Sports Bar in Hillsboro

Yesterday we went to buy some more ski socks in order to improve our smell during our upcoming ski trip to Whistler. Coming out of REI, M suggested to go watch Black Swan in a nearby theater. We decided it was easier to eat out as it would allow us to go to an earlier show. As we were standing right in front of a wings place, I suggested to just go there and have some comfort food. As we entered I realized it wasn't just any wings place, it was actually the local sports bar. The rooms were filled with absolutely gigantic screens showing all the NFL and NBA games live simultaneously. The place was quite packed. As a perfect tourist I started to take pictures as I found it so "exotic" (or typically local as you prefer).


See what I mean by a lot of big screens ? Anyway as we were waiting for our wings M went to the ladies room and came back telling me I absolutely had to go check it out. I went to the men's and I suppose it didn't look the same as they probably didn't have any urinals there. I stayed in awe for like a couple seconds in front of THAT:

Yes there is a TV so you won't miss that critical minute of the game while you were emptying your beer filled bladder.
Sorry for the @#$#$ pictures, I just had my phone with me.

Dragons

It had been quite some time since last time I dragged friends to the beach for a fire blowing party. Last night a few collegues and friends joined us at the student's beach for a few beers and some flame throwing. You can read an old post on this blog explaining all the details on how to do it. As I was pretty busy Michelle took all the pictures and was very successful at it: those are definitely the best fire blowing pictures I ever got from any session.

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As you can see here, I also dragged Yuval and Avinash to try it ;)

Purim

Yesterday we had a Purim party at work, some of us took advantage of the makeup stand in the cafeteria to improve our costumes. As you can see we enjoyed it quite a bit.



I have also a large backlog of pictures taken during the various sightiseeing trips while Fifille was here that you'll probably see sometimes in the next few weeks.

Will it blend ?

That has to be the best advertising campaign I've seen to date. They take their blender, and blend stuff with it, by example here we have a piece of Apple-geek-tech.

Everything goes through it, from a can of coke to canned spam, baseball, golf balls, handles, lightbulbs, bic lighters, lightsticks, videocamera, you name it they tried.

And the best part of it, is Michelle actually owns one, I now just have to convince her to let me play a bit with it !!!!!

Paris - Christmas Week

I was tired when I posted about our first day and forgot a few things so I edited a bit the post. In the evening we ended up quite tired at Home with some nice and warm food waiting for us with two happy parents. The next day in the morning was the official ceremony for the "bapteme republicain" of the little monkey and turtle. So now I am officially their republican godfather, I can speak with my best low pitched Marlon Brando voice and say whatever I want trying to look serious. Anyways, after a couple glasses of champagne we went to visit fifille's museum (if you go there don't hesitate to ask for fifille as a private guide she even does tours in English !). The evening was time for a usual Nico party, he was back from Istanbul for a couple of days so took advantage of the opportunity to gather friends. The next day saw 2 birthday parties, the one after a Christmas dinner and the next one a Christmas-day lunch. Yes we just spent 3 days in a row eating good food, yummy.
After X-mas we established residence in temporarily deserted fifille's apartment in Chevreuse.

Chevreuse and it's castle on a sunny morning.

We spent the rest of our short time in Paris going around the city and its museums.

Main hall of "Le musee d'Orsay".


A view on the Louvre.


Champs Elysees, Blue White and Red !

More pictures on Zenfolio as usual. We then took our train for the Alps to go ski. This wasn't uneventful, first we weren't able to buy a suburban train ticket because there was no teller, and the automated machine would not accept foreign credit cards (the great thing about superior french technology, is that it obviously refuses to be compatible with the others, it would be too simple). So we took it with our heavy luggage without paying, and ended up stuck behind the barriers at the train station in Paris, hopefully a helpful SNCF employee just opened them for us without asking anything (he probably assumed we couldn't be cheating with that big bags ;).

We eat and head towards our night train, to realise that someone is occupying our compartment... After some discussion we realize that our ticket is for the next day... Yay, stupid me... We find some free beds in another wagon and depart with the train hoping the controller guy will be nice. Next morning, no one checked our tickets and we're in the freezing and snowy alps :).

The 15th of Av

Thursday night the city of Haifa organized a special street party for the 15th of Av. They blocked all the traffic to the main Carmel street just above my place, put a small scene, loud music, and all the bars and restaurants opened stands on the street. Six of us spent the evening in the crowd, enjoying the crowd, the fun and a few drinks. Here is how it looked like (more pics here):


Dancing on the bus stop with kegs.


Concert scene

The next day Omer, Michelle and I joined a few Omer friends camping on the beaches of the Tiberias lake. No pictures for you, the weather was so hot that we ended up dipping in water all day and all night (felt great :).

