I come down pretty hard on the awfulness of Europop but every now and then I stumble across something that transcends the mundanity Kylie Minogue and Westlife. It’s particularly bad here in the valley where we don’t have much selection on the radio dial.

We do get one sometimes interesting station. Yesterday, I heard an funny little tune called “After Work” by Turner. The lyrics were so odd – there was a bit in there about how “I recycle, separating my trash and the green waste goes in one bin…” It was like a vaguely sarcastic description of how all good mainstream liberals live their lives.

I went hunting for an MP3 (or at least the lyrics so I could confirm what I thought I’d heard) and via the Ladomat label, I found Turner’s site.It’s moody and pop at the same time. Be sure to click on the My Airplane Mania dropdown. The Sunday Morning Version is the noise that suits my state of mind.

Save some time for the Ladomat MP3 page – there’s some other yummy things there – I like the Tocotronic Sailor Man track.

I finally took a bunch of photos today. Figures, though, it would be in a market. The Mercato Centrale in Florence to be exact, which is not unlike a smaller, less hectic version of the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, an indoor market in a large building with multiple meat, fish, vegetable, and oil/vinegar vendors, some stands to get lunch, a few places selling things like wine or kitchen gadgets or dried pasta and dried mushrooms. Small, but a really nice market. It made me want to cook something.

My main observations, which I’ll supplement with the illustrations I took today when I get back:

• Chickens look different. For one thing, they have more color, which somehow also looks like they’ll have more flavor. For another, they still have their heads attached. Yum. Chicken head.
• Fish are apparently more appetizing to purchase when they are arranged artfully in geometric patterns. Especially small, pink fish. Shrimp prefer to be lined up.
• Sicilian oranges are special enough that they get special, individual wrappings.
• Pasta can be made in a wide array of horrifying electric colors.

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I don’t mean to be a poster of only bad news, but when I sent a link to my previous post, I was told by a rather well informed reader that he had seen nothing in the US press about the SPD walkout during the Holocaust memorial.

Yesterday I read this story from Google’s list of sources, few of which were US press based. (This may have changed by the time you read this. Here’s hoping.)

A few choice quotes:

…some 20 members of the Russian parliament from the Motherland and Communist parties, demanded that Jewish organisations be banned throughout Russia on the grounds that they are extremist in nature, hostile to the Russian populace and implicated in ritual child murder.

… the MPs suggested that Jews themselves engineered anti-Semitic attacks against themselves …

…the whole democratic world is today under the financial and political control of international Jewry…

What year is it, anyway? 1939?

I do like this response, quoted in Ha’Aretz:

“I’m not a psychiatrist, and I can’t help them if they’re crazy,” said Russia’s co-chief rabbi, Berel Lazar.

Why Costco is better than Wal-Mart

First, I should disclose that I am a big fan of Costco – even before I found out the things that have been reported lately. Costco is the closest thing to a corporate co-op surviving in the world, today. Wal-Mart on the other hand is a nasty, soulless place that I can not stand. And I have concrete reasons for feeling the way that I do.
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What’s a girl to do?

Everywhere I look, there are pastry shops. And not just pastry shops. Italian pastry shops. French pastries I can walk by and admire for their beauty and all, but Italian pastries, oh the pastacciotte and sfogliadelle and babas and sfincis and cannolis. Oh, it’s just so unfair that calories consumed on vacation you can bring back to the states on your thighs, but grappa, not so much.

I was surprised, walking around Rome, how few pastry shops and bakeries I saw. I always thought it was odd (and not a little distressing) that there are no real Italian bakeries in Seattle (yes, they have ones that call themselves Italian, but then the only Italianish pastries they have are ever cannoli and tiramisu and I just need more variety in my life), and so you can imagine that by the time I got here, I was more than a little chomping at the bit for some good bakery items. But Rome, or at least the parts of it I walked through, seemed to be pastry-free zones. And this disappointed me.

