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COFFEE IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE THAT OVERCOMES CULTURAL BARRIERS

Jun 29, 2024 | JOURNEY FROM MUG TO MUG, WORLD, JOURNEY FROM MUG TO MUG, WORLD

Coffee is a universal language that overcomes cultural barriers: a hot cup can unite people from every corner of the world.

I take the cue from this quote to confirm how coffee here has given me the opportunity to communicate with people living in areas hitherto unknown to me.

Tomislav keeps going on to update me about his project, remember I told you about his comics, but also about the photos of his coffees that he never fails to send me?

I am very grateful to him and thanks to him I discovered that in Temisvar there is a statue dedicated to Romulus and Remus.

These are his coffees!
Turkish coffee in Subotica and ‘morning coffee’ with candies from Macedonia as Tomislav called it.

Il caffè è un linguaggio universale che supera le barriere culturali: una tazza calda può unire persone provenienti da ogni angolo del mondo.

Lela constantly teaches me about her Georgia, and through her love of Italy she uncovers many interesting crossovers, such as L’Antica Trattoria Toscana and Georgiana.

What better combination than food?

Speaking of food, Lela described their cheese to me: Sulguni სულგუნი, სულუგუნი which comes from the Samegrelo region and is reminiscent of our mozzarella. Do you know it?

I believe that being able to chat about any subject and listen to life’s monents, interests, and those little things that simply make up the days is absolutely interesting and instructive.

The small differences, nuances, languages, traditions, environments, which are a heritage to be preserved and passed on.

Have you ever met, known, discovered people through the ‘bridge’ represented by coffee?

A hot cup can unite people from every corner of the world.

Coffee is a universal language that overcomes cultural barriers: a hot cup can unite people from every corner of the world.

Or perhaps your point of sharing has been different.

Whatever corner of the world you come from, feel welcome and free to tell!

ADD YOUR VOICE

Nov 11, 2023 | MUSIC, MUSIC

Add your voice is a call to action launched by Coldplay on their website.

More precisely: Add your voice to a new song:

Hello everyone. We hope you are all doing well in these wild times.

We have almost finished Moon Music. If you would also like to participate, perhaps you could add your voice to a song called One World. (We would love that).

All you have to do is record yourself singing “Ahhhh” for a few seconds at oneworld.coldplay.com.

You can copy the note on the site, or sing a G or C in any octave.

Thank you very much.

Love,

Chris, Guy, Will and Jonny

A concise and meaningful invitation.

One World, the title of the song, two words that for me evoke an extremely important message: I would like the world to be one, in the sense of united, in the sense of the same world equal for all.

We will soon find out what this “world” sung by Coldplay with the voices of so many people will be like.

I find this extended chorus in space a great bridge to unite voices even metaphorically.

But coming back down to earth, concretely this is the required note:

and you can register it by clicking after selecting the country of origin.

What do you say?

Will you add your voice?

As you know I always love to sing and indeed Coldplay’s songs are in general invitations to sing: very different from each other, joyful, at times spiritual, at times evocative enough to make the color come alive.

Chris Martin’s voice is introspective and also highly characterized: impossible not to recognize it.

The same cannot be said about him: after some time I am still very impressed by the time he decided to go to one of his concerts on the subway, among ordinary people, but also his fans on the same route, ready to listen to him, but not to spot him, so much so that no one noticed his presence.

Cold, coldness, detachment?

A “coldness” that they chose to represent to the sound of music.

Undoubtedly they are universal, but I ask you: as much as in some ways they reach everyone, do they then reach deep down?

They certainly reached in a way that I love when they decided to send letters typed to their fans to announce the release of the album Everyday Life.

I want to express my admiration for the tribute to Enjoy the silence, accomplice Anton Corbijn, in the unofficial video for Viva la vida, which is actually perhaps their song that I like the most, despite the fact that it seems that statistics show Yellow as the favorite.

And your favorite is what?

Going back to the call-to-action, will you sing the note?

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TODAY TO EARN YOUR PLACE IN THIS CROWDED WORLD?

Jan 12, 2022 | BOOKS, MOVIES, BOOKS, MOVIES, MUSIC, MUSIC

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world?

The character played by John Cusack asks this question to everyone in Utopia.

In naming Utopia my first association of thought is Thomas More.

Among other things, remaining in the field of cinematographic fiction, Thomas More is mentioned in Leonardo’s Cinderella played by Drew Barrymore, for example.

But I discovered that Utopia is also a movie about Australian Aborigines, and seeing the painful trailer let think that situation has stopped at the time as told by Baz Luhrmann.

