cats and boxes

Cat and vacuum

Puppy Pile - 25 Days

Puppy Pile - Feeding Time

This is almost too cute.

Fairness Study

I borrowed this story from the website DW. I have excerpted parts of it. If you would like to go to the full article, please click on the link.

Passing on Holocaust tattoos

Soon, there will no longer be any living Holocaust survivors. But in Israel, some of their grandchildren are choosing to have themselves tattooed with the concentration camp ID numbers on their grandparents' arms.

Holocaust survivors are disappearing and, with them, the memory of what they went through.
But some of their children and grandchildren have found a way to preserve the past - by tattooing on their arms the very numbers the Nazis inscribed on their victims. The crude mark that had been a concrete and painful reminder of the Holocaust has turned into a strong symbol of solidarity for some of the survivors' family members.

Arik Diamant, a 33-year-old from the Israeli city of Herzliya, came up with the idea four years ago to duplicate his late grandfather Yosef Diamant's Auschwitz identification number on his own arm.

... "I told him that if it bothered him at all, I wouldn't do it. At first, he was really shocked and asked me why I would want to do something like that," remembered Diamant. "But then he stopped me and said, 'When you have a grandchild and he asks you what it is, will you tell him about me?'"
Diamant's story has been worked into a documentary film to be released soon: "Numbers," produced by Uriel Sinai and Dana Doron.

Ayal Gelles' arm on the right and his grandfather Avraham Nachshon's on the left

Ideology of numbers

Diamant is one of a growing number of young Israeli Jews who are deciding to preserve their grandparents' stories in this way. About three years ago, Ayal Gelles, a 28-year-old from Tel Aviv, tattooed the number of his grandfather, Avraham Nachshon, during a trip to South America. ... Gelles added that the connection the tattoo gives him to his grandfather is just as meaningful to him as the ideology behind it. But unlike Diamant, Gelles didn't tell his grandfather about the tattoo.

"Maybe he guessed when my mother took a photo of his arm to send to me," speculated Gelles. "Today he says that if I had asked him, he would tell me not to do it. But it doesn't bother him today. Maybe he objected because of religious reasons." In Judaism, tattoos are prohibited according to some interpretations of the book of Leviticus.



Recognition, continuation, appreciation

Gelles and Diamant say that when people notice their tattoos, the reactions are mixed - but mostly positive. Still, they know the topic is loaded and, for many, it is difficult to get used to the concept.

... Professor Dina Porat, a Holocaust scholar at Tel Aviv University, agreed that the general public is not entirely ready for such drastic methods of commemoration, but pointed out that Holocaust remembrance is becoming more personal.
"In the late 1940s in Israel, many survivors actually asked their doctors to remove their numbers. The interesting thing is that with these recent cases of tattoos we see a sort of opposite expression: people who are willingly doing it, not as victims, but as a way of recognition, continuation and appreciation," explained Porat.

...

The tattooed numbers are the strongest symbol of the camps

Outdoing the rules of time

According to research conducted by the Brookdale Institute for the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust victims in Israel, there are currently 190,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel. In 2025, that number will have dropped to 46,000. If the tattoo trend continues, the mark left by the Nazi concentration camps will long outlive the survivors themselves.

Diamant says he appreciates the fact that his tattoo starts deep conversations with those who notice it. And Gelles describes his tattoo as a refreshing departure from repetitive public discourse on the Holocaust.

"We're taking a detour," he said. "We're leaving the clichés behind and we're going back to the story from a different point. It's a different kind of memorial, and maybe it's what people need today."

Giraffe Facts!

I got these out of this month's Mental Floss magazine. Interesting!

The nine giraffe subspecies - and individual animals - can be distinguished by their unique coat patterns, which break up their shape as camouflage but also help them to identify one another.

At full tilt, a giraffe can reach 37 mph.

Giraffe hooves are lethal weapons. The animals' kicks are strong enough to kill lions, their main predator.

Giraffes have just two gears, and they swing differently at each one. When walking, they move the front and back legs of one side together and then the other. When galloping, they bunny hop, moving their back legs together and then the front ones.

Giraffes can close their nostrils at will, which is good because their hair secretes a stinky mix of bacteria- and parasite-repelling compounds that can be smelled from up to 800 feet away.

A giraffe's 20-inch black tongue and prehensile lips are covered in small hard bumps called papillae that protect it as it eats from thorny acacia trees.

Despite their impressive length, giraffe's necks have exactly seven vertabrae, the same as most other  mammals; their vertabrae are just exceptionally long (each is 11 inches compared with about half an inch for humans).

The giraffe's laryngeal nerve runs from the brain down the neck to the heart and then back up to the larynx; at 15 feet, it's the longest nerve in the animal kingdom.

The giraffe's circulatory system is adapted - by way of a 25-pound heart and one-way valves - to pump blood up the neck when the head is up and keep it from rushing down when the head is lowered. Scientists have to be mindful of this when chasing down giraffes for study. Because of their high blood pressure, giraffes are prone to heart attacks.

People used to think that giraffes were mute, but they actually communicate infrasonically (via very low tones that are undetectable to the human ear).