today new computer

miei cari, for some reason it's past 4 in the morning and I cannot sleep, despite the fact that I know that I am tired. Mah...
Anyway, I am writing from my new computer, which I got this morning from Naka (thanks!). This thing has a weird long screen, slightly disproportioned, however so far seems to be faster than the old crap that I had before. Also, I am enjoying a proper touchepad after the one of the old computer decided that it was more entertaining to wander randomly on the screen.
Today I was out the whole day. I went first to get my computer, then tried to meet Jack and Jasmina at the wrong Extrablatt and then had the very bad idea to go to Lorey, which is a store where they sell all sort of stuff for the house, all disgracefully expensive however very nice. Result: my bank account is significantly lighter now. I bought a nice red glass from Baccarat for my mum (it's her birthday next week) and then 3 small plates of a collection called Balcons du Guadalquivir (the 2 at the sides on the bottom row and the one in the middle in the upper row). Reallllllly nice. Well, I assume at the end of the day every now and then it's OK to treat myself with something nice. Now I assume I will have to go to bed, I am sure that sleep will come after 2 pages of the Paradoxes of Infinity, nice light and funny book written by the guy Bolzano (the one that drove us crazy at university, together with his friend Weierstrass). A mali estremi estremi rimedi...

tomorrow new computer

miei cari, tomorrow the evil demons of IT will take away my computer and replace it with a (hopefully) newer model. About time! So now I am deleting all the nice illegal programs that I had installed, before they fire me. This means that I will also remove messanger, hopefully I am intelligent enough to copy all the addresses, still send me a message so that I can copy you again once I re-install it. And tomorrow morning I wanted to go to the hairdresser, since anyway I have no computer; then my boss obviously decided to have a meeting at 10. Shit.
I've just finished reading a book from Tom Wolfe, "the bonfire of the vanities", which I bought in a second hand book shop in Washington. The book is a nice cliché story, with the rich white Wall Street guy with super flat and 40-year old wife that has an affair with a "foxy" lady and then they run over a guy in Bronx and hell breaks loose. That said, it's a nice read on planes, trains, cars (if you are not driving...). Only thing that pisses me off is that many times it sounds like a morality play. It's nice when you read these books to find out that actually life is much more interesting.
This makes me realize that it's been a while since I have read a book that I really enjoyed, apart from "l'utopia armata" which is a collection of real stories that happened in the 70s in Italy and made me want to go work at Fiat. Actually, now that I think about it, I also liked a lot "malgudi days" from RK Narayan, really nice, well written stories (thanks Kasturi). Please please send me some good titles.
ciaociao

does Harry Potter die?

well, I'm not going to tell you :P
This to say that I have just finished reading the last Harry Potter book. Not bad, to be honest. The very last chapter is slightly moronic, but I assume it leaves some opportunities to the author to write some more books in case she needs another couple of billions in the future.
By the way, I am back home, yesterday I eventually managed to find some partners in crime (Petero and Tina) and we convinced the whole group to go eat Indian food. Really good. And today for breakfast I had the I-don't-know-what-it's-called-nor-how-it's-spelt-thingy-with-blätterteig-and-cheese that Jasmina cooks. Taaaaasty. Then nothing worth mentioning, apart from Harry Potter and 3 loads in the washing machine.

Cincinnati

miei cari, this morning I left Delaware and am now in Cincinnati. I haven't been here for a long time and it' s nice to be greeted by so many people. So tonight eventually I will get my Indian food and a girls' night and tomorrow I will cook for a not better defined number of people at Eileen's place. Must be cool, especially considering that we told everyone to come with wine :-)
Now I pack because I will meet with Patricia for some pre-Indian drinks.
ciaociao

can't walk anymore...

