Creminelli Salami

At Pike Place Market there is a little handcrafted salami stand where you can get some nice salami and sausage. The place is called Creminelli and our favorite is the Salami Tartufo – a salami with truffle shavings. We’ve also had the Cacciatore which is nice too. Creminelli is a fairly new American artisan maker of salami but with a founder with a longer history of salami-making in Italy.

Carosello – Italian Ads

Left: Carosello Logo. Right: Mina surrounded by boxes of Barilla pasta in a 1967 Carosello Barilla ad.

We were out to dinner with our Italian friends and the talk turned to music – as it always happens when we are around. They mentioned that the carosello ads that used to appear on Italian TV. Intrigued, we looked them up and found an interesting story of the Italian media culture. 

Carosello ads aired just before bedtime (for children) at 8:45pm from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s and were a cultural touchstone for those that grew up watching them. As pointed out on bavatuesdays, the ads are not always obvious in terms of what they are selling. You have to wait and watch them to see where they are going. 

A list of ads can be found at mondocarosello.com with some video clips (you have to wait a bit to get the video). YouTube may be more useful for a quick fix. 

In this carosello video from 1967, in the first 30 seconds of the video can you tell what Mina is selling? 

Mina is selling Barilla pasta in that clip. The first few frames of the clip say "Barilla presenta Mina".  But before getting to the pasta, she is sings the song Ta ra ta ta Fumo Blu (1967) about how she loves a man who knows how to smoke. To her, that’s a real man. The lyrics are:

Con me

Tu puoi fumare la tua pipa quando vuoi

Perché mi piaci molto di più

E sei così romantico

Fumo blu, fumo blu

Una nuvola e dentro tu

E poi, e poi

Se un uomo sa di fumo

Ma sì, ma sì

È veramente un uomo

Io ti amerò finché vorrai

Proprio perché sei così

Which can be translated as:

With me

You can smoke your pipe when you want

Because I like you even more

And you are so romantic

Blue smoke, blue smoke

A cloud with you inside

Besides

A man who smells like smoke (or knows how to smoke)

Ah yes

Is truly a man

I'll love you as long as you want

Because you are like that

At the end of the Fumo Blu Carosello clip, Mina does a spot for Barilla pasta and she says how Barilla pasta reveals the grand chef in you! She says:

Barilla

Con Barilla

Capolavoro di pasta

Potete fare ogni giorno 

Un capolavoro di buona cucina

B come buona cucina

B come Barilla

Con Barilla 

Rivelate la gran cuoca che c'è in voi

É così davvero

C'e una gran cuoca in voi 

E Barilla la rivela

Which can be translated as:

Barilla

With Barilla

Masterpiece of pasta

Every day you can make

A masterpiece of beautiful cooking

B for good cooking

B for Barilla

With Barilla

Reveal the great cook in you

That's a fact

There a great cook in you

And Barilla reveals it

In this related YouTube video with Mina, you even get cooking tips for the pasta, but you have to wait to the end of the music video naturally. 

Phelps, Bigfoot, and Presidentialism

What do these three things have in common? Perhaps nothing really, but in my early-morning, crow-cawing-pierced, groggy Saturday morning mind they all united in a common theme: fascination with the “top dog” to the exclusion of everything else. I know, sour grapes in regards to Phelps and his medals, but it did not sit well with me the response and media coverage of his effort. It seemed so over-the-top to the exclusion of all other possible stories. Now a pending book. Then throw in another Bigfoot hoax. People just want to believe there is a “big guy”, a “top dog” out there waiting to be discovered. The "discovery" was complete with an official news conference put on by the two car salesmen who made the find. Psst, hey reporters, you know that Bigfoot doesn’t exist and besides (exclusion theme) we have so many other serious problems (war, poverty, etc.) to deal with? Finally, there is the vice president choice for the two presidential candidates. Does it matter? Not really according to many and it displays our endless fascination with the “top dog”. In an interesting piece called The Conquest of Presidentialism, presidentialism as defined by Vanderbilt professor Dana Nelson is: our paternalistic view that presidents are godlike saviors—and therefore democracy’s only important figures. In the same piece there is a reference to a quote by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), a French historian who made some astute observations about 19^th century American democracy that are still relevant today, which I’ll repeat here. The quote refers to our capability to select leaders. True or false?

“It is in vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.” (Democracy in America, Volume 2)

Prompt if device unused for…

What did I expect? A new device running a Windows OS (on Samsung BlackJack II -previous post) and with a day or so I need to tweak the registry. To tweak the registry I used CeRegEdit. Why? Because I connected to an Exchange Server in the sky and it squirted some security policy changes down to my phone so that it would not let me select “Prompt if device unused for” checkbox. This meant I had to enter a complicated password every time I unlocked. I’m fine as long as I was talking to Exchange, but after I discontinued that partnership/connection I should at least have the phone go back to the way it was. But no. I followed the advice in this post and it worked great. Basically, connect to the registry of the device and change the HKLM/Security/Policies/Policies/00001023 to 1. Ironically, I think having a password is good, just that I want the flexibility to determine when I want it.

The password settings in Windows Mobile located under Start\Settings\Security\Device Lock.

To All the Watches We Loved Before: Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes

As I was taking a last look at all the watches we collected over the last 20+ years I just had to hear Disco Tex and the Sex-o-lettes. In my head, somehow the watches reminded me of the Disco Tex’s classics: I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo and Get Dancin' ("...my chiffon is wet darling..."). The watches were in a brown paper back buried in the closet, much like many a Disco Tex record? Sorry, if these songs enter your brain.

Argh, They Hooked Us Again

Why oh why could we just not keep our old phones and save a bundle of money? No, instead we both have fancy new phones (the same), just different colors. (We get the same phones because one of us is hardware-challenged and relies on the other for instruction.) The phone: the Samsung BlackJack II. The screen is a little small-ish and the headphones and the USB are not standard. Also, can’t use my old SIM storage card because it takes a different sized one. So far, the jury is out. We are on a family plan which is suppose to save you money, but with the features we added is actually costing us more.