[travel] Boombamela

It's the Israeli burningman.  This country more or less invented psy-trance, so I'm guessing the music would be fantastic.  It would mean spending a lot of extra time in Israel though.

http://www.boombamela.co.il/site/article.php?article=43
http://www.boombamela.co.il/site/gallery.php?c=1

This is offtopic, but I love this technically correct ly translated "Evacuation Plan" from the Q&A:

Where can we evacuate? The site holds in 2 kinds of lavatory's at 5 points (see map): comical lavatory's and "like at home toilets" (at cost of few shekels), reports of unclean points will be taken care of.

[travel] Turkey passport thing makes sense now...

The thing I posted about earlier with the security guy confusing Turkey and Syria sort of makes sense now.

Written sideways on the Turkish Visa is "Seri: A"  which presumably means "Series A" in Turkish.  Maybe, since he already had the passport sideways, he saw the star and crescent and "Seri", and thought that was the English spelling for Syria. 

Still, someone who does security for a living should know what a Turkish visa looks liek.

[travel] The most interesting artist in old Jaffa

Old Jaffa had an artist's quarter that was almost entirely unimpressive.  There was a lot of trite biblical art as well as some guy who had become quite rich and famous selling shiny sculptures of limited aesthetic value.  I'm guessing the latter guy simply had a good marketing team. 

however, there was one lovely artist who crocheted bizarre organic forms out of various types of yarn.  She wouldn't let me photograph her amazing creations, didn't have a website, and didn't even know how to use a computer.  However, I did find some of her work on the web, probably from people who bought some and are reselling it:

You creative knitting/crocheting crafty folk (you know who you are...) would enjoy it.