bellezze di mamma, as predicted I have walked all day here in Washington and now I feel as if someone transplanted 2 pieces of concrete where I usually have my feet. Not confortable.
Anyway, today I behaved like a good tourist and I have seen a lot of nice must-see monuments. I had also taken some pictures, but I think my sd card is screwed, I can't see anything therefore I assume I won't have any picture. Too bad. So I started from the hotel, which is north of Dupont circle (pretty nice area, and surprisingly the hotel is not even that expensive), went down direction downtown and ended up, somehow, in front of the White House. I wanted to get in but apparently I have to contact my deputy or governor (yeah right) or my embassy (better) to get a reservation. The guy at the entrance told me that usually it takes around 3 months to get a reservation. Giorgì, la tua casetta dei puffi allora tientela e soffocati. Tiè! - as usual there is nothing better than cursing people in your own language- Then I started walking again and saw that at the Corcoran musem they had an exhibition about modernism so I went and saw that. Actually I stopped in the first place because there were 2 lions at the entrance and they looked so stupid that I started laughing as if I had taken some psychedelic drug (at least judging by the way people looked at me). I had taken pictures, but as said I don't think I will manage to get them out of my sd card. This modernism exhibition was nice but pretty much superficial. Anyway, at least there was air conditioning...
After that I walked to the National Mall, which I found out is not a place to go shopping but is this long green strip of grass with all the monuments around. At one end there is the Capitol, at the opposite end there is the Licoln memorial, in the middle there is the Korean war memorial, the Vietnam memorial, the WW2 memorial and the Washington monument (the stuff that looks like a big long stalagmite). On the side there is also the Jefferson and the FDR (F. D. Roosvelt, the guy of the new deal and of WW2) memorials, but I found out too late when I was already away. Will go there tomorrow. Anyway, the Lincoln memorial is the one where M. L. King gave the "I have a dream" speech. Apart from that, you get inside and you see old skinny Abe sitting on his chair, and around carved his speeches. I assume the speeches are interesting if you know American history; since this is not the case with me, I just tried not to stay in the way of all the people taking pictures. Scaringly enough the chair and the whole monument is full of fasces, which gives a weird feeling being Italian. Anyway, the monument was built before Idiot Big Jaw (i.e. Mussolini) went to power so I assume they meant it with the original Roman meaning. The other stuff is nice as well, and also moving like the Vietnam memorial. Anyway, after this I went to see the Museum of Natural History, they have these huge dinos skeletons. And they also had a part dedicated to mammals, in which they said that the main characteristics of mammals are that they have hair, a complicated hearing system and their mothers made milk.. So if it's true, now I want a whale's fur. Mah... After that I went to the International Spy Museum. That was cool. I mean, they kicked us out because it was closing so I had not enough time to read all the stuff in the last part, but it was interesting. The best thing was that they had a video in which they talked about the Affaire Dreyfus(pronounced, dry - like a Martini - fuzz) and then they faked Émile Zola reading in English a piece of the J'accuse: they made such a ridiculous French accent that compared to that Gaborno and I should get the French citizenship.
After that, I somehow managed to get back to the hotel, had a shower and then went to eat in this really good Ethiopian restaurant.
Now I am pretty much destroyed and I think I will sleep really tight.
ciaociao zzzzzz

Washington

cari miei, as you can see I can now put titles again. And as you might have guessed from the title, I am in Washington DC, i.e. in the capital. I decided to come here and see the town instead of staying in Delaware and seeing the mall. My cultural level and my credit card thank me very much. I have just walked a little bit around and the town looks pretty nice. There is a lot of people around, which makes it interesting for tomorrow night. Now I will open my lonely planet and start figuring out what to see tomorrow. From what I've read so far, first of all the guy and girl that wrote the lonely planet are slightly democratic and vaguely anti bush. Vaguely. Really really a hint. Second, tomorrow night I will have blisters as big as watermelons on my feet, considering the amount of stuff that I'm supposed to visit and assuming that I will have to go around in flipflops, since it's going to be way too hot to wear sneakers. One thing I want to visit for sure is the International Spy Museum: must be really cool. Then I wanted to see the museum of American history so that at least I learn something but apparently they are renovating it therefore it's closed (shit). Well, since that is closed I will go to the one on the American Indians, which is supposed to be OK. Talking about Indian, the Indian restaurant that is on Connecticut Ave. is shit, in case you ever come to DC and fancy some Indian food. But it was amusing to hear the moron at the table close to mine trying to chat up this girl (with horrible shoes, really disgraceful) by telling her that despite being brought up as a wealthy spoiled kid he thinks he will change his life and live with other 3 people in a flat because at the end of the day money is not everything. This after having talked for half an hour about his trip in Costa rica and complaining that the girl he was with wanted to go to this local hotel instead than to the Hilton. Ridicolous. As they say, the mum of idiots is always pregnant.
I am reading that at the National Air and Space museum you can taste the ice cream that the astronauts get and touch a piece of moon: I go for sure. And then there are billions of art museums but unless it's very hot and I need AC I assume I will just walk around and see all this super big monuments, I wonder why I should come to DC to go see paintings if I have lived 3 and a half years in Frankfurt and haven't seen 1 single art museum there (and apparently they are really good).
ciaociao

