|
|
|
to links pages [1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
/
phone texts to +36 -- --- ----
@
/
links /
languages? /
pins
/
archive /
book
May 30th;
Saturday. As if by magic, when I get to the gym, the same two overweight Gypsy lads are in the changing room as yesterday. They have the same banter with each other, composed of saying A: "Just?" B: "Just." A: "Just?" B: "Just!" to each other over and over again, as if they went nowhere in the last 22 or 23 hours and were in the changing room overnight. Of course this can't be true, since today I caught them starting, whereas yesterday they were getting dressed after training ready to leave, but it's still like they're doing scientific research in how to be annoying. My latest piece for the Salisbury Review about how Hong Kong could be defended now online: not my original title.
May 29th;
Friday. Andras takes me out meet a group of friends & former programming colleagues at one of the outdoor night bars. I tell them how important it is to uninstal and reinstal Alpaca 3.2 if anything goes wrong. Two have come with their 3-month-old baby daughter snoozing quietly in a pram. The child is adorably christened Raspberry (Malna), which is apparently a genuine girl's name in Hungarian. Never heard it before. In case this turns out to be just too squee for the growing tot, she is equipped with a back-up name, Laura. Salisbury Review writer suggests white male artists are being abolished.
May 28th;
Thursday. Via Adrian, old recipe for Yorkshire Pudding, to refer to.
May 27th;
Wednesday. Congress asks Pentagon: did it weaponise ticks?
May 26th;
Tuesday. Have scientists found evidence of a parallel universe where time runs backward? Oh no, they didn't. And more of they didn't.
May 25th;
Monday. If there is any truth to this story, it's the biggest political scandal in the US since their Civil War.
May 24th;
Sunday. Get to the end of a paperback novel borrowed from Iris, 'The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man' by Jonas Jonasson, translated into English from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Iris warned me that the first book (this is the second book to star irrepressible centenarian Allan Karlsson, and it was published in 2018, nine years after the first) was better and this second follow-up was not so good, but I was pulled in by the first few pages. The style is a neat trick, a sort of shaggy-dog novel, where the author faux-naively embraces the childlike approach of "this happened and then this happened and meanwhile that other thing was happening, and then this other thing happened too." Done with coy deadpan charm, this was obviously the main gimmick in the first novel, and in this one it starts to wear thin after a few chapters. Once confident his readers are with him, Jonasson's restraint slips, and he begins to involve famous characters and forces like the North Korean leader, the "far right" AfD in Germany, leaders like Putin, Trump, Merkel, he and his readers smugly assured that we all know what they're really like, how they speak in private, etc. Brexit is Britain "turning its back on Europe" and (of course) only happened because it was orchestrated by agents of Putin. Trump is (of course) a short-tempered idiot - you get the idea. This is really going to age very fast, even among the people who still hold this worldview. Merkel (despite 2015) is viewed as a force of stability and common sense in the book, nationalists are all dangerous bastards etc. The pseudo-liberal globalist outlook is a bit like the lip service the greasy class creep pays to the cool kids, where he thinks he'll be part of their clique if he uses their language and apes their style. The self-congratulation is almost tangible as Jonasson cycles through these reassuring tropes that Trump's election, Britain's decision to leave the EU, the rise of the in fact rather moderate AfD, and so on of course really only happened because of a mixture of Russian-funded contradictory web bots and mentally retarded Nazis. That and the quiet but audible humble-brag humour about boring bourgeois little Sweden still being a notable player in world events.
May 23rd;
Saturday. Latest music homework from Andras the Benedictine coder monk for next time we try to put something together with keyboards and bass guitar:
background culture Finnish youth /
more background culture McAfee Speaks /
Bjork explains the background of
her television set / some 1980s new wave pop
magyarul / some beautifully coloured
fantasy camp.
May 22nd;
Friday. An active day, and around 3am one of Andras' younger brothers (Bela the drummer) turns up with his producer friend Tzapa: both very much under the influence of various jolly stimulants. Switching into English at one point Bela amiably tells me "Go home nigger, no blow jobs for you here!" He seems quite focused on this topic because when I offer him commission if he can get a book deal for me, he immediately warns me he's not doing any blow jobs to secure the deal. We all chat (after a fashion) until around 4 when the two leave. Turns out that
that clip was the work of Tzapa.
