Sarah Margalit in the Land - Day Two

Time. The eternal question. Why are there 24 hours in a day? Why does the earth spin counter clockwise (viewed from Polaris)? Why does the coriolis effect cause my toilet to act differently than a commode in Christchurch, New Zealand?

More to the point, why am I blogging about this on August 11th? Because on the thirty-third minute of this day (Eastern US time), our phone rang again at approximately 5:33am GMT/Zulu, with another call from the banks of the Mediterranean. Seems that Sarah is settling in nicely to her new digs in Ashdod. But she still is a little jet-lagged and was confused about where the sun is in the sky, back at the other end of the Atlantic Ocean.

It's not a big problem. We will get the hang of this seven hour difference. I just wonder how on earth the astronauts/cosmonauts/sinonauts cope with this. Except that they aren't on earth. And now for a really big problem...Sarah says that her computer power adapters (taken over, supposedly would work in Israel) don't fit the house wall plugs. There goes the cell phone, the I-pod, the laptop and the hair dryer - the true essentials of daily life.

I now understand that Israel has two styles of electric plug, hangovers from the English and French quest for regional hegemony. (The Ottomans subsisted without electricity?) Why cannot human beings settle on one electrical power standard, one voltage, one frequency and one wall plug? For an idea of this electric Tower of Babel, take a look at the global map of electrical plugs. What a pretty picture. Must have used up an entire box of Crayons to make it.


And here is a picture of the grounded Type H plug used in Israel and apparently nowhere else. The rest of Israel uses a more common C type plug, found all over Europe, OK well, all over the French speaking areas. The English have a logic all to their own. And us Americans, let's just say that old Tom Edison is laughing at how much money has been made over the years with our own version of the English flat blade socket...you know, the one with two flat prongs modified with a third circular one too. That's called compromise.

This all Hertz so much that I will have to go and meditate, repeating Ohm over and over. The United Nations should take up this reVolting subject and do something to Rectify it.