here's something funny about sex

Hi there. for this weekend, I want to suggest my italian speaking friends a website where some wacko gather crazy questions about sex from various online 'forums' - one of them is from the infamous teen-magazine "Cioe`" - which bradly translated means "That is", but is an often used interjetion for teen agers, kind of 'dig it'.

so, click here - girlpower vs cioe - and enjoy!

What to listen

Just a quick link to the very good BBC Radio Player. Not as simple as the Rai Radio Player (just six buttons, nothing more), but the sheer number of channels and broadcast prorams available makes it worth a check.

cheers, and thanks BBC for making this available to "offworlders" too... Kudos!

(best channel for open minds: BBC Channel 4)

Of Time Machines and Birthday Cakes

So, suppose you forgot that monday last week was your birthday. Any reference is purely coincidental. Suppose you felt ashamed that you didn't buy a cake to share with your friends, so that you didn't say it to anyone. You obviously want to amend this.

The first idea that came up to my mind is to devote yourself at creating a new branch of physics, and manage to create a wormhole which acts as a time machine. you then step back in the future, drop to the nearest patisserie/supermarket, buy a cake - you birthday cake must obviously be produced the day of your anniversary. Finally, you step forward in time and you share the cake with your friends. However, since cakes have an 'eat me before ' typically less than one week, you end up witha cake who's rotten. or may be not. but it doesn't really matter, none of your friends is going to believe that it's still good when they see the writing on the wrappings... damn... So much time wasted for nothing...

well, you're left with no friends, but a time machine, and that is reasonably cool. you can always go and look for new friends in different ages...

What am I reading

May be you're interested, may be you're not.

but here comes what's been keeping me awake at night - no, it's not my GF.



a book which is the follow up to 'The Lexus and the Olive tree' (which I haven't read yet). In essence, it talks about how the world market is being flattened by globalisation, and how this is going to impact our lives. Unfortunately, as many american books, after a good start he only stress the point over and over again...

So that after a while I lost interest and cast it aside. it's been lying on my kitchen floor for two weeks until my GF picked it up.

Now, it's been substituted by a very clever book by Peter F Hamilton, author of the acclaimed (by me, if nothing else) "Reality Disfunction" cycle. The new Book is called Pandora's Star (click here to read the prologue on the author's official web page)



As in the Reality Disfunction cycle, humans have spread along the galaxy but this time using WormHoles rather than Spaceships. The first chapter is very good indeed, and after that is a jump of three hundred years in the future, to when a neighboring (only one thousand light years away from Earth) star is secluded from the rest of the universe by mean of a gigantic shell of exotic matter - The Dyson Pair, since there are two of them, puzzle the human, which decide then to send their first faster-than-light spaceship to investigate - 'cause wormholes don't get that far without five or six intermediate steps, and each one needs very expensive infrastructure to be mantained.

The Universe is accurately detailed as in Hamilton's tradition, and reminds strongly of the Hyperion universe. However, it lacks credibility in the semi-fantasy social ordering, and the absolute monopoly over technologies such as Force fields and WormHoles transport - the Corporation who runs the latters can decide to cut everybody off the Commonwealth, and I can believe the governments would allow that. and if so, after three hundred years I'd expect the same technology to be available to everybody, so that worlds cut out would eventually form a kind of shadow commonwealth... mah... annyway, as Space Operas go, there's certainly a lot of meat and high-tech-babbling and gizmoes and stuff to keep me entertained. a tad below the previous saga, though. you can't beat the combination spaceships+zombies, can you?

The Crocodile Hunter killed by... a StingRay

I often watched his documentaries when I was in the UK... always meddling with very dangerous animals such as snakes, sharks, and of course, crocodiles. one of his pets was... a dingo, which isn't exactly tame...

at the end, what was inevitable (IMHO) happened. while shooting a documentary swimming along a sting ray, he must have ennoyed it too much, and the ray put the sting in his heart...

Goodbye Irwin!

Happy Birthday to me...

happy birthday to me...

Hi everybody, I'm 32 today... since the crucial date of 33 (Jesus Christ's age) is approaching, I thought about making a balance of my life to date:

- find a nice girlfriend (check)
- starting a family (on the way there)
- being liked by my friends (check... ehr... right?)
- getting a degree (check and a half)
- getting a job (half-check)
- starting my own religion (to do)
- lifting one hundred Kg on the bench (check)
- parachuting (to do)
- win the nobel prize (to do)

I believe it's all... I guess this puts me above JC in the list of accomplished things. after all, He didn't have a degree, one of his friends betrayed him to death, and as for girlfriend... well, let's skip over it. Over all, he only managed to start a religion, ad get hung like a thief. sad uh? Luckily, I am here to dave the day... Ok I stop being such a pun and start my first honest day of work as a thirty-two year old... what? boy? man? bah, whatever...

a zent'annos!