Tim Moore Fan Club

I just finished an awesome book, French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France. Author Tim Moore is a (purportedly) unathletic Brit who decides to cycle the Tour de France route. Being unathletic, British, and riotously sardonic, Moore naturally transforms his tour into one long misadventure. This is the same guy that walked the Camino de Santiago with an ass, and there too basically went looking for crazy things to happen. What he does is pretty amusing to begin with, but what he thinks about it (and what he thinks about in general) and how he says it are just wickedly funny. If I had to choose a writer-model, this would be the guy. Anyway, he’s too good to not tell you about. Here are a few of his lines that made me smile . . .

. . . Attracted perhaps by my attempt to encapsulate the works of Heronymous Bosch in a single sound, and perhaps by leaking ceiling, the proprietress had seen fit to enter my room at a moment which coincided unhappily with my wild, humid egress from the cubicle [shower].

. . . And though cycling might be the national sport of France, from what I saw that day strimming [weed-whacking] runs it a close second. Every garden and field buzzed with Canutean attempts to hold back the green tide, to keep the undergrowth from overgrowing. I even saw a couple of leather-faced fellers with scythes, which was pleasingly traditional. Death must be dreading the day when they upgrade him with a strimmer.

. . . I put the hammer down but it bounced back and smacked me in the teeth.

And also literarily pleasing but of primarily – ah . . . – “cultural” interest, Moore also makes me laugh with what he has to say about my adopted countrymates. If I were in sophisticated company and trying to be supremely diplomatic, I think I might respond to these comments with an “I can appreciate what you’re saying, Tim. More wine?” Actually, if I were in sophisticated company, I probably wouldn’t be discussing Tim Moore, and if I were somehow discussing Tim Moore, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t proffer these examples, but I think it would be cool if one could, in “sophisticated company,” discuss Tim Moore, as well as politics, sex, and religion. Furniture upholstery and regional weather peculiarities only take me so far. In any case:

. . . [He was sick to his stomach and uncomfortable all night:] As dawn prodded at the curtains I was still writhing and groaning like an ankle-tapped Italian footballer . . .

. . . They’ve never needed a Seventies revival in Italy: along with fare-dodging, drink-driving, and sexual molestation, littering is just another in the nation’s impressive roll-call of lingering period pastimes.

. . . Simon O’Brien had been at Nick and Jan’s place in the Pyrenees the night before the Tour passed their front door in 1997, and offered a stark warning of what can happen when you’re out there in the dark with a paintbrush, how your intended ALLEZ CHRIS can find itself evolving into an EVERTON FOOTBALL CLUB or a FUCK THE MANCS. The Italians, however, sated these unseemly urges in a more appropriately artistic manner. Their preferred icon was the erect penis, sometimes as an incidental prop in a scene depicting unpopular riders eagerly fellating or sodomising one another, but more commonly as a stand-alone icon, a vast, scarlet-frenumed, wispy-scrotumed deity solemnly spanning both sides of the carriageway.

And a final passage, which I think summarizes my current perspective perfectly, and explains why I am reasonably happy cleaning toilets for no money in France:

. . . Actually there was something else. Wheeling ZR [his bike] back out through the Holiday Inn’s automatic doors and into the misty sun I’d seen a roomful of sales-conference delegates staring bleakly into their Styrofoam cups as a bald man drew pie charts on an overhead projector; one of them turned to me as I cleated up and as our eyes met we both understood an important truth: however wretched my day might be, even if it meant going back to Belfort [254 km] and back, his was going to be far worse.

I think that says it! Rock trumps scissors, scissors trump paper, paper trumps rock, and toilets trump cubicles every time you play.

2008

Two thousand eight is a great year, in my opinion: Not only is it the International Year of the Potato, it's also the International Year of Languages.

Did you know . . .

. . . That there are over 1200 varieties of potatoes cultivated in the "potato park" at the International Potato Center in the Peruvian Andes!?

. . . That, of the 6700 languages in existence, about 50% are considered "in danger of disappearing," and that, in fact, one language does disappear every two weeks?

Thus, tomorrow I am going to eat a pomme de terre and study francais. (Not to be confused with eating french fries.)

