Glory

[tag]Tangled Bank[/tag] 52 is up over at The Inoculated Mind, and it is a labour of love. Karl J. Mogel, the man with a hypodermic in his brain, has painstakingly crafted a Star Wars Tangled Bank, complete with awesome sound track. (Thank God he didn’t make the text scroll.) As he says, “It helps if [...]

7:43 am. I am standing at the bar, doing a cappuccino and cornetto. In walks the milk delivery man. Short, wiry, sparse sandy hair and blue eyes. Not very Italian, if you get my drift. He’s lugging two crates full of milk. His truck is parked outside. Double parked, obviously. He drops the crates, heads [...]

To the Popes’ Hot Baths, near Viterbo, on a perfect day for soaking; overcast, drizzly, cold wind. There was a goodly lot of steam rising from the surface, but not enough to obscure the delights of carefully plucked male eyebrows and a fair amount of ink. While lazing about in the water, moving hither and [...]

One of the best parts of traveling for work is that one sometimes gets out and meets the people for whom one is ultimately working. One of the worst is that usually there is no direct communication. Sometimes, with an associate who is reasonably out-going and self-assured, the nuisance of having an intermediary ask questions [...]

Best to be frank. In two months time I will have lived in Rome for five years. Until today, I had not yet been to the Sistine Chapel. I’m glad that’s off my chest. There are all sorts of reasons. There always are. None of them holds up. I’ll go another time. Yes, but when? [...]

The Mall really is the jewel in Washington DC’s crown. Not just because there are so many museums there. And not just because they are free. But being both dense and free, there’s no pressure to exhaust oneself doing an entire building. One can flit in and out, take in the Italian miniatures in the [...]

To the countryside once again, for another celebratory meal. And yes, this time, there were the fabled ucellini — little birds — that many Italians wax lyrical about. A clockwork contraption gently rotated two spits in front of a bed of banked oak embers, each spit loaded with pieces of bread, squares of yellow pepper, [...]

Cheap flights make playboys of us all. To Geneva (for less than 100 euros return, for two) to meet up with an old friend who foolishly suggested a few weeks ago that we go see Bob Dylan play Zurich. Of course I soon discovered that Bob would be playing Bologna on Thursday and Milan on [...]

A fine evening, as a Philistine among the anointed. My first exposure to the term “appropriation art” though not, I subsequently discovered, to appropriation art itself. Some of it I think I understand, the visual equivalent of musical sampling. Some I definitely don’t, the artistic equivalent of straightforward theft*. As ever, the web leaves me [...]