A few pictures from a very special day at the park, in Monza.
This is where I am with respect to Italian politics… I agree with no one’s position, but I already knew it.
Another service compares my positions with those of the available parties… this could help me on the election day 
Here are some pictures from the past (long) weekend. They’re from Bergamo, Monza, and there’s also the Venezuelan Cuatro Veronica gave me as a present… that’s cool!
Last week I finished reading “A short history of tractors in Ukrainian” by Marina Lewycka, another Amazon recommendation I trusted. It is the story of a family of Ukrainian post-WWII emigrants living in England. When the old father decides to re-marry with a young Ukrainian, his two daughters (long parted because of a fight over their dead mother’s will) unite to stop him. Even if it is very light entertainment, the story has a captivating plot and is ultimately very well written and enjoyable. I don’t think this book can find a place in my top 10, but I had a good time with it.
I forgot to do my weekly English homework, so I asked my girlfriend to provide me with a topic to write 150 words about. She came up with: “Why don’t you write about those colleagues who bother you and make you waste all that time?” I must admit she listens when I mumble, at least from time to time.
My office is the first door in the corridor, so it often happens that people stop by just to chat for some minutes, as a matter of courtesy – the problem is that this happens way to often in a day. I read somewhere that a good way to get rid of people coming to bother at your workstation is to simply continue to stare at the PC screen, possibly with a blank expression. Well, this is the first tactic I tried but it seems not to work. Moreover, some people started to simply come by my side to look at my screen! As a consequence, I have to pay attention at what I am (publicly) displaying. I think I will need to look for something better, or maybe just invent something new and then publish it. I think I could get more money from a book about annoying colleagues than from scientific publications. If only Dilbert strips weren’t so real!
Reading what Bruce Sterling wrote on Wired about Italian national Anthem I’ve only one thing to say: you suck Bruce. (Isn’t this the way he seems to be used to comment on other nations?)
Somewhat like the American national anthem, which is all about having the British blow the living dayights out of some American fort in 1812, the Italian national anthem dates back to the 1860s and is full of sanguinary, bayonet-charging 19th-century enthusiasms.
So what? And, by the way Bruce, there are better sources than Wikipedia.
Is there another explanation for working here?
The homework of the week (for the English course I am attending) was to look for conditionals in the book I’m reading. In the hundred pages I’ve read this week I found only one conditional sentence:
“If she loved you she would be here right now.” (p. 74)
What can the reasons for this scarcity be?
- The novel is mostly written in the present tense, with a descriptive style and very few hypothetical sentences;
- Conditionals are mostly used in spoken conversations, rather than in writing – unless writing is about conversations. The novel is about Ukrainians, whose conversations are not very elaborate (in style);
- Italians like to use conditionals, due to the Latin inheritance of our language, way more than native English speakers do.
But these are only my two cents, jotted down a couple of minutes before the lesson after a very short reflection.
