This is one of the best campaign ads you will ever see

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come out with a commercial for his campaign (and the Likud party) and... well, it's pretty gosh-darn brilliant no matter who you are!  A couple expects a babysitter and instead they get a "Bibi-sitter". Check it out:



I understand that there is some play-on-words here that will probably go unnoticed by most English-only speakers.  F'rinstance, when they mention "carpets" that's also Israeli terminology for "territories".

I've a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Mr. Netanyahu.  A tremendous amount.  But I never thought that he'd be making a commercial like this.  Seeing him let his hair down with such a clever ad seems perfect somehow.

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When animals attack: cows and snakes

A man in Brazil has died after a cow on top of his roof crashed through the ceiling of his house and crushed him in his bed.

From the story at The Telegraph...

The cow is believed to have escaped from a nearby farm and climbed onto the roof of the couple's house, which backs onto a steep hill on Wednesday night.

The corrugated roof immediately gave way and the one-and-a-half-ton animal fell eight feet onto Mr de Souza's side of the bed.

His wife, and the cow, both reportedly escaped unharmed.

Rescuers took Mr de Souza to hospital with a fractured left leg but no other obvious injuries, reporting that he was conscious and talking normally.

Hours later however he died from internal bleeding while still waiting to be seen by doctors, according to his family.

Mr de Souza's brother-in-law Carlos Correa told Brazil's Hoje em Dia newspaper: "Being crushed by a cow in your bed is the last way you expect to leave this earth.

"But in my view it wasn't the cow that killed our Joao, it was the unacceptable time he spent waiting to be examined."

His grieving mother, Maria de Souza, told Brazil's SuperCanal TV channel: "I didn't bring my son up to be killed by a falling cow."

 Meanwhile over in Israel, another man is recovering after he went to a restroom to "drain the main vein" and a snake leaped out of the toilet and bit him on his penis.

Fortunately it was small (the snake, not the... nevermind).  And it was also determined at the hospital to be non-poisonous (again, the snake).

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World's oldest ground discovered in Israel

The next time you hear someone speak of a thing as being "old as dirt", now you'll have some context for it...

Deep in the Negev Desert of Israel, scientists have discovered what is being called the oldest patch of exposed ground in the world. It's been dated at around 1.8 million years old.

Pretty humbling, aye? To know that there are still places in this world that defy the savagery of both nature and man. It's much like whenever I go out on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the western part of North Carolina: seeing all those mountains, knowing that they were here long before us, and will still be there long after we are gone.

And who knows? This might literally be ground that Abraham, or Joseph, or Moses once walked upon. Perhaps even Jesus Himself, who we are told went out into the desert for forty days. Maybe He came to a place such as this.

Makes one think, doesn't it?

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Hatred and stupidity are a terrible combination

The photo on the right was taken during a protest in New York City in late December 2008.

Not as unintentionally funny as Sesame Street's Bert colluding with Osama Bin Laden, but still a somewhat hilarious peek into a heart of darkness.

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