A bit of history: the ViewMaster (or View-Master) was first introduced at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 by the partnership of Wilhelm Gruber, an organ maker and amateur photographer, and Harold Graves, who was in charge of the postcard division at Oregon-based Sawyer’s Photo Services.

Their idea was to update the old-fashioned stereoscope to the new Kodachrome 16-mm color film, printing small-format photo transparencies and mounting them in pairs on a disk to be viewed with a simple hand-operated viewer. Initially, the photo subjects were travelogues, such as Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon, quickly followed by more far-flung locations such as Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

Collector and dealer Kip “Mr. ViewMaster” Brockman has several such travelogues on his site, as does the ViewMaster World blog. The disks were accompanied by a narrative booklet. For example, if you were to purchase Modern Israel, part of the Nations of the World series, as you viewed the stereoscopic image, you would read the following:

“Our El Al Israel Airlines plane lands at Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. An attractive hostess welcomes us to Israel with a spoken greeting in Hebrew, from the Bible: “Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and when thou goest out.”

Tel Aviv, Israel’s No. 1 boom town, is the first all Jewish metropolis since Biblical times…The beach front is a Coney Island on the Mediterranean; booths sell corn on the cob, watermelon, or falaffel (“the Israeli hot dog”)…

Tel Aviv stands as a symbol of modern, energetic Israel. The country’s spirit is personified in its new generation. The native born Sabra— Hebrew word for cactus (tough outside, sweet inside) — is tall, healthy, suntanned, and confident, with the swagger of an adventurer.”

Oh my gosh! I would really like to visit that place where air-hostesses quote scripture, Israelis are tall and un-neurotic, and the notion of falafel as “the Israeli hot dog” doesn’t send me into paroxysms of laughter. But I digress.

After 1966, when Sawyer’s became a wholly owned subsidiary of the General Aniline & Film (GAF) Corporation, more child-friendly subjects like cartoons and TV series were introduced.

The full account of View-Master’s history of Mergers & Acquisitions is a long one; the short version is that the product is currently carried by Mattel subsidiary Fisher-Price, which in December 2008 announced that it would cease production of the scenic disks depicting tourist attractions. According to Wikipedia, “These disks of picturesque scenes and landscape scenery were descendants of the first View-Master disks sold in 1939.”

Fisher-Price continues to produce disks of animated characters, including Dora the Explorer who prefers to go places instead of just looking at them on-screen. Well, travel is easier nowadays. There was something magical, though, about looking at the tiny celluloid images through the ViewMaster lens. (It was, as my significant other says, “like having a tiny, personal TV” and if you squished the eyepiece sideways into your brow ridge just right, you could get the full 3D effect, however briefly). So you can still get a ViewMaster. As for getting hold of ViewMaster travelogues, there’s always eBay.

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Developed by Israeli company Funtactix, the online game has become a big hit since being launched last week. Which should not be too surprising since the Jerusalem startup is apparently so talented that Lionsgate Films signed an agreement with them to develop the official ‘Hunger Games’ game – two months after it launched the Facebook game for Mission Impossible 4.

The Hunger Games online app enables fans of the film and the book dynasty to play with virtual friends based on the characters from the books and film.

“Even though we knew in advance that the movie would be a huge hit with teens we were still very excited when we saw the initial statistics, and we hope they will continue to grow and increase,” said Funtactix founder Yaron Leifenberg in a press release.

The (JVP) Erel Margalit-financed company was founded in 2006 and has developed a reputation in web-based gaming since its 2008 introduction of connected 3D multiplayer action gaming to the browser. Based in New York, with development teams centered in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Funtactix is another example of the burgeoning Hollywood-Israel connection in full bloom.

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On their Facebook page, people are sharing music links — Stevie Wonder’s We Can Work It Out — messages about their appreciation for the campaign, wishes for a happy Iranian new year and Iranian versions of the Israeli poster. If you were just reading this site, you’d think there’s no chance for a nuclear war.

Read this comment:

Just in from Iran:

miscommunication is a funny thing . when i saw the original blog and first comment was why so cocky why u say u dont bomb us like u want to but u dont and few hours later i saw one israeli said why they dont said it back that we dont bomb u either. u see? something its good thing in Your country and its bad thing in mine . because we dont know each other. they never let us to know each other. they afraid we became united and realize we got played and they cant control us any more (they are : government of both countries ) . i dont know about u guys but here they keep saying israel is bad . israel its evil and all that crap and its going into your subconscious and u start believe a lie that deep down u know thats not true at least not all of them but u know what, when i see pictures specially family ones its like i know u guys and i never met any of u .any one with a little bit knowledge knows innocent people gonna get kill in wars .people who dont deserve it and people who do deserve it they going to sit in their office and write a apology note . love and respect to every irani or israeli or american or what ever countries that say no to war . some people said this is start of a friendship between two countries but i say (base on two countries history ) this is reunion of brothers and sisters who lost each other over time and finally find each other .

