Planning a Trip to Death, Then Going Anyway

Proto-Travel ~ Not Everyone Travels This Way ~ Constructed Familiarity ~ 

Planning as Relationship Work ~ The Limits of Research

Sometimes for us obsessive people it feels like modern travel begins long before departure. Not at the airport or on the train. Not even when the suitcase comes out of the closet.

It begins weeks earlier, somewhere between opening Google Maps for the tenth time and learning the names of neighborhoods we’ve never visited. And, at this point you already have a pin collection of hotels, coffee stops, and sights in a city you are not even sure you'll visit.

In this light, we want to talk about how trip research itself has itself become a form of travel, at times as suggestive and powerful as the actual visit.

Proto-Travel

At some point, planning stops being preparation and starts becoming something else. It's like a low-grade form of mental relocation.

Before our recent trips to Spain and our ongoing planning for Japan, we realized we were already partially living in those places, at least in our heads. We knew train transfers before stepping onto the platforms. We had opinions about neighborhoods we had never walked through. We recognized street names from maps and videos. We knew where we wanted coffee in Seville and Osaka before we had even booked all the hotels.

Research has become a kind of proto-travel. It's not the trip itself, obviously. But also, it is no longer entirely separate from it.

Modern travel planning makes this easy. We can study routes, walk streets virtually, read years of blog posts, compare transit options, watch train departures in real time, and obsess over whether a transfer in Tokyo Station is psychologically manageable with luggage and jet lag. Add the modern AI assistant and it all goes into overdrive.

Of course, this did not start with Google Maps or AI. Years ago, in our 2012 post Too Many Maps - Iceland Case Study, we came home from Iceland with a small paper ecosystem: tourist maps, dining maps, bus maps, rental-car maps, promotional maps, and probably a few maps whose only function was to make us feel guilty about throwing them away. Proto-travel existed then too in a way. It was just folded badly and stuffed into a plastic bin that you eventually recycled.

With proto-travel, the unfamiliar slowly starts to feel familiar, and travel research compresses geographic distance.

Not Everyone Travels This Way

To be clear, this is not how travel has to work. It is how modern travel often works for us because we choose it. We are not trying to program every hour of every day, though it may look suspiciously like that from the outside. The point is almost the opposite: to create enough understanding that opportunities can arise once we are there. A little intel work can make a trip more open, not less.

Some travelers book the flights, reserve a place to sleep, and let the rest unfold on the ground. There is a lot to admire in that. It sounds liberating. It also sounds, for us, like a controlled experiment in mild anxiety.

Others hand the reins to a travel company, which can be exactly right. There are trips where having someone else solve the logistics is not laziness but wisdom. Still, that is usually not where the pleasure is for us.

Constructed Familiarity

One interesting side effect of all this preparation is the strange feeling of arriving somewhere that already feels vaguely remembered.

The obsessive planning, and yes, we call it that, also tickles the research bone. We like understanding a place in albeit a limited way before arriving, not because we think we can master it from a distance, but because a little preparation lets us go deeper once there. We get more experiential bang for the buck. We notice more. We ask better questions. We waste less energy on avoidable confusion and leave more room for interesting confusion.

For our Seville Christmas 2025 trip (see Seville at Christmas: A Short Return to a Familiar City), we found ourselves navigating toward places we somehow already “knew.” We had mentally rehearsed the rhythm of the days before they happened. We already had ideas about quiet morning walks, Christmas closures, and how neighborhoods connected.

With our Lanzarote trip (see Lanzarote - In the Layers), the research became even more immersive. Before arriving, we had already built a mental picture of volcanic landscapes, cactus gardens, wind-shaped terrain, and the strange visual contrast between black lava fields and whitewashed buildings. We were not just researching a destination anymore. We were constructing a framework for understanding it.

For our Japan 2025 trip (see 21 days in Japan – Observations and Tips), our preparation and therefore beforehand familiarity was taken to new levels. We were not contracting with an agency to do all the groundwork for us and instead arranged all the logistics ourselves. But because of a language barrier and shear unfamiliarity with the culture, we overcompensated you might say on the planning.

