smothered

According to the BBC "the prisoner Hezbollah wants most" is Samir Qantar. On April 22, 1979, Qantar murdered 28-year-old Danny Haran and his 4-year-old daughter and caused the death of another Haran daughter, age 2. Haran's widow, Smadar Haran Kaiser, describes the crime (she transliterates the murderer's name as "Kuntar"):

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border.

Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer.

As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.

They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The BBC gives a rather more sanitized account of the crime: "Qantar . . . attacked a block of flats in Nahariha in 1979, killing a father and his daughter."

Narbacular? what the heck does that mean?

What has Jesse been up to? Quite simply, Narbacular Drop:


The premise of the game is that you can create two portals, a red and a blue one, to go through the game. If you enter the blue portal, you will come out the red portal, and vice-versa. As you can see in the above picture, I ran into the wall and was shot into the air because my other portal was on the ground. I also placed a portal on the ceiling and made a portal under the box, and the box came out of the ceiling.


Here, I can be seen trapping some frog dude in a cage by making a portal in the cage, and then creating a portal under him. He fell sideways into the cage.

The game's official website (which sometimes exceeds its bandwidth limit for the day) can be found here. If you cannot download the game from there, you can download the game from here.

Thanks to Kum for showing me Valve's new game, Portal. The makers of Narbacular Drop are working with Valve to create Portal, which is how I found this game.

By the way, I have the world's fastest time to beat the game: 1:28. Second place is 1:45. I emailed my run to the website admin, but if it fails to show up there in time, just ask and I can email it to you. However, please play the game through before you watch my or anyone's speed run, as there are spoilers for how to beat the levels.

***EDIT: My fastest time is now 1:11.

Restore Marriage Canada! Newsletter

Restore Marriage Canada! Newsletter

Does this make anybody else shudder? I opted in to their website newsletter so that I could stay informed of what they were up to.

It's about Harper's decision to allow Parliament to consider whether to take another look at same-sex marriages:

"What this means in the simplest terms is that if this measure passes Parliament, then we will still have a showdown over marriage itself at some future time. But if it fails, it is unlikely that Parliament will consider restoring traditional marriage in Canada until the damage to the very fabric of our society is obvious. By then, it will be too late to reverse that damage.

And make no mistake. Unless we restore traditional marriage, that damage to our society is inevitable."

Sometimes, I feel as if I'm the only person that considers this ordeal to be a question of human rights... But at least all you intellectuals that read my blog are on the same wavelength with me here. [Cuz you guys aren't idiots]

What REALLY bugs me is black people or female people that oppose the same-sex marriages. Isn't it obvious to them that they'd be slaves or unable to vote if they had the same mindset a few decades ago?