B. Tehran – IRAN

It helps to have a ‘place’ to go where you can regain a sense of sanity about people and war and the general desire to vote for peace rather than warfare. The question is whether pink and green posters can make any kind of difference in this global disaster.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with youngster Shimon Peres.

At age 88, Peres is a new media star and has spent this week, after holding a face to face with President Barack Obama and addressing the AIPAC conference, touring California hi-tech hotbeds as the toast of Silicon Valley, with heavyweights like Mark Zuckerberg and Serge Brin clamoring to pose next to him like he was a rock star.

Zuckerberg helped Peres launch his official Facebook page, which is aimed at creating a dialogue with Arab users. The president repeatedly praised the social networking site as a way for people to bypass failed efforts of governments to seek peace.

And if that’s not enough for you to press like, Peres’s people recruited celebrated Israeli DJ Noy Alooshe to put together a techno mash-up of a Peres speech to promote the page. Alooshe, a member of the techno group Chovevei Tzion, was propelled to international success after his parody last year of former Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, which included excerpts from one of his speeches during the early stages of the Libyan civil war.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Accompanied by a pulsing techno beat, the Peres clip features Peres rapping his way through a “be my friend, for peace” riff in his endearing Old World English acent. Visually, we see the presidentin various scenes, from scrolling through his page on a Tablet to meeting international leaders and celebrities like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, comedian Jerry Seinfeld and the Pope.

The clip appears, of course, on Peres’s own YouTube channel. The man’s a modern marvel. Meanwhile I’m still trying to figure out what Twitter is all about.

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Kristen Henderson, second from left, Nini Camps, second from right, and Cathy Henderson, right, all of Antigone Rising pose with two Arab students after their performance in Beersheba.

Well, the quartet was here and gone, and they were fantastic. Not only that, they had a great time, as they themselves pointed out in blog postings on the site After Ellen.

Let’s take a peek at singer/rhythm guitarist Nini Camps’ observations after only a few days in Israel for the first time.

Today we played at Eshkol Ha Pais in Beer Sheva for about 250 Bedouin and Jewish students from local high schools.

Throughout our careers we’ve played tons of shows for high school and college students. Sometimes even in remote towns in the nooks and crannies of the U.S., but it’s safe to say that we have never played for kids that have never heard American music — at all.

I look around the town and it is developed as much as many American cities. But here, unlike in the U.S., there is such a diverse mix of cultures that a girl in jeans and uggs is walking next to a girl in full cover. I can’t think of anywhere in the U.S. that has such polar cultural diversity within such a tiny radius. We’ve been told the entire country of Israel is the size on New Jersey.

And then here we come blazing in. Ha, culture shock indeed!

We played for about an hour and it was hard to read some of the faces. Some were visibly interested and clapping, swaying, but some looked away or looked down and you couldn’t help but wonder if they were bored, shy or just not comfortable with what was happening onstage. Or all of the above, for that matter.

After the show we sat along the edge of the stage. It took a few brave souls to break the ice but once they did it was like a torrent rushing the stage. They all came up to say hello, teach us how to say hello, tell us their names, take pictures and some just came up to stare at us.

One boy couldn’t wait to tell me he loved Eric Clapton! One girl, pretty well covered up and with great English skills came up quickly to say how lucky she felt to have been at the show. Before I realized it she was gone and I was left wanting to tell her it was the other way around — that we were the lucky ones.

And here’s bass player and band founder Kristen Henderson’s take on the show in Beesheba.

We just played our first show in Beer Sheva for a mixed group of high school students, both Israeli Jews and Arabs. All of the Arab female students were covered from head to toe, a few only had their eyes showing.

One of our hosts from the U.S. Embassy told us that this would be a very culturally diverse group of students. That in most cases, these kids would never be in the same room with one another, but part of the U.S. State Department’s initiative was to bring them together from time to time in an effort to create peace and understanding between the cultures.