Our upcoming Japan 2026 planning, you might think we have relaxed a bit. But no, we haven't. The drive to optimize and honestly just understand and create the opportunity for an experience has us again in a fevered pitch. We have spent evenings discussing Tokyo coffee-shop clusters, Hiroshima tram routes, whether Amanohashidate makes more sense than Kinosaki-Onsen, and how many train transfers are acceptable in one day.

A recent trip to Fez was another version of this, though delayed. In summer 2023, we had first researched a trip for that fall in Morocco, mentally relocating ourselves into the medina before ever setting foot there. Then the September 2023 earthquake happened in Morocco, and for various reasons the plan went quiet. The imagined trip was folded away, like one of those Iceland maps we couldn’t quite throw out. When a friend later suggested a short trip to Fez, much of that old research suddenly became useful again. Not complete, not current, not enough to replace fresh thinking, but enough to give shape to the possibility.

This is another thing travel planning teaches: sometimes you have to be willing to set a plan aside without mourning it too much. A researched trip is not wasted just because it doesn’t happen on schedule. Sometimes it waits for a better time.

Planning as Relationship Work

In a previous post, Why do we travel?, we tried to sort out what we actually get from travel: vanity, relaxation, exploration, companions, awe, and all the uncomfortable little negotiations that happen when people leave home together. 

Planning also forces many aspects of the why-do-we-travel question. A question that sounds simple until you try to answer it. Rest? Beauty? Food? Difficulty? Novelty? A sense of being elsewhere? A day with no decisions? A day with exactly the right number of decisions? In that sense, trip planning becomes an exercise in self-knowledge before it becomes an itinerary.

Planning a trip with a partner adds another dimension entirely, where trip planning becomes a kind of relationship rehearsal. Before the trip even begins, you are already negotiating pace, comfort, priorities, interests, tolerances, and expectations. 

One person dreams about quiet ryokans and long contemplative baths. The other may be thinking: “How long exactly are we supposed to sit in hot water?”

That realization recently reshaped our Japan planning. For example, Kinosaki-Onsen occupied a glowing place in my imagined upcoming itinerary: canal walks, yukata, atmospheric inns, slow evenings, public baths. It looked perfect in the abstract. But eventually I had to confront something obvious: the other half of my traveling party is simply not a spa person.

So why exactly were we going there?

Good trip planning sometimes means abandoning the version of the trip you had already started mentally living inside, and that can be surprisingly difficult.

The planner often becomes emotionally attached to the researched version of the trip. Routes become narratives. Hotels become symbols. Carefully optimized itineraries start to feel inevitable.

Then your partner says:

“I don’t think I would actually enjoy that.”

And they are probably right.

Travel planning becomes a small test of flexibility and empathy. You are not designing an abstractly good trip. You are designing a shared experience for actual humans. And the best planning decision may be to delete something beautiful.

The Limits of Research

Of course, the researched version of a place is always flatter than the lived one because reality refuses complete reconstruction.

No amount of reading prepares you for exhaustion, weather, smells, awkward moments, getting lost, overheard conversations, or the random bakery that becomes your strongest memory of a city.

Tokyo was perhaps our clearest example of this gap between research and reality. On paper and during planning, it initially resolved into something simple in our heads: a giant city. Dense. Efficient. Overwhelming perhaps. But once there, it unfolded into something much more layered and human. It felt less like one city than many interconnected cities stitched together. Quiet side streets suddenly emerged beside giant stations. Tiny neighborhood coffee shops existed just blocks from overwhelming commercial corridors. And perhaps most surprising was the everyday politeness and cleanliness. We had read about it, of course, but experiencing it directly was something else entirely (see Japan Trip – A Salute to People We Saw and Cleanliness).

The same thing happened in Seville with the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. During planning, it was just another museum pin on the map, one item among many. But in practice, visiting it became a whole-day experience. Crossing the river, wandering the grounds of the former monastery, getting slightly lost, sitting outside in the heat, and feeling temporarily removed from the tourist center of the city itself. The experience expanded far beyond the researched outline.

