Via Maqueda is a Spanish name, which the street takes from a viceroy of Sicily who was called – rather fetchingly, if you ask me – Bernardino de Cárdenas y Portugal, Duke of Maqueda. So originally the “que” was pronounced as “k,” but the Sicilians pronounce it the way an English speaker would read it.
Just as Congress is approving $40 billion in new aid to blow up Ukraine, the U.S. media is starting to admit Russia is winning, as I have pointed out since shortly after the war began
If the main domestic objective of the government-engineered COVID panic was to alienate Americans from their families, churches, and communities, to make them depend even more completely on the state—an objective the political class has largely obtained….
What’s the big story in America? Young parents going hysterical over a shortage of baby food. And what is the Republican response? Not that American children should grow up before having children of their own, but “We shouldn’t be sending baby food to concentration camps for illegal aliens.
The experience I’m about to relate is little different from Tom Sawyer’s in the famous episode of painting the fence. The point Mark Twain makes – that something is only fun when it isn’t a job – is far from incidental to the great American writer’s thinking, but instead runs through all his works, from his stories to his sketches and travelogues.
I know I test the gentle reader’s credulity when I say that I was among the first in the world to own a mobile phone, but it’s true. It was a Motorola flip job in matte black, and I received it as a gift from my father-in-law of the day, who in turn had received two samples of that novel contraption as a gift from the manufacturer.
After their recent holiday in Kiyv, SecDef Lloyd Austin and SecState Anthony Blinken actually told us the real reason for the war. And it isn’t to promote independence, freedom, democracy and liberty in Ukraine. The Ukrainians, dying by the tens of thousands, are just pawns in their game. So are the Russian troops also being slaughtered.
I share the gentle reader’s annoyance at the newfangled spelling of place names, and on coming across “Kyiv” or “Turkiye” it always seems to me that, like Rip Van Winkle, I had fallen asleep for many years and woke up in another world, bizarre, irrational, and just plain irksome.
Florence, over the weekend, seemed unchanged. The hordes of ill-dressed people are still shoving each other to get into see the Baptistery, cafes and restaurants are overcrowded, and prices even higher than in previous years. After our required visit to San Marco to see the Fra Angelico frescoes and breathe the spirit of Savonarola, we make our way to Fonticine, which a half dozen websites assure us is open. They lied, but who expects anything but lies from online sources (except this one, of course). Walking back by way of the Mercato Centrale, my wife spots a restaurant she remembers....
