Tig and Gracie’s vet is in a little shopping center with a Ukrops. Prior to last year (and using Lousy Vet instead of Great Vet until the Great Gracie IBD Misdiagnosis), I mostly went to the Ukrops, bought groceries, went home. From December through February, I was there every week, sometimes every few days. I still bought groceries when I didn’t have Tig. The market is on my way home from many places, including my synagogue.

Haven’t been back there since Tig died. I thought it was because I started going to the store that’s five minutes closer out of convenience.

Nope.

I stopped by the vet’s today, as I was driving past, and realized the reason I wasn’t shopping at that Ukrops is because I couldn’t bear to be in the last place I had my Tig.

The reason I stopped by the vet was to tell them I’m looking for another orange Maine coon mix, preferably a kitten, definitely a male. Then I went to my car and tried not to cry.

I miss my Tig.

The IDF will be deploying robotic machine guns to guard the Gaza border. My forecast: Expect a lot more reports about 65-year-old men killed while tending their farms, no matter how many terrorists get killed.

First report: A new system deployed by the IDF in the Gaza-region enables soldiers stationed in the operations room to fire at Palestinian terrorists near the Gaza fence, Ynet has learned.

The systems, which are equipped with a camera and a machine gun, enable soldiers to watch any activity that takes place near the fence and if necessary to fire at the push of a button. The new system will soon be officially declared “operational.”

Do you think they’re going to call it Skynet? But wait, here’s more about the bloodthirsty Zionists, who want only to destroy the Palestinians:

“The system is not supposed to replace soldiers on the ground, and it won’t replace the need to charge at terrorists when necessary,” an IDF official said.

“We will be able to distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians,” another military official said. “We won’t fire needlessly, yet at the same time we are responsible for protecting IDF soldiers.”

Damn ruthless Zionists. Pure evil, I tell you. Evil!

I think I have figured out the true source of the Hulk’s rage. It wasn’t exposure to gamma rays. It wasn’t being beaten by his father.

It’s hormones.

Who knew the Hulk is really a woman?

And the reason I know this is because I am currently undergoing hormonal fluxes of Hulk-like proportions, thanks to something called perimenopause, which is apparently nature’s practical joke on women, forcing them to undergo puberty for the second time in their lives. And for me, that’s a rerun of the worst years of my life; years that I never, ever, ever wanted to repeat.

I have never forgotten one particularly stupid incident, when I was unable to find my brush, and refused to leave for school without it, and raged up and down, searching for it, until I finally had to give up and head downstairs for the car or be late for school. For whatever reason, I put my hand on my back pocket. And found the brush. And did not, of course, tell my mother I found it.

That rage has suddenly returned, and for equally stupid reasons. Tonight, I found myself internally raging about something that in no way deserves any kind of emotional investment, let alone anger. And even as I write this post, the rage is going away. And not because I’m writing it. I know the difference between getting something off my chest, and inexplicable anger. Well, except this anger is explicable. It’s effing perimenopause. It’s a rerun of my teen years. It’s a really, really, really bad practical joke on women.

And by the way: Not funny.

And that isn’t even the worst part. For that, you boys can turn away and stop reading. Or you can continue to read after the prompt, in which case my response to anyone who thinks he’s just read TMI and is stupid enough to say anything about it is going to be: I told you not to read it, so shut up.

If I’m feeling polite.

Yeah, that’s the hormones talking. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(more…)

The amazing Palestinian civilian death toll has a new angle: The 65-year-old farmer who keeps getting shot and killed by IDF soldiers.

Today’s 65-year-old casualty:

Palestinian medical officials says Israeli forces have shot and killed a Palestinian farmer in the southern Gaza Strip.

They say the shooting occurred after militants attacked Israeli army vehicles in the area.

Palestinian militants say they fired mortars at the Israeli vehicles. The Israeli army isn’t commenting, but medical officials say the attack prompted the Israeli forces to fire back. They say the dead man was a 65-year-old farmer who was on his land at the time.

The shooting occurred near Kissufim, an Israeli crossing into the Gaza Strip.

The dead 65-year-old-farmer from four days ago:

Palestinian sources in Gaza reported on Thursday morning that IDF troops shot dead a 65-year-old Palestinian farmer near the security fence along the border with Israel.

The army denied soldiers had opened fire in the region but said it was still looking into the claim. The farmer is said to have been riding his donkey to tend to his fields, located east of the town of Khan Younis.

Funny how this seems to happen a lot. It’s not even fauxtography—it’s the process of uncritically passing along information from Palestinian “medics” and “witnesses,” while always downplaying any Israeli sources, or using them as denying the incident occurred. In journo-speak, a denial is a confirmation.

Any way you look at it, Israel loses.

The U.S. Army is having some success against Al Qaeda information warriors:

The U.S. military said on Saturday it had hampered al Qaeda’s ability to recruit new members in Iraq by capturing or killing many of the people who make slick videos used to attract disaffected young Muslims.U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said that in the past year, 39 al Qaeda members in Iraq responsible for producing and disseminating videos and other material to thousands of Internet Web sites had been captured or killed.

“The power of this information is obvious. These guys are using material that is used on Web sites to recruit and raise money,” Smith told Reuters in an interview.

Michael Goldfarb comments:

I heard Gen. Wallace speak on this subject a little more than a year ago. At the time he said that al Qaeda had a “better information operations capability” than the U.S. military and that the group had benefited from the “sanctuary of cyberspace.” It looks like killing the bad guys has had a salutary effect on the situation (surprise!).

(via memeorandum)

However that didn’t stop this:

Al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called on Muslims in a new audiotape released Monday to strike Jewish and American targets in revenge for Israel’s recent offensive in the Gaza Strip.The al-Zawahri tape came on the heels of a message from Osama bin Laden, who called for a holy war to liberate the Palestinian territories. Together, the two messages appeared to be a more direct push by the terror network’s leadership to use widespread anger over the Gaza violence to whip up support.

The problem is that the bin Laden tape was apparently an old one that was resurrected and al-Zawahri’s tape is a few weeks after the fact. The response time wasn’t so good if the point of these tapes was to rile up the Muslim world over Israel’s counteroffensive into Gaza. Maybe the efforts against Al Qaeda’s propaganda units is paying off.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The AP has been salivating over this number for weeks:

US Death Toll in Iraq War Hits 4,000

And the depressing lede:

BAGHDAD (AP) — A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000. The grim milestone came on a day when at least 61 people were killed across the country.

Rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone, underscoring the fragile security situation and the resilience of both Sunni and Shiite extremist groups despite an overall lull in violence.

The soldiers with Multi-National Division — Baghdad were on a patrol when their vehicle was struck at about 10 p.m. in southern Baghdad, the military said. Another soldier was wounded in the attack.

The thing about the AP death toll—it isn’t a total of American soldiers killed in action.

The 4,000 figure is according to an Associated Press count that includes eight civilians who worked for the Department of Defense.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The AP also counts deaths caused by accidents. The number of deaths caused by hostile fire is lower than the Grim Milestone that the AP likes to keep in the news on a daily basis:

As of January 10, 2008 3,431 of the 4,228 total coalition military deaths were by hostile fire. 3,201 of the 3,921 total U.S. deaths were by hostile fire.

As usual, the media are sexing up the figures to make things look worse than they are. Eighteen percent of the AP figures are not KIA statistics, and the AP also inflates their figures by adding civilians to the death toll.

I’m not saying all those people didn’t die. I’m not saying they didn’t die in Iraq. But I am saying it’s deceptive to imply that 4,000 Americans were killed in Iraq by the enemy, when that is clearly not the case.

It’s “poring.”

You’re welcome.