No country for old men*
Recently, the Italian government passed a draft of a law that would require all bloggers and users of social networks to register with the state and even pay a tax for using the internet. Ignoring the logistics of enforcing such a ridiculous, unenforceable law, it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t last for long in a ‘normal’ country, never mind one as corrupt as Italy. So it’s not something that’s been worrying me (and for the amount I’ve actually been blogging recently, I’d only owe about five cents tax).
However, one good thing to come out of this whole furore has been Bernhard Warner’s article for the times, which gives my favourite explanation of why things are done in Italy as they are.
By G8 standards, Italy is a strange country. Put simply, it is a nation of octogenarian lawmakers elected by 70-year-old pensioners. Everyone else is inconsequential.
Romano Prodi, the Prime Minister, is a spry 68, knocking off 71-year-old Silvio Berlusconi in last year’s election. President Giorgio Napolitano, 82, has six more years left on his term; his predecessor was 86 when he called it quits. In the unlikely event that Italy declares war, the decision will come from a head of state who was a month shy of 20 when the Germans surrendered at the end of the Second World War.
This creaky perspective is a necessary introduction to any discussion about Italian politics with outsiders, I find. If the Italian Government seems unable to adapt to the modern world, the explanation is quite simple. Your country would operate like this too if your grandparents were in charge.
(* with apologies to Yeats/Coen Brothers)
This party’s dead anyway
The temperature here has plummeted. We’re talking two-duvets cold. To the point where I’m now squatting over the toilet to avoid touching the cold, cold toilet seat. Our apartment building uses centralized heating, but doesn’t turn it on until the first of November, so until then we’re putting our air conditioning into ‘heat’ mode and heating individual rooms as best we can. But in a weird way, I kind of like it. I’m used to this kind of weather. I can deal with it. Apparently the Italians can’t, and the city has been extremely quiet the last few days. Everyone’s bailed to somewhere with a warmer climate.
And they’re not the only ones. The birds, too, are beginning their migration. Now, I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve always ‘known’ that birds migrate. Just like I ‘know’ that atoms exist and I ‘know’ that size doesn’t matter - birds migrate because that’s what the books say and I just took it on faith that ‘migration’ wasn’t part of an elaborate practical joke to weed out the gullible (see also: dinosaur fossils). Twenty-eight years and I’ve never really seen a migration that didn’t have David Attenborough talking over it.
Right now I’m watching what seems to be every single bird in Rome start their migration, and it is both awesome and terrifying. It’s an wide, unending line of birds that stretches from the horizon to just over my house. And these are mostly small birds, so they’re fast and playful, and they’re whirling around each other, making the line undulate sickeningly - creepy in the way that only nature can be. I swear to Christ, when I first saw it, I thought I was about to be attacked by the fucking smoke monster from Lost.
I was reading Band of Brothers recently, and seeing these birds instantly reminded me of the part in the book where the paratroopers heading off to Normandy on D-Day looked down and saw the invasion fleet, 6,000 vessels strong. So good luck, little birds. The eyes of the world are upon you.
Well, the eyes of my apartment anyway.
EMERGENCY
New business idea
A couple of weeks ago, I said I was thinking of getting rid of my DVD collection. I mentioned this to a couple of friends over dinner at the weekend, and we hit on another way to make money from them.
A new project was born:
Summer is here
Well, summer has certainly begun here. And it’s almost making me wish we’d been sent to Addis Ababa instead. There, it’s a relatively cool 20°C. That’s not so different from Dublin. Except for the slightly increased risk of malaria.
Artist’s impression of me, today:
They eat horses, don’t they?
Italian Music
When I moaned about Italian music before, I admitted I hadn’t looked very hard to find something good. And, in my defence, it’s easy to be a little dismayed when you’re bombarded by Michael fuckin’ Buble in all the shops. But things are picking up! Here are two songs I like right now.
Continue reading Italian Music
Fire on the metro
You know, it’s getting to the stage where I’ve got half a mind to rename this blog to “lowbrowcultureshocked“.
Today, I was up at the Irish College to get a mass card for an aunt who died recently. To get home, I decided to get the Metro at the Colosseum. Now, I should probably explain that there are two metro lines in Rome. Metro A has been recently revamped and now all the trains and most of the stations are pretty. Metro B, on the other hand, is dingy and ugly. All the trains are covered in graffiti outside and covered in piss and various other bodily fluids inside.
Colosseum is Metro B.
