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i am waiting for the hillsides to be covered in poppies.
on the saturday afternoon diretto train to Florence i can already see the teletubby green starting to show through everywhere. there are men and women out with large-pocketed aprons, doing farmy-looking things to farmy-looking plants.
starlings are going absolutely *nuts* everywhere.
there is actually still light out when i leave work. well, some days anyway.
and morning jogs are presenting themselves as possibilities. only possibilities, mind you.
as are cafe shakeratos.
yay.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[lunedi 22 marzo 2004 ore 12:00:53] [¶]
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a biglietto multiplo for the ATAF bus system in Florence. three euros and ninety centesimi. so crumpled; i don't know if the little machine on the bus will be able to stamp it.
the one, long end-bead from my turquoise tasbih -- the one keepsake i was carrying around the world from Zainab and Daniel's nikah, for good luck -- before it broke.
crumbs from crackers i carried between tables at the brunello tasting consorzio in Montalcino last month.
my scontrino from this morning's two cafe macchiatos.
one euro seventy centesimi.
one, triangular, colored pebble from the beach at Positano. that night Ciro told me, that Francesca used to do the same thing.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[mercoledi 10 marzo 2004 ore 10:13:18] [¶]
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so, have been looking up some of the specifically Italian explanations for the origins of this yellowy mimosa-happy spring festival, and i find another link between where i was and where i am...
"Another story harkens back to the early days of New York City, when the Triangle Shirt Factory caught on fire. Locked inside the factory were 134 Italian women who were refusing to participate in a strike. They were tragically killed by the fire."
--- from Festa Della Donna - Yellow flowers mark International Women’s Day - By Darby Macnab
the article's not as detailed (or as accurate) as this one excerpted here from THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEW YORK CITY. and neither piece hints at why the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire is more than a random piece of new-york-city-trivia to me:
the former Asch Building still stands today, at 29 Washington Place in Greenwich Village, except that it's known as the Brown Building, and belongs to New York University. the University uses the building as a major classroom and lab center for its College of Arts and Sciences.
so.
i took freshman biology there. i mixed acids and alkalis for my Introduction to Chemistry on some of the same floors that those women burned in. i've taken the stairwell down from the ninth and tenth floors when the infamous Brown Building elevators slowed to a crawl between class sessions. i've even been in fire drills there.
hm.
see also:
THE LEGACY OF THE TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE
Triangle Fire: March 25, 1911; Victor Joseph Gatto (1893 -1965)
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[lunedi 8 marzo 2004 ore 11:01:42] [¶]
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so i don't read the new york times online every day -- i like being more viscerally intimidated by the print edition -- enough that, as you may have read, i am willing to pay twelve euros (TWELVE EUROS!) for it.
but occasionally i will browse through the front page online, and the Op-Ed section, because i love looking for things that A, piss me off; or B, show me that other people are pissed off.
so, while i cannot claim to be expertly familiar with the quality and consistency of the Times' online writing, and while i do understand that the Op-Ed *Contributors* section is a different beast than that of the Op-Ed Columnists section (or most of the paper, for that matter), i *do* think yesterday's contributor piece is pretty below-par for something that has the right to run under that brand. i am left to wonder, what "freewheeling international companies" have to do with "264 firms from Iran and 44 from rogue regimes like Syria and North Korea"? "60 tons of the heavy water were forwarded to India, where it enabled the government to use its energy-producing reactors to create plutonium for its atomic weapons program."? "A sample was delivered before the deal foundered when middlemen were caught by American officials in a sting operation"? maybe i'm nitpicking (and if i am, it's my blog, so i figure i'm allowed to) but, what happened to sentence structure, folks?
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[venerdi 5 marzo 2004 ore 10:03:46] [¶]
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the first of march and the snow is coming down in Lisciano Niccone like a slumberparty pillowfight. the office is in a tizzy about how we will get over the hill back to Cortona this evening. i wonder if they will have soup down at the (only existing) restaurant in this village. would you be able to get ribollita in an Umbrian restaurant, if the Umbrian restaurant was right on the border between Umbria and Tuscany? would it by default have to be bad ribollita? i grapple all morning with these, the really important questions in life...
yesterday was another, typically Italian food-centric sunday. i woke up in my new apartment, all set to have the much-planned and much-awaited pici & filetto di Chianina feast be the only meal of the day. instead, we had rigatoni con sugo d'anatra for lunch, a walk through the public gardens with a bagful of home-made chocolates from the pasticceria, a quick stop at Cavatappi for wine and a plate of prosciutto and cheese (and oh yes, wine), back home for a cup of tea, and um, then, that dinner of pici and filetto di Chianina. so this is what happens when you have one of those sky-high-metabolism Italian boyfriends hovering around... for the nineteenth time, i want to know, *how* is obesity not a problem in this country?
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[lunedi 1 marzo 2004 ore 12:31:39] [¶]
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