Dear Mrs My Dog Is Not Aggressive,

That's what you said the first time she attacked my dog.

This is the end result of the second time.

I hope you're satisfied.

Jeremy

p.s. Dr Andrea Lanza and his crew more than make up for your selfishishness.

Podcasts are probably the single best thing about the internet. Sure it is handy to be able to search for things, but after a while I get so used to information on demand that I get angry when I can’t find it, or it isn’t there, or — Gasp! — what is there is wrong. But podcasts! Radio on Demand. And...

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“I remember my Yorkshire grandmother, when as a small child I asked her if she used herbs, went very tight-lipped and said well there was pennyroyal … She had had a hard life, a brutal husband and too many mouths to feed.”

Pennyroyal is Mentha pulegium, a mint whose Latin name indicates that it was once used to deter fleas and other insect pests. For Gillian Riley’s grandmother, and women since at least the time of Aristophanes, it was probably more useful as an abortifacient. Which was why I saw red when a respected food blogger in Rome referred parenthetically to “mentuccia (pennyroyal)”. But I need to backtrack.

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I'm not sure how long I've been waiting to see Beasts of the Southern Wild. There was a great article some time last year that made me write down the title and scour my usual haunts from time to time, each time coming up empty. So when a friend casually mentioned that she'd seen it here in Rome, a...

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Confetti, in Italian, are the sugared almonds given to guests, traditionally at a wedding, when the sugar coating is white, and now extended to pink or blue at a baptism and red at a university graduation. "A quando i confetti" is apparently a cute way of asking when one is going to get married....

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