Sand and Steel - Field Artillery Training

I just came back from army reserve duty doing a few days of field artillery training. December is definitely not the best time of the year to hang around in the deserts of southern Israel.

Pros: the guys at artillery battalion 8157, the endless wind-sculptured untamed view, the undisturbed round rainbows, the unpolluted night sky, and the extra time to think.

Cons: missing the family, the extreme cold, the threatening weather, the dirt on your hands, the sand in your eyes, and the extra time to think.

My Hebrew is much better than my English (which I mostly got from watching episodes of MacGyver), but I think this came out ok:


~
The son of autumn starts to mumble, sending his amoeba fingers through a cloak of mist, reaching for the open neck of the unsuspecting sun too busy melting away into the hundred shades of the foam of the sea.

A long metal snake sails through the vast sandy plain claiming its territory with a spray of gasoline; its camouflaged scales are moaning and clashing in a mythical fencing duel of a thousand brave knights.

A frowning cloud roars an ice-cold command, and its army of drops silently forages the city, transforming stone into marble, asphalt into granite, a shattered street lamp into a treasure of diamonds.

The steel serpent raises its head to the rhythm of drums of adrenalin rush, praying to the lord of man-made thunder, spitting gifts from Prometheus across the pastel horizon, carving coffee trails in the pale porcelain of the Milky Way.

Motion-blurred figures sniff the wet ground through cracks in the pavements, howling to the ivory moon through arrow slits in their Babel glass castles. Skyscrapers piercing through heaven; angels bleeding tears into the winds of the west; chain tracks as far as the eye can see.

Rust in peace ol’ tank.
Scrub the gray ol’ man.
Let us have our rainbows again.

~~~
p.s. Isn't Natalie Portman the ultimate proof to Intelligent Design?

Hello World - Birth of a New Blogger

To be honest, I’ve always thought blogs are just pink static HTML pages designed by 13 year old girls with pigtails writing about how they love Britney Spears. Although pictures of Spears are probably considered well spent kilobytes by most of the Y chromosomes on the western world, writing about her seems to me like a complete waste of good hosting server disk space. I never read a blog and never posted a comment in the first 32 years of my life.

The last war between Israel and Lebanon changed all that. During the war, I’ve found myself almost every night surfing several popular Lebanese blogs, exchanging thoughts and ideas, while we all tried to understand how things are perceived on the other side of the border, striving for a sane solution for an insane situation. Towards the end of the war I was drafted too. I've spent two weeks actually fighting in northern Israel, and another two weeks on the Golan height on alert. When I got back home to my family, I already knew - I will soon become a blogger myself. Oren Ellenbogen, a colleague and a friend of mine, with his excellent and popular blog on software development, gave me the last push, and the rest is history.

In this blog, I will present some ideas of mine (and others) about computers, biology, philosophy, mythology, physics, math and science fiction. I'll try and keep my posts short, sort of like an introduction to a subject, and hope for an interesting debate on the comments section. I hope you'll like my blog. If not, please tell me and I will delete all the text and just post pictures of Britney.

~~~
p.s. PETA officials continue to insist armadillos do not taste like bananas.