ants.in.the.snow

These three people display a modern-day behavior where individuals no longer have the ability to communicate face-to-face while sitting in the same room. Once a phenomenon only found in restaurants and coffee shops, it has now spread to living rooms, and probably, bedrooms.

Yes, it even happened to us. There we were, Deborah and I, sitting with our little nephew Noah in a highrise in a suburb of Milan, Italy, ignoring each other. Actually, it wasn't as pathological as I make it sound; Noah doesn't understand any English anyway, and I don't speak much Italian at all. Other than playing peekaboo, we didn't have much to talk about.

Only as we were walking out the door on the way to the airport did I realize that he  understands Serbo/Croatian and that his mom actually speaks a little.

It was like a fantasy: The carols playing, the giant Christmas tree, children on Santa's knee. One last sweep of South Coast Plaza mall and I'd fulfill my shopping duties for 2011. "Such a beautiful dress in this store window." I remembered having a crush on a mannequin just like that one when I was four years old. "Look at the interesting display in that one. I should take a picture of it," I thought to myself. "No. Never mind."

"Oh, look! They're serving champagne in that store! They have waiters. What's it called? Oh, it's called Assouline. Hmm. And it's a book store. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong.

Ah, French. So impossible for me to understand. So easy to mispronounce. Should I learn to speak French? No. Why? No practical reason, I suppose.

I have an American friend who speaks French. He moved to Paris with his wife. They got mugged on Christmas Eve. They'd seen a concert and were walking home when a small crowd of rowdy, bratty French teenagers came along. One grabbed his satchel. My friend tried to fight him off but failed. My friend's wife swore in English at the brats. She swore that she'd kick their asses if she got ahold of 'em.

My friend picked himself up off the ground. He'd lost his balance in the tussle. The brat ran toward the darkness with the satchel while my friend squinted, huffing and puffing, thinking dirty thoughts.

From the other direction, a whining, grinding sound swelled up from a dim alley. It was a Samaritan. The Samaritan was driving a Vespa. He'd seen what had happened, and like Batman to the rescue, he vowed to right the wrong done to my friend and his satchel.

The Vespa roared like only a Vespa can roar, thinly adolescent, yet insistently toward the thief. Four seconds later, the French brat was on the ground, tire tracks drawn up his back like a skunk's stripe, his face mashed into the sidewalk.

"Merci," my friend told the Samaritan as he took back his dusty satchel. "Joyeux Noël," he said.

The Samaritan responded in French. "You're not from around here, are you?"

I'm kind of lazy, so when I decided to rob that bank, I only disguised my hand.

Not really.

Actually, what happened was that I baked something in a pan in the oven last night, took the pan out and removed the food, then a few minutes later decided to use the pan for something else.

The salad was ready. The potato was in the microwave. I had just opened a beer.

It didn't occur to me that the pan was still about 300 degrees Fahrenheit (down from 450) when I grabbed the stainless steel handle with my bare hand. At the emergency room they said, "I'll bet that really hurts."

The answer is, "You dream in English."

When you think about it, you can't sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" in Italian, can you? (Look at the picture.) The song won't rhyme.

The creator of this store window display in Rome agrees. He/she knows that you don't mess with tried and true slogans and lines from Christmas songs. (Try singing, "Here Comes Suzy Snowflake" in Italian.)


They have a different approach in Asia, though, where anything goes. Look at a couple of examples of Christmas sloganry on www.engrish.com. example A - example B

So why tear down a perfectly functional building when you decide that you don't want to use it as a movie theater any more?

Obviously, there's no reason to. Someone in charge in the Croatian town of Pula decided that they needed more parking spaces. Where better than in the movie theater?

Until 1990, it was called the Beograd Theater, then it was called the Pula Theater, then it was called the Sayam book store. Now you park cars in it.

When my brother showed it to us, I asked him if people could sit in their cars and watched movies, just like in the good old days. (It was a funny thought as far as I was concerned.)

He looked at me quizzically and said, "No. It's a parking garage. They park cars here."

I said, "No... but wouldn't it be funny?"

"They park cars here now," he said.

He had a point. Besides, all the cars were pointed sideways which makes for a bad movie experience. (But still, don't you think it would be funny if they still watched movies there?)

_I've been mesmerized lately by a peculiar phenomenon that's been plaguing Los Angeles: Tuba thefts.

For what? Steal 'em for spare parts like a Cadillac Escalade? Hold 'em for ransom? Maybe even make music on 'em?

It appears that something called "banda," a type of polka-style brass band music from Mexico might have something to do with it.

Look at an example of banda music on YouTube.


According to a Los Angeles Times article, an abnormal amount of these sometimes mind-numbingly expensive instruments (worth as much as $5000 each) have been the removed from local schools during after-hours breakins.

Stolen by whom? Aspiring banda bandits, one might assume. I can imagine, if this theft trend continues, that in a matter of months one could assume that if he saw two banda groups in a given period of time, one of them would be serenading you with a stolen Los Angeles School District tuba.

But why would someone want to be in a banda group in the first place?

To pick up chicks, of course. What draws women like a tuba? (I once saw a didgeridoo player fail to pick up two girls on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. He failed because he wasn't playing a tuba.)

Curiously... on the other side of the world, a similar brass music phenomenon (minus the tuba thefts) has been sighted. It's in a town called Gucha in Serbia where, every year, the Gucha brass band festival and competition is held.

What's a Gucha band sound like? It sounds like a banda band. Click to listen.

(Hey, that tuba looks familiar.)

Helpy?

When we stopped at an Autogrill, a chain restaurant on the freeway between Trieste an Milan, this was written in the no parking zone. I'm not sure if helpy is some international code (For, oh I don't know, "emergency vehicle?") or if it's the name of the eighth Disney dwarf who happens to have VIP parking privileges at Autogrills worldwide, and who happens to be their honorary goodwill ambassador... a sort of Ronald McDonald. (No, the space next to it did not say Dopey.)

If you're feeling helpy today, let me know what you think.

Deborah's nephew David, the architect, likes to travel light. Rather than carry a tripod and risk losing it or forgetting it in a restaurant, he carries three kids, kind of like Sherpas. In this case, at the Roman Coliseum, it's Alexander, his oldest son who's serving as bipod. To the right in the background is Kate, mother of Alexander, the bipod.

I noticed that everyone else who had kids at the coliseum started doing this too immediately afterwards. They must have sensed that we were trend setters.