In the morning helped D prepare for her Day of Mindfulness at the Spiritual Center. In the daytime, I was at home. My son and his daughter brought the “family cleaner” to clean up the rooms they had been living in before moving into their new house. The mother of M said originally told me that he was from New Guinea, but it turned out he was from Konakri Guinea in West Africa. He has been spending time in Israel on-and-off for years, since 1988, and is now aged 56. He belongs to the Fulani tribe – which is huge – they are spread across more than 20 countries, all across to the Red Sea. Most are Muslim. He says that in Guinea, there are no inter-communal problems, unlike, say in Nigeria. But Guinea has a history of military coups and is currently again run by the military. He is planning to return again soon, as he has been away for awhile. He has one grand daughter, whose picture graces the wallpaper of his phone. They have a house in the city and another, a few hundred kilometers away in a village. He says that he enjoys the village the most; it’s very green there and the family are farmers. We talked a little about music as I like a few musicians from neighbouring Mali – Kandia Kouyaté, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, and he likes these too so I played him some of the music while he worked. He says that also in Guinea they have great musicians and told me a couple of the names to check out. Meanwhile he did a really good job of cleaning. I don’t know if he has a profession besides cleaning, but he is quite a smart guy.
I too have been doing a lot of cleaning lately, at the office, after the arson attack there, so it’s not just dirt, but nasty black soot. Zakariya and Mahmud have meanwhile painted so there is no lingering smell from the fire. It’s been a good opportunity to get rid of a whole lot of material that has accumulated over the years, and I’ve been putting everything else back in order. After tidying up I will check and see if the computers still work and we will also bring in someone to clean windows, doors and everything that wasn’t painted.
In the afternoon I had to take Yael home, as she had overnighted with us since Friday, and fetch the grandchildren. It’s been a while since I was in Jerusalem, and so got a bit mixed up with the way – OsmAnd wasn’t very helpful; it couldn’t find the street, only the neighborhood, and then it wanted to send me off in a completely opposite direction, or, at least a direction that was counter-intuitive, so I ignored it.
In the evening we had a birthday party for one of the grandchildren and D. My daughter gave her a gift of earrings, the stone of which comes from meteorite fragments from the Campo del Cielo site in Argentina. I read about this: it seems that it’s one of the world’s most important meteorite sites, from a fall that happened 4,000 – 5,000 years ago. The meteorites are the heaviest ever found, being composed mostly of iron. The age of the material is about 4,5 billion years, going back to the formation of the solar system.
Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da)
I saw this fine movie the other day, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. We have seen one other film by him, The Wild Pear Tree, but I think that the one I just saw was a more interesting one. Most of the film takes place on a night trip through the Turkish countryside by a team including a policeman, a prosecutor, a doctor and two suspects in a murder to try to discover the site of the body. The real material of the film is the back stories of the main figures. Their stories are not presented visually but emerge in the conversation. There are some surprises along the way, and the film leaves a strong impression.
Links
Forget state surveillance. Our tracking devices are now doing the same job | John Naughton | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/19/forget-state-surveillance-our-tracking-devices-are-now-doing-the-same-job>
On a less mundane level, a German activist, Lilith Wittmann, had a suspicion that a particular mundane government agency was a front for a spy operation, a hunch that was stoutly denied by all concerned. Reasoning that one way of checking might be to see where post addressed to the agency actually wound up, she sent a parcel with an AirTag in it to the agency and watched through Apple’s Find My system as it was delivered via the Berlin sorting centre to a sorting office in Cologne-Ehrenfeld and then appeared at the federal domestic intelligence agency in Cologne.
‘People want to reclaim something pure’: the rise of the urban honesty stall’