She's a planner, with a long anticipated carefully crafted list of things to do today and things for us to buy. Hot items this year were clothes-of-a-kind. We strived, apparently successfully, to match her expectations on items such as "a French pret-a-porter", "a Spanish skirt with the black fringe", etc... Local remainder's stands work miracles. Medium-sized girls wear medium-sized heeled shoes, we have got these for her too and initial reports sound positive, she is extremely comfortable on high heels, the Italian side of her, we argue. If you want to verify what a 5-years-old fashion designer (or fashion victim) sounds when she's 5 I'll set you an appointment.

Today's menu included fish, this year tuna steak. Wendy mastered this not-easy-to-cook piece with a vengeance, honoring American flexibility and cooking abilities once they turn civilized. Tuna is the basis for sushi and it surprises me that We-The-Locals prefer to ignore one of the many non-obvious uses of the most celebrated local fishing resources (at least historically). I warn you that freezing a bunch of tuna steaks (without separating them first) for longer that 8 hours leads to results on the catastrophic range. Be very mild with freezing fish stakes in general or you'll end up working a razor or scalpel just to separate the bloody mess. Hot water dips and/or microwave defrost won't save you from shame.

On her first birthday, sometime before September 11, when Americans were more happy and sociable, we had some 60 people in the house altogether drinking out of a strategically placed beer keg. And rapidly onto the second keg. I miss my cousin Simona and her beautifully peaceful eyes. She was not here today but we are still a wild bunch and the kid embraced another cousin's faith, Serena, a dancer in the Classic domain. She adores her (and desperately cries when she has to leave).

An appetizer of the size of the London attack was not expected and quite shocking and Wendy's email has been tickling every five minutes with American friends recalling the past Apocalypse in NYC. But International Terrorism is a patient beast as you can see from today's slaughtering and attacks at this location have been promised by OBL in person and forecasted by every and all analysts that I can recall (Peter Bergen, Adjunct Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, CNN's terrorism analyst and author of Holy War, Inc. has been warning us for ages on this). Video and audio messages the West receives every other day from OBL and derivatives are not just generic threats, they all turn out to be circumstantiated promises.

I watched the first Tony Blair's address today several times and while I do not want to forget the innocent victims of this heinous, coordinated attack, I want to point at his master-level abilities as a speaker. Beyond today's circumstances and his true or not-so-true abilities as a politician the Blair's speech of today was a masterpiece.

UP: the English press for not showing body parts.
DOWN: Gianfranco Fini, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs for declaring "Gli obiettivi potenziali sono mille e c'e' un numero enorme di terroristi che possono essere arruolati" (potential targets are in the thousands and there's a huge number of terrorists that can be enrolled...) thus enabling the idea that attacks are inevitable and furthermore failing to do his job.
UP UP: Elizabeth Morrison (with a devious ally here at home) for using me as a model in the most recent issue of Knitty Magazine