Little bites

• This morning I'm bursting with schadenfreude. If you're reasonably plugged in, you probably already know this, but the NYPD (having learned nothing from Big Oil, Wall Street, and others) tried to launch a social media campaign yesterday. It didn't turn out as planned. If I were to tweet a photo identified with "#MyCPD", it would be of a mass of officers cycling the wrong way on the one-way street alongside our apartment.
• One of the things we picked up at Mariano's the other day were sweet yellow tomatoes. I tried eating them and though I didn't have as strong a gagging reaction as I do with ordinary non-hothouse tomatoes, it was still there. We also bought an heirloom variety that's nearly white, so I'll try again with that, but I'm not holding out hope.
• Yesterday at the staff do, I mistook tapenade for "hippie nutella". My coworker asked if that was "made with real hippies". I replied that it would be made with the dirt washed off of them, and then point out that for that reason it could only be made in the spring when it was time for their annual scrub. We started talking about the finer point of various vintages and how easy it was to identify terroir from such things as the dominance of patchouli notes.
• I'm caught up with Mad Men again. I've been trying to watch the episodes on a week's delay because Comcast has an annoying glitch that causes small skips in feed for the first several days, but I really wanted to see what was happening with Joan's story arc. monshu wants to dive into Game of Throne, which would probably prompt me to bump up our service to two-at-a-time so I could still catch the occasional poignant tale of childhood and loss.

Chwedl plentyndod a choll

As an example of the kind of movies I was reference in the last post, the other day I watched Submarine. At first it seemed an odd choice for the directoral debut of Ayoade (best known to American viewers as Moss in The IT Crowd), but as it advanced, I could see how well his sensibility suited the material. Yeah, it's another awkward teen romance centred on a cerebral and sensitive man-child, but his love object isn't a manic pixie and, as Ebert perspicaciously notes, the experiences aren't "filtered through the sensibility of more weathered minds" as so often the case.

It brought to mind Moonrise Kingdom on the one hand and Flirting on the other--which made me even more squeeful to discover that star of the latter Noah Taylor plays the protagonist's übergeeky marine biologist father. The scene where he tries to give his son romantic advice is so excruciatingly but hilariously awkward that I insisted monshu watch it again with me. Sally Hawkins is his match as the quietly neurotic mother; with parents like those, it's impossible for their son not to be the kind of baroque piece of work who conducts "routine inspections of [his] parents' bedroom".

Of course, what tipped me off to Taylor's Australian origins is that he never does quite have the accent down. Many of the actors don't, but that seems to be par for the course with feature films filmed in Wales. Michael Sheen was apparently tapped for a role--whether as the father or not I don't know--but had to drop out. Gavin and Stacey's Steffan Rhodri and Melanie Walters both have smaller roles, and Wales' answer to Brian Blessed, Sion Tudor Owen, has a noteworthy cameo. But aside from adolescent star Craig Roberts, all the other principals are English and sound it.

Jordi ha arribat!

Hurrah! Once again, Amazon came through: When I slipped into the entryway, my St George's Day surprise for the GWO was right there waiting for me and I was able to casually discard my Plan B. As a bonus, he'd gotten too distracted to check the post so there was no risk of him finding out. (They delivered to our neighbour the same day, so there was at least even odds he'd read that label and assume neither package was for us. But I'd rather the sure thing.)

When I brought up the Economist review at the breakfast table, he agreed that Mai Jia's Decoded looked like an interesting read, but he was content to wait for it to come out in paper. That's when I knew he was getting it. Of course, I cannot resist of the lure of Super Saver Shipping, so I slipped in a couple titles for me as well: Pietro di Donato's Christ in concrete and Ben Okri's Famished road.

I'm ready for another English-language novel, having just finished Fulvio Tomizza's Materada. That was a solid read. There's a lot of local colour and affection for his hometown, but the sentimentality us kept nicely in check. I think it helps that the protagonist is older (30s rather than 20s) and the events are so recent (it was penned only five years after his family relocated to Trieste). But while it might be nice to follow it with the rest of his Istrian Trilogy, I know there's no way I'd ever get through that much Italian. (Only the first book has been translated into English.)

It's given me a bit of wanderlust for the languages of the area, particularly Venetian and Friulian. If there were only a bit more support for these languages, I might try learning them for real. (I'm just not really one for poetry these days.)