Harry’s Place

I recently went to see Adam Sandler’s “You don’t mess with the Zohan” with a friend who is an extremely proud ex-pat Israeli, who laughed until she cried at the fundamental truth of the movie: that removed from the immediate environs, and without an opportunistic hand operating in the background whose interests are served by ongoing strife between the parties, Jewish Israelis and Arab citizens of Israel and the territories both love life and their children more than they love death and hate the other.

On balance, I think I prefer cooking to fighting.

In the B5 universe, every species in the known universe has a dish comparable to what the Humans call Swedish meatballs; for example, the Minbari refer to it as flarn, while the Narn dish is known as breen. Since the Vorlons have manipulated all the younger races, perhaps Swedish meatballs are really a Vorlon delicacy, part of an intricate plan to defeat the Shadows through culinary unity.

Bloody irresponsible post.
I googled Tamimi and recipe and have just been questioned after trying to buy half a tonne of Ammonium Nitrate.

hahahaha.

We should have a HP dinner at this place! Their puddings are to die for

(not to kill for)

I was only ordering a pudding with 72 raisins officer.
They’re to die for

In fact
I was only ordering a pudding with 72 raisins officer.
They’re to die for

I wonder if they’ll be able to convince a jury of the “it was all an elaborate PR stunt” defence.

With the Festival not even begun, I’m wondering it such “elaborate PR stunts” would be that bad a move…

[…]

[…]

Joke! Don’t arrest me! Look, I’ve got Claudia Roden’s book!

In the Qur’an programme the other night, they didn’t mention raisins, they said houri meant grapes. But the presenter also claimed that Islam differed from both Judaism and Christianity in that Islam’s holy text was the only one directly dictated by god to the prophet, whereas with the other 2 Abrahamics, men had written the texts claiming to inspired by god. He has clearly confined his research to the non Orthodox Jewish grouping, as Orthodoxy insists that god dictated the whole of the Torah plus commentary to Moses.
So if he is unreliable on this fundamental, I don’t know if I trust him on the grapes.

hmm. they’ve a place not far from work. i’ll try it out some time. thanks for the tip!

They’re very good. Recommended.

Very funny post. Well spotted.

Orthodoxy insists that god dictated the whole of the Torah plus commentary to Moses.

And Mormonism insists that the Book of Mormon was dictated to Joseph Smith by the Angel Moroni (I kid you not).

Smith was a con man.

However, if these books were not written by god, why follow them? To be frank, they’re a curate’s egg.

And Smith looked through that amber shotglass spyglass at a time sufficiently close in a society sufficiently similar to now for his and his immediate fellows to have been absolutely aware of their psychopathologies.

Ami, have I expounded on my minor thesis that Islam emerged as a mish-mash of Semitic moon worship, Messianic Judaism, Gnostic Christianity and political opposition to the Byzantine Empire, with the prohibition on alcohol of wine being an effort to distinguish it from mainstream Judaism and Christianity?

(And, by the Festival, I meant the whole Islands of Dr Moreau about to descend on Edinburgh. Then again, after the scare of bombings at 2002 Hogmanay, I recall seeing black-clad men on Princes Street roofs wearing abseil ropes, so best not.)

Alec,
Just curious re. your research on origins of Islam - is there a factor of Arab cultural nationalism in that mix?
(i.e. what influence did Arab clients - both Byzantine/Persian - have on the origins?)

Bed beckons, Onion, and someone else could explain it better than I do, but it was firstly the *emergence* of this new faith in the 5-6th Centuries in the Arabian peninsula and its environs. Absorbing subsequent societies would have altered it, as much as the Salafists would like to deny, quite quickly - Stylites’ pillars becoming minarets, Zoroastrian-influence inspiring conflict before Mo’ was cold in his grave - or much later - such as the popularization of the crescent moon following the taking of Constantinople. There were vestiges of ancestor worship even in the heartlands well into modern times, with the graves of Mo’ and his family being desecrated by early Wahabis at the end of the 18th Century.

Oniad, of course. Just a [double] typo.

What do people think about Israel Finkelstein’s view on the Torah/Bible, that it was written as an expressly political document in the 8th century BCE (or 10,000years before present) during the reign of King Josiah?

David, as viewers of South Park will know, The Book of Mormon wasn’t exactly dictated to Smith. He found golden plates with all the writing already on them. God was involved in the translation of them.

Moses though, what a dude! Writing about his own death and the stuff that happened afterwards requires a fair old degree of stoicism.