May 21st;
Thursday. More tunes from Knower:
It Goes On /
That's Where You Are /
Lady Gaga /
Die Right Now.
May 20th;
Wednesday. How Taiwan warned the world about the boring virus, and nobody listened. Not least because the World Health Organisation's been so busy sucking the Peking Dick.
May 19th;
Tuesday. A modest attack on British journalism today.
May 18th;
Monday. Finish a book borrowed from Andras, 'The Righteous Mind', in which American sociologist Jonathan Haidt explains the emotional & instinctive underpinnings of moral & political loyalties. Decades of experiments by different sociologists and psychologists gradually brought him to see Hume ("reason is the slave of the passions") as the deeper thinker about morals than those who try to claim that ethics is an outgrowth of reasoning and intelligence. Haidt has reached a point where he see Americans on the left ("liberals") as basing their moral views on three pillars: care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating while Americans of the Republican/traditionalist persuasion base their moral views on six pillars: care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/impurity. Haidt counts himself as a liberal, excited when Barack Obama was running for president, and so he makes a powerful critic of other liberals in their thoughtless contempt for non-leftists. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this thoughtful, well-reasoned book, is the revelation that huge swathes of academia literally regard people who don't share their political views as mentally ill and in need of medical attention.
May 17th;
Sunday. Among sounds Andras shows me is Knower, a jazz-funk sci-fi counterattack, bracketed here at each end by Louis Cole, I suppose branding himself. With him fronting Knower for female vocal is 'Genevieve', the first Genevieve I've come across since that sartorial guide of Robin's.
F*** It Up by Louis Cole with live band in someone's house /
Overtime by Knower live in the same house /
Time Traveler by Knower live etc / impressive 22-minute
'living-room set' by Knower, with slide shows /
Butts, Tits, Money by Knower /
The Government Knows by Knower /
Time Traveler by Knower, another slide show /
Thinking by Louis Cole.
May 16th;
Saturday. Andras the Benedictine coder monk turns up in the early evening with a bass guitar, lots of wires coming out of a small red box, and huge amounts of alcohol. He genially insists we do a jam session together. Toiling over keyboards, bass guitar, sampling software, and cans of beer, the two of us manage - astonishingly - to produce something quite good. Andras keeps explaining chords, scales, time signatures, and the looping program all through the chaos. At intervals we compare videos, including two polished versions of one song by Russian duo Little Big:
Skibidi main version, and
Skibidi romantic version. Not to mention Billie Eilish &
Bury A Friend
(from the cleverly-named record 'When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?') / a Russian song called
In Piter We Drink by Leningrad / some non-famous
Hungarian rap / song called
Zsebeibe zse - a local parody of whatever that French style is / and a bass-guitar tutorial where Andras adores the (Italian?) girl's happy, funny
expressions as she enjoys playing over the tune.
May 15th;
Friday. Computer code used by Niel Ferguson to persuade Britain's government that epidemic stats urgently justified crashing the economy for Covid-19 reviewed harshly as clunky, amateurish, and lacking credibility. Which civil servants slyly steered government ministers towards this fool with the Avaaz-activist girlfriend (surnamed Staats, seriously), one wonders?
May 14th; Thursday. Fascinating dialogue with a sleep-biology researcher, Matthew Walker, the interviewer again Rhonda Patrick. Choice quote: "Sleep is the Swiss Army Knife of health."
May 13th; Wednesday. Very interesting interview by Rhonda Patrick of a researcher, Charles Raison, who thinks depression is inflammatory and evolved from our immune systems.
May 12th; Tuesday. Pretty girl, beware of his heart of gold: this heart is cold! Perhaps the Bond themes were arias for the Cold War opera?
May 11th; Monday. Inside the mind of A Master Procrastinator: sharp, witty talk.
May 10th; Sunday. Andras alerts me to the following tunes:
Volcano Hamster by Szagos Ho:rigekkok /
Slaves from Wonder Showzen /
Fuck the Shit by Sons of Butcher / and in similar vein
I Kill People by Jon Lajoie. So much out there, citizens.
