Francesca

We lived in Nidau, a French and German speaking town, around 200m from the lake. My father then decided to move back to his canton of origin before I had to go to school. Ticino is Italian speaking and I spoke only German, so the choice was between moving back immediately or never moving back again.

Whenever I’m here I wonder how my life would have been like if my father hadn’t decided to move back to Ticino.

The weather on Lake Bienne is just perfect.

Congratulations!

That's the Tremola, the old road. It's now mostly used by cyclists, motorcyclists and classic car owners.

The Gotthard axis is an important transit route between northern and southern Europe. I don’t mind driving in a tunnel for 17km, but if I have time, I prefer driving over the pass because it’s more scenic.

I have my annual family reunion this weekend, so it's almost guaranteed that the weather will turn the moment I'm driving home. I usually drive over the Gotthard Pass and always catch the first light snowfall of the season. This is last September.

A large grey cat kinda spilling out of a wicker cat bed resting his chin on the edge of the bed. He looks comfy and sleepy.

I am so jealous of this oblivious pile of fluff.

I just saw a TikTok like “the motivations of assassins don’t make sense anymore” but boy have they never.

Hinkley shot Reagan to impress Jodi Foster. Oswald was such a complete mess people just assume the CIA did it. Guiteau killed Garfield because no one would make him an ambassador.

They must have realized that many don't want to wait and torrent/download the show.

And you can watch on Youtube one hour after the shows premieres in the UK. No more waiting 24 hours until the show drops on Youtube.

The new season of Taskmaster starts tonight 😀 You don't even have to wait 24 hours anymore, tonight's episode will be on Youtube at 2 p.m PDT

I used to look at watches with my father. I think about him every time I take a stroll along via Nassa in Lugano and see a Vacheron Constantin on display, they were his favourite watches. I'm always mesmerized by the Overseas Tourbillon Skeleton, truly a work of art.

If you see this, I implore you to post an image from your device without context.

Few people realise the scale of the Himalayas because static maps are a bad way to convey topography. Fortunately, we can use interactive maps to explore topography. Here is an example using Pyvista.

Screenshot: No room for wokeness! @Wokenessisevil Notice how no one, not a single soul, has ever complained about the female gaze in entertainment. [photos show Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) and Alan Ritchson (Reacher) with ripped muscles]

This isn’t the female gaze. This is the male gaze. It’s men who are obsessed with the physicality of other men. Women, in the main, would much rather see a man who looks like he’d make himself a stack of buttered toast and let you steal a slice

Infrastructure tends to be invisible until it starts being used against you. Back in 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, for repressing democracy protests on China’s behalf. All at once, Lam became uniquely acquainted with the power of the dollar clearing system—a layer of the world’s financial machinery that most people have never heard of. Here’s how it works: Global banks convert currencies to and from US dollars so their customers can sell goods internationally. When a Japanese firm sells semiconductors to a tech company in Mexico, they’ll likely conduct the transaction in dollars—because they want a universal currency that can quickly be used with other trading partners. So these firms may directly ask for payment in dollars, or else their banks may turn pesos into dollars and then use those dollars to buy yen, shuffling money through accounts in US-regulated banks like Citibank or J.P. Morgan, which “clear” the transaction. So dollar clearing is an expedient. It’s also the chief enforcement mechanism of US financial policy across the globe. If foreign banks don’t implement US financial sanctions and other measures, they risk losing access to US dollar clearing and going under. This threat is so existentially dire that, when Lam was placed under US sanctions, even Chinese banks refused to have anything to do with her. She had to keep piles of cash scattered around her mansion to pay her bills.

Excellent article on how the US is starting to weaponise its control over critical financial and technological systems against its own allies. Contains a good explanation of the sanctions stuff I've been talking about lately. www.wired.com/story/enshit...

Lou is writing an angry fax to Darche as we speak.

Happy birthday!

If you don’t understand how anything works, everything is a conspiracy.

it is hard to fully appreciate just how incredibly *dumb* America’s Troubles will be.

Our Years of Lead Paint.

One of the things that *actually*, *truly* makes America great is NASA. And Trump has slit its throat.

I got so uncomfortable I had to close the stream.

And make it stick

well it's obvious there was no intelligence involved in the decision

Lemon ravioli are next. I usually make a big batch with ricotta, grana and finely grated lemon peels and keep them in the freezer. I haven’t made them yet, so the pictures are from last December.

I listen to your podcast mostly when I'm cooking dishes that take several hours. This time it's more than 4kg of ragù. Thanks for entertaining me while I was cutting onions and carrots.

Last Monday, my delivery window was from 10.10 am to 12.10 pm and UPS left me a note that they couldn't find me at 12.20 pm. I was home, having lunch, and they didn't even ring the bell 🤬 I had to pick up my package at an access point the next day.

We're having August weather (30°C or more) since June 11 and there is no end in sight 🥵

Sci-fi view of The Future: We'll all have flying cars and holidaying on Mars! Disease will be fixed with a quick blast from a Star Trek thingy!

The Actual Future: