Mer-MAN, pa. Mer-MAN.

Well, it's technically a mermaid that some Israelis believe they have seen doing a few tricks and then vanishing into the horizon. Get some footage of it and you could be a million bucks richer, according to Israeli officials.

An alleged mermaid, said to resemble a cross between a fish and a young girl, only appears at sunset. It performs a few tricks for onlookers before disappearing for the night.

One of the first people to see the mermaid, Shlomo Cohen, said, "I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail."

Pretty sure Israel is just going for the Nessie strategy and using the reward to bolster tourism, but either way Sam Brownback is legitimately pissed.

This week in unneccessary cultural chaos

Behold! The Arab-Israeli conflict. An anarchic conundrum of irrational people doing irrational things, with reasonable folks hovering around in the background trying to figure out why we can't go a day in Haifa or Gaza without some crazy bastard holding up a burning effigy, a young kid throwing rocks at something stoic to rocks (like tanks) or the Israeli government chucking a rocket at someone. For two decades now, peace agreements have been rescinded, people have been blown from here to the Suez Canal, and the underlying theme of it all is that it is the other guy's fault.

We could go through all of the crazy shit that has gone down and why it has been insane, but that would require us to work take too long. Go read a book or something; Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem actually would be a good start.

But this week, it's Israel's turn to be the assholes.

Israel's ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has ordered embassies abroad to use a photo of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric to counter international criticism over a Jerusalem settlement project, a senior Israeli official said on Wednesday.

The decision to circulate a 1941 photo featuring the Nazi dictator sitting with the then grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini is aimed at easing pressure on Israel over a construction project on land in annexed east Jerusalem once owned by the cleric, the official told AFP.

Thanks, Minister Lieberman. Real fucking cool. Play the Holocaust card as it relates to the people of Palestine, who had no control over Amin al-Husseini's courting of Hitler. It's not their fault the British were completely screwing Palestinians over and that al-Husseini sought an ally, but it is your fault that Palestinians hate you. You're really making great strides toward peace, and are really representing the maturity of your party well. Dick.