And during our June 2026 trip through Normandy and Brittany (see 8 Day Getaway in France: Honfleur and Douarnenez), we realized that no amount of planning had prepared us for how deeply the countryside would affect us. The hedgerows, fields, small roads, changing light, and layered greens were not things we had really researched in detail. Yet they became one of the emotional centers of the trip.

Travel ultimately exceeds the models we build of it, otherwise there would be little reason to leave home at all. And thankfully so. The trip still has to happen.

And perhaps that is why research remains pleasurable. It brings us closer to another place without fully collapsing the distance. The destination remains slightly out of reach, preserving the possibility of surprise. Research becomes part of the journey, but never the whole thing.

We plan not to eliminate surprises, but to make better surprises possible.

Fez cat sipping like us from pool of information.

On Being Lightly Observed

Big Time Not ~ Unexpected Conclusion ~ Let There Be Music ~ Still Transmitting

Big Time Not

When I started blogging in 2007, I entertained the same quiet fantasy many people do when they first begin publishing things online: that somehow I might become known. Not famous exactly but discovered by cool people. Maybe not read widely, but passed around among those that matter.

The early days of blogging encouraged this kind of thinking. The web still felt open and full of possibilities. (Boy does that sound like an old person ranting or what?) People linked to one another. Search engines felt democratic such that you could convince yourself that if you kept writing thoughtful things, eventually the audience would arrive.

So, I wrote. A lot.

Travel posts. Language observations. Museum visits. Notes about hikes, signs, maps, software projects, organizational systems, food, language, travel tips and all manner of sundry subjects. Over time, the blog became less a publication and more of an accumulation. A long trail of things that caught my attention strongly enough that I wanted to pin them down in words.

Eventually reality arrived, gently and without much drama: most readers came through search queries. Someone wondering about an Italian road sign. Someone researching a museum in Florence. Someone trying to understand a train route in Japan. The audience was niche, fragmented, and almost always accidental.

The comments were sparse but meaningful. Every once in a while, someone would write to say a post resonated with them or helped them see something differently. Those comments meant disproportionately more because they were rare and specific. Someone had not merely landed on the page—they had actually read it.

Somewhere along the way I realized something else: the fantasy of becoming “known” had quietly faded. Not because I failed exactly, but because the work itself had changed function. The writing stopped being an attempt to enter the culture and became a way of narrating my own life. And I’ve come to realize that feels better.

I can imagine what it would be like to be widely observed. Who hasn’t imagined that at some point? But I also understand the cost. Visibility has consequences. It can harden experimentation into persona. It can turn curiosity into brand maintenance.

Meanwhile, obscurity, or partial obscurity, leaves room to wander. There is freedom in being lightly observed.

Unexpected Conclusion

The unexpected conclusion after years of blogging was this: making things becomes much more enjoyable once you stop imagining an audience large enough to validate them. And more accurately: once validation stops being the engine, what remains is curiosity.

You can write exactly the strange thing you want to write. A post about Italian impersonal grammar constructions. A meditation on clutter and organizational entropy. Thoughts about navigation systems south of Milan. Notes on politeness in Japan. Posts celebrating album cover artwork. Long reflections on a personal Scrapbook system that accidentally begins behaving like a tiny science-fiction memory companion.

None of these are market-tested ideas. They tickle our curiosity. Our writing no longer feels like output aimed outward toward “the culture.” It feels more like connective tissue. A way of arranging experience into patterns that make sense later. Especially now, in a world overflowing with expression.

Today, words, music, and images are everywhere. There is infinite commentary layered atop infinite commentary. Entire ecosystems are devoted to producing more content than any human could ever absorb. So, what does it mean to make anything inside this abundance? To release an album, publish a book, make a film, or maintain a long-running written project once required passing through gates. Now nearly everyone can pass through these gates instantly and continuously. The result is both wonderful and overwhelming.

And yet people still make things.

