This afternoon I went to Germany to buy some olive oil and stuff. On the way I bought an ice cream. There is a stand were they have real homemady Italian Gelato.

But thats not all, I even got an invitation to go dancing with the iceman, at the riverboard, tomorrow night. How about that! :-D

Must be good news for John McCain.

Off to play in the traffic.

Meantime, Bloomberg sez recession started in Q4 2007 (via Calculated Risk:

July 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy may have slipped into a recession in the last three months of 2007 as consumer spending slowed more than previously estimated and the housing slump worsened, revised government figures indicated.

The world's largest economy contracted at a 0.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of last year compared with a previously reported 0.6 percent gain, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Growth for the period from 2005 through 2007 was also trimmed.

The revisions now reinforce measures such as employment and production that already signaled the economy was shrinking. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based arbiter of economic cycles, defines a recession as a ``significant'' decrease in activity over a sustained period of time. The declines would be visible in GDP, payrolls, production, sales and incomes.

``We're in a recession,'' Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. ``It's going to widen, it's going to deepen.''

In the past century and a half there have been exactly three documented sightings of living humpback whales in German waters. Marine biologists say that makes last Friday's sighting a "sensation."

Biologists Andreas Nick and Christoph Bock had travelled to the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea to watch birds. Yet, instead of spotting some rare animal in the sky or in a tree, they came across a far more unusual sight: a humpback whale...

The last time a living humpback whale was spotted in German waters was nearly 30 years ago: in August 1978, also off the coast of Rügen. But to find a prior documented sighting you have to go back another 127 years -- to 1851.

Russian energy giant Gazprom [RTS: GAZP] said Thursday its net profit calculated to Russian Accounting Standards more than doubled, year-on-year, in January-June 2008 to 285.7 billion rubles ($12.2 billion).

Gazprom, which accounts for nearly 20% of global and 85% of Russia's natural gas production, said its net profit in January-June 2007 totaled 138.67 billion rubles ($5.9 billion).

Suppose it's rare for Hollyweird to turn something as hefty as an Albee play into a commercial film, but i would highly recommend seeing this for anyone who gets the liz bug in the next few days.  Stunning.

Couldn't have been easy being the most beautiful, and sexiest woman in the world.  With chops to boot.

Skennah Kowa

Would California have HSR today if it had been settled by France?

Utsukushii kereba sore de ii

Should I expect to be ill shortly?

Also, I am getting ready to head out, so have a lovely weekend everyone!  My parent-type people are coming to stay for a bit.  They've very demanding and difficult to please.  My step father is the kind of insane person who will go to a very nice restaurant and then demand to speak to the chef and proceed to explain to him how he would have prepared something differently, better.  Gah.  These insane people are coming to a town near you (Italy, Switzerland & France) soon, if you want see them with your own eyes.  Maybe they will tell you secrets about me...

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

MOSCOW, July 31 (RIA Novosti) - Less than 10% of Russians see President Dmitry Medvedev as the true leader of the country, according to a July opinion poll released Thursday by the Yury Levada Center.
When asked "Who holds the real power in the country?" more than a third - 36% - said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin did, while only 9% saw Medvedev as the main figure.

Almost half - 47% - answered that power was shared by "both equally." Eight percent gave no answer.

Medvedev, 42, was inaugurated as Russia's third president since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 on May 7, taking over from Putin, who was approved as the country's premier a day later.

When pollsters asked the same question in March, after Medvedev had been elected president but before Putin had stepped down, the public's view was that power was shared more equally.

Also,

"Kremlin diet" from RussianFun.net

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

Double trouble: Are breast enlargements imitation or mutilation? - Features, Health & Wellbeing - The Independent

Big, bouncy and completely fake, larger-than-life bosoms are everywhere we look. Is it any wonder that last year, 26,000 British women went under the knife? More's the pity, argues Bethan Cole - you can't improve on nature

I remember distinctly the first time I saw a pair of surgically enhanced breasts with my own eyes. It was around eight or nine years ago, in the changing rooms of the gym at a private members' club where a friend had taken me for a workout. I was getting undressed, nervously, as I don't like disrobing in front of strangers. And there was another woman, a matter of a few feet away, topless, with oddly firm, projectile breasts pointing skywards.

My first reaction was shock. Two very weird, alien, unnatural body parts, brazenly displayed, right in front of me. They didn't look real or natural in the slightest. They looked like what they were - breasts that had been bought and paid for. Not soft and slightly saggy, like a thirtysomething embonpoint should be, but plastic, hard-looking and aggressively perfect. I felt like I'd been slapped in the face. They said robotic. They announced aspiration. They said "I'm considerably richer than you", and "I'm considerably more attractive than you", and even "Money well spent". For there was an unmistakeable air of conspicuous consumption in this woman's light golden tan and bizarrely pert orbs. I felt instantly sickened, and turned away.

The media's moment of disillusionment with John McCain appears to be at hand. Even Joe Klein has finally noticed that McCain's profile is beginning to resemble the endomorphic shadow of his backstage advisor, Karl Rove, not one of the faces on Mt. Rushmore.

It's all very predictable - about as predictable as the media's abrupt discovery in the summer of 2005, as New Orleans sank beneath the waves, that the president of the United States was, gasp!, an incompetent boob.

But anyone who's studied McCain's career with any intellectual detachment at all (as opposed to the hagiographic tendencies of his media cheerleading claque) could have told you: The truth about John McCain is that he'll do just about anything and say just about anything to win. He always has. He's just been more clever (and cynical) than most in how he goes about it.