So let’s see. Events that pop up on the “Most Stressful” lists include losing a job (December), getting a new job (February), the death or illness of a parent (see above), financial troubles (good job, but still paying down debt), buying a house (looking, haven’t yet decided whether or not I can afford the condo), and I’m pretty sure “Throwing a big party for the first time in your life while working full-time and trying to learn the haftarah and Torah” should be on the list, at least for people having their adult bat mitzvahs.

Oh, and throw in three cousins and their entire families living in San Diego, and half of them having to be evacuated from their homes. Thankfully, they and their belongings are all safe and sound now.

I got about half an hour’s decent practice in with Elisson this afternoon on our lunchtimes. Then I tried to practice this evening after work. Everything sucked. Nothing worked. I gave up in frustration, and told Elisson I wanted to bail during our evening practice. Dr. Elisson prescribed listening twice to the mp3 my old rabbi made for me before bedtime, and relaxing until tomorrow.

I am going to watch The Bionic Woman, and then I’m going to bed.

I need to recharge. There is far too much stress in my life. My batteries are dead. I’m about ready to break into the Halloween Milky Way bars.

There is a slightly wet Tig waiting for me to relax in The Chair That Swallows You Whole. I can deal with a damp cat purring in my lap.

Yeah, and a couple of Milky Ways. Definitely.

If you’re a kick-ass programmer with VB, SQL, Oracle, and database skills, Company in Northern VA is hiring. Email me a summary of your skills and I will pass them along to the boss.

It’s a great place to work, but they’re not looking for another telecommuter. They want a full-time programmer on-site.

Another Palestinian Arab terrorist momentarily forgets the fiction that he is only supposed to hate Zionists, not Jews:

Prominent leader of the Popular Resistance Committees Abu Al-Sa’id on Wednesday called on the de facto Palestinian government to hasten disbanding the Palestinian Authority and establish a ‘Resistance Authority’ instead in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Speaking during a press conference, Abu Al-Sa’id urged Palestinian resistance factions, particularly the Salah Addin Brigades of the PRC, to “kill Jews everywhere without waiting for permission”, in retaliation for the murder of Muhammad Al-Ashqar and the violent treatment of Palestinian detainees at Ktziot prison.

The PRC and Hamas are linked together, there have been numerous cases where they worked together for terror attacks.

Yesterday’ s airstrike against a Qassam cell is a case in point:

An Israeli aircraft attacked a car in central Gaza on Tuesday, destroying the vehicle and killing a senior security official in the Hamas government, Palestinian officials said. Hamas radio identified the dead man as Mubarak al-Hassanat, a senior official in the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry. The ministry oversees all Hamas security forces in the Gaza Strip.

Al-Hassanat, 37, also was a top member of the Popular Resistance Committees, a Hamas-linked group that frequently fires rockets into Israel.

So Hamas has effectively just declared open season on Jews worldwide. And since the vast majority of Arabs have no problem with Jews, only Zionists, we can expect to see a torrent of Arab and Muslim condemnations against this anti-semitic statement any minute now.

Any….minute….now…..

Meanwhile, I will also wait for any other media outlet to publish this story. At the moment the phrase “kill Jews everywhere” comes up empty on Google News. I guess it is not newsworthy.

Media Backspin writes of the documentary To die in Jerusalem, which somehow balances the death of Rachel Levy with the death of the girl who killed her. (My guess is that the movie ignores the hero, Haim Smadar, who died that day.)

Backspin notes that the source material, the article in Newsweek was just as wretched as the portrayal of the two girls in the NY Times. Someone else noticed this at the time, Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post.

There’s a hero to this story. She’s a quiet, studious, beautiful Palestinian girl, with a rich and mysterious inner life, who one day bids a nonchalant farewell to her classmates, leaves a “grim warren of alleys and tightly packed dwellings,” and commits something perfectly abrupt and terrible, in the stylized manner of ritual Japanese suicide or a French art-house film. The Rachel Levy of Greenberg’s telling is, by contrast, just another transplanted JAP. More problematic is that Greenberg’s evident concern for balance is such that he tells us nothing about Akhras save the details of her life that mirror Levy’s. Which is to say, everything about her that’s banal. But it is not a banal girl who walks into a supermarket with explosives wrapped to her waist to detonate herself and every other living thing within a 20 meter radius. To limit the profile of Akhras to the fact that she went to school and did the laundry is a little like telling us that Charles Manson likes mustard on his burgers and is a huge fan of the LA Lakers.

Absent from Greenberg’s account is some idea of how a young woman can be raised, educated and eventually recruited to become a suicide bomber. What were her family’s politics? On what diet of literature was she schooled? How did the suicide squad find her? What sort of training did she get? What kind of society makes murderesses out of its future mothers?

But we get none of it, except that Akhras “was quite normal.” Within that artless remark there’s a story worth telling about this killer and the world that made her. Too bad Greenberg misses it.

…

Yet for all this, Hammer’s story disappoints. “There was something about staring into the almost-twin faces of the bomber and her victim last week,” he writes, “that moved the seemingly unending tale of strife in the region to a deeper and even more unsettling place… Martyrdom - or, depending on your point of view, murder - is becoming mainstream.”

Depending on your point of view?

“To die in Jerusalem” is not the first dramatization of this terror attack. A few years ago, there was a play “Paradise” that was being produced in Cincinatti and upset the Muslim population there. I found out about this in an obscure blog, David’s Israel Blog.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Because we all need this.

