Lowering the Bar, raising the profile

So do most Americans have issues with Israelis? Many, many issues, it appears...and more than ever. The most popular magazine in America, the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, sports Israeli model Bar Rafaeli on its 2009 cover. She's shown adjusting her suit, just as the IDF (whose service she managed to dodge) is strategizing how to tackle suits about some alleged war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. You'll notice that both actions literally let the left down. How low can you go?

In the same week, Bar's portrait is going to be painted larger than life on the side of an aircraft-- the Southwest Airlines jet to Las Vegas, no less--but the 23-year-old blonde has her feet firmly on the ground and says she is most delighted with her exposure on the newsstands. (She's been displayed on the inside pages twice before) Here's to a full-body press! Bar also mused to Time magazine that, had she been at home to vote, she might have cast her ballot for a fellow-blonde, Tzipi Livni, who is also a forward thinker. Kadima, eh.

It'll be some time before all the sums are done and Israel's new ruling coalition is in place. In these transitory times, in her skimpy swimsuit, Bar Rafaeli is raising interest in a different side of Israel.

Russian roulette - ageing breast implants

Heard about how the perky new false breasts of a starlet suddenly imploded when her jet started its descent into LAX ? Or the new insurance required for Californian crematoriums that risk explosions when the silicone implants of the departed hit the flames? It gets worse.

Consider the plight of two Russian immigrants in northern Israel whose breast injections have gone bad a decade after their Ukrainian doctors completed their boob jobs. Apparently, a yellowish goo called Bio-gel was shot straight into their delicate breast tissues, and now has passed its sell-by date. After two women in their 30s showed up at Sieff Hospital complaining of sharp pains in the chest and grotesque swelling, plastic surgeons launched an investigation into the undocumented mystery substance pumped inside their breasts. Now Israeli doctors are urging any Russian woman who had breast enhancement during the 1980s or 1990s to come forward and have them surgically removed.

This is no small order. For the past decade, massive waves of immigrants from the former Soviet republics boosted Israel's non-Arab population by 3% per year, adding over one million new citizens. Dr Eyal Winkler, a plastic surgeon, told Haaretz that, because of a shortage of silicone in Russia, women frequently sought cheaper alternatives. One marginal "natural" treatment was harvesting fat from corpses and injecting it into living breasts. Eeew. And, imagine, this they did voluntarily.
Over the past ten years, Winkler personally has treated five cases of infected breasts which had been plumped up with cadaver-fat. But the commercial Russian Bio-gel is even more difficult to treat, because no one has deciphered its precise compenents. "There is no reason to panic," he said soothingly.

I can't help recalling that old advertising campaign for Jaffa oranges which was popular about the same time these breasts were being 'enhanced'. Beautiful Sabra women handed out Jaffa oranges while wearing t-shirts lettered with a most sensible slogan:

"Small ones are more juicy."