Sailing against the tide
Getting a flu with heavy cough just as I was preparing to travel from Italy to Spain, I bought a pot of delicious “linden honey from the tuscan hills” to sooth my throat, but it was confiscated at the Amerigo Vespucci airport on Uncle Sam’s orders. Apparently, even solid-type honey counts as a “liquid” and…
Gemma Saint Gemma Galgani was born in 1878 into a poor family in a small village near Lucca, but they soon moved to Lucca as her father, a pharmacist, found work there. She was the fifth of eight siblings, only two females, the rest males. As it happened to other poor people at the time,…
In one of the stories by Frank O’Connor, “The Ugly Duckling” — the title is of course a reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale, but this story about a tomboy girl is as Irish as it gets — there is a wonderful observation about certain types of people who, because of certain inadequacy…
It has snowed for the first time just a few days ago and the city is still all covered in white. There is something magical about the first snow of the year. And even if, months later, you get absolutely tired of all that white and cold and yearn for spring and flowers and warmth,…
It seems that there have just been some riots in Dublin. The details are not very clear, but apparently a few schoolchildren were stabbed by an Algerian migrant, right on Parnell Square, which led to fighting and then to a more generalized anti-government riots, with cars being burned and clashes with the police which are…
In Latin America, it is customary for governments to alternate between “right-wing” pro-American populists and “left-wing” anti-American populists. Last year, Bolsonaro was replaced by Lula in Brazil; now Argentina, with the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction, ousted the left-wing peronista government and elected right-wing populist Javier Milei. The conventional wisdom is that the rightists…
Is the Pope Catholic? For a long time, this was a rhetorical question, similar to the question about where do bears relieve themselves. But as of late, it has become an actual question, with no clear answer, or maybe a negative answer. Something very strange is happening in the heart of the Catholic Church. I…
There was a construction going on for months near my place, and every morning at 7 AM they would start this annoying BEEP-BEEP sound that pierces your ears and can be heard from a block away. Even after construction ended, I could still hear the sound in my mind. I think it permanently damaged by…
The other day I started playing with one of those new “AI art” tools. Bing’s one is the most popular, I suppose, but it’s also the most heavily censored. So I tried to play a bit around the politically correct filters. It was no surprise that all kinds of ethnic or religious descriptions were forbidden….
In George Orwell’s classic novel “1984”, the records of past history are constantly being modified by workers at the Ministry of Truth. As a Party member observes: “He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future.” Orwell had been, of course, inspired by Soviet communism, where Stalin would…