May 9th; Saturday. Someone is seriously going to make lab-grown salami for public sale cultured from the protein samples donated by famous chat-show hosts, musical performers, whoever signs on the dotted line. Ugh, honestly.
May 8th; Friday. Italy's COVID deaths far higher than official figures, says Reuters.
An Istanbul "private party project" with DJ Armen Miran here: I have mild qualms about using audience members as footage for music, but those girls right up against the mixing desk seem happy to be seen.
May 7th; Thursday. During our lesson in the early afternoon, Esoteric Veronica makes me watch on her phone a video (already removed one day later by Youtube) about viruses, drug patents, and nefarious pharma firms, asking my opinion. The video is a long interview with someone called Judy Mikovits, co-author of this book.
The same night later pop out to look around, getting an almost-empty tram towards the river. I sit somewhere in a central carriage of four or five connected carriages, lodging an empty drinks can in position that threatens to roll. Once I'm 200 yards before the river, I get out and catch another tram one stop up the side street where I almost worked in a primary school two years ago, so as to visit the all-night Spar supermarket. Walking back ten minutes to the main road, I wait at the tram stop and let the first tram back home pass me. That's because I'm in some accidental WiFi hot spot there at the tramstop and am reading something on my old phone. The second tram away from the river comes and I get on it, stroll down the length of the tram, sit down, and after five minutes see I'm sitting exactly opposite the seat I used in the opposite direction half an hour earlier. I know this because the drinks can I lodged in place so it wouldn't roll as the tram drove off, going back in the opposite direction, is there right opposite me just where I left it. Both completely banal & oddly magical.
May 6th; Wednesday. Here's a 25-minute film in Babylonian. The Poor Man of Nippur.
May 5th; Tuesday. Allegation that US Senate intelligence committee chair sold shares ahead of the market crash when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
May 4th; Monday. Interesting long article on China's superpower aspirations. Sample quote "As matters stand the United States will be overtaken by China in the next several years. China is developing its own intellectual property in key areas. Some of it is better than ours - in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, cryptography, and electronic warfare. In other key fields like quantum computing - possibly the holy grail of 21st-century technology - it's hard to tell who's winning, but China is outspending us by a huge margin."
May 3rd; Sunday. Wake out of a very vivid dream where I am travelling to somewhere in a German-speaking country to either teach or take part in a seminar with some young students. I reach a clean, sparely-decorated modernist room with maybe six of them, and the tables have textbooks which are like menus, little more than large pieces of card folded 3 or 4 times to make 4 or 6-page booklets. They concern some arcane type of computer science which I don't understand. But I trust the friendly Germans to explain it to me, translating from technical English to slightly less technical English. Above one small spreadseet or look-up table of about 12, perhaps 15, cells I see the intriguing sentence "A wolf is like a 9-penny chaplin", knowing (in the dream) that this is some kind of definition of some technical terms in database something-or-other. I wake up musing on this phrase.
One scientist explains that COVID-19 was never exponential.
May 2nd; Saturday. Some Swedish common sense in the Lancet about COVID-19.
May 1st; Friday. The scare story that some COVID-19 patients relapse after recovery now seems untrue.
Recent weblog entries
continued:
Who can translate the next 300 words into
Korean or
Hindi?
Contact
us and there will be revelry.
Languages dying out each week
- who cares?
We do - otherlanguages.org is gradually building a reference resource for over five thousand linguistic minorities and stateless languages worldwide.
Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world's five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we're losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now.
So?
We may soon regret the extinction of thousands of entire linguistic cultures even more than we regret the needless extinction of many animals and plants.
The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin
Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese,
English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali - all
beautiful and fascinating languages.
But so are the 5,000 others.
These are groups of people?
Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country's main official language. Swedish speakers in Finland, French speakers in Canada, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia - and hundreds more - are linguistic minorities.
And totally stateless languages are the native languages of some of the world's most intriguing, little-known, cultures. Like the Lapps inside the Arctic Circle, the Sards in Sardinia, Ainus in Japan. Cherokee in the US, Scots
Gaelic in Britain, Friesian in the Netherlands, Zulu in South Africa.