Not always because the world is waiting for them. Often because creating itself is a form of noticing. A way of orienting oneself. A method for stitching together places, conversations, moods, disappointments, jokes, weather, signs, meals, and passing thoughts into something that resembles continuity.

Luck plays a role in who becomes visible and who remains obscure. Sometimes the line between “unobserved” and “observed” feels absurdly thin. Timing. Algorithms. Connections. Cultural mood. Accident.

But there is another truth too: some people truly dedicate themselves to mastery for years or decades. There are artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers whose visibility is not merely luck but the result of enormous discipline and deep study. The gap between amateur curiosity and practiced craft can be vast and fully earned.

I admire that but at the same time, I no longer feel compelled to measure my own work against those scales. The act of creating serves a different function for me now. It is less about arrival and more about continuation.

Let There Be Music

Recently I added music to the mix. Or perhaps better to say: musical blogging. That’s because it's how I think of the songs, connected to the writing rather than separate from it. They inhabit a similar emotional center for me: weather systems, static, memory, motion, transmissions, fragments, recurring imagery, private references. There is crosstalk between songs and posts.

What surprised me was how quickly music repeated a lesson I had already learned through writing. People often react more to the fact that you make music than to the music itself.

“Oh, you’re making songs now.”

The category arrives before the engagement. And I think I understand why. Modern attention tends toward classification. We absorb labels quickly because there is too much to absorb deeply. Am I a musician, writer, photographer, traveler, content creator, or what? We sort one another into recognizable containers almost instantly to keep ourselves sane.

But categorization is not the same thing as attention. Listening carefully is rare. Reading carefully is rare. Both probably always have been.

And maybe that is what caught me off guard again when I started sharing songs. Music feels strangely vulnerable because it asks for a sustained presence. A song says, stay here with this for four minutes. Enter this atmosphere. Listen closely enough to notice the texture and intent, ...and...most people understandably do not.

Even friends often engage lightly. They acknowledge the existence of the thing rather than inhabiting it. The reaction becomes social instead of immersive.

But then there are exceptions. My companion. A few close friends. The rare people who actually listen. Who notice lyrics, recurring phrases, references to older posts, emotional callbacks, certain sounds or moods that connect to conversations we had years ago. And with those few people, the work becomes something else entirely. It becomes sort of an inside joke, a secret language.

It becomes a shared archive of references accumulated slowly over time, where lyrics recall a trip, a phrase recalls an old argument or a song title recalls a rough spot in the year. Certain themes keep returning often enough that they become sort of a personal mythology. And at this point, I realized that this tiny audience might actually be enough.

Still Transmitting

Maybe that’s what all the writing and music making has become: a running commentary on a life lived. Not content. Not branding. Not a bid for recognition.

It’s a private cinematic universe for an audience of a few people. A secret language built over years of trips, jokes, references, observations, signs, songs, software projects, maps, museums, and repeated phrases.

The blog posts, photographs, notes, and songs now feel less like separate outputs and more like one long interconnected system. The work talks to itself over the years. Certain emotional frequencies repeat (noise). Certain imagery keeps resurfacing (graffiti). Certain obsessions refuse to leave (language).

I’m writing the script and now composing the soundtrack of my life and those close to me, whether they want it or not. And perhaps the most surprising part is that being lightly observed may be exactly what allows it to continue. There is enough audience for resonance but not enough scrutiny to calcify into performance. There is enough attention to feel heard occasionally. There is enough obscurity to remain curious.

And when careful attention does appear, from the small handful of people who truly read and listen closely, it matters enormously precisely because it is rare.

Maybe careful attention has always been rare. Which, annoyingly, is probably why it matters so much when it shows up.

Altered Street Signs

Studying for the Italian patente has made me hyper-aware of street signage. I start seeing rules everywhere painted on the road, hanging on poles, implied in the way people drive (or don’t). One rule that stuck with me, somewhere between right-of-way diagrams and trick questions about parking, and that was: you are not supposed to alter street signs!