As the room filled, it was very clear who belonged to which group. The Israeli Jewish kids filtered down to the front rows. The boys stuck with the boys and girls with girls, but they were “Westernized” in the sense that some wore Adidas sweat jackets and carried iPhones. You didn’t get the sense they were intentionally divided by gender, but it was obvious they were divided by culture.

The Bedouins (or Israeli Arabs), on the other hand, sat further back – boys in the middle of the room and the girls fully covered from head to toe in the back of the room. At one point Nini came over to show me that two of the girls were cautiously clapping along during our set, unsure if they should be visibly enjoying the show.

After we performed, an Arab girl approached us accompanied by her teacher. She thanked us for sharing our culture with her and told us that our show, seeing four women on stage playing music, “empowered her” (her words; she spoke impeccable English).

A U.S. Embassy worker later told us the girl comes from a village with no running water or electricity. Her mother recently passed away and she is the oldest of six siblings. She is one of the brightest students in her school and hoped to go on to study science and technology, but due to her family’s situation she is now responsible for bringing up her siblings. The Embassy worker went on to say that seeing us perform today gave her hope that she can still have more for her life.

Here’s a short video montage of the band’s visit to Israel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Infected Mushroom will be mesmerizing the US and UK bloggers this week in Tel Aviv.

It’s a great idea because you can’t get every person to come and visit Israel, but if one popular blogger comes over and gets a good impression of the country, then everyone who follows that blogger is going to be reading about Israel in a different light.

A new player in the game is Kinetis – a young Tel Aviv-based advocacy organization that aims to promote Israel as a vibrant and inspirational source of creativity and innovation. Their pet project focuses on bloggers and is called Vibe Israel.

Previous Vibe Israel trips have focused on ‘mommy bloggers’ and design bloggers, and this week, their third group has landed, consisting of five popular music bloggers.

• Rebecca Schiller of the New Musical Express from London,
• New York’s Samantha Edussuriya of MTV Iggy
• Luke Britton of This Fake/DIY from the UK
• Rory Hamilton of Feel My Bicep from Scotland
• and Brandon Bogajewicz of The Burning Ear, blogging from California.

Collectively, they boast over nine million readers.

Their week-long visit, which encompasses the Mardi Gras-like atmosphere of Purim, includes meeting a slew of top Israeli musical talent including Koby Farhi, the frontman for Orphaned Land, Idan Raichel, Geva Alon and Ivri Lider. The group will also attend a Purim show by Mashina and Infected Mushroom in Tel Aviv.

There’s no way they’re going to come away with a bad impression of them, or of Israeli music in general, and maybe, with their clout, it could start a groundswell that will push the names of some of them into the international spotlight. And if not, the bloggers’ posts from their week in Israel will surely open the eyes of their readers to the astounding variety of world class music we have here.

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However, I was all for the cottage cheese revolution last summer which found the populace fed up with the price gouging of our big conglomerates. And thanks to that initiative, some of the prices of our cheese and milk products have indeed been lowered by companies like Strauss and Tnuva.

However, one Israeli who lives in the US wasn’t satisfied. He happened to be in a grocery store in New Jersey and saw a display of Israeli Pesek Zman chocolate bars (made by Strauss) being sold for 69 cents, about a third of what the hard-working Israeli chocolate lover pays for it here.

He posted a photo for his Facebook friends, and presto, the chocolate Watergate was flowing.

The news snowballed and the media, apparently unaware that we’re under an Iranian threat, reported that other chocolate bars manufactured by flagship Elite company (also owned surprisingly enough by Strauss) are also being sold at similarly low prices abroad.

Strauss said in a statement that it cannot control the price that retailers place on their products, and said it believed that the prices were lower in Jewish communities in the United States in advance of Purim.

Nonetheless, after sensational headlines and much chocolate binging, it’s been decided that a month-long boycott of Strauss and Elite chocolate bars is set to begin on March 1, just as we’re entering the chocolate-intensive week of Purim.

We’ve endured hardships before, from milk and egg shortages during the War of Independence to the more recent hummus shortage, which admittedly did cause some of us to crack. However a month without chocolate bars is tearing the Zionist dream at its fabric. We can only sacrifice so much.

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Sela, who only a few weeks ago, launched Radio Nostalgia, an online music channel playing Israeli hits from 25 years ago and beyond, has clearly tapped into a wellspring of human emotion: the good feeling elicited from seeing an old movie poster, classic naaley bayit slippers or even the relief felt from seeing a picture of a rusty old kerosene heater and being able to say, “Well, thank goodness we don’t have to use THAT anymore!”

