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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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

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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Plains of old Nebrasky-o

Program 8 Broadsides in the Sounds to Grow On series contained some wonderful songs, and some terrible ones (Song for Patty, anyone?). Some early Bob Dylan, some early Bob Dylan wannabees, some glorious others. But how could I resist a song that starts

In school I...

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