Hamodia Pulls a Reuters

As seen here, it looks like the Hamodia was trying to pull a Reuters:

The image appeared in the June 5th  Hebrew edition.

Photo from Amona struggle wins Pulitzer

The following AP picture won the Pulitzer prize in breaking news photography (by an Israeli photographer):

Amazing Astronomy Picture

Here’s a picture of Saturn right when the sun is directly behind it.  Even cooler, if you look at the high-res picture, you can see Earth on the left side, just inside the second to outermost ring.

Beautiful Montage from Avraham Rosenblum

Baltimore’s very own Avraham Rosenblum, of Diaspora Yeshiva Band, has put together a montage of pictures of recent events from Israel and beyond set to the tune of Kedem, which is the title song of his latest CD.

Check it out:

My First Sephardi Minyan

I don’t know how this has not happened to me, but until Monday, I had never been to an ultra-Sephardi minyan. There is an Iranian guy who lives in the building next to me who unfortunately just lost his mother (in Iran, so he couldn’t even go to the levaya) and was therefore sitting shiva. My upstairs neighbor is in school with one of the Iranian’s neighbors and asked for guys to come for minyan. So on Monday morning, I showed up (was one of 11 guys), and got to experience my first Sephardi minyan.

While I have seen their sifrei torah before, it was always from afar. Now that I was able to see it up close, I can see just how beautiful and ornate a sefer torah can be. There were lots of things I wasn’t used to, like Birchas Kohanim during chazaras hashas, but it wasn’t too hard to follow along. Sephardim also seem to say a lot of extra stuff at the end of davening, so I managed to finish a good 5 minutes before someone else before I realized that they were saying other things.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience, although going to daven at a shiva minyan isn’t the most optimal reason to experience this.

Black and White

This picture is making its way around the internet:

Interesting Google Maps Find Revisited

A while back, I had shown a picture of what was a government-owned Navy Seals building that was built in the shape of a Nazi Swastika.  But I hadn’t looked at the big picture, and I mean that literally.  I’m going to copy the original picture for reference.  Look’s like a swastika, right?  And on a government building!  For shame!

But now, let’s expand the satellite view.  You’ll see two other odd-shaped buildings just below and to the left of the Swastika building.  It took me a second to figure this out, but supposedly, these are two bomber’s on their way to bomb the Nazi’s!  They’re airplanes inside brackets, as highlighted below:

So maybe the Navy isn’t so bad afterall.  Either way, I found this interesting.

Weird Critter

I had to move some stuff on my porch because of the rain when I found this cute little critter. Anyone know what it is? I would say caterpillar, but I’ve never seen one so fuzzy. And the red lines that distinguished the parts that make it bend were cool.

Click the thumbnails to enlarge. If you click the last thumbnail, it’ll load up the original, unedited picture. I think that that picture is a piece of art. Just looking at all the droplets on the leaves is beautiful.