There are only a couple of hundred recognised sovereign states and territories, so 5,000 languages - more depending on how you count - are the native tongues of linguistically stateless people.
How could I help?
You don't need to learn an endangered
language - any more than go to live in the rainforest to help slow its destruction.
A good start is to just tell friends
about websites like this.
Broader public interest makes it easier
for linguists to raise funds and organise people to learn these languages while there's time.
That's right. There are people who love languages and are happy to learn them on behalf of the rest of us, but they need support, just like zoologists, botanists, or historians.
Fewer languages still sounds good to me
Depends what you think languages are for. They're not just a tool for business. We never said you should learn three or four thousand rare languages - or even one. And which ones we make children learn in school, or whether we should force children to learn languages at all, is another question.
Typical scene in a European city;
Chances are, folk here speak some sort of foreign
language *5
|
A century ago - before we understood ecology, and when we cared less about wilderness, most educated people would have laughed at the idea of worrying about plants or animals going extinct. Now we understand how important species diversity is for our own futures, we are more humble, and more worried.
In the same way, linguistic triumphalism by English-speakers who hated studying foreign grammar at school is dangerously ignorant as well as arrogant. Few of us know what we are losing, week by week.
How many people realise these languages have scientific value?
Scientific value?
You can think of these languages across the planet as beautiful cathedrals or precious archeological sites we are watching being destroyed. That should be motive enough.
But these five thousand languages may also hold clues to the structure of the human mind. Subtle differences and similarities
Wireless radio can be a great comfort to those unable
to leave the textbooks in which they live *6
|
between languages are helping archeologists and anthropologists to understand what happened in the hundreds of centuries of human history before written history. And that is one of our best chances of understanding how human brains developed over the thousands of centuries leading up to that.
Study of the mind and study of language go hand in hand these days. The world's most marginal languages are actually precious jigsaw pieces from an overall picture of who we are and how our species thinks and evolves. Every tiny language adds another brightly-coloured clue to this academic detective story.
Yet researchers have hardly started sifting through this
tantalising evidence, and language extinction is washing it away right in
front of us.
And worst of all, most people have no idea that there is this
fantastic profusion of cultures across our world, let alone that
they are in danger of extinction. Even just more people learning that
there are still five thousand living languages in the world today (most
of us would answer five hundred or fifty) is already a huge help.
We English-speakers hardly notice English - it's like air for us.
But every other language is also an atmosphere for an entire cultural world,
and each of these worlds has people whose home it is. Each language encapsulates a unique way of talking and thinking about life. Just try some time in a foreign prison, being forced to cope in another language, and you'll realise how much your own language is your identity. That's true for everyone.
Minority languages are a
human-rights issue?
One of the most basic.
Dozens of millions of people worldwide suffer persecution from national governments for speaking their mother tongue - in their own motherland.
Many 'ethnic' feuds puzzling to
outsiders had as their basis an attempt to destroy a linguistic community.
Would the Northern Ireland dispute be quite so bitter if we
English had not so nearly stamped out the Irish Gaelic language, for
example? Almost nowhere in the world does a language community as
small as the few thousand Rheto-Romanic speakers - the fourth
official language of Switzerland - get the protection of a national
government. Next time you see some Swiss Francs, check both sides of the
banknote.
But outside exceptional countries like
Switzerland or the Netherlands, speakers of non-official
languages have a much less protected experience.
Speakers of minority languages are often seen as a threat by both the governments and the other residents of the countries where they were born, grew up, and try to live ordinary lives.
They experience discrimination in the job and education markets of their homelands, often having no choice but to pursue education in the major language of the host state: a deliberate government policy usually aimed at gradually absorbing them into the majority culture of that country.
Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, of course *7
|
Most governments are privately gleeful each time another small
separate culture within their borders is snuffed out by a dwindling
population or a deliberately centralising education system.
The United Nations is no help. It is an association of a couple of hundred sovereign states based on exclusive control of territory, almost all of them anxious to smother any distinct group or tradition that in any way might blur or smudge the hard-won borders around those pieces of territory.
The usual approach by sovereign states is to deny their linguistic minorities even exist.
