The event was a contest of Jewish anti-Semitic self-deprecation cartoons and it was a reaction to the Iranian contest of anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial cartoons. From their Flickr page, the contest was announced on Feb 13th 2006, the winner on April 6th 2006.

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Zusman, and Sandy added: “We’ll show the Iranians no one can do better Jew hating cartoons than the Jews!”

Often when people write a bigoted article or draw a racist cartoon they will respond to the media storm by saying “I was only satirising the racism/bigotry! [By exaggerating it]“. So it’s understandable that people would be suspicious of an event that sets out to satirise racism at the outset by exaggerating it. And supposedly they’re hiding behind their Jewish priviledge like it confers on them a right to make these cartoons?!

And yet this argument can be dissolved by looking at the actual cartoons. If ever there is room for satirising bigotry by exaggerating it this would be it. In fact it has a text counterpart that’s already acceptable. Let’s say someone makes a comment in some online forum to the effect of: “Jews control the world’s money”. I might be inclined to respond to it by saying something like: “Other than the cheques I get from Rothschild, the billions I save in tax thanks to my cousin’s brother accountant Moishe and my Passover butchering knife made of solid gold, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Now, you might think my imagery isn’t very good — but that would only reflect on my shortcomings as a writer. But most people wouldn’t think I was doing anything wrong. The cartoon contest merely puts the same kind of exaggeration in a visual form. This certainly makes it more visceral but still the same in format.

And so I invite you to take a look at them. I’ve used my Jewish privilege to reproduce my favourite — it’s the only one that I found pretty funny over and above the satiric exaggeration — the angst in his face created with but a few lines is priceless. Another priceless bit is that almost every cartoon in the collection has some ridiculous aggressive comment from a tokyhotel314 who has missed the point by parsecs and has taken it on him/herself to damn each cartoon individually.

I imagine there might be some timidity commenting on this post so I’ll prompt some: what do you think of the general idea? Is there a stereotype of your own culture/background/whatever that you think would go well in a cartoon, just to show the world that you can produce more quality hatred than the bigots?

Source

If you’ve flown in Europe you’ll have encountered RyanAir’s incredibly low airfares. In the article source above, they mention that the ticket often costs less than the cab ride to/from the airport. But what the graphic shows is that actually lose money on each flight — money they must aggressively claw back to stay in business as the rock-bottom-priced airline they’ve pitched themselves to be.

There are some parallels with large websites. When you join Facebook or use a Google service you’re also costing them money. Sometimes it’s trivial, but when you need lots of processing and storage for tens of millions of users, the costs can be substantial. Like RyanAir, they too need to claw this back, plus the profit they want to be making. And, in both cases the company is psychologically put in a situation where they feel entitled to take something from you. If they feel you owe them, this creates a completely different customer service incentive compared to a fully paid service.

If you do a quick search for RyanAir, you’ll see it has a very large number of customer complaints. In a particularly funny case, when a blogger posted about a possible bug on their website, they abused him in his comments section (and in a subsequent media response!) calling him an idiot, liar and pathetic [story link]. If the RyanAir finances story linked in the graphic is to be believed, and the aim really is to provide free flights, what else would customers endure? Would you take a free flight if the company must recoup its money by testing experimental drugs on you during the flight?

Traditional economics might consider free flights with huge frills attached as a beneficial service (since people will be paying for it). But the reality of cognitive biases shows that people are pretty bad about weighing such things. Consider this quote from a financial planner: “[A]s soon as I mention Fidelity gives 25,000 frequent flyer miles, most clients stop me and choose Fidelity. Some will move tens of millions to Fidelity in order to get frequent flyer miles that might have a $200 economic value[.]”

So on the one hand people are likely to agree to irrationally high non-economic inconveniences for the novelty of a Free Flight!!1! On the other, because of the financial irrationality (from the above example), people are also likely to agree to free flights where it costs $100 to use the toilet, not calculating that it’s more expensive in the end. I’m usually not the doomsdayer but when high-end services (like flights) get this cheap, I’m nervous about their true economic and social cost.

This entry is part of the Blogging-the-Bible series. To see a list of passages, covered so far click here.

Quite a few things happen in these 2 chapters which I’ll breeze through. David hides from Saul in a cave system and Saul with his soldiers go in to pursue him. The first interesting point is that the text says Saul went to “cover his feet”. In the Hebrew Bible, the feet are usually a euphemism for something to do with male genitalia, in this case referring to Saul taking a leak. However it can take on other meanings, such as Ruth 3:4 when she is instructed on how to come onto Boaz. This type of reference would often be missed by modern readers who would think of Ruth as a particularly chaste story but we can see the verse in its full force: “When he lies down, note the place where he is lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do.”

Saul then falls asleep near a rockpool. David comes upon his sleeping body and instead of killing him decides to sever his garment. He then speaks to him from across a stream showing the garment as proof that he doesn’t want to kill his king. We start to see the other mafiozzi aspect of David: his smooth-talking. David sycophantically appeases Saul, calling himself a dead dog — a bit of self deprecation that seems to work.

But the interesting thing in that story is this may be one of the first instances of recurring motifs in fiction. Earlier, when Samuel cursed Saul we have the famous scene where he starts to walk away from Saul who clutches at his garment and Samuel walks off leaving Saul with a torn piece of cloth. It was so famous I didn’t even mention it in my post about chapter 15 where it happens. But now there is more in the torn garments department. Even though it’s David who is left with the torn cloth, both times Saul is the one put to shame by the incident.

