Category Archives: Travel notes

Nowhere in Europe is really isolated any more, but Ithaca remains hard to reach. The boat from Patras takes 4 hours. Patras itself has no airport and is four hours by road from Athens, or fourteen hours by ferry from … Continue reading → Continue reading →

In my hotel brochure in Jerusalem there was a story about a sculptor, the daughter of a holocaust survivor. Almost all her mother’s Polish family had been killed — Grandpa had gasoline injected into his vein; one brother was made … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Moment café on Gaza Street in Jerusalem serves very good sandwiches. I know because I ate there twice, appreciating also the fact that it was never in the least bit crowded. At least before nine I never saw more … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Mass tourism is pretty horrible. But to see a city where tourism has died off is ghastly. Of course, it looks absurd to come to Jerusalem and see the city’s problems as primarily touristic, but I’m not sure that the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m off to Israel until Sunday, so there may be no posts till then. It all depends on business and connectivity. Continue reading →

The textbooks will tell you that the painters of the renaissance had mastered naturalistic representations of the human form. So what is this woman doing in the fresco’ed roof of the collonade of palazzo Santini in Lucca? There is an … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Just back from a three day trip to Lucca — more later — to find SpamAssassin outmanoevred again — 440 spams on the server; 220 made it down to my spam folder. One of those was legitimate. But the number … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I think of buffyspeak, and (I’m,like,) totally not Mohammed. But one of the distinguishing features is the lack of punctuation, and the fact that you’re expected to hear a voice shifting constantly to represent different speakers. In fact the correct … Continue reading → Continue reading →

It is cruel and old-fashioned to laugh at machine translations. But whoever decided that their web site on florence could be translated more profitably by Google than by a professional human being deserves to be mocked. without further ado: Who … Continue reading → Continue reading →