Back On Line

If a column is posted to the Internet but no one can read it – was it funny?

Well, not the ones I posted the last couple of days that you couldn’t read – there is nothing funny about the precarious residential real estate market, let alone Lebanon or Iraq.

So, apart from the obvious (great work, Scotland Yard! no, Joe Lieberman should not run as an independent), I hope you will find a few minutes to catch up with anything you missed – especially Eric Hoffer’s short, poignant column from (yes) 1968.

The reason for the web site problems is known only to our estimable web hosting company. They claim we did something. But we haven’t changed our code in five years (which is why I look 12, top left).

But just before you do go back to Eric Hoffer or residential real estate:

FMD

Earnings reported yesterday beat expectations by $.28 a share (largely from a change in local taxes) – up 65% from last year, and up even more per share because the company has been buying back its own stock (fewer shares to divide the profit over). Loan growth and revenues are accelerating, while margins are expanding. “Not bad,” writes my FMD guru, “for a stock with a PE of roughly 10 times next year’s earnings.”

R.I.P., YUSUF RAHIL

Patrick Gallot: “Yaakov Har-Oz’s first point is incorrect and defamatory. ‘Yusuf Rahil’ is a transliteration of a Lebanese name that probably was never written in the Latin alphabet before the kid was killed. Another common transliteration of ‘Yusuf’ is ‘Yousef’. If you Google that, you will find his death reported on February 4th, 2006 in Italy and Uruguay. Lebanon too, presumably. So it is incorrect to say that this ‘wasn’t reported on anywhere’ and to imply that Strindberg made up this incident is libelous.”

David Williams: “Was Yaakov Har-Oz lazy? Or did he just not want to find the story of the shepherd boy killed by the IDF? It took me approximately three minutes to find this and this. Strindberg, apparently by mistake, wrote the boy’s father’s name. The account from Lebanon gives the boy’s name as Ibrahim Rhayyel; the father, Youssef Rhayyel. There is an issue of phonetic spelling.”

ARABS SIDE BY SIDE WITH JEWS

This is how it should be – at least until the rockets started flying.

Especially now, it is hard to understand this reality in Israel – that many Jews and Arabs share communities and citizenship, the day-to-day activities of their lives. “Ten years ago, when I went to the Arab villages, they would say, ‘You stole our land,’” Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said Monday at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. “Now they say, ‘Let’s talk about education.’”

☞ Okay: now go back and see if a tree fell in the forest – though it was not funny.