Joe's Blög

It’s currently 22° and raining. I’m wearing a sweatshirt.
I guess this can only mean that I’ve adjusted to the warm weather here. It’s actually been quite a pleasant summer. There was only 1 week where the weather was unbearably hot and that was without having a fan. It’s been really nice since then. Even when it’s hot there’s usually a nice breeze here. The hottest time of the day seems to often be in the morning. It’s kind of deceptive on a hot day to go to work in the heat and have it (seemingly) be cooler when you get off work.

and on a totally different topic.
There’s a waitress I don’t really know named “Isa” – I assume that’s short for Isabella, but I’m not sure…anyways I was reminiscing about a different time I met someone named Isabella and my immediate comment was something like “Oh, do you go around converting non-christians at swordpoint”…The problem with my humour is that it’s a stretch for even english speakers to get (think spanish inquisition)…if I make a joke like that with a non native speaker they have to connect about 4 dots to get the joke (swordpoint is probably a word they’ve never heard)…and even then the joke isn’t funny. Just sort of an off-hand remark (or “witty retort” if you will).
There are basically two reactions from a non-native speaker to this sort of comment I make…1) confused look or 2) laughter…but not real laughter, just the sort of laughter indicating that I said something frickin hilarious and they’re laughing out of principle (cuz they know how hilarious I am) – even though they don’t get it…

This in turn makes me think of a comment Matt made to me once about having a non-native speaker for a girlfriend…I’ve had germans get almost irritated at me for making a witty/sarcastic remark. No matter how hilarious it was they seemed annoyed at having to connect dots in search of humour.

Another thing I noticed today (cuz it was raining all day)…The Italians are much better than the germans at recognizing umbrella status whilst walking on a sidewalk.
I think I mentioned a long time ago that if you’re walking in Germany without an umbrella (on a sidewalk) towards someone with an umbrella the person with the umbrella doesn’t seem to register the fact that you’re hugging the building to avoid rain because you don’t have an umbrella and they expect you to move out into the rain to get out of their way…(I hope that explanation made sense). The Italians are the opposite. If a person is walking towards you and they have an umbrella – and you don’t – they will make a point to move away from the building and into the rain so you can stay on the building side.
This is very nice of them

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A paste of the full article linked right here:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/who_can_we_blame_for_job_losse.html

“Obama’s America,” tweets Republican political consultant Patrick Ruffini, linking to this map of economic devastation.

Fairly or not, Ruffini raises an interesting question: How much unemployment can we blame on the Obama administration? Economist Rob Shapiro dug into some Bureau of Labor Statistics data and came back with the best numbers I’ve seen on the subject. He separated job losses into two buckets: Those that happened before the stimulus, which was Obama’s major effort to deal with joblessness, and those that happened after the stimulus. Here’s what he found:

From December 2007 to July 2009 – the last year of the Bush second term and the first six months of the Obama presidency, before his policies could affect the economy – private sector employment crashed from 115,574,000 jobs to 107,778,000 jobs. Employment continued to fall, however, for the next six months, reaching a low of 107,107,000 jobs in December of 2009. So, out of 8,467,000 private sector jobs lost in this dismal cycle, 7,796,000 of those jobs or 92 percent were lost on the Republicans’ watch or under the sway of their policies. Some 671,000 additional jobs were lost as the stimulus and other moves by the administration kicked in, but 630,000 jobs then came back in the following six months. The tally, to date: Mr. Obama can be held accountable for the net loss of 41,000 jobs (671,000 – 630,000), while the Republicans should be held responsible for the net losses of 7,796,000 jobs.

We can argue about how much of the job losses should really be pinned on Republicans or Republican policies, of course. Financial deregulation happened under Bill Clinton, for instance. And it’s hard to hold George W. Bush solely responsible for a global financial crisis. But insofar as the job losses go, it’s hard to credibly blame this White House for the vast, vast majority of them.

That said, though this wasn’t Obama’s economic crisis, it is his economic recovery. There’s a fair question as to whether another set of policies could’ve led to faster job growth over the last year or so. And the recent shakiness in the recovery is cause for concern on that front. So it’s worth looking at Shapiro’s proposal to strengthen the recovery, too:

First, create jobs by expanding an Administration initiative already in place: Deep cuts in the payroll tax for employers who expand their workforce. Second, shore-up the weak housing market and stabilize falling home prices with a long-overdue, new initiative: A loan program for homeowners with mortgages in trouble, modeled on federal student loans, to bring down foreclosure rates. Third, prepare tens of millions of Americans for the jobs the economy will begin to create once it’s back on track: Provide grants to community colleges to fund free computer training for any American adult who walks in and asks for it. And fourth, put in place some long-term deficit reduction to head off higher interest rates when the economy does begin to expand again.