::
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact at
otherlanguages.org
back up to top of page
*1 image from , with thanks
*2 "Al-Araby" in written
Arabic
(read more)
*3 "What?" in American Sign
Language; image from , with thanks
*4 "Big" in written
Chinese
(read more); image from , with
thanks
*5 image from , with
thanks
*6 image from , with
thanks
*7 image from
'B?ume', with thanks to
Bruno P. Kramer,
and Franckh-Kosmos Verlag
|
|
|
...............................................................................................................................................................
April 30th; Thursday. More sun. More people on the still largely empty streets. Please Stay, by Matthieu Faubourg: tries to capture a mood of (I suppose) longing, rapture, and regret in a few chord loops.
April 29th; Wednesday. Fascinating documentary film about sinkholes in northern Russia, intercutting investigations by oil & gas geologists with helicopters, and animist interpretations of the same phenomena by the local deer-herding nomads. Insects flit across the camera lens as the two groups trudge patiently across the endless tundra. "God must be punishing us," stoically says a nomad who lost hundreds of sick deer to a sharp winter, "We must have done something wrong."
April 28th; Tuesday. Article about the astonishing 18th-century utopian Charles Fourier.
April 27th; Monday. Findings on UV & heat versus COVID.
April 26th; Sunday. Kutiman looking a little smoother of late, and has conjured himself a
producing
career.
Mind you, his older tunes assembled out of
Youtube -
instructional -
videos
still win on wit & charm.
April 25th; Saturday. For anyone hoping a commentary might help them through Fulcanelli's book on alchemy & cathedrals, this article might be a start.
April 24th; Friday. Corona-caused GDP drops worldwide - is CO2 dropping too?
April 23rd; Thursday. Piece about underlying disease cycles.
April 22nd; Wednesday. Times article about the 'bat lady', a Chinese scientist who was worried COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Wonderful photo of her in bio-hazard suit.
April 21st; Tuesday. A letter to Nature claims that COVID-19 isn't lab-modified.
April 20th; Monday. China's actions over the COVID-19 outbreak (such as lying about it for weeks) seems to have finally sunk Huawei's spyware project in Britain.
April 19th; Sunday. Spectacular 1930 cartoon. Obviously a main source for the Stephen Foster 1990s retro item. As one friend put it, this is the motherlode.
April 18th;
Saturday. Turning out with increased testing that indeed COVID-19
death rates and
infectiousness are
much lower
than claimed.
Another summary. Seems that the dangerousness of the condition for most healthy people has been hugely exaggerated. So why have borders and streets been shut down across the world?
April 17th;
Friday. Snatch from a live Chemical Brothers concert one or two years ago. Music a bit like circus, circus like the catwalk. Now effectively the chord change is the melody. Back in about 1981, when I was bored revising - and trying to imagine the pop music of the future - had a fleeting waking vision of puffed-up fluffy dancers in shapeless teddy-bear-like / Michelin-Man-type outfits with no faces. Not so far from the 2nd half of this: Gotta Keep On Making Me High.
April 16th;
Thursday. Nothing like a bit of nihilism. Anti-motivational posters again with choice quotes from German film director Werner Herzog:
friendship /
wild bears /
the beach /
flowers /
birds & trees /
cows.
April 15th;
Wednesday. Warm sun in relatively empty streets. This recent film might be very entertaining. Never come across it. Like an American Carry-On film?
April 14th;
Tuesday. More on COVID-19: an Israeli mathematician gets into a quarrel on television for saying the epidemic is already burning itself out.
April 13th;
Easter Monday. Stir myself out of vivid half-dreams about large-scale history, castles, Pope Gregory, the usual. Meanwhile, the newly-built 4,000-bed Nightingale hospital in London open for a week right now has apparently 19 beds in use. So perhaps not a runaway crisis after all.
April 12th;
Easter Sunday: He is risen, as Greeks say.
April 11th;
Easter Saturday. One of the great pauses of the calendar.
April 10th;
Good Friday. Execution Day.
April 9th;
Thursday. In the late morning read though a confusing set of increasingly tetchy phone messages to me from someone today & yesterday. Fascinating how something can escalate into a quarrel in one person's mind without the other person saying or doing anything. Meanwhile, three bits of video-song-knitting: Temptations & Danzig / Metallica & Los del Rio / Prodigy & Orinoco. You get the idea.