Chapter 25 begins with what’s possibly the most understated eulogy of a major character in the Bible: “And Samuel died; and all Israel gathered themselves together, and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah.” For a character whose precocious childhood is described in such detail, I don’t see what dramatic point is meant to be made by such a quick goodbye. A thought did pop into my head that this might have been a way on commenting how Samuel was forgotten by everyone in his old age, but that’s probably reading too much into the text.

Despite this last idiosyncrasy, the storytelling remains effective. The next story deserves a separate post so stay tuned. But let’s just say that things come full circle in that once again we return to the illustrious “feet” euphemism.

Chances are, the cliffs will have some regular formation. Sometimes it’s a flat surface, sometimes a maze or a bunch of holes and grooves. The longer you watched the wave the more amazing it is to ponder just how long it took for the water to make these grooves, to carve the cliffs. Think not of the tens of millions of years, that’s nothing. Think of the 5 trillion or so individual waves, some of which you just saw.

Maybe you don’t live near the coast. You can do another experiment. Next time you are to fly, take a look out the window as the plane is still and then continue to peer intently at the ground as it first pulls out. You’ll probably cover only a few centimetres in the first second or two. This is how far a continent might move in a year. But then keep staring out the window. By the time you’ve made the first turn, you are retracing a path that the ground has been making probably since the start of agriculture. And yes, this is a path the ground has taken.

As you taxi to the runway and then accelerate to an unimaginable speed, keep looking. The plane is still covering a distance that the ground did, at the speed of less than a metre a year. The amazing thing is that you can keep going while you are in the air, while you fly for 8, 9, 10 hours, and when you land you are in a spot where your original piece of ground travelled from, just at that incredibly slow speed.

But maybe you don’t have an opportunity to fly. There is yet a third thing you can do. Go on a walk where there is some soil. It can be in a city, national park, wherever. Take a look at the soil and consider the enormity of genetic material that’s contained in it. Forget fossils! In this story a research team took soil samples from just site in Siberia where they expected some preservation, and found mammoth, horse, Arctic hare, bison, and moose DNA casually laying about in the permafrost.

If every breath you take you are breathing molecules from the last breath of Caesar, Gengis Khan, Marilyn Monroe and everyone else, for every step you take you can probably name an animal that used to roam these parts, dig your hands into some dirt and it will have that DNA there, somewhere. Without permafrost it might be mangled but it’s there. The history of life is so long, some species have racked up so many billions of bodies over the years, that the soil is littered with them.

Geologic time is neat. Sure, galactic time is grander but the numbers are so huge (and the objects of comparison) are so far removed from us that it’s sometimes useless trying to ponder it. But with the earth it’s different. The props are there, and every rock tells a story that’s longer than all the books we’ve spewed out over the last few millenia.

About 14 months ago, I had the carpets in my apartment steam-cleaned. The steamcleaner was a man with a heavy French accent. I remember the accent because it really stuck in my memory when he told me in the accent that “it’s really bad” upon finishing.

About 2 weeks ago I moved out and I arranged for end-of-lease cleaning (with steamcleaning). I was amused to recollect how horrified-yet-dignified the original guy was. I remembered myself standing in the kitchen (where I retreated during his cleaning) while he rebuked my carpet from the living room itself just a few steps away. Naturally, the memory of the scene included his face and body.

A few days later something crept up from my subconscious that told me that memory was a bit funny. After some searching I realised what had happened. The man who I visualised during my recollection was none other than the Quebec actor Lothaire Bluteau!

I’ve seen him on 3 or 4 episodes of Law and Order. Like the steamcleaner, he has a heavy French accent and always played very stereotypically French villains (eg.a poetry professor). I assume he was also of a similar build to the steamcleaner — for of course I don’t remember what the steamcleaner looked like at all. Memory is reconstruction so when my brain searched for “+thin medium build +heavy French accent +dignified displeasure”, Bluteau was the more common match. Even though I probably haven’t seen him on TV for years, I’ve seen his face many more times than the steamcleaner’s. So that’s the face my brain slapped on the memory.

Yep, our criminal justice system (being based on the totally-disproved notion of memory being a reference book not a head-transposer) is screwed.

• Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – This is the actual name of the Saudi religious police. Here be the proof. (You know, the same religious police that stopped the rescue of 15 girls from a burning school because they weren’t wearing sufficiently Islamic dress, thereby causing them to burn to death.)
• Insufficiently Biblical – As if this isn’t funny enough by itself, the context is from a conversation on Declaring Independence Radio, This is the term used by one of the founding fathers of modern creationism to criticise the Discovery Institute (which promotes Intelligent Design a.k.a creationism in a cheap tuxedo). It’s always amusing for a wingnut to be criticised by an even greater wingnut for not being wingnutty enough.
• Time travelling chiropractor – This comes from an old SGU episode. It sounds like a parody but isn’t. A chiropractor claimed he could heal you by travelling back in time to when your injury originally occured and fix you there. And this is where it gets good: he treated complaints that were sent to him over the internet, thus never even having to meet the patient. Yep. Of course this isn’t much more ridiculous than some alt-med claims.

If you have any intrinsically hilarious phrases, pray tell…

*There may be social cues here because I remembered the last 2 because the podcast hosts actually highlighted that these phrases are hilarious intrinsically.