Sailing against the tide
So let’s conclude with our end-of-the-year report. The posts with most viewers here were the ones about politics, AI and immigration. The least viewed ones were the ones about travel or obscure movies. I am not sure what it means. I normally prefer to write about travel or obscure movies, but most people obviously prefer…Read more
Getting a flu with heavy cough just as I was preparing to travel from Italy to Spain, I bought a pot of delicious “linden honey from the tuscan hills” to sooth my throat, but it was confiscated at the Amerigo Vespucci airport on Uncle Sam’s orders. Apparently, even solid-type honey counts as a “liquid” and…Read more
Gemma Saint Gemma Galgani was born in 1878 into a poor family in a small village near Lucca, but they soon moved to Lucca as her father, a pharmacist, found work there. She was the fifth of eight siblings, only two females, the rest males. As it happened to other poor people at the time,…Read more
If you’re into complicated hobbies, perhaps this video about “how to make a medieval book” will interest you. I thought it was nice; perhaps it might also interest the three or four readers of this website. The video has no voice-over narration, just a written commentary in the subtitles, and no music either, just the…Read more
In one of the stories by Frank O’Connor, “The Ugly Duckling” — the title is of course a reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale, but this story about a tomboy girl is as Irish as it gets — there is a wonderful observation about certain types of people who, because of certain inadequacy…Read more
It has snowed for the first time just a few days ago and the city is still all covered in white. There is something magical about the first snow of the year. And even if, months later, you get absolutely tired of all that white and cold and yearn for spring and flowers and warmth,…Read more