Category funny

Aug 16 2010

Widow’s mite coins for sale

This shop sells coins based in Luke 21:2-4 about the story of the Widow’s copper coins she gave to the temple treasury.

I was on the way to church coming back from the Kotel, so I didn’t get to properly see this shop, but I imagine these coins offered could be genuine as there is an abundance of history under the ground that has been discovered all over Israel.

These sorts of antiquities stores are pretty unusual as they sell jewelery made from pieces of Roman glass found in archelogical sites.  Some of these stores actually fashion pieces of glass that are cut and filed to shape and set in broaches, necklaces etc.

Aug 16 2010

Jerusalem UN Headquaters yard

I went walking today around my neighbourhood, across from my street is the Peace Forest or Promenade, that looks over Jerusalem.  Its one of several hills in different directions that look over the city.

From the path behind the building has some nice places for walks.

The building used to be the government offices for the British Mandate of Palestine (what Israel was known as before 1948)

There is  a road upto the security gate which cars have to weave around the blue barrels filled with concrete to stop possible terrorist attacks.

Here are some odd looking metal sheds that look like mini aircraft hangers.

Out the back gets more interesting, seems the UN run their own car scrapyard.   There are about 20-30 abandoned cars here that look like they are not running.   Mostly Toyota 4x4s, that have been crashed, rolled or have bits missing.   Reminds me when I got a bus through part of Los Angeles, I spotted the back of police station full of crashed standard US police model Ford Crown Victorias.  There are also a few recent Volvos and a BMW 7 series which are not damaged but have no licence plates and look very dusty as if they have not been used in months.  There are trucks with low open backs, I guess some of this stuff is mothballed for when there is a war or serious security issue.

On the side road, there is this monument called the ‘Tolerance monument’ and contains writing in English, Hebrew and Arabic encouraging reconciliation and understanding.   I think these monuments are a nice gesture, but peace will only be fulfilled by the return of the Messiah, Jesus one day.

This is a nice place to go walking around.  The UN’s compound is covered in barbed wires but you can easily see the back from a path outside.  Interesting fact.  I was talking to a chap who works there, who tells me its the cheapest place in Israel to buy Coca Cola (60c) although the prices for the canteen are in US dollars.

Also along the view outside, are these outdoor canopies that gives a bit of nice shade for when you want to take time to admire the view, especially this time of year when the extreme heat can be seriously overwhelming.

Aug 15 2010

Recycled rockets into gifts

Saw these souvenirs for sale a while back, which made me think about my trip to Sderot next to the Gaza Strip, although I have not seen them for sale in any markets in Jerusalem.

Some enterprising blacksmith from Sderot has taken spent rockets that have come over from Gaza and recycled them into works of art, from flowers to menorahs!!

http://www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com/christian-gifts-home-from-rockets-into-roses-p-1186.html

I was reading this bible passage the other day;

Isaiah 2:4 He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation,nor will they train for war anymore.

Not an exact glimpse of prophecy yet, but as some of these souviners have been given as a gift to the Palestinian Authority seems a really nice idea to convert a tool for death into something worthwhile.

Aug 11 2010

A glimpse of Israel’s brief car industry

Saw this ancient possibly Eastern European looking automobile at the weekend.

Appears have a fibreglass body, not a particularly pretty car, but noticed the chrome badge on the back looked like Hebrew.

There was elderly gent sitting in the car asleep and it was parked in a rather dangerous part of King George Street, a busy main road.

Like a lot of other Mediterranean and Middle East countries, there are quite a few ancient cars around especially old Fiats, unlike a rainy country, rust seems to be less of a problem.

This wiki article on the Sabra / Autocars business of Haifa is worth a read.  Seems these cars were nothing special and were not able to keep up with more established makers.

Nowadays a small number of military vehicles are built in Israel are still made today.

Aug 9 2010

Jerusalem Segway tours

Something funny I see sometimes on the promenade of the Peace Forest about 1km from my house.

People doing tours of Jerusalem on Segways. These funny looking upright two wheel scooters can be rented on organised tours which let you whizz about in convoy around the outer parts of the city.    I have always wondered how these things work, staff at Disney world have them and so do some police forces around the world, you balance on two wheels only as there are some gyroscopes and nifty electronics that keep you perfectly upright, steering and changing speed by the rider is done but just tilting the handlebars forward or back and left and right.

