and why do I get the feeling that you (Maiko) are not working on what you should be working???

baci

giulio

Meet the characters of 'Catch 22': Dunbar.

Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll's. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead... Dunbar liked Clevinger because Clevinger annoyed him and made time go slow.

The war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals...
Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.
"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
"Then why are they shooting at me? Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone, they're trying to kill everyone," Clevinger answered.
"An what difference does that make?" Yossarian asked.

Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all.

It seems that SARS is back in Toronto. Here some facts about death rates of diseases…


Worldwide, the death rate for SARS is approximately 6 percent.
Reliable death rates are available for the flu. In a typical year, it is usually below 1 percent.
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 had a death rate estimated to have been about 2 percent. It killed perhaps 25 million people worldwide because it quickly swept the globe and infected millions.
Ebola has a mortality rate of 70 percent to 95 percent and for this reason does not spread easily, therefore the overall number of people who die is low.

Shankar Vedantam and Rob Stein
WashingtonPost

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives."
Carl Sagan


NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft took the first Earth portrait from Mars on May 8.
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/find/mars_global_surveyor.html
In 1990, as NASA's unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft reached the fringes of the solar system, it turned back to take a final look at Earth at the suggestion of astronomer Carl Sagan. The image, taken from 4 billion miles away, inspired the title of Sagan's 1994 book "A Pale Blue Dot."
Associated Press

Again about Ann Marie...

Happy Birthday, Ann Marie !!!!!

I know, you 're still somewhere in Holland having fun with S.D. (that is, Tom), how does it feel celebrating a birthday in Holland?


And finally, finally, from now on, the Parma ham and gourmet Parmesan cheese, can only be sliced and grated in the region where they are produced !


"Maintaining the quality and reputation of Grana Padano cheese and Parma ham justifies the rule that the product must be grated or sliced and packaged in the region of production," the European Court of Justice said in a statement.
The Parmesan cheese case involved Ravil, a company in France that imports whole Grana Padano cheeses from Italy and then grates and distributes them in France. Reuters

Ann Marie was in Nijmegen!
Yes, Ann Marie and Tom stopped by Nijmegen, in their one-week vacation in the Netherlands.
The most obvious thing to do was clearly going to a mexican restaurant, here in the Netherlands, were we had German beer and Italian cappuccino...
talking about globalization...

Anyway, when are all of you coming to visit me in this little gem in the center of Europe?

Meet the characters of 'Catch 22'...

Major Major

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped…
Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in school. At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual. He majored in English history.

Joseph Heller, Catch 22.

Meet the characters of 'Catch 22'...

Colonel Cargill

Colonel Cargill was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

'Men,' he began his address to the officers, 'You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.'

I'm happy to be riding back into this country [Dakotas]. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this…

Robert Pirsig, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.’

What did you ask, Jeff ?

Maiko - you're moving to DC?

ok, great, but how to call the guy who operates the hooks on carriers ??

Ann, its called Carhenge and it is actually close to the route I am taking.

Don't know if I will swing by yet.

How do you call the guy who operates the hooks on carriers ?? HOOKER ??
I mean, there must be a name for that job...What do his kids answer in school when somebody ask them about their father's job?
"My dad is a lawyer and your?"
"Oh, ... hem.. hum... my dad operates ..hum... the hook ...hum... on carriers.."

Hey Mike, you'll be on the road for a month! Wow! By the way, I'm just reading now the book 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance',which is also about being on the road...

It would have taken just one dude who operated the hooks on that carrier to see that plane coming in and just say "ah, fuck it" and let it keep going........

… Bush made his speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, where several hours earlier he had become the first sitting U.S. president to make a carrier landing…

What an credible joker, this guy, and what an (in)credible president…