Ha'aretz is solidly in Left field and is outright anti-religious.

You first said that the JPost was "far, far right." I consider Avigdor Lieberman to be moderately right. His party is almost as compromising as Shas. Try Ya'akov Katz (Ketzaleh) for "far" (i.e. true) right. Baruch Marzel for "far, far" right. Not that there's anything wrong with being right...

The Jerusalem Post hosts a range of views, but overall, it is a secular, center-left mainstream media organization, complete with a Zodiac/astrology page. Israel's "far right" never reads JPost, except with dreading curiosity.

As for "Greater Israel," I did manage to find a JPost column from April entitled Keep Dreaming: The case for a greater Israel. Maybe this is what you're thinking of. But did you read the column? About midway, it reads, "The greater Israel [19th century Zionist visionary Theodor] Herzl envisioned had nothing to do with borders; it had everything to do with morals, ideals and behavior." Moreover, the bottom of the column notes that it was written by a representative of Conservative Judaism, which is a branch of Judaism that tends to be politically center-left. (The word "Conservative" here has nothing to do with politics.)

In their view, should Stuxnet not be handily around to embellish on, they would have to fall back on to their old standby canard of "God's finger" slowing the Iranian centrifuges directly to protect his Jewish children

Trusting in God's protection, in fact, has been a sturdy standby for the State of Israel. One could begin a study of this topic with Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War, a modern miracle by all accounts.

Nitpick: The phrase "finger of God" usually has to with one of the following subjects: astronomy (Hubble telescope picture), God's creation of the universe, or God's etching of the Ten Commandments. I'm pretty sure it's not a common phrase in JPost articles.

I wouldn't say "nicely." His rant has a load of f-bombs and other blatantly offensive language. He has a good point, but his manner of delivery makes it unlistenable. (Note to comedians: Cussing isn't funny. Or professional. You come off as a trashy low-life, demeaning both yourself and your audience.)

The point is that Aziz the "Christian" was helping to advance very anti-Christian goals (pro-Islamic or not), as is the case with the Ground Zero Mosque.

Very clever! A basketball court is a great idea to lure blacks into the "cultural center" to convert them to Islam.

And the board of directors for this cultural center also includes a number of Christians!

So what? Saddam Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister was a "Christian." There are countless examples of nominal adherents (often leaders) exploiting their religious affiliation (whether by pedigree or congregational membership) to battle the interests, doctrines, and followers of their supposed faith.

To properly assert one's "geek"ness and intellectual understanding of the subject matter, you must get the definitions right!

"sous vide - cooking food in a temperature-controlled water bath"

Sous-vide is NOT cooking in a water bath but rather cooking in a vacuum enclosed containter often immersed in a water bath.

A bain marie on the other hand, is specifically a method of cooking in a water bath. Often for the preparation of whole poached fish or other foods. :| Far too much time spent watching Alton....

I made a mistake. In the last paragraph, I meant to say "Excel" instead of "Word" in some places. The advice goes for either app. Also, I just noticed that Microsoft is calling Office plugins "Add-Ins" in Office 2007. I don't know when that change happened or if it's always been that way.

I've had that problem in Word but not in Excel. I just keep tinkering with it, achieving limited success. I get to the point where I don't care anymore whether Word "understands" that the text is supposed to be going RTL. Sometimes I cheat and use a tool to reverse the letters. (However, of course, this is a terrible solution if it's a document that's going to be edited with any frequency.) From what I understand, there is an invisible character that denotes when Word should begin to read text as RTL. Maybe there is a Word plugin to make this character appear.

What do they do in Israel??

For Hebrew word processing, one could try DavkaWriter or Dagesh Pro. I'm not aware of a Hebrew-centric spreadsheet program.

I might suggest trying a Hebrew version of Excel, but I can't say from experience (I haven't tried it) that it actually handles bi-directional-text documents better. I don't know if anything under the hood is really different or if it's just textual localization in the chrome and different default settings. Seeing as Microsoft has a large corporate presence in Israel, you'd think they would get RTL and BiDi issues smoothed out very well in their flagship products.

Another thought just hit me: I wonder if using a Hebrew version/language-pack of the Windows OS would make it work better. This close-reopen issue reminds me of a problem I had with either WordPress or Joomla -- I can't remember which. When you saved a document, it would attempt to "clean up" the markup, which ruined my work the first I encountered this default behavior. I wonder if Word is trying to "clean up" the document (i.e. reverse the text direction) based on the OS's LTR/Anglo-centric settings. In a similar vein, the person you're helping could try setting Word's spell-check feature to use Hebrew. Then, maybe it wouldn't "clean up" as for an Anglo user, if that is indeed the nature of the problem. You wouldn't think that such a setting would be a factor, but we are talking about usability bugs here. And Microsoft.

I decided not to give a hyper-literalistic reading to the text of the above post. Let's try a word.

"Christian" - In this context, it doesn't make sense that the normal definition of "Christian" could apply. What the author really means to tell us that he is a theist who may evolve into a Christian in ~4.5 billion years.

You should read up on the background of that phrase and the profound influence that John Locke's writings* had upon the Founding Fathers.

* Link: The Second Treatise of Civil Government, CHAP. V. "Of Property.," 1690.