November 21, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-20

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

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Right at 6 PM, a siren sounds. My boss bellows, "Gentlemen! An outing!" At the same time, I'm told, a voice on the loudspeakers at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers squawks, "Dear residents, good evening. Alarm, alarm, alarm!"

I head to the staircase with the few coworkers who are still in the office. I walk down half a story to the landing, then look up. I like the geometry of the stairs and railings. I take a photo with my phone. When I look at it later, I see a woman with a radiant smile looking right at the camera. I hadn't noticed her when we were both there. I don't know what office she's from.

An email shows me where I’ve traveled during the past two months. Since the war started, I haven't been more than about a mile from my house.

Location tracking on my phone is useful for some things. I don't mind Google knowing where I've been. The one time that I lost my phone, It helped me know where it had gone. It traveled back and forth through several cities south of me, and got to a lost-and-found before its battery ran out.

Since the start of the war, I've been shuffling back and forth between home, work, and the center of town, where my favorite café, the chicken joint I frequent, the hummus spot where I sheltered from the missile sirens a couple of Fridays ago, and the supermarket that I use the most are all within a block of one another.

I see that I went farther south than usual on October 11th, but can't remember why. I check my post for that day. It was when I picked up a piece of medical equipment for my family.¹

I have only gone into another town once, when I saw the Taylor Swift movie at the edge of the next city north. Looking at the map, I'm surprised by how squiggly my path was. I then remember that I tried several shortcuts to the theater, none of which worked.

I have gotten out of the house every day except for the day that the war started. As I recall, I was going to head out at one point, but was interrupted and dissuaded by sirens.

I have taken the bus twice, going to and from the mall. Otherwise, I have walked everywhere.

The app that tracks how far I walk is happy, I think. The Hebrew interface is a bit cryptic. They give me points for walking certain distances. I can eventually redeem them for things, but they add up to useful amounts more slowly than S&H Green Stamps did.²

A WhatsApp message invites me to get a political sign to hang from my window. I think about it for a moment, then realize that anything hanging from my basement apartment would either be in a window-well below ground level, or lie flat on the lawn where people would walk on it.

I see more photos of the ship that was taken by pirates. The one in the tweet yesterday ³ had Hebrew printing on the front of the ship: "Get News Before Everyone on Telegram." The other images in the news appear identical, but without the Hebrew.⁴

It's possible that the first image, from a news service in Dubai, was taken from a Telegram feed and thus had the text as a sort of watermark. But it's positioned perfectly on the ship, in a way that a watermark, placed without regard to the context, probably wouldn't be.

My hunch is that someone grabbed the Hebrew from somewhere else, removed the background, and slapped it on the photo without knowing or caring what it said. They just wanted to make the ship look Israeli. The actual event was a serious matter, but the photo that the news service ran now looks even sillier.

An article in Wired from a few weeks ago takes a good look at the role that Telegram is playing in spreading information and disinformation about the war.⁵ Members of my family, who are pretty information-savvy, have been frightened by sketchy items there.

I've suggested that they stay away from it for now, but it is used for some useful local information and business. Most of the handbills that I've seen on walls and telephone poles advertising cannabis delivery have Telegram contacts. I don't know of anyone who has used those, though.

A monthly ranking⁶ says that my primary news source, the Times of Israel⁷, is the fastest growing news website in the world. Its year-on-year change was over 600%. The second fastest is Al Jazeera⁸ at 147%. Each has their biases, but do some pretty good reporting.

Which reminds me: if you're following the war news (and not just how I'm dealing with it), you would probably like another daily newsletter. Marc Schulman's Tel Aviv Diary takes a solid look at the hard news. I'm not a journalist, and I don't have contacts with inside information. He's the real thing. I read him daily.⁹

After the sirens, I stay at work for about another half hour, then give up on getting anything more done and leave. It doesn't rain on the way home, but it's windy enough that I'm glad I'm wearing the raincoat.

Along the way, my phone suddenly goes berserk. All my apps (except for, strangely, WhatsApp) disappear from my home screen.

After cursing loudly at it for several minutes, I head to my usual café, get a sachlav, and try to find the problem. I spot a tiny icon marked "Exit" and tap it. Everything comes back.

Poking around further, I see that I had gotten into something called Ultra Battery Saver mode.¹⁰ My phone has been reacting to phantom fingers triggering things. This has apparently been another. It's time to replace this failure magnet.

I come home, make a quick cheese sandwich, and sit down at my desk. It's relatively early. If I stick to my tasks, I should be able to do some homework for my Hebrew lesson, finish writing this, and actually, for a change, get some sleep tonight.

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Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.