The English edition of the pope’s new book came out while I was gone, and I came home to find a copy waiting for me.
I’m reading it now.
You can guess how good it is!
It’s also available on CD for those who prefer audiobooks.
THAT VERSION IS HERE.
Traveller’s Tip
Well, I’m back from the pilgrimage/cruise now and am semi-recovered. (It was very rewarding but also very exhausting!)
I thought I’d pass along something that I discovered during my preparations for the trip in case it would benefit others.
It turns out that there is a web site that forecasts airplane turbulence. It’s name, unsurprisingly, is TurbulenceForecast.Com.
On our flights back we encountered enough turbulence that they kept the Fasten Seatbelts sign lit for most of the two flights, making it really hard to sit in the airline seat for hour after hour–which was frankly more annoying than the turbulence was!
In any event, you might want to check out the turbulence forecast site if you have an upcoming plane trip and would like to know what kind of turbulence you may encounter on your flight.
Above is a screencap of a forecast from last night (when I was blogging) that shows color gradations on where the most intense turbulence is likely to be.
They also have a bunch of other turblence maps, including international ones and live pilot reports of where they’re hitting the turbulence, as well as information about the phenomenon in general.
CHECK IT OUT.
Authentic Cuisine?
So you know how they say Italian pizza is really different from American pizza?
It is.
Well, it can be.
Some actually isn’t that different, but some is.
It’s all pretty thin crust, which is fine by me. (I did decide to go off my diet during this trip, but thin crust ain’t as far off as pan pizza would be.) Some of it also doesn’t have tomato sauce, though a lot does.
Here we see a selection of pizzas from a pizzeria just a few blocks from our hotel in Rome, and also just a couple blocks from St. Mary Major.
Some of these have toppings that are pretty obvious (or at least normal for American pizza), but a few don’t. The one with white stuff on it is slices of fresh mozarella chese on tomato sauce. The one with green is fresh arugala (a sour, peppery-tasting leafy vegetable . . . which they oddly call "rocket" in English translations over there) with feta cheese crumbles. And on the lower shelf there is actually a french fry pizza.
Now, I’ve read that they do unusual things with french fries in other countries (like serving them with mayonnaise, for example), but I’d never heard of a french fry pizza before.
And that’s not the only unusual use of french fries I encountered. At the same pizzeria they offered hot dogs for sale that had the french fries built in . . .
Nor was creative french frying confined it Italy. In the Greek port town of Katakolon (pronounced ka-TAK-o-lon), I ordered an gyros sandwich and got this . . .
Eat up!
Be Careful Buying Those Carbon Offsets
Sign in the Ephesus Market
And the hucksters were really shouting "Fake watches! . . . Fake watches!"
(Meaning, I gather, imitations of name brand watches–not things that look like watches but do not tell time.)
I Have No Clue
Your guess is as good as mine, folks!
Soggy dorito?
Melancholy inhabitant of Flatland?
Steamrollered cheese wedge?
Mystery Photo
The Coming of the White Worm
I think this one’s actually supposed to be a swan, but I can’t help thinking of that Clark Ashton Smith story The Coming of the White Worm. . . .
Michael & Us
“The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes,” the non-profit group, which studies health care issues, said in a statement.
Canada rates second worst out of the six overall. Germany scored highest, followed by Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
“The United States is not getting value for the money that is spent on health care,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said in a telephone interview.
The group has consistently found that the United States, the only one of the six nations that does not provide universal health care, scores more poorly than the others on many measures of health care.
Link:
Report: U.S. health care expensive, inefficient: America ranks last among six countries on key measures, group finds
Michael Moore is, well, not my favorite person.
BUT I WAS STUNNED TO READ THIS ACCOUNT OF HOW HE GOES ABOUT HIS FILMMAKING.
A New Corollary of Godwin’s Law?
Recently there was a story in the Catholic press about a speech in which an Italian churchman apparently referred to things like abortion and euthanasia as "terrorism with a human face."
Now there’s this story about L’Osservatore Romano referring to an Italian commedian’s jibes at B16 and the Church as "terrorism."
The paper is quoted as saying:
"This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the
Church," it said. "It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage
against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life
and love for man."
I don’t know what all the commedian said, but the story refers to him saying:
"The Pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," he said.
He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.
"I can’t stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn’t the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco," he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.
This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head.
I’m one of the biggest B16 fans there is, but I don’t see how this kind of stuff amounts to "terrorism." Either there’s something missing from the new story that the commendian said that would qualify in this regard or there is something in Italian culture that would allow these statements to be taken as incitements to violence or the word "terrorism" means something different in Italian . . . or I don’t know what.
While people regularly talk about how hard it is to give a rigorous definition to the term, it seems to me that at the core of the idea of terrorism is using either violence or threats of violence to cause fear in order to get someone to do what you want.
If there isn’t at least the threat of violence, it isn’t terrorism. It’s something else. For example, if someone threatens to release damaging information to get someone to do what he wants, it’s blackmail.
If violence or the threat of violence isn’t being used as some kind of coercion (either on the social policy level or on the personal level) then it isn’t terrorism. Violence without the purpose of coercision is just violence. Thus murder–even mass murder–is not terrorism.
So I don’t see how abortion or euthanasia or joking (even joking badly or offensively or mean-spiritedly) about the pope is terrorism.
But like I said, maybe the press reports have left stuff out, or maybe "terrorism" means something different in Italian.
I just hope we aren’t approaching an ecclesiastical equivalent of Godwin’s Law–something to the effect of "The more sharply felt the subject matter of a dispute is, the more likely a churchman is to call it ‘terrorism.’"
That would only rob the word of its meaning.
Would that count as lexical terrorism?