Month: June 2006

Totti!

I think I’m one of the few blog-writers to have easy access to a copy of Tutte le Barzellette su Totti (with a preface by the great man himself), so here’s a sample:

Totti cerca di finire un puzzle. ci mette quasi quattro mesi. Poi gira la scatola e legge: “Dai due ai tre anni”. Commenta: “Ahò, ma allora so’un genio!!!”.

Totti jokes are quite similar to David Beckham jokes, but in Italian and with bits of Roman slang (which I don’t usually understand) thrown in. I don’t know whether Beckham or Totti jokes came first, or whether, as with the differential calculus or neo-classical economics, it is basically a case of simultaneous discovery.I thought it was a penalty, anyway. Lucas Neill sort of lay down in front of Fabio Grosso and invited him to trip over him, which isn’t terribly sporting.

UPDATE [27.06.2006]: The resident Italian police-bear is quite pleased, too:

Early Modern Carnivalesque

Welcome to the latest Early Modern instalment of Carnivalesque, hosted for the first time at the Virtual Stoa, and with apologies for appearing a little later than I think I said it would.

Kicking off in Tudor England, we’ve got another entry in the Dead King Watch, conceivably inspired by a regular feature on this blog, who knows?, with this one devoted to Edward VI.

Something Earmarks saw on telly brought Thomas Wright�s 1604 The Passions of the Minde in Generall to mind.

Misteraitch over at Spamula has been considering the artist Jacques de Gheyn, 1565-1629.

And while we’re thinking about artists in the Low Countries, the Interesting Thing of the Day a few days ago was a discussion of the possible use of a camera obscura by Johannes Vermeer.

Crossing back over the Channel, Escalus is advertising the Early Modern English Ballad Archive and shares a favourite ballad, “A Looking-Glass for Lascivious Young Men: OR, THE Prodigal Son SIFTED”, together with a bit of discussion and an attempt to date it to the 1680s.

And it’s ballads ballads ballads at the Carnivalesque, with Blogging the Renaissance telling us all about “My Bird is a Round-head”, a fine ballad from 1642.

Continuing the Puritan theme for a short while, at least, Early Modern Whale interested in face patches, and in what puritans thought about them (not keen).

And moving towards the broad sunny uplands of the eighteenth century, David Davisson has helpfully reproduced the text of a 1773 Connecticut law against mountebanks and told us a bit about his proposed research on itinerancy in colonial America…

… Brandon Watson has some valuable words and links about Moses Mendelssohn…

… and we end over at The Skwib with its presentation of lost power point slides of the Marquis de Sade…

Cricket

I kept wicket for sixty overs yesterday, and for the first half of the morning it’s been pretty difficult getting down the stairs. When I bent over to feed the cats, I made an involuntary strangulated miaowing sound, which took them a little by surprise, but not so much to put either of them off their breakfast.

TCB [Unusual Thursday Edition]

There haven’t been many cat pictures recently. Andromache’s still pretty hard to photograph indoors, and as the weather’s been getting better, Enkidu in particular has been spending longer and longer outside, away from my camera lens. (Although I think if it stays as warm as this, they’ll be spending more time back indoors, as I doubt it’s that much fun being a furry animal in bright sunshine.) Anyway: here’s Enkidu:

And here’s Andromache: