“Mah zeh ‘first and ten’?”
Benji Lovitt grits his teeth and survives his Super Bowl experience alone with a sick Israeli friend:
“Ehhh…why do they call it that? They ahr noht using their feet?!”
It’s 2:00 AM, I’m watching the Super Bowl in a dark room with not a drop of caffeine or alcohol in the apartment, lying six inches from a coughing man.
REMIND ME WHAT I’M DOING HERE AGAIN?! (Oh yeah-I like it here.)
(Middle East TV just ran a commercial for “Lassie”. I kept waiting for the punchline, like for Diddy to run out with a bottle of Pepsi. I must be dreaming.)
Paragliding above God’s country
Here’s my crazy friend Arieh , the former defense correspondent of The Jerusalem Post. Arieh’s a nice Jewish boy from the South with a capital S who settled in the heartland of Israel with a penchant for life-threatening hobbies.
Check out the beautiful scenery…
Super Sunday
Filed under: General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Sports
There’s a surprising large number of bleary-eyed Israelis this morning stumbling around the country. It’s got nothing to do with insomnia over worrying about the state of the government, the sex lives of our political leaders, or the Iranian threat.
It’s because of the Super Bowl, stupid.
Football fanatics here don’t have it cushy like Americans do – with a civilized 6:30 pm starting time. If you wanted to see the genius of Peyton Manning, you had to get ready to party at 1:30 am and plan on staying up til dawn. Which is what an increasingly growing number of native Israelis are doing along with the expat Americans who have always done it.
Two channels broadcast the game live – Fox Sports and Middle East TV, the latter also showing the much hyped advertisements featuring Kevin Fed-ex and others.
I was invited to two Super Bowl parties – one an all-men’s whiskey, cigars and drugs marathon in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and another in Jerusalem populated with the local touch football league establishment associated with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft who evidently paid for the wide screen TV and the munchies. There you had players (both male and female) in the touch football league mingling with staffers from The Jerusalem Post and the IBA TV news in English, and other south Jerusalem personalities.
I opted for a good night’s sleep instead – a more mature decision perhaps, but one which I immediately regretted making. Now, if the NY Giants had been one of the teams… maybe next year!
Shahar Takes the Court
Our rising tennis star is kicking some serious butt:
Israeli teenager Shahar Peer carved out a bit of history with her 6-4 6-2 humbling of third-seed Svetlana Kuznetsova in the fourth round of the Australian Open on Sunday.
The 16th seed became the first Israeli woman to reach the quarter-final of a grand slam with a performance of great agility on Vodafone Arena, often cruelly exposing the lethargic movement of her flat-footed Russian opponent.
The 19-year-old broke the Russian’s serve three times in a scrappy opening set and even a five-minute rain interruption while she was serving at 4-2 in the second failed to disrupt her concentration.
Win the Race, Lose Your Citizenship
This is a serious bummer:
Authorities have revoked the Bahraini citizenship of a Kenyan-born athlete who ran in an Israeli marathon, the nation’s athletic union said Saturday.
Bahraini runner Mushir Salem Jawher competed and won the Tiberias Marathon in Israel on Thursday, ending the race in just over 2 hours and 13 minutes.
Most Arab states do not recognize Israel, and the Jerusalem Post newspaper said Jawher was the first athlete from an Arab country to compete in an Israeli marathon. Jawher was born in Kenya in 1978 and moved to Bahrain in 2003, according to the International Association of Athletics Federation.
The Jerusalem Post cited Jawher as saying he was “very proud” to have run in Israel. Even though Bahrain has no official ties with the Jewish state, “It is a free country,” the athlete was quoted as saying.
Bahrain’s Athletic Union said in a statement Saturday that it had received the news that a Bahraini national competed in Israel with “shock and regret.”
“The union deeply regrets what the athlete has done,” the statement said. A comity of sport and government authorities decided to strike Jawher’s name off the sport union records and strip off his Bahraini nationality, the statement said.
It said Jawher had entered Israel with his Kenyan passport and added that the runner’s Bahraini citizenship was revoked because he had “violated the laws of Bahrain.” The tiny Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain has no official ties with Israel but is a close political ally of the United States. The oil-refining and banking island also hosts the US 5th Fleet.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Israelity via email:
Social Media
Categories
- A New Reality
- Art
- Blogging
- Business
- coexistence
- Crime
- design
- education
- Entertainment
- Environment
- Food
- Foto Friday
- General
- health
- History and Culture
- Holidays
- Immigrant Moments
- Israeliness
- Life
- Medical Breakthroughs
- Movies
- Music
- News
- Nostalgia Sunday
- Picture of the Week
- Politics
- Pop Culture
- Profiles
- Religion
- Science
- Social Justice
- Sports
- Technology
- Travel
- tv
- War
The Face of Israel Today
-
About Israelity
Free newsletter
Stories from ISRAEL21c.orgPopular Posts