I’m in the station waiting for the Metro to arrive. It’s around lunchtime, so there’s not a lot of tourists leaving yet - they’re all inside the Colosseum, baking and sweating and wearing funny hats. The sign says there’s a train in three minutes. I drift back off into the dreamworld I go to when I’m wandering around Rome listening to my iPod (travel tip: this is the only way I have found to not constantly lose my shit at the lack of an orderly queuing system in Italy). Gradually, I start to smell smoke. I’m looking around, a couple of other people are sniffing too. But there’s no obvious fire, so no major panic yet. Then we get the buildup of wind that precedes a train coming down the line. Suddenly the train screams past as if it’s being chased by the devil himself. It’s totally dark except for the one carriage that is completely ablaze.
My mouth was still hanging open by the time the next train arrived. All the Italians shrugged as if this was entirely unremarkable and went back to wearing their giant sunglasses and looking like Hugo Boss models.
Failing Now.
Our Macbook had been crashing frequently over the past week or so. It would hang randomly when doing minor things, like copying a new program into the Applications folder. Sometimes it would take the computer two or three minutes to get itself together. Other times, it wouldn’t get itself together at all and a hard reboot was the only option.
Eventually, I took a look in Disk Utility. The hard drive was listed in red. It told me the disk was dying. I used smartmon to give me more information, and this is where I got the image at the top of this post - my “Reallocated Sector Count” was at 0, and my disk was “FAILING_NOW”. I’ll spare you the gory details of what this meant, but the shorthand version is “ABANDON SHIP! WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!”
What the world eats
I’m pretty sure this is old news, but Time Magazine is running excerpts of the book “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” on its website.
My favourite is the Ayme family from Ecuador, pictured above. It makes me wonder: are pork pie hats mandatory in Ecuador? If so, I’m booking a flight today.
This is my pork pie hat.
There are many like it, but this one is MINE.
My pork pie hat is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
My pork pie hat without me is useless. Without my pork pie hat, I am useless.
One thing that’s concerning me is the lack of processed foods in that picture. Surely they’d have a Subway or a McDonalds or something? Maybe one of those sacks is just full of spice burgers, I dunno.
Quick confession: A few days ago, I actually Googled “KFC Rome Italy”. I am weak.
Perspective
Four weeks ago:
Working at a computer for twelve hours a day, I’d go home and watch some really shit movie until the early hours of the morning. I’d go to sleep full of junk food and self-loathing.
Today:
After Italian class, I walked home in the sunshine, sat down beside the Pantheon and finished the Agatha Christie book I’d been reading (I’m 28 and never had time to read Agatha Christie before). Then I went home, ironed my girlfriend’s suit pants and monogrammed handkerchief, and got myself ready for dinner with the Irish president.
I don’t feel very different.
Insults and advertising
This week, I started an Italian language course which has really been helping me settle in. My pidgin Italian is starting to develop some structure (for ’structure’ read ‘actual verbs instead of grunts where verbs should be’) and I’m a lot more confident in dealing with people now that I have a better idea of what they’re saying.
Something I’m discovering is just how much you can learn a lot about a country from its insults. For example, one of the worst insults you can throw at someone in Italian is Cornuto, which means “cuckold”. You’ll hear this a lot in football games, Arbitore Cornuto! (”The Referee is a Cuckold!”). The other major insults include “ugly” and “homosexual”. There are loads of other, smaller ones, but these three - ‘cuckold’, ‘ugly’, ‘homosexual’ - are the ones that are likely to send an Italian into a rage and are usually saved for when someone has really pissed you off.
Maybe it’s the armchair psychologist in me, but I think this says a lot about the insecurities of Italian people.
Similarly, you can also learn a lot about a country from its advertisements. From what I’ve seen here, most ads seem to revolve around crime. For the most part, the ‘crimes’ are innocent enough. Like the TV ad that has a woman driver pleading with male driver to let her take his parking spot. She shows him her broken shoes, puts on her best puppy-dog face and the guy lets her in. Once she’s parked, she gets out of the car in - wouldn’t you know it? - perfect shoes.
But they’re not all so cute and cheerful. Adidas recently launched a shoe that has interchangeable gel pads in the soles. These come in all sorts of designs and aren’t really taking off here. The print ad shows a guy hiding from the police while quickly swapping his gel pads for ones of a different design.
And of course, there’s the other major source of advertising inspiration: sex. At worst, back home, these hover around the ’saucy’ end of the scale. Here, they’re positively explicit. Here’s an example:
It’s for a water park in Rome, but it took me ages to realise there was a water park in the picture too. The caption says “Slide with me” although, to me, it will always say “Come to aquapiper and you’ll get to have sex with me!”
(My favourite part of the ad is the “Bambini Gratis!” down the bottom, because the rest of the ad doesn’t make it look like somewhere I’d want to bring a child.)
Copyright © 2006-2008 lowbrowculture • Buy the ticket, take the uh.. ride.