Sometimes the Internet turns me into a spoiled child, drumming my heels on the floor and holding my breathe till I turn blue in the face, and all because it won’t give me what I want. And of course it is all the Internet’s fault. If it hadn’t indulged so many of my whims for so long, I wouldn’t find...

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The Rome Digest is plugging a translation of Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio. Somewhat sensitised by my earlier efforts to dispel the idea that the herb mentuccia is pennyroyal, I looked inside. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the error con...

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Kiva is probably the most succesful thing in existence to allow ordinary folks to lend money to other ordinary folks. I've been a member since early 2008, and I think it's a really good idea, which is not to say that Kiva is a particularly good implementation. In fact, we've had our differences. But I keep "reinvesting". I suspect in part because it is, or was, the only game in town. That and inertia. But maybe the time has come to overcome my inertia.

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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.

“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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