Fair enough. Traffic signs are, after all, meant to be clear, consistent, and unambiguous. A shared visual language that keeps things moving and, ideally, prevents chaos.

And then we went for a walk in the old town of Cuneo and found on a few side streets were signs where someone had creatively ignored that rule. The signs in question were senso vietato (do not enter), direzione obbligatoria (mandatory direction), direzione consentita (allowed turn), divieto di sosta (no parking), and senso unico frontale (one way).

   

Left: Senso vietato and direzione obbligatoria.

Center left: Senso vietato.

Center right: Direzione consentita.

Right: Senso unico frontale.

Example of the alterations: A standard divieto di accesso (no entry) sign becomes a pillory holding a person bound by their hands and head. Another no entry sign featured a suited figure, head obscured by the white bar, giving off a kind of anonymous, noir presence. One no entry sign showed a bent figure carrying the bar like a burden. And yet another had a figure painting out of the sign itself, as if frustration had turned literal.

These weren’t acts of vandalism in the usual sense. They felt more like small interventions where someone looked at an impersonal, authoritative symbol and decided to make it more human.

Which brings us back to language.

In a recent post, we talked about how Italian often prefers the impersonal: È vietato, si prega di, divieto di…. The impersonal comes across as facts, not commands. “No entry” becomes “Entry is forbidden.” No finger-pointing, just a statement of reality.

These altered signs flip that dynamic, just a bit. They reintroduce a subject. Suddenly there is someone there ducking under, carrying, resisting, nibbling at the rule. The impersonal becomes personal again.

There’s something disarming about seeing a rigid, standardized system loosened just enough to allow a bit of personality through. Not enough to confuse the meaning—you still know you can’t go that way—but enough to create a small pause and smile.

Of course, the patente book would not approve. Somewhere in its pages, this is clearly filed under non si fa. And yet, walking those streets, it was hard not to feel that something was gained in the breaking of the rule.

  

Senso vietato and Divieto di sosta signs in Cuneo.

Two Phones South of Milan

The New Responsibilities ~ Free Flow  ~ Two Phones South of Milan ~ 

The Black Box Problem ~ Optimization Addiction ~ The Navigator's Seat

 

On road trips, my role has always been navigator.

Traditionally this meant entering the destination, maybe checking traffic once or twice, and then spending long stretches staring out the window commenting occasionally on abandoned buildings and puzzling out Italian road signs.

Not anymore.

On a recent drive between Bergamo and Cuneo, while holding an iPhone showing one route and an Android phone showing another, I realized my navigation job has changed.

The old-me navigator dealt in directions. The modern-me navigator arbitrates between information systems. 

Driving around the south and east of Milan on the A58.

The New Responsibilities

The change announced itself gradually over the course of a weekend trip. Each new layer of technology brought with it another tiny responsibility, another tab to keep open, another system to monitor “just in case”.

The first big shift came from renting an electric car for the first time. We rented through SIXT and suddenly charging became part of the trip planning itself. Not difficult exactly, but present in a way gasoline rarely is anymore.

As navigator, I found myself checking range estimates, locating charging stations, and calculating whether we had enough battery to comfortably make it through the next stretch.

Gas stations have become mentally invisible to us over decades of driving. Electric cars bring infrastructure awareness back into consciousness. You start noticing distances differently. Elevation changes matter. Speeds matter. A casual detour suddenly might have consequences.

In some ways it made travel feel more tangible again. But it also gives the navigator homework.

Free Flow

Then there was the autostrada A33 between Asti and Cuneo.

On this stretch of autostrada, traditional toll booths have been replaced by a “free flow” system. You drive through without stopping while cameras record your license plate. Convenient in theory. Invisible infrastructure at work.

Except now the navigator has another task: remembering to go online later and pay.

And not immediately either, because the license plate often takes a day or more to appear in the system.

So now the navigator keeps a mental ledger of:

• If we paid and if not setting a reminder for tomorrow.
• Remembering the time we used the road.
• Keeping the rental car license plate on hand to identify the car in the system.
• Remembering what app to use to pay.
• Figuring out if we should just go ahead and create (yet another) account or just pay as an anonymous user.

