This will hurt me...

Look both ways. The intersection of Davey and Murray Streets, July 2012. More Q and A. More stolen from Sunday Stealing. This week, Our Players' Meme ... 1. You have been awarded the time off from work and an all-expenses paid week anywhere in the United States. The catch is that it must be somewhere you have not been before. Where do you choose to visit? Given that I have not been to the US at all, I have a whole continent to choose from. Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. 2. Name three of your guilty pleasures. I generally don’t feel guilt about pleasure. However, the recent healthy-living kick has seen me attach some to the wrong types of food. I also struggle with spending money on myself. 3. The best kind of Girl Scout Cookie is: Ummm, the normal ones? I like a nice plain biscuit. 4. What do you value most in other people? Honesty, integrity and half a brain. 5. Be honest. Do you sneak some raw cookie dough when you’re baking cookies? Not unless the reci...

Achtung! Ampelmännchen sagt halt! The point just after Davey Street turns into Sandy Bay Road. June 2012. Just the one book finished this week, and a trip back in time with Mussolini And The Rise Of Fascism by the academic/ historian Donald Sassoon. Sassoon is the author of what is to my mind the definitive work (and weighty tome coming in well over 1,000 pages long) on continental European socialism, One Hundred Years of Socialism , so I was looking forward to his analysis of the development of fascism in Italy. You might already be familiar with the tale: in 1919 the former socialist newspaper editor-cum small time political player Benito Mussolini had assembled a ragtag group of followers in Milan and launched the movement that was to result three years later in a dictatorship. This itself would last 23 years, and draw Italy into an escalating number of foreign interventions, ending ultimately with a disastrous war that was to leave large parts of her in ruins. Oddly enough...

Ampelmännchen, Ich werde auf dich warten. Campbell Straße, December 2010. The Christmas/New Year period has derailed my reading somewhat. Who knew that so much literary graft could be achieved on public transport and during lunch breaks through the week? That said, I'm knee deep in Gert Hofmann's Luck , and should be finished in a few days. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I think that much will depend on where he takes the tale...

So I’m standing at the lights, and these two guys are in some kind of speed boat. Only I think that they were trafficking cocaine, rather than speed. C’mon, they’re not on motorbikes . So I see these dudes, and I’m like, “it’s my duty as a good citizen to stop them going about their destructive ways”. The thing is though, the little red man/woman/citizen is up, and I’m like, “it’s my duty as a good citizen to obey the little red man/woman/citizen”. Torn by the conflicting drives and obligations, I had a little nervous breakdown. After my recovery – and the flight to freedom from our Columbian friends in the speedboat – the little red man/woman/citizen got me to thinking about my favourite variation on the theme, the world famous Ampelmännchen . You might be familiar with the Ampelmännchen tale, the friendly face of East Berlin. Like me, you may have even been to the Ampelmännchen shop and purchased an Ampelmännchen t-shirt. The theory behind Ampelmännchen (are you starting to see h...