Random thoughts:

• I've enabled comments on the blog. I hadn't done that before, but since looking at Kim's nephew Tim's blog, I decided to go ahead. Please feel free to post comments, but be gentle - I'm extremely sensitive :)
• Kim has a case of the winter crud. She's coughing, lots of drainage, etc. Several of the students here have had it, so we assume one of them probably caused it (tongue planted firmly in cheek).
• Last week Kim and I went to Ash Wednesday mass with a couple of BSU students, John and Jackie. The ashes were placed on our heads rather than on our foreheads. Filiberto later told me both systems are used here.
• Another church comment: in the US, where we say "forever and ever," Italians say "for centuries of centuries" (in Italian, of course). It's more poetic - is that why?
• A very interesting daily TV program is Blob, which is a 10-minute collection of video clips edited together. Most often they come from the previous day or two, but sometmes they throw in an older clip. The way they edit the clips can sometimes be commentary in itself.
• BUT, Blob doesn't hold a candle to Stricia la Noticia, which is a humorous news review. I'd compare it to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show but there are several differences. Many weeks, Stricia is the number one rated program. It's been on the air for 20 years with different hosts over time. You can't watch the show straight through online, but you can watch the pre-produced video segments.
• Students in the program have the option of participating in a Tandem program, where they are paired with an Italian student learning English. They're then supposed to meet and have conversations in both languages so each can learn. Kim is now participating. A middle school teacher is her Tandem partner. He happens to be one of the clients my 2002 students worked with when they made a video for the local hiking club.
• I heard on a game show recently that the median length of an Italian marriage was 14 years. I know what median means, but what I dn't know is whether that statistic is based only on marriages that have ended either through death or divorce (in which case the number seems frighteningly low) or includes all marriages, which I hope is the case. I also don't know how that compares to the US.
• Last week, one of the students commented that whenever people she meets find she's an American the first thing she is asked is whether she thinks Clinton or Obama will win the nomination. She was also astonished at how much they know about US politics.
• That leads to my next comment: Kim pointed out to the student that every bar or cafe here has at least a couple of daily papers, and that patrons from teenagers up flip through them. I don't know newspaper circulation statistics but I venture that a larger percentage of the Italian population peruses a newspaper daily than Americans.
• The Mafia may not be what it used to be in its heydey, but it's still alive and kicking. There was a major arrest last weekend in the New York-Palermo connection.