MANSFIELD, Ohio (AP) - A couple won’t mark their 27th anniversary until Thursday, but they’ve already received the perfect gift: the wedding pictures they couldn’t afford when they married as teenagers. Their photographer showed up last week at the diner where Karen Cline works and surprised her with a photo album from her big day in 1980.

“About a month ago, I was just cleaning out some of my old things and I found it,” said photographer Jim Wagner, who’s now 80. “I knew she didn’t have any money back then, and I just thought she might like to have it.”

“I just stood there and cried and cried and hugged him,” Cline said afterward, tearing up again.

She recalled being a new bride at 18 and admiring the pictures, but feeling heartsick because she and her husband, Mark, who was 19 at the time, didn’t have $150 to pay for them.

All these years, the Clines have had just one wedding picture that someone else took, of her walking down the aisle.

Wagner said he was able to track down Karen Cline after running into her stepfather a few weeks ago.

When the photographer showed up in the diner, she wrote him a check for the long-awaited $150 - and that’s when he cried, she said.

The Jerusalem Post reports that according to a report in the UAE, Syria was preparing for a war with Israel two weeks ago.

Al-Khaleej quoted “senior sources” in Damascus as saying that Syria had received intelligence that Israel was seriously considering launching an offensive during the Id al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan.Therefore, the article said, Syria began taking “defensive steps.”

The Syrian sources, who were unnamed, told Al-Khaleej that Russia and China, when apprised of Syria’s concerns, sent “stern warnings” to both Jerusalem and Washington that an Israeli attack would destroy the balance of the Middle East. According to the report, China and Russia asked the United States to intervene and “rein in” what Syria perceived as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s threats of war.

“Despite Israel’s calming messages, sent through mediators, there is still a possibility of a military confrontation,” the sources told the UAE paper.

Was Syria really afraid of an Israeli attack, or is this just saber rattling to save some face after the Israeli raid in September?

The Post also refers to a story in the Washington Post that quotes independent experts who identified the structure bombed by Israel as a reactor.

Independent experts have pinpointed what they believe to be the Euphrates River site in Syria that was bombed by Israel last month, and satellite imagery of the area shows buildings under construction roughly similar in design to a North Korean reactor capable of producing nuclear material for one bomb a year, the experts say.Photographs of the site taken before the secret Sept. 6 airstrike depict an isolated compound that includes a tall, boxy structure similar to the type of building used to house a gas-graphite reactor. They also show what could have been a pumping station used to supply cooling water for a reactor, say experts David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

(Have those IAEA experts figured out what those pictures show yet?)

I think that someone in Syria’s getting nervous. Hopefully, the fear will keep him from further mischief making.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In honor of UN Day, let us do exactly as the UN does. Since we don’t exactly have wars here, these are the rules for anyone who attacks anyone else in the comments of this post:

If the complainant is white, Israeli, American, or Jewish (and particularly those four and male), I’m going to ignore him.

If the complainant is Muslim Arab, I’m going to issue a resolution demanding that the offender cease and desist immediately, and follow that up with more resolutions condemning the attackers for Islamophobia.

If the complainant is Muslim non-Arab, same as above, unless the complainant and the attacker are both Muslim. In that case, I will do nothing and say nothing.

If the complainant is a woman, I’m going to organize a worldwide Women’s Day of Solitude and solicit other women bloggers to put up a post protesting the lack of respect for women bloggers in my comments, and in the comments of weblogs the world over.

If the complainant is from certain parts of Africa and female, she will be propositioned for sexual favors by the people who police the comments here, and in some cases, forced into having sex and keeping quiet about it. If the woman is underage, well, you know the drill there, too.

If the complainant is from Darfur, I’m going to determine that there was not an attack taking place and ignore him completely.

If the attacker is from a South American country that is ruled by a dictator but had, in any part of its past, suffered from American imperialism, I’m going to ignore the attack.

If the attacker and attacked are both South or Latin American, I’m going to ignore the attack.

If the attacker is North Korean, I’m going to recommend that we find five other bloggers and discuss the attack for several years, then try to get the attacker to promise to give up attacking, and of course, ignore the attacker when this does not happen.

If the attacker is particularly vile, I’m going to refer it to the Yourish.com Commission on Human Rights in Comments, where we will then condemn my Israeli commenters while ignoring the vile attackers of other origins. Omri Ceren will probably come in for a special lashing; he’s Israeli, he lives in America, and he’s a Zionist.

If one of my commenters makes signs like s/he’s going nuclear, I’m going to issue a warning. Then I’ll wait a few months to see if that commenter is still ready to go nuclear, and issue another toothless warning. I will have my Comments Inspectors keeping an eye on that commenter, that is, with the commenter’s permission, and if the commenter refuses, I will think for several months about issuing yet another warning. After several years, I will attempt sanctions against that commenter, but if my fellow bloggers refuse to go along, then I will simply wait and see if that commenter is really going to go nuclear, while allowing the head of my Comments Inspectors to say that the commenter is not going to go nuclear, and probably will never go nuclear, and anyway, the commenter should be allowed peaceful nuclear power in the comments, and there’s no way to prevent it in any case. The Russian and Chinese Blogger Commission will threaten to veto sanctions, and there we’ll be stuck for some time.

And last, but not least: I will allow my commenters to talk all over everyone else’s comments without obeying the rules, and without paying any penalties, since they have diplomatic immunity.

Happy UN Day, and thanks for the idea, Alex Bensky.