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I’m booked for Oktoberfest this year. Which is to say I’ve got a flight, but no accommodations. I’m the best traveller ever!
This will be my first Oktoberfest tho. Should be a fun weekend! Hopefully Pete and I can find some Mexican food there. I’m sure Pete knows where to go…

Thanks Piero for acknowledging my incredible musical taste today. It’s amazing a man of your advanced years sometimes has a valid opinion

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I’m not sure where I heard of her, but I kind of like her. Nothing particularly original about her I suppose, but still listenable (and lookable – hot birds with angst .

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So today I learned two new phrases thanks to my colleagues (Cristina: “I’m really worried for your italian”)…

“Tu hai il cula pesante”. Which means you have a very heavy ass…which means you are lazy. I had to think if there was a similar saying in english about being lazy…I supposed not. I’ve heard “lard ass” or “fat ass”, but those are saying to indicate one is fat, not lazy.

The other EXTREMELY VALUABLE saying I learned was “vado a pisciare in piscina”. Which is: “I’m going to piss in the pool”.
due to previous knowledge I know that adding -are to some words makes it a verb. I believe “piss” is piscio or something similar.
this latin stuff is easy
If one was 4 years old I suppose one might use “pipì” instead of pisciare. Makes me wonder if the english of “pee” came before or after pipì…a valid question.

Matteo and Massimo are bursting with class

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The Italians thinks it’s odd that I’m not taking any holidays in August. I guess that’s the normal thing to do here. The office is a bit empty…

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It’s been a while since I’ve done that eh?

So last night whilst spending a bit of time with the frenchie (via Brussels), and the world citizen (swiss-ghana via Paris) it occured to me again that people who are living outside their own country seem much more interesting than people living inside their own country.
I assume this is due to the open-mindedness one needs to leave their homeland. It’s just sort of a subliminal mindset you have to carry with you. Not something us foreigners think about after a certain amount of time (hey, I’m a foreigner. I don’t fit in here!).
To be clear this is completely different than being a tourist somewhere.

This reminds me a bit of my friend Luca from Frankfurt. He’s Italian, but I know him from Frankfurt. I spent a few days with him in rome at x-mas time and it was just slightly different to see him in his own country around his own friends and family. Not a huge difference, but a very subtle difference in…timing…
that’s a weird word to use, but I’m not sure how else to describe it. Just slightly more at ease and maybe it’s the language thing. He was speaking more italian than english (with his friends etc). Whereas in Frankfurt he had to speak his second language the whole time. It’s definitely more than language, but that’s an obvious thing…

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This question occurred to me the other night and it reminded me of way back in school days (a waaay fuzzy memory) when I used to love starting a story with one sentence and then passing it to friends who would also write one sentence and pass it on.
I don’t know where I got the idea (I always find out later that it was never really my idea – I probably overheard it/them somewhere else), but I always seemed to enjoy it more than my friends. We’d sometimes have several going at once so that I didn’t have to wait more than 2 minutes to get something passed to me

Anyways it’s best to do this with just a few friends because at some point someone had the bright idea to pass it to every single person in the class (whether they knew how it was supposed to work or not)…Somehow that one ended up in the teachers hands (and even worse it had morphed into a story about the teacher – haha).

One time I tried this and one guy I didn’t know basically took the 4 sentences that had been written so far and proceeded to write about 10,000 words on his own. This irritated me

Anyways so I had a brilliant idea for my novel (yes, a midget is the main character and yes in the final scene he is shot out of a cannon – to his death btw) and at the same time realized everything is crowd sourced these days (didn’t that guy from weezer do a whole album this way?)…but has anyone used google docs or something to say write a beginning, middle and end to a story (or more like plot points really), and then turned it loose onto the net with some mechanism to allow the owner to edit it, but not allow any one person to write more than a few sentences/paragraphs/pages at a time?

As usual I thought of this on my own, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of it…

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Last night went with some colleagues and a few strangers to a Sagra…It took about 2 hours to discuss the proper translation of sagra. I think they all were satisfied with “country fest”.
As I’m told most villages in Italy have a sagra every year which consists of traditional music, rustic food, picnic tables and wine (whilst sitting under olive trees in this case).
Lots of fun!!! I wish I had gone to one sooner.

Took a few pics, but as it was dark they didn’t all turn out well…

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hahaha…is this guy a tea bagger at the weekends? Maybe he should focus on keeping “shit my dad says” off the air
The Euros can just ignore this…This is for americans.

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