Florence, on the other hand, is a pastry Mecca. There are tons of little bakeries with good varieties of biscotti and cookies and pastries as well as bread and panini. They tempt me. They call my name. Actually, they sing my name, not unlike the sirens, irresistable and charming and oh-so seductive. And it’s not like I can just say, “sorry, it’s the middle of the day and I just had lunch, so no thanks.” These are Italian pastries we’re talking about. The gold-standard of desserts in their native environment. You don’t just walk by them callously unless you’ve no heart, no soul, no appreciation of…

Excuse me. I get a little worked up about this sort of thing.
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I know everyone has told you that Florence is beautiful. If you haven’t been there, you’ve seen the photos and the film footage in A Room with a View and things like that, and you’ve said to yourself, “yeah, beautiful. I know beautiful. I’ve been to Paris. I know beautiful.” Well, if you’ve been to Florence, first of all you wouldn’t be so blase about it. And if you haven’t then, actually, you don’t know a thing about beautiful.

I’ll pause here to add my own editorial comments on the beauty of this city. HOLY SHIT! I am being purposely vulgar because, well, actually, I don’t think I could describe the beauty of this place in any terms that wouldn’t be vulgar in comparison. So let’s just not pretend and accept the vulgarity of language in this instance. Seriously. I was walking along today (well before I crossed the Arno and got myself hopelessly lost for several hours) and came upon the Duomo. And my first thought was “Jesus Christ!” which is, I guess, appropriate. The second thought was, “Holy Shit that’s gorgeous” and that’s sort of typified my reaction to this city ever since.
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It’s the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and here in central Europe, feelings are running very high. There’s a thoughtful commentary in the Times on the recent scandalous walk-out by Saxon members of the National Party of Germany (NPD) during a moment of silence for the victims of the Holocaust.

There’s no denying that Dresden was a bloodbath and that many innocent people lost their lives. I can’t do the whole moral equivalency thing where you equate the bombing of Dresden with the millions of lost lives in Europe, Jewish and otherwise. They’re all lost lives, ruined by Nazism.

What sticks in my throat and infuriates me nearly beyond words is the blantant racism and sheer stupid insensivity of the NPD. I’m pretty sure no one is stopping the NPD – or anyone else for that matter – from commemorating the bombing of Dresden. Hell, we all learned about Dresden in grade school history classes and I don’t remember being taught that it was an event that glorified the allies and downplayed the loss of human lives. It was a firebombing. There was death and destruction everywhere. Yet the SPD can’t acknowledge that Auschwitz, too, was a tragedy beyond description.

Neo-Nazism is on the rise in former Eastern Germany. In Saxony, the SPD got just over 9 percent of the vote. You could conclude that one in ten people you’d meet when walking the streets of modern Dresden supports the SPDs racist platform. This is terrifying. Combine this with the rhetoric coming out of Iran these days about the Zionist agenda (thank you Dick Cheney) and you end up with the world looking pretty scary for this latke eating member of the tribe.

I just saw this on "Insomnic with Dave Attell": ScooterMan, a service you can call that sends a sober, fully insured driver to your location to drive you home in your car. The driver arrives on a small scooter that is quickly disassembled, bagged, and stored in the trunk. Someone interviewed on the show said that the cost was about 150% the cost of taking a taxi. What a great idea! Sorry, only available in the Greater London area.

Sometime last year, I was surprised to find that Johnny Carson was neither dead nor doing anything regarded as news-worthy. How does a person so important just disappear like that?

There was a time in the ’80s, when I was just out of high school and starting college, and I could remember when we might all die at any moment due to a Soviet nuclear strike. What was I going to do with my life? Would Ann ever be interested in me? Would we all die tomorrow? For some reason, all of those questions seemed to melt away with Johnny’s monologue. It felt like people somewhere were awake, and Johnny was making jokes like he had the night before; therefore, the world was likely to continue in some predictable way, and I could relax.

As much as I’ve liked other latenight shows and hosts, I’ve never had for them the same positive, sentimental feelings that I had for Johnny Carson. I’m sure that was more the result of my age and experiences at the time than Johnny, but the fondness did exist. I’m sorry Johnny’s dead, though it felt like he left us a long time ago (though CNN’s obituary says that he wrote jokes for Dave).

In Dramarama’s "Last Cigarette", John Easdale sings, "You don’t have to hear the headlines, you can hear what Johnny Carson said". I suppose many of us almost feel that way about John Stewart now.