The French Villa

The last month has been a blur for me. (But not for you, since I haven't written anything at all, so you're welcome for sparing you that slightly "twanged" feel I'm sure my Ashe-slant writing imposes, and sorry for not assuring you that I haven't, in fact, been kidnapped, though that's an apology you'll probably have to pass along since the kidnap-worriers are precisely the same subgroup as the non-computer-users. Anway, moving forward . . .) I finished up my last papers in Bologna. Packed up my apartment. Said goodbye-for-the-summer (isn't that a cottage song?) to everyone I knew. Flew to Salt Lake City (where they lost my bags). Did training in the Salt Lake City office of my new favorite company, Backroads (http://www.backroads.com/) - learned how to repair bikes, drive a trailer, and handle tricky customer service "challenges". I was so impressed - the training program, the trainers, and the leader-focus of the company just knocked my new bicycle-style socks (but not my new bike shorts, because they're spandex with a tight padded butt and thus remained firmly in place) off. And then, and then . . .

Went on a mock trip to Southern Utah - Bryce and Zion National Parks. This was awesome, and also holy-shite-level hot. On the awesome amazing side, it was beautiful. I slept my first night on the bank of a desert river. (Actually, as one of my co-leaders pointed out, it's not actually a desert. But it's sandy and sand-colored and cloudless and little-red-horned-guys-with-pokers hot, so I think the label is perfectly, though not scientifically - how do you like that one!? - justified, and I'm going to continue using it.) Since it was - yep - hot - I went tent-less and lay in my sleeping bag listening to the running water, peeking at the moon and the stars, and feeling impressed, even in my slumber, by the red sandstone cliff in front of me. With my training group, I made lots of fancy picnic lunches, did some public speaking exercises, went on some hikes and bike rides . . . and ate food prepared by camp chefs that you'd never in a million years guess didn't come out of a professional kitchen, enjoyed the company of my awesome co-leaders (at least most of the time - the too-many-leaders-in-one-campsite virus definitely unleashed a few strains of hyper-competitiveness), and learned a ton. It was really awesome. And then . . .

Got my summer assignment: Family Camping Trips in Southern Utah. Yep. While the Canyons were spectactularly beautiful, and I'm spectacularly in love with Backroads, I was less than thrilled with the assignment. It's all about the match, kind of like choosing a college, and looking at the three principal elements of the trips - "Family", "Camping", and "Desert" - none of them really got me going, especially since I really believed I was heading back to Italy to do trips that essentially focused on biking and gastronomy. But a miraculous intervention occurred, and . . . I write to you now from a villa in France! My scheduled changed at the last minute, and I'm now kind of an "all-Europe back-up." I'm stationed in the Leader House - although I prefer to refer to it, according to my mood, as either the "Villa" or the "Chateau" - in Provence, and I'm scheduled to do a trailer drive to the Czech Republic and to be on-call as a replacement leader for any last-minute leader injuries or the like. (And I guess they almost always use these on-call people, so - for me - that's great.)

Not bad, eh! (My two housemates right now are Canadian. I haven't yet heard any ehs flying around, though. I think it would be an interesting study to quantify eh usage per province. These guys are from Montreal.)

A picture game

I went to Terra Futura in Firenze last weekend. It was a conference on "sustainability" from all different perspectives. I learned about electric cars; indulged a vegan by letting her evangelize me for a while . . . and then had a little fun asking questions she couldn't quite answer; tried almond milk; saw an awesome concert in Piazza della Signoria; and saw a great film called "Merica". There's so much I "want to tell", but I'm disciplining myself until I finish all these research projects!

So, I leave you with these pictures. First, anyone who can tell me why I took these two shots wins a prize:



And second, I think I've told you about the Italian obsession with enormous fashion handbags. This isn't the most gigantic or the most fashionable bag I've seen, but I think the carrier-plus-fashion composite score rates rather highly:

A few of my favorite things

Possibly my favorite thing about living in Italy is the market. I love going to the market! In Bologna, the "Mercato delle Erbe" is a ten-minute walk from my house, it's open every day but Sunday, and they sell everything I need. The central area is filled with "beautiful" (and mostly expensive) fruit, and the side wings offer in-season produce, often local, at good prices. I'm a side-wing shopper, myself. My bread man Pietro and my vegetable man Luca take care of me.

Every day I have a delicious salad of spinach (I like the stems the best), fennel, tomatoes, and now I'm adding cucumbers. Luca tells me that the spinach season is finishing up, though, so I'm going to have to move on to another green. He's suggested chard.

Oranges are about a dollar a kilo, and I have one or two every day. The south of Italy is filled with oranges, so they're always available and always delicious. My favorites are the Sicilian tarocchi; they're red inside, and I think we call them blood oranges.