The parking (follow-up)

I've been quite lazy and busy so I am catching up on stories. After my car got locked into that @$#%@#$^%$ parking on Sabbat evening, I left it over the weekend in Jerusalem because the parking was reopenning only on sunday morning.

Sunday morning I took the bus to the station then jumped in an "express" bus to Jerusalem. It was obviously full, mostly with young soldiers. I ended up sitting on the floor for the 2 hours it took us to reach Jerusalem. It was a strange feeling, I was surrounded by M16s and other guns, one guy actually dropped his charger on me and spread the ammos all over the place... I am still not used to be surrounded by firearms.
The worst part of it is that I was sitted right on top of the engine, burning my .ss, and that the guy sitting next to me was impaling me with his M16 each time he was falling asleep (about as often as I was waking him up).
Once in Jerusalem I jumped in another bus and finally reached that stupid parking. I took my car, pretended to have lost my ticket to avoid paying for the whole weekend of parking and drove back to work. It took me almost 6 hours and an experience of Israeli buses, so now I kinda try to check the signs at the entrance of closed parkings...

Dolmas 1 - Fefe 1

I am sure a few laughed at my previous post about dolmas, so here I am again on my quest to eat good dolmas. I don't give up that easily, especially when I am the one that define the rules. This time I stopped by the mall on my way back from work and bought the dolmas from the local Druze cook. I have been buying stuff there for like 3 years, and they're always good. The man is really nice, has like 30 or more years of experience in cooking dolmas, plus he let me take pictures.


For the ones that would say I gave up, don't worry there will be a third round.

Another guess

Before I tell you stories about last weekend you'll have to guess what this is:
(and yes this is edible, remember who is posting).

Bonjour c'est pour un retrait !

Je suis tombe sur cet article sur Libe:

Un homme d'une soixantaine d'années qui fréquente son agence bancaire une à deux fois par jour depuis un an, ça met en confiance. Jusqu'au jour où il s'évapore avec 20 kilos de diamants d'une valeur estimée à environ 28 millions de dollars.

Chapeau ! Ca me rappelle des parties de jeux de roles tout ca :). Arsene Lupin est donc sextagenaire :).

Hot stuff

She told me hot stuff, I couldn't resist... and invited her home.

Pigeons !

Today I was browsing the news and found that news on Slashdot:

Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."

This reminded me of the numerous usages invented using remote controled animals:

• Google pigeon rank technology
• State University of New York remote controled rats
• WWII US army bat bombs

Well after all this I discovered that we got one step closer to all these cyborgs stories in the SF litterature, and I am actually really impressed by the state of these research (and preparing plans to take over the world using 2 crazy remote controled mouses).

Ok, I am working too much, I am taking a break.

Leiffe

Look ! I didn't dream, there is an "i":

Mysterious picture

Guess what it is, and for who it is :).

Dick Cheney tire sur ses amis

Dick a loge un plomb dans le coeur de l'un de ses amis de 78 ans pendant une partie de chasse a son ranch au Texas. Cela a bien entendu declenche une vague de blagues sur le sujet dont certaines pas mauvaises du tout.

Pourquoi, alors, a-t-il tiré? «Dans le monde de l'après-11 septembre, les Américains s'attendent à ce que leurs leaders soient décidés. Ne pas avoir tiré dans le visage de son ami aurait envoyé aux cailles le message que l'Amérique est faible!»

Merci Dick pour tonaction militante pour le "Gun control" ;)

Campagne de pub

Act-up a lance une campagne de pub a laquelle je vous conseille de jeter un coup d'oeil :).

New usage model for falafels

Jpost reports an interresting new usage for falafels: smuggling drugs into your sandwich. I think this can only happen here, how the hell did the policemen think abouth searching INSIDE the falafel balls of the sandwich the guy was bringing. This gives you an idea of how ingeniously the smuggles and the searches are done around here (and also gives you a hint of what I have had to go through countless times at the airport :).

Red nose ecologists

Hating SUVs inside cities like Paris started to do some commando actions against them. Find their blog here.

PS: kind of private joke for Izard.

Bat-Mobile

I am now going through all my Barcelona pics :). I found this one taken during the Gracia festival. Many strange items were hanged in the streets. I liked the idea of a bat-mobile ( mobile=cell in french and spanish :). 

RC cars

Sunday is Karate day for Pierre's wife, so I often come by on sunday evening, we eat pizza drink beer and play with tiny RC cars on his balcony. I know it sounds both childish and "beauf" but we're enjoying it quite a bit :). Yesterday a couple of friends joined us so we had a race. I was impressed by how small those things are, when I was a kid a RC car was at least 30cm long, now they're like 5 long and 2 wide have lights, good steering etc. The ones we are using are ZipZaps, enjoy.