Riders on these tours have helmets and wear pads on their knees.   Remains to be seen if you get a Segway (I think they are extremely expensive)  if the tyres can be changed over between road use or more rougher terrains.  Looks fun though.

www.segway-jerusalem.co.il

Aug 1 2010

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 3: Masada secrets

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Back to up again on Masada, there’s quite a few buildings that are interesting, for one thing there are an interesting plumbing system that brings water through some clever channels that run around the side of the mountain.

Marcel made friends with a bird that fed from his hand.  These little black birds look like starlings but have orange tips on their wings and have a fondness for biscuits.

Along the top of Masada there are many buildings for the community that lived up here, complete with synagogue and dwellings.

Whats this strange cave room down here?

Not sure what it was, but something moved in the corner of my eye, that made Magnus nervous:

It was this cute quite large mouse.  Not sure exactly what sort of rodent it is.

You can see for a long long way from here.  Of course next door neighbour country Kingdom of Jordan shares the Dead Sea and some of the thriving industry from cosmetics that come from this unique mineral rich lake.

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Jul 30 2010

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 2: The lowest camp site on earth…

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

In my characteristically quirky random way of doing things, I didn’t mention what we did before going to Masada.

Marcel, Magnus and myself stocked up with food and supplies at a Talpiyot supermarket for camping expedition in Marcel’s work’s Fiat Doblo van.

The camp site we stayed at was pretty good in terms of location.   The toilets were nasty to say the least, the camp site itself was free but the toilets required some coins put into a turnstile gate, but this was not working, probably as no one was taking care of any cleaning or maintenance.

When choosing a place to put our tent, some of the other people were a bit noisy, there were several cars playing Arab music rather loud, we had to get to sleep early as we planned to get up at 3am (!) to walk up Masada to see the sun rise over the Dead Sea.

So we pitched the tent closeish to the beach.  This just required a scrape around of any big stones to get the ground as flat as possible for sleeping on.

The tent is borrowed of Marcel’s Swiss work colleague, it took us three attempts to put it up as its quite unusual in design and took several goes at trying to work out if the sticks go on the inside or outside…

Another problem we hit was the ground was too hard to get the pegs in.  After bashing them with a big rock and bending them in the process, a better idea was just to tie the guy ropes to some bottles of water.  It was quite windy, so keeping the tent upright was best achieved with at least two of us in the tent at once. 🙂

Something hit me when it got dark…  This is the lowest place on earth, this is the lowest camp site on earth, AND, our tent is lower than everyone else’s.   Therefore we spent the night in the lowest tent in THE WHOLE WORLD!!!!  YEAH!!!!

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Jul 30 2010

Apostle Paul on twitter

Was thinking the other day, about Twitter the hugely popular way of making a commentary of life events, things in the media and often how celebrities get followed and current news events get shown.  I was perhaps a bit mean with my earlier writings thinking it was a bit naff, but lately I was thinking about someone who told me that maybe the Apostle Paul in the bible was the world’s first blogger, so imagine in Paul was on Twitter too, it would be interesting to see as one of the first followers of Jesus who brought Christianity to the gentiles, travelled around various corners of the Mediterranean and got put in prison a few times, how his tweets would of looked like….

SaulOfTarsius I’m outside the Sanhedrin with my fellow Pharisees.  Today we are stoning some guy called Stephen.  #MyBenjaminTribe #MyRomanHomies

SaulOfTarsius Feel the urge that I need to do some writing for some reason.
sent via Papyrus

SaulOfTarsius Sorry not been online for a while, crazy week.  Only just got my eyesight back

SaulOfTarsius Had serious meeting with the boss.  Put me straight about some things.  #Salvation #FoundMoshiach

SaulOfTarsius Thanks everyone in coming to my baptism, it was a nice day

SaulOfTarsius PS YHWH told me to change my name from Saul to Paul.

SaulOfTarsius @Ananias, thanks for relaying what I needed to hear.

SaulOfTarsius Follow my new active account at @ApostlePaul

ApostlePaul Now in Damacsus.  Had some help to get there whilst my sight returned #Damasq #Asyria

ApostlePaul Praying with my new friends @SimonPeter and @James #Apostles

ApostlePaul Writing a book, I am going to call it Acts. Got a feeling, it will be one of many.

