Passed on by Kim Darnell, a BBC News piece from the 5th by Dany Mitzman, “The day I ordered pizza that ‘doesn’t exist'”:
Bologna, Italy — One of my favourite things about living in Italy is the pizza, and it’s recently given me an insight into how our brains are wired differently.
Pizza has taught me that logic can be subjective and that subjective logic can be cultural. It has also made me humbly realise that, in some ways, I’ll probably always be considered here as an ignorant foreigner.
Some background for a posting on Italian names for pizza. It’s about the names for food, with some parallels to common names for plants.
A recent PHD Comics:
C (Count) — and PL — or M (Mass) — and SG — that is the question. But, yes, you need more than one data point.
[Addendum: I have added a Page about postings on C/M, here.]
The Zits from the 7th:
Jeremy is given to responding to what people say in perfectly literal terms, not taking account of their reasons for framing things the way they do. He’s deliberately no good at Gricean relevance — a tactic that, by his lights, allows him to do nothing at all in situations where people (in particular, his mother) are trying to get him to do something.
As here. Jeremy’s mother asks him a question about his ability, a standard form of indirect request, framed this way out of politeness, so as to avoid issuing a direct command. But Jeremy takes her to be literally asking about his ability, a question asked only in case it might turn out that she wants his help in clearing the table.
(Warning: much of this posting is about gay porn and male hustling, and it refers in plain language to the male body and to male-male sexual acts; the photographs are not actually X-rated — such images are in a related posting on AZBlogX — but the posting is not for kids, the sexually modest, or the easily offended.)
In a comment on my posting about the Basque language and the Basques in the U.S., someone using the name “Dirty Harri” (it’s a joke, as you’ll see, a play on the title Dirty Harry) picks up a news story about disagreements in 2013 between Aitzol Azurtza, the president of the New York Basque Club, and the visiting Iñigo Urkullu, the president of the Basque Government. During this contretemps, it was revealed (by others) that Azurtza had had a career in gay porn, under the stage name Antton Harri; Azurtza had come out some time before, but it was not generally known in the Basque world (in NYC or elsewhere) that he was a gay pornstar (of some repute), or indeed that he’d worked as a rentboy in NYC. Under the cloud of the porn revelations, Azurtza resigned his Basque Club position “for personal reasons” and not long after moved from New York to Palm Springs CA, where he lives now. A piece of reporting from the time:
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(On the left, Azurtza in business suit. On the right, Harri in his work clothes.
After yesterday’s picnic breakfast at the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, two attractive plants noted blooming in the garden: Chrysopsis villosa and Amaryllis belladonna. Checking up on them led off into other stuff, rather surprisingly in the first case.
Time to go to the beach. On Culebra, from Wikipedia:
Isla Culebra (… “Snake Island”) is an island-municipality of Puerto Rico. It is located approximately 17 miles (27 km) east of the Puerto Rican mainland, 12 miles (19 km) west of St. Thomas and 9 miles (14 km) north of Vieques. Culebra is spread over 5 wards and Culebra Pueblo (Dewey), the downtown area and the administrative center of the city. Residents of the island are known as Culebrenses. With a population of 1,818 as of the latest census, it is Puerto Rico’s least populous municipality.
The place wins some kind of prize for being the least populous municipality in P.R.! But it embraces even smaller places.
Today’s Zippy:
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It’s the whole package …
This is Mel’s Diner in Lebanon PA:
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From the RoadsideArchitecture site:
Mel’s Diner is an O’Mahony from 1955. This was previously the Lincoln Diner.
In the NYT Magazine on Sunday the 2nd, “The Miracle of Preserves”
by Tamar Adler, with this illustration (photo by Grant Cornett):
Mushrooms make a delicious base for vegetables à la grecque
The recipe is worth checking out; here I’m just savoring the phallic photo.
In the NYT on the 5th,”A Taste of Basque Paella Amid Idaho’s Potatoes” (the on-line head) by Kirk Johnson, beginning:
Boise, Idaho — When the president of the Basques arrived here in Idaho’s capital from Europe late last month, the mayor stepped in to interpret for him into English from Basque, one of the world’s most ancient and difficult languages.
“Boise is part of Basque Country,” said the mayor, David H. Bieter, in an interview, explaining his role. [Basque Country is the customary name for the Basque regions of Spain and France, viewed as an entity.]
Mr. Bieter’s brother, John, a professor of history at Boise State University who was at the time running an academic conference across town about all things Basque — coordinated with the weeklong festival that had drawn the president, Iñigo Urkullu — said he could not agree more.
“If you’re into Basque studies,” he said, “this is Christmas.”
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A giant puppet, a Basque tradition, at the Jaialdi festival in Boise, Idaho
Two things here: the claim that the Basque language is one of the world’s most ancient and difficult languages; and something of the story of the Basques in the U.S.