I just looked outside in the glooming dusk and saw a bright star moving fast, and silently. I assume it was the international space station in low earth orbit. It moved too fast to be a star, and too high and quiet to be a plane. We don’t get excited about satellites anymore. We take …
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Dubai Airport takes on a surreal carnival atmosphere
It’s about 1am and I’m in Dubai waiting for a connecting flight. Aside from the temples of material excess which are the duty free stores, there is even a Hard Rock Cafe in the terminal, and some guy with a guitar doing a performance not too far from that. This is way over the top …
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Do the trains run on time in Italy?
During the past month of rail travel between cities, I often heard announcements about whether the train I was on was running on time or late (the announcement usually said it was running on time) and that was so unusual to my ears that it reminded me of the infamous saying about Mussolini making the …
Homesick
I’m about 28 hours from the start of my journey home and I am feeling pretty homesick now. There are a lot of things I miss. Aside from the obvious – ie my family, friends and my own home, here are some of the less obvious things that I take for granted: Speaking English: after …
All Is True
One conspiracy theory I will not entertain, even in jest, is the Shakespeare authorship question. The original advocate for someone else being the author died in a lunatic asylum (Delia Bacon) and an early advocate for the Earl of Oxford was an eccentric unfortunately but perhaps approximately named Looney. What saddens and appalls me is …
Why the moon landings are real and the Roswell UFO is not…
I like to stir people up by being provocative. I get ample ammunition from my frequent purchases of ‘alternative news’ publications (ie the looney conspiracy stuff about UFOs, vaccinations, Chem trails, 9/11, Obama’s citizenship etc). For example, this past July during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, I was calling it the ‘moon hoax’. And …
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I blame Vespasian
The Emperor Vespasian was the son of a tax collector. This explains a lot. As a form of revenue collection, he introduced a urinal tax. When his son Titus objected, according to his biographer Suetonius, Vespasian grabbed a coin from the pile of revenue from this tax and held it under his son’s nose, exclaiming …
Crepuscolo
Crepuscolo is the Italian word for twilight or dusk. I never knew that til I asked google translate just now. Just like ‘calice’, it’s not a word in my Italian vocabulary. Right now I’m sitting out the front of my hotel in Treviso enjoying the crepuscolo. You need to be a certain distance away from …
Tired in Treviso….
I’ve now been abroad and on the road for over three weeks and I am starting to feel pretty tired and homesick. Not counting day trips to Asti and Magenta, Treviso is my ninth stop on this trip. I’ve seen as much new stuff as I can handle for a while and I am getting …
An overwhelmingly sized pizza menu
Last night I did dinner with a legion of my cousins and their families at Charlott, a Charlie Chaplin themed pizza restaurant which is in the centre of Cusignana, my father’s home village (and therefore my own ancestral home). Great to see my cousins again, and to meet one of the latest additions to the …
Lost For Words! 