Police tape and cops loitering

The yellow municipal tape has been up for a few days, warning drivers not to park along the street after midnight last night. And this morning, the street was almost clear, one or two stragglers being loaded onto tow vehicles. Cops of all stripes everywhere, and sniffer dogs, and important looking...

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It was a cold, raw day, which may be par for the course in northern Europe but is decidedly unpleasant here in Rome. Earlier in the week we’d agreed to go down to the Farmers’ Market in the old slaughterhouse to see if I could score more than 1 kg of flour at a time. So off we walked down across the...

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Advert for cashmere on the side of a bus, showing a sheep rather than a goat

Snapped on a bus this morning. See the animal there on the left? Does it look like a sheep to you? Does cashmere come from sheep? Would you buy “cashmere“ from a manufacturer that doesn’t know what animal produces cashmere? Not even at a 50% discount?

I’ve bleated about this before, in relat...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.6

Blast. Plateaued again.

The Economist alerted me to a paper in PLOS One by Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at the NIH in the US. The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact,1...

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Two Good Men

Album cover artwork Sacco and Vanzetti are two names that any vaguely left-leaning person will recognize. Come to that, maybe right-leaning ones will too. Their story is simple; known anarchists, they were framed for a murder that “they almost surely didn’t commit,” according to Entertainment Weekly,...

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