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Make sure you check out the extended version for interviews with the cast and crew of the 2010 North American tour.

It Gets Better by Emily S. Grosland – Lyrics

Every Who down in ‘Whoville’ liked Christmas a lot,
But the Who that didn’t fit in did not.
He hated the Who girls who loved the boys.
For him all their giggles and flirts were just noise!

What was sad, no sadder, no saddest of all,
Was when this Who’s smile started to fall.
He hated himself for his feelings and thoughts.
He yelled, I’d rather have antlers, pimplers, or spots.

No matter what this Who tried he couldn’t fit in.
And one day he took a Who’s fist to the chin!
The Who-bully called him a terrible name.
And other Who-boys repeated the same.

What hurt him the most was the holiday season.
But, he really did have a very good reason.
Under the mistletoe others kissed by the fire.
But, when he kissed the girls he felt like a liar.

He wanted to stop it, to end the whole thing.
But then the Phone-Ringler started to ring.
And who did he hear with his little Who ears?
It was he, he himself, in twenty-five years!

And his older self said to his younger lost Who.
Don’t end it I beg, we have so much to do.
Soon you will leave and move far far away,
And your world will grow three sizes that day.

You’re going to lose a few Who-friends, it’s true.
And parts of the journey will be scary, and new.
But you’re going to have great friends, family, and LIFE.
And you will take a man instead of a wife.

I know now that seems crazy and terribly scary.
But someday the world won’t care who you marry.
Don’t miss out on that change, please be a part of it!
Hang in there, fight through, and I promise you’ll love it!

Many will surprise you and love you for you.
And someday, I promise, even you’ll love you too.
And you’ll sit by the fire in your new Christmas sweater,
And think to yourself: Wow… It got so much better.

In various workplaces around Israel, including mine, one may find the following poster depicting a woman demonstrating the safe way to manually lift items. These kind of workplace safety posters, issued by Israel’s Institute for Occupational Safety and Hygiene, can be found in most Israeli production plants and warehouses, and are supposed to eliminate work-related injuries.

Now let’s properly examine this image and try to determine whether it is sexist:
A young blond woman, wearing a pale blue sleeveless summer dress and flat white shoes, bends down in order to lift a rather large yellow box. The model’s attire seems totally out of place; Not only does it look unprofessional, it doesn’t seem to comply with safety regulations which require clothes that cover most of the body and steel-capped boots to protect the feet. Moreover, choosing a woman as the exemplary worker seems odd, as the vast majority of factory workers who lift heavy boxes are men. To top it all, the phrase ‘Proper Lifting’ (Hebrew: Harama Nehona) appears in the upper-right corner of the poster. In Hebrew, the word ‘lifting’ may be used as slang to describe sexual intercourse.

All and all, I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to assume that in all the production floors in which these posters hang for oh so many years, not once had a similarly dressed woman tried to lift such an object; And so, the only logical conclusion I can come up with for using this model in such a poster is good ol’ fashioned ‘sex sells’ chauvinism which claims that women sell cars and women sell men’s perfume, so women can ‘sell’ safety.

The good news?
In preparing this blog post, I tried to order this poster from the Israeli Institute for Occupational Safety, only to find out that while it does appear in the online catalog, it is no longer in stock and there are no plans to print additional posters.
I guess we can call that progress; Tiny, minuscule progress towards gender equality.

2010 was my year of win, including landing a job in the best company in the world (Yes, that’s my excuse for blogging less frequently).

Not sure why, but many Israelis have an aversion to the English language; “If it’s in English – I won’t read it” they tell me (in Hebrew). Myself? Although it is not my native language, I use English around the web to allow the entire world to understand what I am saying. And so I had to devise a plan, a hack if you will, to post Facebook status updates in English for the benefit of my multiculti friends, while not bothering my Israeli friends too much.

Luckily, Facebook allows you to put your friends into lists, and allows each friend to belong to more than one list. And so, in addition to my regular lists (‘family’, ‘workplace’ etc), I created a ‘HEBREW‘ list and an ‘ENGLISH’ list and attributed a language to a friend; I even put some of my more gifted friends under both languages.

After that, posting something in English without my Hebrew-only friends being bothered is as easy as setting the privacy of the status update to ‘ENGLISH’. Sometimes, when I blog in English and post a Hebrew translation on another blog, I publish a status update in English with a link to the English post – and an additional status update, with its custom privacy set to ‘HEBREW; except: ENGLISH‘. Thus, making sure each of my friends only sees one status update, in the language he or she prefers.