Meme copied from Rfachir
Dec. 24th, 2012 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbYou 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-12-24 06:56 pm (UTC)Good luck with lowering your weight, my friend. It took me some time to get mine moving in the direction I wanted it to go and then some time to develop the proper habits to maintain the trend, but it does a world of good and feels fantastic. Also, good luck with the essays (and the computer).
My condolences about your friend Franco. Losing such a friend is a terrible thing. I empathize.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-06 10:30 pm (UTC)Does your projected book end with the hyperinflation, or the beer-hall putsch?
no subject
Date: 2013-05-30 07:30 am (UTC)- 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.
PUTSCH AND PASTA
Date: 2013-05-30 10:37 am (UTC)The post WWI settlements are a fascinating era of history;
It is often frustrating to see the hyperinflation treated as a purely economic problem and not placed in political context.
I have not heard of the hyperinflation as a deliberate wrecking strategy; if so, who was behind it? The financial community per se? Heavy industry? The junkers? All three? I can see why they would want to weaken the trade unions, but deliberately wrecking the middle classes looks almost suicidal.
On your other topic; have knocked off a good deal of weight since January when I had a major cardiac fluid overload and lost a good deal of weight in the hospital.
Out of curiosity, on discharge I tried out a high protein, high fat and extremely low carbohydrate diet, because a number of friends told me they had good results following it over several years. I'm 40 pounds lighter than I was in October 2012.
It worked for me better than any dietary regimen I ever tried. There was very little strain or stress following it; and I was never hungry or miserable.
I kept off pasta, rice, bread, potatoes and virtually all sweets and starches for several months. Ate mostly eggs, cheese, meat, fish, leafy vegetables, some legumes and occasional fruit as a treat. In the last month I have resumed eating some bread with meat.
The only strain was a persistent craving for macaroni and cheese and spaghetti carbonara which I satisfied as a treat on Sundays.
The nicest thing was dumping the nonsense about trimming off fat, patting bacon dry, removing poultry skin, etc. The animal fat is an essential part of the diet.
An unexpected side effect is that my sweet tooth has almost completely vanished. I simply have no desire whatever for pastry, ice cream, candy or such. I found I can't even drink orange juice without diluting with water.
Well I'll stop prostelyzing now, but it did work out well for me.