The site is a comprehensive, non-profit enterprise with content written by Sela and a team of volunteer researchers, with materials contributed by thousands of visitors, private entities and institutions all interested in preserving the collective memory of the modern State of Israel. The site is divided into dozens of sub-sites (portals) and tens of thousands of entries, images, presentations, audio and video clips and various visual images.

In addition to Radio Nostalgia, there’s a video archive that gathers together over 1000 YouTube clips, an audio archive with sounds from famous historical events, a collection of downloadable PowerPoint presentations and print materials. There’s even a daily trivia factoid. For example, 34 years ago today in 1978, the film Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle) — itself a nostalgic look back at wayward Tel Aviv youth in the　late 1950s — premiered and became a national sensation.

Nostalgia Online also publishes an online magazine called Kova Tembel (in Hebrew) distributed free to 146,000 subscribers, runs an information center and also answers individual questions about the various historical aspects of Israeli culture and heritage.

The Nostalgia Online team assists organizations and institutions in creating displays for employees and/or the public and has also formed a non-government organization (NGO) for the purpose of establishing a museum of Israeli nostalgia.

You can show your support by joining their Facebook page. And if you’ve got any Israeli knick-knacks, bric-a-brac or any other cool old stuff lying around, take a picture and share — it will surely be appreciated!

For old time’s sake, here’s the trailer for Lemon Popsicle.

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Tel Aviv Beach – Wintertime 2012
Photo by Ilan Malester, Courtesy of the Ministry of the Environment

Well, yes. It’s definitely an improvement but reaching the line doesn’t mean we’re done with the drought yet. The lower red line is a fluctuating government-recommended level below which water should no longer be drawn from the lake. Beyond it, there’s the black line, at 215 meters below sea level, the point at which pumping water becomes dangerous and must be shut down. We hit that on November 29, 2001. There is also an upper red line, set at 208.80 meters below sea level, which is the high-water mark. We haven’t been there since the great flood of Tiberias in 1934. So, we still have a way to go.

The rain has also brought out Israel’s storm chasers in droves. Jessica wrote about these hardy — or do I mean foolhardy? — folks two years ago. Since then, the popularity of driving 4x4s and jeeps into the desert or the mountains in search of rushing water has only increased, judging from the activity on the various storm chaser forums, chat groups and recently posted YouTube videos. Even the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) has gotten into the storm chaser act, offering hikes specially geared towards those with taste for flash. Er… flash floods, that is.

For those of us who’d rather chase storms from the comfort of a nice warm living room, here are a few recent clips, courtesy of the Israel Nature & Parks Authority.

Floods in the northern Dead Sea region – January 2012

Floods in the Carmel mountain range – Nahal Oron

Initial moments of a flood in Judean Desert dry river beds

And here’s a local news item from northern Israel, reporting on snow on Mount Hermon and flash floods in the Golan and Galilee.

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Ben and Jerry's Israel ad for their ice cream club

In fact, when I typed ice cream for breakfast into the search bar of Facebook, dozens of posts popped up for celebrants around the globe, from Mexico, Seattle, Louisiana and Philly to Maine, Albany and Shanghai.

According to Serious Eats, all you need to do is eat ice cream, for breakfast, and on the first Saturday in February.

We’ve always celebrated on Saturday, Shabbat in our house, which is the only day that we’re all around, fairly calm and relaxed, and have the time to enjoy the wonders of ice cream for one’s first food of the day. Usually it’s a good selection of Ben & Jerry’s, sometimes with homemade ice cream as well, thanks to my nephew Natan, the artisanal ice cream connoisseur. Toppings? Not always, but it does add to the experience.

Serious Eats also adds that “the holiday was started in the 1960s in Rochester, New York by Florence Rappaport, who let her kids eat ice cream for breakfast on the first Saturday of February to make winter more bearable for them. Now this custom is done all over the world, from Minnesota to Israel to Australia.”

Turns out, there’s an official IEICFBD blog, where you can list your own celebration — there are four in Israel, including one in my own neighborhood of Talpiot (I think that one is hosted by other neighbors of ours) and one down at Kibbutz Ketura, where given the hot weather nearly year-round and a surfeit of American-born kibbutzniks, they’ve been celebrating for some 30 years.

It comes down to the fact that you just need to celebrate sometimes, and even with the upcoming holiday of Tu B’shvat, which, lord knows, offers ample opportunity for celebration, February can be a bleak month. So, if you missed it today, go for it next week. We won’t tell.

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