Phrase #36987 That Totally Turns Me On

I've bagged the groceries according to where you store them so it's easier for you to put them away.

- The SO as he's unloading bags into our elevator

So. Hot.

OCD? Me? Nope.
Overly domesticated, maybe.

Instead of watching Germany-Turkey....

...we went to the hip hop recital of a friend's daughter.

It turned out to be the singular most "OMG I would have been lynched if I did that when I taught dance" experience. Leading up to the climax, we have:

- Starting over a hour late, and ending at almost midnight as a result.
- The teachers inserting themselves into 3 of the major parts. Pity - two of the students were better than them.
- A faux tango scene & classical ballet interlude. The former was another exercise in teacher spotlight hogging & the latter just made me want to scream because the poor girl had obviously not had proper training, risking injury since she was en pointe & probably shouldn't have been.
- The main teacher taking half an hour to bask in the spotlight at curtain call, thanking everybody, handing out flowers to the students and generally blabbing on and on and on and on...

The climax: Drumroll please...

The no older than 10 yo protagonist, who was promising, doing her solo to Kia's "My Neck, My Back".

Which if you don't know, features the lyrics "Lick my pussy & my crack".

You can argue that probably 99% of the audience (and probably the teachers) don't speak English or not well enough to be familiar with hip hop gutter slang, but...Holy Crap. I've still got the OMG face going on.

My Worst Fears are Proving True

Cannavaro's out injured.

And Donadoni isn't fit to lick the week old dog shit from Lippi's trainers.

*crosses fingers for Friday's game and wonder to whom I should sacrifice these virgins to...*

Wanted: Stable Web Hosting

I finally have my appointment at the questura to get fingerprinted & whatnot for my permesso renewal tomorrow. I was neatly informed of this via SMS, which was a pleasant "Hey, nifty!" moment, seeing as the online webportal for seeing at what point your renewal request was at has gone tits up at various times.

I should note that the tits up moments were usually panic inducing errors that said "Invalid User Number" or the like. Calling the info line during those times got one a busy signal 9 times out of ten, and I usually resorted to Googling & scanning various expat forums to see if there was news of problems. So the SMS and the corrisponding entry on the webportal was cheering in the thought that maybe the tech problems were getting sorted out.

Today I was putting together all the various copies of docs that I need to take with me tommorrow. Since the registered letter informing me of the appointment has yet to arrive, my plan was to print out the webportal notification to show alongside the SMS.

Good ol' Murphy's Law: the portal has been tits up all day. And this time, tits up means TITS UP. Nothing was coming up, and a traceroute showed an unreachable destination in the Poste's servers. Oh joy.

I just now managed to pull the site up, and I've gotta laugh.



The immediate, facile snark would incorporate Microsoft (the portal is ASP), the Poste and 'recipe for disaster'. But really? I get the feeling that the massive infrastructure needed for this 'new' procedure was either poorly thought out, executed poorly, not tested enough, or all of the above. And when one of those options happens, somebody's going to be frentically patching holes 'till the cows come home. You'd almost feel sorry for whoever's doing the patching, until you think about how much money the government's tossing at tech. (article is in Italian by noted comic-cum-activist Beppe Grillo)

Surely there's enough money somewhere in there to buy a few more hard disks for the webservers, n'est pas?

Kitchen Geek

One of the coolest things my mom ever did was make a family cookbook for her daughters. She printed up or scanned the handwritten index card of favorite family recipes, put a photo of the relative above the recipe, and slapped 'em into a type of photoalbum-cum-binder with plastic covered pages.

And today, prompted by a metafilter post about various foodstuffs, I've got another 20 bookmarks of recipes I'd like to try out. Which prompted me to search for recipe managment software as the recipe folder of my bookmarks is getting unweildy.

Recipe software reccommdations have been requested numerous times on ask.metafilter. Problem is, I don't want to download and assload of free-trials to see if they that special feature I'm looking for:

Conversion between American & metric measurements.

Everytime I'm cooking from a recipe, I have to hit GourmetSleuth and 'translate' each ingredient adn temperature. Pain. in. the. ass. Soemtimes I can 'eyeball' it, but I only do that when making stuff I know by heart, like Grandma's ragu. Anything involving baking or dough from scratch, I need measurements.

A bonus feature for this dream software would pull ifno from the Cooks Thesarus - because buttermilk & cheddar cheese can be neigh impossible to find here.

So, for all five of you who still read this blog, know of any decent recipe software?

I'm not really limited to a specific OS, as I have Linux & WinXP, while the Fiancee's laptop is a Mac. But I would like to avoid the latter as I don't want to have to steal his laptop everytime I want to stick in or look up a recipe.

Bush Visits Rome, Romans Respond

I'm unable to link to the original photos as La Repubblica has recently changed their photo galleries to some non-standards compliant Flash bullshitwidget, hence the screenshots.

Typical Roman sayings? Ok...



And...



Loose Translation: "Oy Colombus. Couldn't you have just minded your own fucking business?"

To Frou-Frou or Not To Frou-Frou...

...that is the question.

Diverting myself from work for a minute or 30, I've been looking at the wedding dress collections of a store on Corso Vittorio that always caught my eye even when I was thoroughly single and poo-pooed the idea of ever being officially hitched. The window display is always striking and the unique dresses would appeal to almost every girl's inner principessa.

Perusing the collections on the website, however, I find myself torn. Said inner principessa always loved the intricate costumes from the ballet days of yore, the yards of tulle and embroidery and what have you frou-frouery.

But the total slut side is saying, "There's no way in hell you'll be able to get a quick shag in the cloakroom while wearing a bell of tulle, darling."