April 8th;
Wednesday. Beautiful weather. Evening: I buy some inexpensive mineral water with an adorable brand spokeslass on the label called 'Emese'. She seems to be a chirpy cartoon girl with black hair who goes cycling in the Hungarian countryside under the benificent influence of these life-giving waters.
April 7th;
Tuesday. Still more on COVID-19, the "coronavirus" is apparently not a lung disease, but a blood condition, which is why antimalarial drugs seem to be working to cure patients with it. If this is true, then ventilators are no longer the equipment bottleneck they seemed.
April 6th;
Monday. Stumble on a rather lovely lecture: enthusing students about the writings of Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
April 5th;
Sunday. An article about the COVID-19 epidemic suggesting that in New York obesity is one of the biggest risk factors.
April 4th;
Saturday. Vigorous early-70s group I'd never come across until a few weeks ago, Fanny: Blind Alley / Ain't That Peculiar (some major time-wasting, they don't start until 1:40). Versus something slicker & more recent. Was told this singer lacks merit - inclined to agree except for this song, suspiciously humble & apologetic to be her work: "I was wrong -- I won't let you down and run". Methinks some pro song-writing from middle-aged men in cardigans down at the studio.
April 3rd;
Friday. After days, found how to switch off one of the lights in the kitchen, the three lampshades (above the strange electrical hobs with glowing red discs beneath a black glass surface). Gyongyi knew of an extra light switch hidden behind the bread bin. I remembered to ask Simon ten days ago - he revealed that the smoke extractor in his kitchen conceals a light tube not normally visible operated by a hidden button: another vital mystery solved.
April 2nd;
Thursday. Finished another book I found in Iris's library, a book I bought for Eva many years ago in the 1990s: 'The Europeans' by journalist Luigi Barzini. Rereading it was strange - first because so much came back as I went through his witty, erudite chapters (one on France, one on Britain, one on Germany, one on Italy, one on the Dutch and the Belgians, and one on the USA) - and secondly because odd features vividly in my memory of reading the book the first time by contrast weren't there. However, the book is sadly marred by his central guiding belief that European unification is necessary, or desirable - which in a way shows that his reading and his years of thoughtful observation were largely wasted. One review starts with these words " 'On the eve of Sarajevo no passport was needed to go from one European nation to another.' Why does Europe not unite today?", showing just how poorly Barzini (and that book reviewer) thought the overall idea through.
Some of the erudition is suspect because there are mistakes. He claims Belgium built the Continent's first commercial railway line in 1832, yet there was already a line operating in France in 1830.
Among the odd features was the way I vividly remembered him framing each chapter around a central metaphor. Britons each see themselves like the captain of a ship at sea (Barzini claimed in the version of the book I read in the 1990s), Germans see themselves as individual trees brought together in a forest, the French are a people, not a nation, and so on. Strangely this was all missing from this edition. I assume that there was tinkering between reprints, and some editor nixed those folksy sentences I remembered so clearly from an earlier or later edition than this one. I would like to read his earlier success - a book called 'The Italians' from the 1960s. I'm sure it was/is wonderful, and paradoxically (I suspect) concealed a message he failed to tease out or reason from in his later whole-Europe effort: namely that Italy is still a rich patchwork of highly distinct and independent regions or cities. The idea that unification - the Risorgimento of the 1860s - was a mistake of historic dimensions (likewise Bismarck's creation of Germany, and Britain's earlier creation of Belgium) escapes the European unifiers. Of course I have yet to read Barzini's doubtless entertaining and shrewd (though also doubtless not too shrewd) book on his own people, but if he thinks European unification is wise, it strikes me it never occurred to him that perhaps Italian unification wasn't. He ticks off the French, seems to admire the Germans and the British, and has the usually affectionate mixture of hope & despair that intelligent Italians have about their century-and-a-half-old country. He also quietly notes Italy lurches from disaster to disaster yet seems strangely resilient, mysteriously bouncing back from each period of chaos. That quote I often recall from a 1980s Economist survey of the peninsula (a businessman: "I am a Venetian first, a European second, and an Italian last.") more apposite than ever.