Now road trips acquired administrative tasks and follow-up.

Two Phones South of Milan

The moment that crystallized all this came on our return drive from Cuneo to Bergamo.

We were south of Milan traveling east on the A50 and had two options: continue north toward Milan on the A1, or swing south on the A1 to catch the A58 — the Tangenziale Est Esterna di Milano (TEEM) — a wider loop that is longer in distance but often faster in practice because it avoids Milan traffic.

Google Maps insisted the A58 was closed. 

Not congested. Closed.

Every time we selected the route, Google tried to reroute us away from it. We were still a few kilometers away from the decision point but me-the-navigator felt pressure to make a good decision. Trust Google Maps?

Apple Maps showed the A58 as perfectly normal. The road signs on the autostrada also suggested no issues. And traffic reports sounded fine. (We ignored Google Maps and went on A58 and it was just fine.)

And it was at that point I realized I was no longer navigating. I was conducting a small transportation fact-checking operation real time. I had an iPhone in one hand with Google Maps open, an Android phone in the other checking the same route, and meanwhile I was consulting the official A58 website.

The navigator’s role now includes determining which machine/service/system is lying least.

The Black Box Problem

Part of the navigator's unease is that modern navigation systems are black boxes.

We know they ingest traffic patterns, road reports, historical data, closures, accidents, speed estimates, weather, and probably the emotional state of nearby commuters. Then they produce a route with an aura of mathematical certainty.

But the systems are always changing and a route suggestion that worked one way six months ago likely behaves differently now. Small interface changes might alter behavior. New code is rolled out silently behind the scenes. Priorities shift, for example, for calculating routes for fuel efficiency. We assume determinism because maps look authoritative, but the logic underneath is fluid.

And unlike paper maps, these systems don’t simply describe the world. They actively shape our decisions in real time. If we had followed Google Map's advice and not taken the A58, we would have ended up in a lot more traffic and an hour more of driving. How many people made that decision? Did Google Map's error in this case (and I think it's safe to call it that) cause more traffic?

Today navigation is about dealing with a competing layering of realities:

• the car’s navigation system
• the phone’s navigation system
• traffic websites
• road authority websites
• our own common sense
• and finally, the actual road in front of us

Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they do not.

Optimization Addiction

Of course, there is an easy response to all this: pick a route and stop worrying.

And honestly, if you surrender to that approach, modern navigation is wonderful. Voice guidance, live traffic, estimated arrival times, and charging locations. It’s objectively easier than unfolding giant paper maps across your knees somewhere near Piacenza.

But modern systems tempt us with optimization like:

• Save seven minutes.
• Avoid congestion.
• Faster route available.
• Charge now instead of later.
• Traffic ahead.
• Incident reported.
• Recalculating.

Every route now feels like a live market constantly updating itself.

Humans are not particularly good at ignoring optimization opportunities once they are presented. Especially not when the difference between choices is quantified in glowing blue lines and precise minute counts.

So the navigator stays engaged. Watching. Comparing. Verifying.

Not because the systems are bad, but because they are dynamic.

The Navigator’s Seat

There is also something social happening.

While the driver concentrates on the road, the navigator increasingly manages the surrounding digital ecosystem:

• replying to messages,
• confirming arrival times,
• checking traffic,
• looking up charging stations,
• paying tolls,
• cross-referencing maps,
• interpreting alerts.

Sometimes as navigator, I'm also answering the driver's text messages while trying to sound enough like the driver that the receiver doesn't notice.

The navigator used to help you get somewhere. Now the navigator helps decide which version of reality to trust. 

Music Album Covers with Televisions on Them

36 albums covers featuring TVs on them.

Ah, the good old television. TV, tube, boob tube, telly, idiot box. A piece of furniture, a glowing shrine, background noise, babysitter, cultural glue, and eventually just another rectangle in our lives competing for attention.