Here's another photo related to the market. It's Pietro, the Bread Man, who also plays in an African drum band. He told me about the Festival of Soup a few weeks back. I went, bringing with me, as instructed, a spoon and a cup, and I must have tasted a few dozen different soups! My favorites was a peanut soup from Bolivia.

The Movie Series Begins. I hope.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: The Bologna Cineteca is awesome. It’s basically a movie theater that screens films in a “meaningful” way. Lots of the films are themselves “meaningful” – in the sense that they’re not Die Hard 37 – but the Cineteca also makes them more meaningful by making them into series (“Focus on Argentina”), staging lectures related to the films, and inviting the directors to present the films and field questions. Best of all, they host film festivals, and the most recent was Slow Food on Film.

One of my classmates hooked us all up with “credentials,” which let us see as many films as we wanted for free. It also gave us a lanyard with a nametag, which is almost like a membership card, and you all know by now how important membership cards are. So the credentials were great on both counts. I saw a few awesome feature-length films and a bunch of documentaries and shorts. (I’m a short fanatic, if you didn’t know.) I learned a ton – you could become a semi-expert in food just by going to the festival – and I have to say that the quality of the filmmaking really impressed me. Definitely the best film fest I’ve been to. In any case, I saw a few films that are definitely worth seeking out, and – if I can manage to follow through on the idea – I thought I’d introduce you to a few of them in the next few blog posts.

The first one is King Corn. Two guys graduate from college, discover in a hair test that they’re basically “made of corn,” and move to Iowa to farm an acre of “King Corn”. In the process, they discover all kinds of absurdities and abuses that pervade the American food system (and – really – American food). Definitely worth a look, and I’ll bet you can even find it at the library.

In other news, I made octopus for the first time tonight. I’m crazy for it, I told you, but this is the first time I’ve actually made. It comes frozen, and I bet you can find it at Wegmans if you want. If you buy it frozen, it already comes de-eyed, so you just have to plop it in a pot with a little garlic, white wine, lemon juice, and just a touch of water, and it’ll take care of itself.

So, my recommendation for tonight: A trip to Wegmans, a trip to Blockbuster, octopus, and King Corn.

Chestnuts and Cannibals, oh my!

I apologize for the lag in entries. I’m up to my eyeballs in schoolwork. It’s awesome, though. I just love what I’m working on. I have five final papers due by the end of the month. I think I’ve just about finished three of them and have two more to go. Want to hear what I’ve been studying?

The first project I finished was on the chestnut. I’ve been working on that one for a while. Go ahead, try me, ask me anything about the chestnut! I now know for sure that the horse chestnut (which I tried to roast and eat the last time I came back from Europe) is definitely NOT related to the chestnut and it is definitely NOT edible! All of the real American chestnut trees got wiped out by a fungus in the first half of the last century, and – this is incredible, to me – its pathogenic spores are still floating around out there and the American chestnut still cannot grow successfully in North America. There is, thank heavens, The American Chestnut Foundation, which is doing its darnedest to bring ol’ Chester back to life. Seriously, they call the Castanea dentata “Chester” on their website.

Then I finished up a research into cannibalism. One interesting finding I had was that, in Medieval Europe, even though there weren’t practicing cannibals, per se, there were a few interesting cannibalistic “trends”. Yeah, how do you like that? Today it’s tight black pants and tomorrow it’s cannibalism. Go figure. Anyway, there were a handful of popular uprisings – the price of bread was too high, or they imposed a new tax, or whatever filled the Text-Message-to-the-Editor column in the Ye Old Town Crier of 1385 – in which the townspeople took to capturing the scapegoat politician, whacking him, sticking his head on a pole, and then eating his intestines. And then, there were some edgy docs who started prescribing human blood as a curative for all kinds of health problems. Most of the time they got the human blood from criminals who had been hanged or decapitated, and a whole chain of “mummy shops” opened up in the big cities to meet the growing demand. (I’ll bet there was a pyramid scheme/scam and everything.)

Then I had to analyze a piece of art. Most people stick with sensible genres like Last Suppers and Madonnas eating pears and things like that. Horrified by the prospect of seeming normal, I stuck with my cannibal theme and instead analyzed this picture:

Next up, I have a bibliography project I’m doing on sustainable agriculture, and – this is what I’m really excited about – my paper for “Anthropology and Food.” I talked with my prof, and he supported my idea: I’m basically going to do a “field study” regarding the differences I pick up between the food cultures of the United States and Italy. Now that gets me going!