I keep noticing that when you hear an Arab say it, they say back into the sea. When you hear Israeli youths, they spout the line they've been fed repeatedly - the Arabs want to drive us into the sea. Note the omission of the word back. So when an Arab says it - the underlying message is they want to send them back where they came from. Back on the boats - back to wherever they were living before the invasion of '47. By ignoring that one word, the message is one of total annihilation.

But the Jews had no place to go back to. Their homes and property in Europe were siezed and/or destroyed. They were freed from the camps only to walk the streets homeless with the millions of others trying to find their way back someplace. Usually it was gone.

Anyway the other big thing I got out of the '48 almanac was about the UN. At this time it was all still brand new, and the almanac contains the whole charter and org chart. We created this thing so there would be no more war. They were very optimistic - gushing about how we could move beyond these petty state issues by resolving them on regional or global levels. They really thought at the time that they could fix any problem by getting the best and brightest to propose solutions to the UN, which would adopt them and that would become global policy. Little states would have to get in line because this is how the world works now. In that same year they were grappling with conflicts in Korea, Palestine, and India/Pakistan. And they fixed them. Poof. Problems gone. You may shake your head in disbelief but this is what happened and it pretty much created all these simmering conflicts. At the same time they were putting back together some 40-50 countries that had been devastated by the previous war. They did pretty well in those cases.

I've tried my darndest, but I'm afraid violin isn't my instrument. It just isn't friendly to lefties. I can scratch out a scale but not muh more. And I have to hold it totally, completely wrong to do that. The instrument wasn't meant to be played in such a contorted positon. Cello I can manage. Incidentally a couple came in today. Remember that with a cello it's only a matter of time before the neck gets broken off - and I bought these for student rentals. So I bought the super-deluxe cases to protect them. What I hadn't counted on was that the package service would drop the box not once but twice. At perpendicular angles each time. I watched and cringed knowing what was inside. Snapped the neck right off - inside the deluxe case. On the minus side this is now the third package service that the cello manufacturer has switched to and they state on the invoice that they won't let FedEx on their property. Probably because they dropped the cellos. The only person you can trust transporting a cello is a cello player; and preferably a lucky cello player. A lady actually asked me today (after this incident) if I would ship a cello to her in New York. She's just visiting. Would have loved to make the sale, but I couldn't put her through seeing a fine German cello on her doorstep with a broken neck. Nope. If you buy a cello from me you carry it away. And I hope you're a lucky cello player.

The fact that a handful of original Stradivarius cellos exists in the world amazes me. Course if you can buy a Strad cello it's a foregone conclusion that you're lucky...