riyan, a leading member of the Islamic group’s political wing, said: “It is a definite decision within the organization that Israel will be removed from the map, to be replaced by a Palestinian state.”

What would be the sense in declaring a goal that could not be possibly achieved by this gang and not a single one of them believes in? Very simple: as the attacks by IDF escalate, the chances of innocent bystanders being hit grow exponentially. And the bloody ghouls of Hamas just pray for more blood of their own kin, using every innocent victim to the best of their considerable PR ability.

In fact, the exploitation of the merest photo op has already started, here it comes:

A Palestinian man reacts as the injured and dead are brought to hospital following an IAF missile strike in Gaza City, Sunday.
Photo: AP

Does it look familiar? Don’t worry, your friendly and responsive reporters from AP, Reuters, BBC and others are ready to bring you more on the horrors and Israeli atrocities. Not that there were that many of them in Sderot lately.

But on the other hand - unlike IDF, the Qassam rocket scientists could not care less where their sewage pipes fall, so if I were a journalist I would think twice before deciding in favor of Sderot over Gaza.

So - expect in a few days, if not sooner, the first headlines on the Israeli high tech cruelty, disproportional use of violence, blah blah blah ad infinitum.

Just don’t try to say: “but they started it!” Waste of time…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Sderot Media Center is a new website that is trying to get the word out. But the media isn’t listening. Here’s an idea for us all: Send letters to your local news and TV stations with the URL to Sderot Media Center, and especially to this article, which is an account by an American of what it’s like to be in Sderot during a rocket attack. It’s the one I excerpted last week. It needs to be seen, again and again.

The first ‘TSEVA ADOM’ alarm went off as I was across the street from my office, borrowing a friend’s computer on the fourth floor of an apartment building. Like usual, we stepped into the corridor – the safest place in the house – and waited. 15…14…13…I had gotten to twelve when I heard the screaming. A type of scream I couldn’t recognize, half laughter, half terror, complete madness. 11…10…it fell. Maybe a block away at most. Everyone in the apartment raced outside, and it wasn’t until 30 seconds later – when I woke from my daze - that I realized the screaming hadn’t stopped. I was about to step outside to join the rest when, ‘TSEVA ADOM’. Again. 15…14…I had barely reached 13 when it crashed, shaking my entire body – half a block away.

My phone rang: it was my boss Natasha, telling me to immediately come back to the office, as the fourth floor of any building was not safe. I grabbed my roommate Jackie who had come with me for the day, curious about my work in Sderot, and together we ran back across the street, as quickly as we could – into the office. Natasha looked us over, then asked if we had heard the scream. She explained that a young mother was pushing her child in a stroller, when the first ‘tseva adom’ alarm went off. Rationally speaking, she would have had enough time to pick up her child and rush with him into a nearby basement. But instead, she toppled over the stroller, child inside, and herself fell to the ground – screaming. She did not cease until Natasha and the others who ran out of the apartment lifted her and her child, and carried her into a neighbor’s apartment. How often have you read about Sderot’s ‘anxiety victims’? What do you picture – heightened blood pressure, breathing at a faster pace? No – it is this woman’s body, convulsing, flailing. It is her inability to think or move rationally – to protect her child. She was only able to collapse, hitting the ground, as if the tremor of her beating fists would keep away the Kassam.

Please help get the word out. Email these links to your favorite bloggers as well. If the world media won’t do it, perhaps a grass-roots campaign will. The Palestinians have been rocketing Sderot for six years. More than 6,000 rockets have landed in Sderot. More than 2,000 were fired after Israel evacuated Gaza. More than 140 rockets have been fired in the last six days.

There have been exactly zero UN resolutions regarding Sderot. No emergency sessions have been called by the UN to investigate the Sderot attacks. The UN, in fact, has never to my knowledge so much as mentioned Sderot. The new Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, issued exactly one line in a statement recently that doesn’t even mention Sderot by name:

Equally unacceptable is the firing by Palestinian militants of rockets into Israel, targeting and injuring civilians.

He finds it “unacceptable” that the Palestinians are rocketing Sderot. He doesn’t “deplore” or “strongly condemn” it. He simply finds it—unacceptable.

Well, I do too, but I’m not the head of the United Nations. I’m just a blogger, asking for your help, to try to get the world to start doing more than simply saying tsk-tsk to the terrorist rocketing of Sderot—for six years.

Well, isn’t this special:

THE LEADER of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria told Egyptian television last month the Western Churches were wrong to exonerate Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and criticised recent statements apologising for Christian anti-Semitism.

In an interview with Dream 2 TV broadcast on April 8, Shenouda was asked if the Coptic Church would follow the lead of the Western Christian churches. Shenouda responded that the Christian Churches had “done nothing that warrants an apology,” adding he believed the apologies were being “done for appearance’s sake.”

Asked whether Jews were “Christ-killers”, responsible for the crucifixion, Shenouda stated, “The New Testament says that they are,” and asked rhetorically whether the Vatican was “against the teachings of the New Testament?”

But wait, there’s more: The Pople is afraid of sheer contact with the wicked Jews:

Shenouda stated he had banned Copts from visiting Israel for fear they will “be influenced by the Israeli media, and we will not be able to prevent this. Who knows what ideas they will return with?”

So let’s see. The Muslims in Egypt hate the Jews. The Muslims in Egypt also hate the Christians in Egypt, though many pretend they do not. (See: Laws affecting the building of churches in Egypt.) And now, the leader of Egyptian Christians is saying that it’s okay to hate the Jews. It’s like Tom Lehrer sings:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

A multiple choice question for you all.

1) The IDF fired into a crowd of terrorists; eight people were killed. Hamas, of course, claims they were all civilians (which is uncritically repeated by the media).

2) The Lebanese army fought with a group called “Fatah Islam”; 39 people were killed, and civilians were hurt in the crossfire.

3) Another Iranian Foreign Minister issues a statement delegitimizing Israel, effectively saying it doesn’t deserve to be on the map, let alone wiped off it.

Now, the question: Which one do you think is going to get the most play in the world media?

Oh, come on. Like I need to give you the answer?