Meme copied from Rfachir

[fpb]

You know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes. Rfachir, for instance, had suffered a major loss, and I only found out from the meme.

Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.

FIRST NAME: Fabio Paolo
AGE: 50
LOCATION: South Ruislip, London, England
OCCUPATION: translator.
PARTNER: None ever.
KIDS: (Hysterical laughter).
BROTHERS/SISTERS: 1 brother, 1 sister, 1 half-sister.
PETS:Never had one in my life, don't intend to start now.

3-5 BIGGEST THINGS GOING ON IN YOUR LIFE:

1) Franco Urru, my closest friend since I was 18 has died, an immense grief with many ramifications. (E.G., he died of lung cancer after a lifelong twenty-a-day habit, which has hardened my already negative attitude for smoking. I had been begging him for thirty years to lay off those things.) He was a source of light and laughter in my life, and I can never remember him without a bright smile on his face. It is also atrociously unfair that he should have died so early, when, after a lifetime spent in hope, he had finally managed to build a solid international reputation as the great cartoonist he was.
2) Since last spring I have been treated for a long-term wound in my lower left calf, which, if untreated, could have gone on bleeding and stinking for ever. The plumbing in that part of the human body is rather badly designed, apparently, and can spring incurable leaks for no apparent reason. The treatment is now nearing its end, but I will have to wear special stockings for the rest of my life.
3) I have started seriously trying to do something about my severe overweight problem, which had got much worse over the last couple of years. Results thus far mediocre, but at least I have stopped ballooning. The Christmas holidays don't help.
4) I am working on an extended essay on Homer and a book on the fraudulent peace of 1918-1923. Both are late and the computer seems to have declared war on the Homer.
5) Over the last couple of years I have got to know my half-sister, a fascinating person, both like and extraordinarily unlike me in every way. Before we got in touch via Facebook, I had only met her once, decades ago.

PARENTS: Both in remarkable shape for their years. My father, class 1938, is working on setting up a fashion company, with my occasional help and support. My mother, born 1945, has just been retired - over her own objections - from her post in one of Italy's highest courts, the Council of State, and is developing new interests - and learning to use the internet - to compensate.

Hobbies: maybe I should develop one or two.

Repost at will.

Comments

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

You've got me curious about the specific time frame 1918 - 1923.

Does your projected book end with the hyperinflation, or the beer-hall putsch?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Didn't notice this question before. The settlement of the hyperinflation, and the beer-hall putsch, were part of a general pacification. 1923 is the year in which the Russian and Turkish wars eventually cease. My point is that the war in general did not cease with the surrender of the German army; for one thing, the Germans did everything in their power to sabotage any settlement, and for another the powers they had released - both Lenin's Bolsheviks and Ataturk's Young Turks had ultimately to do with Berlin - continued their own parts of the war until a real settlement, very unlike the paper of Versailles, and thoroughly negative for the Allies. By October 1923, all the premises of the catastrophe to follow had been lain:

- Poland had built itself a kind of European colonial empire, in which non-Poles were second-class citizens, and gained the hatred of every single neighbour;

- Among the other similarly absurd border redesigns, Italy had seized two areas - South Tyrol and what might be called Inner Slovenia - that had never had anything at all to do with Italy, on the wholly arbitrary grounds that they lay within the Alpine watershed. This caused a genuine terrorist movement in Inner Slovenia, and the violence east of Trieste helped Fascism to develop. Meanwhile Serbia had built an empire even more huge and absurd than Poland's, and as part of that had seized the historically Italian province of Dalmatia. These two injustices, each resented while each country ignored her own, kept Italy and Yugoslavia on the verge of war from 1919 to 1940.

- Mussolini had seized power in Italy and Lenin in Russia. These two rogue governments not only were bent - the Russian one, on literally an industrial scale - on international subversion, but represented by themselves a challenge to the very legitimacy of the democratic model that seemed to have won by November 1918. Ataturk's victory in Turkey, though less significant since Turkey wisely stayed out of WWII, had a similar significance.

- The grand alliance had comprehensively collapsed, with each of its members at the throat of all the others. This began with Italy being swindled and outraged at Versailles. The main culprit of this was that horrible man Wilson, but Italian public opinion blamed mainly Britain, and not without reason, since if Britain and France had supported Italy against Wilson, Wilson would have had to accept their terms. Instead of which, both reverted to type, each regarding the other with suspicion and contempt, and all of them together dumping on the weakest member - Italy - in a horrible Darwinian scrum. Shades of May-June 1940.

- The hyperinflation, which I regard as a deliberate German effort to break the Versailles settlement, had failed, but in failing it had weakened the link between German government and people to the point of nonexistence. While the German governing classes had done very well, in general, out of the hyperinflation, the middle classes had seen their property and savings destroyed, annihilated. The terror of sinking into a Lumpenproletariat was assuaged by the following six years of steady growth, but the shock was too recent; when the disaster of 1929 struck Germany - though in a much less serious form than either the hyperinflation of six years earlier, or what was happening in America - the middle classes panicked.

- The gambit of the Beer Hall Putsch, and even more his grandstanding in the box at his own trial afterwards, made Hitler the undoubted leader of the German hard right. He would be the man to whom the German middle clalsses would turn when they panicked.