February 23, 2024

Joseph ZItt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-22

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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I wake repeatedly during the night with a burning question on my mind: Who was the third member of Genesis?

I mean the trio on "And Then there Were Three."¹ I easily remember Phil Collins. It takes a little longer to be sure that Tony (not Peter) Banks was another of them. But I draw a blank on the third member. I should know this instantly.

Later, I wake up knowing that the other guy was named Mike, because he also led Mike and the Mechanics.²

I could just ask Alexa, without getting out of bed or turning on a light. But I insist that I should remember it myself.

I wake up for good after sunrise. The first two words that hit my mind are "Mike Rutherford." I know that's right. That's a relief. And I'm completely awake.

I don't have any instant yen to listen to Genesis. But having the knowledge feels oddly important.

(And yes, I know that some of you will have been yelling "Mike Rutherford! Mike Rutherford!" at the screen since the first paragraph, as if someone were getting it wrong on Final Jeopardy. sigh)³

I have other things on my mind, of course: breakfast, going to work, what I'm going to write here today, and, as always, the war. I sit down at my desk and flip through the accumulated news.

There's a shortage of teachers everywhere. They don't get paid well. Housing here is expensive. (I really lucked out in finding my apartment.)

To deal with that, our city is going to have a lottery for subsidized apartments for teachers and people who run kindergartens.⁴ I suspect that competition will be fierce. It looks like they will open up more later on.

Another article in our local news site contains praise for our mayor, this time from Gadi Eisenkot, a well-respected member of the war cabinet.⁵ He's been mentioned here before, unfortunately, when both his son and nephew died recently in the war.

The mayor himself speaks in the article of how his experience with organization and logistics has helped in crises:

"When a few weeks ago there was an attack by terrorists in Ra'anana, within a few minutes we closed the roads and secured all the entrances to the city from the direction of the threat. In the current situation we do not have the possibility to lower the defenses even for a moment, there is no time to adapt, or time to rest."

More details have emerged about that terrorist attack, which killed the retired social worker for the House of a Hundred Grandmothers.⁶ The killers had a specific target, the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Army. They didn't get to him, but they ran over and stabbed a lot of other people.

It looks like there's going to be a new light rail system between Haifa and Nazareth.⁷

I like what I've seen of both cities. I had visited a friend who had come to Haifa from the US just before the war. On a tour of the Galilee and more of the northern side of the country, I got to spend several nights in Nazareth, which was beautiful. I look forward to visiting there again.

The article says that it's scheduled to be ready in about three years. The way these things stop and start, I'm guardedly optimistic that I'll get to ride it within this lifetime.

The new light rail line just south of me has been open for several months. I loved riding it on its first official day and a couple of times since.

Unfortunately, it hasn't had the ridership levels originally expected.⁸ The planners forgot to predict that we'd have a war.

There's much more ridership within the city, where it mostly runs underground, than in the suburbs, where it doesn't. The city has also done a lot more to make the areas around the stations attractive.

The lyrics to our Eurovision entry have appeared online.⁹ They're mostly in English.

As I mentioned yesterday, reports say that the Powers That Be are considering disallowing the song because it's "too political." Our people have said that if they can't do the song, they'll boycott the contest.¹⁰ Unfortunately, that would make some of the competing countries and their fans very happy. We're not all that popular in much of Europe nowadays.

At work, I try to wrap my brain around some documentation that I'm supposed to use as a source for what I'm writing. I used to work at the company that wrote it (as have others here). We had a rigorous workflow and checked what each other did.

Now, it appears, a new generation has arisen who don't know about editing. I get stuck at ambiguous wording. One entry says that database objects "may not be checked" for validity. Does that mean that nothing is allowed to check them, or just that there is a possibility that they won't be checked? Inquiring minds want to know.

Late in the day, the boss goes around distributing popcorn. He says it's good for thinking well. OK. I spend too much time looking at the kernels. I wonder whether, like snowflakes, no two popped kernels are ever alike.

(And I fondly remember when a boss, at an office that wrote for that first company decades ago, brought around plates of popcorn and green peppers during an all-nighter to keep our energy and spirits up.)

An article in today's New York Times says that those of us who are over 60 and single are remarkably happy. OK. ¹¹ (The link has no paywall.)

This country, especially, is built around family units. It's really unusual for me to be my age and not have offspring. A lot of the structure of housing (including inheriting apartments) and elder care takes it for granted. I can't even imagine what having a partner or spouse would be like for me. It could have its upsides. Maybe I would be able to ask them who played in Genesis.¹²

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.