Egged Can Prevent Nuclear War

A sincere appeal from a citizen of the world to the Egged Bus Company, to allow us to pay for our fares online in an effort to prevent nuclear holocaust.

There is a simple way to make this easier.

It was just this morning when I received an email from the student union at Hebrew University, with a tip for students about how to pay for their bus fares using the new "Rav-Kav" cards.  It said that students who have not bought a monthly or yearly bus pass are entitled to a 33% discount when buying a "kartisiya" (a multiple ride ticket).  It said that instead of paying the normal 51.20 NIS for ten rides, students could pay 64 NIS for 15 rides.

I did the math, and realized it didn't quite add up.  A 33% discount would be 51.45 NIS or so for 15 rides. So I decided to look at the Egged website to see what it had to say.

Indeed, the egged website does say that students (who have not bought monthly or yearly passes) are entitled to buy kartisiyot at a 33% discount.  Unfortunately, the site doesn't calculate out what that discount comes to, or how to get that discount.

I tried to imagine what it would look like when I tried to realize this discount whilst buying my kartisiya, because of course the only way to pay for a kartisiya is by paying the driver in person, and of course, the drivers know nothing about this student discount.

The scene would look like this:  I would make my way through the horde of people trying to get up to the bus. When I finally reach (or am generally shoved to) the front, I would pull out my Rav-Kav card.  I would tell the driver that I'm a student, and pull out my student ID.  I would say that I want the 33% discount, to which the driver would say "ma pitom?"  I would produce a print-out from the egged website where it says that students get the 33% discount.  I would then pull out a calculator to show the driver what I ought to pay.

The driver would then adamantly refuse to give me the discount.  The crowd behind me would start yelling at me to just pay.  The driver would start yelling, the crowd would swell, and all hell would break loose.

Someone would get pushed.  Someone would throw a punch.  Someone would pull out a gun.  Someone would get shot.  20% chance that a Jew would kill an Arab in the confusion.  The third Intifada would start.  Iran would attack Israel.  Israel would counter-attack Iran.  The US would attack China.  There would be an alignment of allies on both sides, and nuclear war would break out, resulting in a nuclear holocaust.

Basically, what I'm saying is, for the love of Gd, and the world as we know it, Egged, please, let us simply pay for our bus fare on the internet.  It would cost almost nothing to set up this system.  And it might just save the world from an avoidable catastrophe.

Help make Jerusalem a better place

http://jerusalemmoves.wikispaces.com/

Posted via email from Avi's posterous

A Holocaust Victim's Recipe

It isn’t often that I find myself moved to tears as a result of reading an academic article.  But the other day on the bus, reading on my way to Hebrew U, I had some trouble composing myself.


I’m taking a class on Jews and food.  And at our class meeting, we were to discuss some articles on the Holocaust.   Jews who were packed into Terezin—the concentration camp near Prague—put together a cookbook of recipes they remembered from before they were incarcerated in unspeakable conditions, for most of them as a stop on their way to death by hunger, disease or gas chambers. 



A woman named Mina Pachter entrusted the cookbook to a friend just before she died of starvation, and instructed him to deliver the book to her daughter.   The man survived, and after several decades, Mina’s daughter Anna received the book.


The book is a full of fantasies.  It is the written version of an activity that starving women in Terezin would take part in, in which they would imagine, if they could have any food in the entire world, what would it be? And it turns out to be foods full of sugar and butter and memories of a recent past in which they lived the lives of normal human beings.


The article I read included a recipe from Mina Pachter for caramels:

Brown [caramelize] 30 decagrams sugar without water.  Pour in 1/3 liter coffee extract [very strong coffee], 1/8 liter cream and bring it to a boil.  Add 8 decagrams tea butter [best quality butter] and cook until the mixture is thick.  Pour boiling into a buttered candy pan.  With the back of a knife divide it before it completely cools.  Then break it into cubes and wrap in parchment and also pink paper.

And then it occurred to me, that I was sitting on a bus in Jerusalem, on my way to class at a university of the state of Israel, peering into the imagination of a starving, dying woman, who maybe imagined a place in which Jews took charge of their own destiny, or at least could make some candy for the daughter she never saw again.   

Posted via email from Avi's posterous