The word “television” itself was introduced by Russian engineer Konstantin Perskyi at the 1900 Paris Exposition during the International Congress of Electricity. He combined Greek and Latin roots into a neat term meaning, roughly, “seeing at a distance,” replacing clunkier technical descriptions floating around at the time. It was the perfect debut venue: a world fair dedicated to showing off the future through electricity, machinery, and spectacle.

In this album cover mosaic, we collected examples of televisions appearing on album covers in all their forms: glowing consoles, portable sets, static-filled screens, rabbit ears, surveillance monitors, and late-night blue light. TVs on album covers can signal comfort, alienation, mass culture, boredom, nostalgia, or just the simple fact that for decades the television sat at the center of domestic life.

As usual with these mosaics, we’re not trying to be exhaustive. There are plenty of examples we missed, forgot, or perhaps once saw at 1 a.m. illuminated by the flicker of a CRT screen.

01 Foretaste – "Terrorist TV" (2008)
02 Lichen – "The End is Near" (2018)
03 Graham Parker – "Imaginary Television" (2010)
04 Cocksure – "T.V.M.A.L.S.V." (2014)
05 Dramarama – "Color TV" (2020)
06 Frank Zappa – "A Token Of His Extreme Soundtrack" (2013)

07 Kacy & Clayton, Marlon Williams – "Plastic Bouquet" (2020)
08 Kiyotaka Sugiyama – "Kona Weather" (1987)
09 Roger Waters – "Amused to Death" (1992)
10 The Bees – "TV Mentality" (1979)
11 DelicTrips. – "Motivated Abstract" (2017)
12 The Cars – "Moving in Stereo The Best of The Cars" (2016)

13 Sweet – "Waters Edge" (1980)
14 Berlin – "Pleasure Victim" (1982)
15 Family – "Bandstand" (1972)
16 Benny Golson – "Tune In, Turn On The Hippest Commercials Of The Sixties" (1999)
17 Lizzy Borden – "Visual Lies" (1987)
18 Tai Verdes – "TV" (2021)

19 A Flock of Seagulls – "A Flock of Seagulls" (1982)
20 Elton John – "The Fox" (1981)
21 George Harrison – "Brainwashed" (2002)
22 Joni Mitchell – "Wild Things Run Fast" (1982)
23 Proctor and Bergman – "TV Or Not TV A Video Vaudeville In Two Acts" (1973)
24 Various Artists – "100 Greatest TV Themes" (2011)

25 AC-DC – "Blow Up Your Video" (1988)
26 The Tubes – "Remote Control" (1979)
27 Holger Czukay – "Movies" (1979)
28 Monty Python – "Monty Pythons Flying Circus" (1970)
29 Rebel Kicks – "A Portrait of Man, Pt 1" (2020)
30 Lou Reed – "New Sensations" (1984)

31 Rush – "Power Windows" (1985)
32 Harry Nilsson – "That's The Way It Is" (1976)
33 Fish – "Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors" (1990)
34 World Party – "Private Revolution" (1986)
35 Tom Jones – "Reload" (1999)
36 Randy Newman – "12 Songs" (1970)

La Dolce Metà

Showing your sweet side and your better half.

I meant to ask our friend and Italian barista: “where is your better half?” referring to her husband. What came out of my mouth was: dov’è il tuo dolce lato. That was followed by laughter. Oops! I got burned by a false friend and a too-literal translation. The correct way is to say la tua dolce metà.

“Dolce lato” sounds like an overly sweet new dessert. “Dolcelatte” is a similar to gorgonzola. So maybe I asked her where her cheese was?

Other traps include:

• Sono freddo — “I’m a cold person” VS Ho freddo — “I’m cold”. Italian uses avere (to have) for physical states.

• Prendo una foto — “I’ll take this photo” (with me, almost like grab it) VS Faccio una foto - “I’ll take a photo” (take a picture).

• Ti ho perso — “I lost you” (in the crowd, e.g.) VS Mi sei mancato — “I missed you”.

They all share the same pattern because you recognize the words, you trust the structure and the sentence is technically understandable. But it lands…off.