High School and University

1998 - 2002

Upon taking his first steps in high school, Yohai also took his first college course (statistics 'A') at the Open University, hoping to graduate both from school and from the University aproximately at the same time, that is, before his entry into compulsory military service. He studied Economics and Management. Besides the seminar papers he wrote as part of his academic assignements, the University courses inspired Yohai to produce two kinds of writing: first, some lessons bored him terribly. He helped pass the time during this kind of lesson by scribbling BLA BLA (in Hebrew) compositions. Secondly, some teachers got on his nerves when he thought they were not proficient enough to teach, or were not skilled test-writers. Yohai took his revenge by writing a dual meaning letter, supposedly a student's evaluation of the course. Read in its entirety, it gives a favorable view of the course and the teacher; but read only on the odd-numbered lines, it is a scathing condemnation of the course. In 2000, he wrote a dual-meaning evaluation of a statistics course. Yohai loved to amuse himself with word games and wordplay which he wrote. The creative technique of a piece that could be read and understood in two different and opposite ways really appealed to him, and he tried his hand at it in English, too, in a monologue he wrote, based on the play "An Inspector Calls". To appreciate its dual meaning, one should first read it in the usual manner and then read only the odd-numbered lines. At the age of 17 Yohai started taking driving lessons. The excitement he felt about these lessons also inspired some of his funniest stories, a board game, and a computer game. Sometimes he translated jokes or other humorous material from English to Hebrew, just for his own pleasure. That was the case with the song "I'm my own gran'pa" from the movie "The Stupids." To express his resentment for lessons on subjects he didn't like, Yohai would compose a paroday. Thus, for example, he wrote a parody on the computer language Prolog that he hated, and parodies of poems and novels and stories that were part of the school curriculum. Some of these parodies are on the Hebrew site. Naturally, with study for high school and university, Yohai had little time to spend on other things. Nevertheless, his creativity never ceased. He continued, for example, to add to his "self-invented" vocabulary. One new word that became very popular with him in these years was "furara." Yohai, who had never used curse words, used the word "furara" to bypass his self-imposed restriction against foul language when he was overwhelmed with anger or frustration. On one occasion, he made an effort to define "furara" formally in Hebrew, and on another occasion, he interwove "furara" in one of his illustrated brainteasers.