Again, this freaking blog doesn't want me to put titles. HELP!!!!
Anyway, I am right now in a room in the plant in Delaware, ready to go and eat crab legs (hmmmm tastyyyyy). I arrived here yesterday, after flying to New Yolrk, then to Philadelphia and then taking the car, trying not to fall asleep and get to this place.
The only remarkable things of the trip were:
1. the JFK airport in NY seems to be a huge, complete mess. 4 flights were supposed to start from the same gate in no more than 50 minutes. Obviously everything was late.
2. the plane from NY to Philly was nearly the scariest piece of aviation history I have ever travelled on. It is competing with the Air Deccan flight from Banaglore to Kochi (which had the record of the scariest flight ever so far): the airplane yesterday was worse (if you can imagine that) but at least we were on the sea and not on some Indian plane so I was thinking that if we crashed I would have ended up fishing some cods and not killing at least 200 kids playing cricket.
As said, now I close and go to dinner. And this weekend probably I will go visit Washington, since I am at 2 hours drive from there.

for some reason I cannot put a title to this post... Misteries of technology...
I spent the weekend in Italy, now I've just come back, I have to clean the flat because I still have all sort of dirty dishes from my birthday party and tomorrow I have to fly to the US. The weekend was pretty good, despite my aunt deciding to make a big scene, as if she is an actress of some sort of Greek tragedy. Too bad that my 2 "little" cousins (the older one is already taller than me) were there looking at this completely moronic act. Anyway. Got nice presents, we put on the doors of the garage of the new house so that next month when I go back we move in. All in all, pretty good. And a kiss to my grandma, la Ine, who is in the hospital.

I'll stay at home on my birthday so I can sleep

cari miei, since today is my birthday (hint!) I decided to stay at home from work so that I could sleep and hopefully slightly reduce the chances of getting wrinkled like a shar pei before even getting 30.
So, in sequence,
- 7:42: sms from my aunt
-7:54: sms from my other aunt (my mum has 3 sisters, merda)
- 8:04: phone call from my parents
- 8:45: sms from my mum saying that it was still 10 min to go until I was born
-8:55: sms from my mum saying that at that moment I was born
After this, I don't know why, really, I decided to get out of bed, before I get the phone call from the remaining aunt (with cousins that have a tendency to shout while singing happy birthday).
So now I am having breakfast and then I will go shopping for tonight; David told me that there is an Italian store where they have all the Mulino Bianco cookies and where they also have a salumeria where you can actually order some etto (100g) of this and that. Worth a look.
Tentative menu:
antipasti:
- spiedini colorati (tomato, cucumber, feta, basil)
- fleuron guarniti (pasta sfoglia, tomato, olive paste - I have it from spain - mozzarellina)
- snack saporiti (gorgonzola, tomato)
(all this assuming that I can find some decent tomatoes, otherwise I am screwed)
- salumi
- sopressa
- mozzarelline
- simil-parmigiana
primi:
- fusilli with safron
- risotto con salsiccia (assuming I can find the salsiccia), if I have time in unortodox form
secondi: I assume we won't need any secondi after all of the above.
dessert: would like to make a crostata, but have never made one before and I am pretty bad at making cakes (or anything sweet, for that matter).
Yes, it's so hard to be 18...

Duncan for president!

apparently a woman in Seattle registered her dog, Duncan, to vote. She got away with it and made the dog vote by post by putting an ink print of his paw on the paper.
This woman is a genius. Now I just need to get myself a pig and then we can really start with the full blown campaign for Antò lo Puerc.

I'm not that good at games

tonight we decided to stay home, cook like crazy (shrimps everywhere), eat even more and then play Carcassonne. Again and again I find out that I am pretty much useless at these kind of games. The point is that they require some sort of reasoning and after the first 10 min I get so bored about calculating how many points I have and how many points the others have (shit, it's my free time) that I start putting cards randomly. Probably that's the reason why I like briscola: 5 minutes and it's finished.
Anyway, we found out that a German guy invented that disgraceful shit that comes under the name of toast hawaii; good information for when my German colleagues will try to convince me of the greatness of German inventions. This on top of the fact that I found out that they exported Tokio Hotel, a ridiculous teenage "punk" band. But, at the end of the day, we should just shut up, given that we are plaguing the world with Eros Ramazzotti and Laura Pausini, not to talk about the fact that it seems impossible to find a salad without rucola (it stinks!), that we made the world think that the only vinegar that is worth eating is balsamico (no, you cannot put ANY vinegar on mozzarella, for god's sake) and that we are exporting prosecco in cans as if it was Coca Cola.