April 1st;
Wednesday. The fashion_for_bank_robbers Instagram account has some whimsical images like
this or
this or
this.
page top
diary entries by month
2020
April 2020 /
March 2020 /
February 2020 /
January 2020 /
2019
December 2019 /
November 2019 /
October 2019 /
September 2019 /
August 2019 /
July 2019 /
June 2019 /
May 2019 /
April 2019 /
March 2019 /
February 2019 /
January 2019 /
2018
December 2018 /
November 2018 /
October 2018 /
September 2018 /
August 2018 /
July 2018 /
June 2018 /
May 2018 /
April 2018 /
March 2018 /
February 2018 /
January 2018 /
2017
December 2017 /
November 2017 /
October 2017 /
September 2017 /
August 2017 /
July 2017 /
June 2017 /
May 2017 /
April 2017 /
March 2017 /
February 2017 /
January 2017 /
2016
December 2016 /
November 2016 /
October 2016 /
September 2016 /
August 2016 /
July 2016 /
June 2016 /
May 2016 /
April 2016 /
March 2016 /
February 2016 /
January 2016 /
2015
December 2015 /
November 2015 /
October 2015 /
September 2015 /
August 2015 /
July 2015 /
June 2015 /
May 2015 /
April 2015 /
March 2015 /
February 2015 /
January 2015 /
2014
December 2014 /
November 2014 /
October 2014 /
September 2014 /
August 2014 /
July 2014 /
June 2014 /
May 2014 /
April 2014 /
March 2014 /
February 2014 /
January 2014 /
2013
December 2013 /
November 2013 /
October 2013 /
September 2013 /
August 2013 /
July 2013 /
June 2013 /
May 2013 /
April 2013 /
March 2013 /
February 2013 /
January 2013 /
2012
December 2012 /
November 2012 /
October 2012 /
September 2012 /
August 2012 /
July 2012 /
June 2012 /
May 2012 /
April 2012 /
March 2012 /
February 2012 /
January 2012 /
2011
December 2011 /
November 2011 /
October 2011 /
September 2011 /
August 2011 /
July 2011 /
June 2011 /
May 2011 /
April 2011 /
March 2011 /
February 2011 /
January 2011 /
2010
December 2010 /
November 2010 /
October 2010 /
September 2010 /
August 2010 /
July 2010 /
June 2010 /
May 2010 /
April 2010 /
March 2010 /
February 2010 /
January 2010 /
2009
December 2009 /
November 2009 /
October 2009 /
September 2009 /
August 2009 /
July 2009 /
June 2009 /
May 2009 /
April 2009 /
March 2009 /
February 2009 /
January 2009 /
2008
December 2008 /
November 2008 /
October 2008 /
September 2008 /
August 2008 /
July 2008 /
June 2008 /
May 2008 /
April 2008 /
March 2008 /
February 2008 /
January 2008 /
2007
December 2007 /
November 2007 /
October 2007 /
September 2007 /
August 2007 /
July 2007 /
June 2007 /
May 2007 /
April 2007 /
March 2007 /
February 2007 /
January 2007 /
2006
December 2006 /
November 2006 /
October 2006 /
September 2006 /
August 2006 /
July 2006 /
June 2006 /
May 2006 /
April 2006 /
March 2006 /
February 2006 /
January 2006 /
2005
December 2005 /
November 2005 /
October 2005 /
September 2005 /
August 2005 /
July 2005 /
June 2005 /
May 2005 /
April 2005 /
March 2005 /
February 2005 /
January 2005 /
2004
December 2004 /
November 2004 /
October 2004 /
September 2004 /
August 2004 /
July 2004 /
June 2004 /
May 2004 /
April 2004 /
March 2004 /
February 2004 /
January 2004 /
2003
December 2003 /
November 2003 /
October 2003 /
September 2003 /
August 2003 /
July 2003 /
June 2003 /
May 2003 /
April 2003 /
March 2003 /
February 2003 /
January 2003 /
2002
December 2002 /
November 2002 /
October 2002 /
September 2002 /
August 2002 /
July 2002 /
May/June 2002
|
|
