In Israel the Dead Live On With a New Name: "Aerial Sharon"

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Either the AP or Fox News is responsible for giving former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon a new first name, "Aerial" instead of "Ariel." Now I suppose this mistake is understandable since Sharon, who suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage in January 2006 and has been in a coma ever since, has long passed into the realm of legend along with other such deceased leaders as Moishe Dayan, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres (oops, my mistake...he's still alive, too !).

For Sharon to be described as "alive" is somewhat like keeping Lenin's reconstructed remains on a heart-lung machine and saying that he is in "stable" condition.

With some surprise I discovered today that Sharon is also now in "stable" condition "after his overall condition and heart function deteriorated" in the last several days (emphasis mine).

My uneducated guess is that, should his health decline any further he will be dead, buried and declared to be in "critical" condition for the next several months.

According to the AP article,

Experts have speculated that because of the severity of his stroke, Sharon, prime minister from 2001 to 2006, is unlikely to recover.

With all due respect to the family of Aerial Sharon and the citizens of the nation of Israel, I do not believe that these "experts" are rocket scientists.