ApostlePaul Oyvavoy… Has it been ten years I have been speaking the good news in Damascus now?
via carrier pigeon

ApostlePaul @Barnabus thanks for the invite to Shabbat, look forward to helping your congregation in Tarsius.  #Tarsius #Nicetobehome

ApostlePaul Went and rebuked Elymas the sorcerer whilst staying Cyprus.  Also got a Roman soldier following Christ.  #Paphos #Κύπρος #Cyprus

ApostlePaul Leaving Cyprus to go on a mission trip to Asia Minor tomorrow, looking forward to it. #AsiaMinor

ApostlePaul Was a pleasure to stay with you #Lydia G-d bless.

ApostlePaul Myself and @Barnabus are off to Jerusalem meet new Christians #Judea #ישראל

ApostlePaul Spending 18 months working in Corinth with @Silas and @Timothy #Κόρινθος #Greece plan to see Ephesus some point soon.
via Greek post office AD52

ApostlePaul In Jerusalem in prison.  At least I escaped from being killed in the temple.   #depressed #WhatAboutRightsOfRomanCitizens #CaesareaJail

ApostlePaul said to the soldier today ‘is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?’ I’ll put that in Acts 22.

ApostlePaul Out of Jail.  Roman bureaucracy takes a long time, its only taken 18 months.. But Governor Felix has let me out today.

ApostlePaul Off to Malta.  The Lord told me this ship really isn’t safe and I dont like the look of those clouds, or how choppy the sea is. 😦

ApostlePaul Ship got wrecked.  Oh well, Maltese people offer unusual kindness though. #Malta

Please note, biblical extracts are very approximate and locations are probably not in chronological order.

Jun 21 2010

Potato batteries

You have probably heard of lemons being used to run simple digital watches back in 1980s, fun but probably no real life use for citrus fruits as means to run gadgets.

But today in seems vegetables have uses instead, this time for lighting (LED technologies have massively get better in last couple of years)

Perfect for developing nations where batteries are scarce and expensive, not to mention poisonous at the end of the lifespan, and yes its those darned clever Israelis again that came up with the idea of using the humble spud.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/20/yissum-develops-potato-powered-batteries-for-the-developing-worl/

The article doesn’t say when your potatoes need to be changed, or if when they grow shoots if that affects their performance though.  Imagine this conversation one day:  “Hello, yeah, er I can I call you back in a couple of hours, phone battery is dying and I need to get a kilo of King Edwards from the market, speak at 9pm mate, bye”

Jun 17 2010

Bridgend > Heathrow > Budapest > Tel Aviv > Jerusalem = one heck of a long day….

Due to some major problems with my flight, I was now going back to Israel via Budapest.  Sometimes this can take some thinking, lots of Eastern European capitals start with B for some reason.  Budapest, Bucharest, Bratislava, Belgrade, etc.  But I have not been to Hungary, I did IT support some software engineers who worked for Ericsson in Hungary last year though.  Unusually enough some friends from Finland tell me there language (which is nothing like Danish, Norwegian or Swedish) is closer to Hungarian than anything else.  I also have an Aunt who is a Hungarian Jew who is a holocaust survivor.

The flight was with Malev, Hungary’s national airline, although the first part of the journey was from Heathrow to Budapest with British Airways, its nice not to being flying with a budget airline and get the perks like a decent sandwich and drinks on this fairly short flight.

If you are hungry in Hungary, I got this unusual pancake (ham, egg and lots mustard) from the cafe in the airport which with a coffee cost me 7 Euros, a lot but I didn’t get any Hungarian (no I can’t remember what their currency was without looking on the web 🙂 ) money out, as this was a last minute trip.  This stop over was about 6 hours, I did get a chance to leave the airport, and just saw a car park and a half finished building site, as I didn’t know how far away the city centre was, I decided just to stay put and sleep.   At least unlike the cruel designers of UK airports who make the seats so you can’t lie down on them, here in Budapest there are no rests on the seats so sleeping is quite comfortable.   There were of course people crowded round a TV watching the world cup also.  Outside it seems that gone are the days of old eastern bloc vehicles I saw when I went to Poland years ago, the Hungarians drive modern Skodas, Renaults, Opels and Mercedes.

Lastly, I maybe did get one glimpse of a nice part of Budapest, from the window of the plane.  I am pretty sure that this is the river Danube. 🙂

The last part of the trip back was fairly uneventful, but touching down in Tel Aviv was nearly 4am, and once on a Sherut I headed back in my flat in Jerusalem at 6am, meant I had been travelling about for close to 24 hours.