Romans in general don’t seem to be big on charity shops, or second hand. Of course, The Church is the charity, and there are big yellow bins on the streets that harvest used clothing for redistribution. For non-clothes, however, there’s not much in the way of options to recycle. There is, however, an entirely wonderful and very third-world solution. You put your stuff by (not in) the dumpster and someone (often, but not always, raggle-taggle gypsies-o) takes it away. An entirely different approach to the canonically Teutonic “leave your stuff out on the third Tuesday in the month and if nobody takes it away by noon then we, the authorities, will remove it and deal with appropriately”. Like that approach, however, it works.

We’re about to move, and there are non-clothes that we just don’t have space for, or want. Nor did any of the members of Freecycle Roma. So we enlisted the help of a well-muscled young man and schlepped them down to the dumpster. While we were doing that a woman, dressed all in white, making me think, after the event, that perhaps she was a dental hygienist, parked her car in the driveway that we were using to cross the road easily. No problem, there were other gaps we could use. On the way back from carrying the last load to the dumpster, she called me over.

“May I say something,” she said, in very good English. “What you’re doing is illegal, leaving things by the side of the road.”

I laughed, good-naturedly, I hope, and from then on cannot recall the conversation even nearly verbatim. It went roughly like this:

“You’re joking, aren’t you? It may be strictly illegal, but it is also something that happens every day every where.”

“In your country, and I have lived in your country, you wouldn’t do this.”

“No, because in my country I could call a number and the community would come and collect my things. There is no number to call here.”

Things got a little shrill then, as she shouted at me from the safety of her car, and I did my best to maintain my version of a good-natured grin and equable tone, almost guaranteed to add fuel to her fire. Eventually, I simply gave up and left her fulminating, which the well-muscled young man had wisely done at the outset.

What I should have said, it occurred to me moments afterwards, was not “Why don’t you just mind your own business, you dental hygienist parked illegally in a driveway,” but simply:

“When in Rome …”

As part of my continuing effort to make myself, rather than advertisers who covet my eyeballs and purchasing power, the customer, I took out a premium subscription to Newsblur. It’s an RSS reader that claims to offer “Visual feed reading with intelligence” and I want it to replace Google Reader. Not that there’s anything wrong with GReader, apart from the fact that it is from the Don’t Be Evil boys themselves. I just like the idea of paying for service, which then gives me a full-on right to demand more of it. That’s why I use Pinboard and Instapaper rather than alternatives.

Observations so far. Import is very smooth indeed. Every last one of my 401 feeds came over from GReader, including many that were either moribund or completely dead, and lots that were no longer of any interest. Were they ever? Alas, in bringing over all those feeds, not all were up to date. It took a while to go through them all, but it was well worth sorting things out. I dumped 70 sources and moved 77 to a folder called Dormant. One of the nice things about any RSS reader is that the cost to me of monitoring a site that updates very infrequently is essentially zero. So if anything dormant springs back to life, I’ll know. What would be truly awesome, in another life, would be able to scan all feeds and place anything that hasn’t updated in, say, 6 months into the Dormant folder, and by the same token promote any dormant feeds. The Newsblur API makes this look easy, but not to me.

Quite a few feeds seem to be broken, at least as far as Newsblur is concerned; I don’t recall GReader ever mentioning it. And slowly, slowly, I’ll either fix them or delete them.

The layout is confusing, for now, but only because I have been elsewhere for so long. I’m sure I’ll get used to it pretty quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are an improvement on GReader. Of course, sharing to G+ isn’t obvious, but then, does it need to be, given that G+ isn’t exactly floating my boat either at the moment. And I might have to make more of an effort to get to grips with this training thing, which seems to underly that claim about “intelligence”.

So far, then, so happy. And this is only day 2.

In my yoof, I do believe I was the only person I knew who knew and liked both Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman. Not merely liked, but was extremely fond of. So I read this young man’s take on what he (or a sub) called L.A. Weirdos with great pleasure, and not a little envy at his perspicaciousness. As in

Most of Newman’s songs are written from the perspective of what some might call an “unreliable narrator,” or, in less delicate terms, an “asshole.” Good Old Boys is full of assholes big and small. They’re racists and provincial creeps. They have big dogs in their yard, and they’re happy to sic them on you. And Newman’s grace as a writer is that he puts you in a position to care about these jerks.

But while I was nodding happily in agreement, one thing bothered me. If Nilsson and Newman are so inextricably linked in this bloke’s mind — ” (If you’re looking for a nice point of connection, the first song on Song Cycle, “Vine Street”, was written by Newman and later covered by Nilsson.)” — how come I never really got round to Van Dyke Parks then? And is it too late now?

Ever a sucker for new productivity porn that will make me effective, successful and attractive to small animals, I’m kicking the tyres of The Pomodoro Technique. In a nutshell: work at something for 25 minutes, resisting all distractions; take a 3-5 minute break; repeat. Every four sessions, take a long break.

This all happened because I read an interview with Brett Terpstra, one of the most helpful and life-enhancing Apple geeks in the entire universe. His changes to Notational Velocity had already changed my life for the better, so when he mentioned Pomodoro (which I think I may have heard about before) I was primed to try it.

I won a kitchen timer a couple of years ago at the works tombola, and up till now I’ve used it only to rouse me from my slumbers workflow to ensure I don’t miss the train. The Pomodoro Technique suggested a better use for it.

Yesterday was our first full day together, me and my trusty timer, and I must say, I was impressed with the amount I managed to get done. There’s something about knowing I can goof off in 24 minutes at the most that enables me to hold off goofing off. Alas, the timer wasn’t quite up to it. The penultimate pomodoro of the day seemed to drag … and then I realized that the timer wasn’t timing anything. So last night’s first order of business was to buy a new timer, and so far today she has done sterling service. Unflappable.

The abundant wisteria in the neighbourhood looks much better to the eye than to the camera. No matter.

I had hoped to be able to solve a mystery for this post; why do Italians call wisteria glicine? To me, the Greek root for glycine is associated with sweetness, although the plant that springs to mind is Glycine max, the not-noticeably sweet soybean. Wikipedia enlightened me. Linnaeus used it in 1737, in reference to the sweet, pear-shaped tubers of what he called Glycine apios. That turns out to be my old friend Apios americana, sometimes known as Indian Potato, which my other old friend Rhizowen wants us all to call Hopniss.

Good to know.

English speakers call the flower wisteria because Thomas Nuttall named it for the Philadelphia physician Caspar Wistar. And Wisteria was previously classified as Glycine.

Mind you, I’m no closer to knowing why Italians call wisteria glicine. Maybe they’re still using the old form; that would be understandable. It can’t be something as simple as the sweet smell, can it?