Utopia however is in any expression of thought.

It is art, as described in this comment, it’s a song by Björk, it is not for The Offspring, it’s even a video game.

Utopia is a controversial Channel 4 series then revised for an Amazon production by an exceptional showrunner: Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and screenwriter by David Fincher, who appears in three different cameos, and disseminates various Easter eggs.

Utopia thus becomes a graphic novel. Viral …

A weird group of fans in search of this mysterious “comic” to be interpreted by riddles, find themselves catapulted into a reality that prefigures dystopia rather than Utopia.

Comics to tell the truth not really, it is a series of drawings by the artist Joao Ruas: some of the inspirations behind his work are the dawn of mankind, folklore, magical realism, the concept of wabi-sabi (侘寂) and human conflict.

Gillian Flynn, in an interview with the New York Times said: “I think it’s a Rorschach test … It’s a show designed to let you find what you want from it, and have different points of view, which is exactly where we are right now.”

Speaking of points of view, John Cusack, in his first role in a series, plays Kevin Christie … but rather than my Agatha, it is inspired by well-known characters of a completely different genre.

Those who follow him have the opportunity to know how much John has a certain aversion to some of Mr. Christie’s alter egos, which is why it was a cathartic interpretation.

In his interview published by The Guardian in addition to defining himself a kind of Cassandra, he gave me an amazing ending!

Cusack rubs his tired eyes. He drinks from his big tin tankard of coffee. (!) Who knows, he says? “Maybe being outspoken hurts your career… I’m just aware it helps me sleep better at night, knowing that I wasn’t passive during this time.”

After all, isn’t such an awareness already a kind of Utopia for many of us?

How do you see Utopia?

An exceptional admirer saw Utopia like this:

Stephen King writes:
I’m loving UTOPIA, on Amazon Prime. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea, given the times we’re living in, but it has the slow build to full steam that I associate with page-turning novels. Horrifying, violent, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

And what song goes with the trailer?

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
R.E.M.

But this world, how should it be earned every day in your opinion?

I would rather ask: what have you done today to improve this world?

Even if to tell the truth I would be without answers …

IL SOGNO DELLA MACCHINA DA CUCIRE Bianca Pitzorno THE DREAM OF THE SEWING MACHINE Bompiani novel

Aug 31, 2020 | BOOKS

If I think of the sewing machine, my grandmother’s one immediately comes to mind, and I see myself as a child observing the gestures, the big wheel I couldn’t stop touching, the pedal, the bobbin.

She made everything seem so easy, then, over time, I experienced that it is not at all, like a whole host of other things.

Even the protagonist of the book, whose name is never mentioned, perhaps to leave the reader the faculty of identifying themselves at a deeper level, as a child watches her grandmother, who is all her family, sew, and she teaches her, together with sewing, the life.

And the teachings of the grandmother, as well as the strong bond between them, will save her in various situations.

The only place mentioned in the book is Paris, all other places are indicated with only the initial. Paradoxically, instead of losing the references, I found a precise orientation, as if Paris represented a single fixed point while “it’s a small world”, precisely with the slightly negative meaning of the proverbial saying.

A world in which even dreams become a luxury that cannot be afforded.

And so the sewing machine becomes more precious than a jewel, transfiguring itself in the way to improve one’s condition more easily, more intensely, but always with commitment, with constancy, with one’s own strength, without discounts, working.

Once again I thank Monica for this reading: an embroidery of female figures that I admired.

Stories of Women of those we like, of those who stand out, of those who struggle not to be princesses.
Women who survive.
Women who teach.

And the negative figures, the ruthless women, consuming themselves in their wickedness do nothing but make those who deserve shine more.

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

May 9, 2020 | BOOKS, ITALY, MEDIA, MOVIES, SCIENCE, WORLD

“It is sometimes said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe.”
This quote comes from the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect and is inspired by a theory taken up and debated in numerous areas.
Once again, as happened for the War of the Worlds: the inspiration comes from a science fiction novel, it is in fact Ray Bradbury who in his Sound of thunder attributes to the proper death of a butterfly during a journey through time, a variation of future events:

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling,
“No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!”
Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

Another coincidence, also in this case the story was broadcast by the BBC in 2011: here if you want to find the podcast (butterfly from about 35 minutes but I would advise you to listen to it all if you have time).
The butterfly symbol was taken up by Edward Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Science and later in a 1979 lecture that went down in history.
In general, the butterfly effect belongs to quantum physics and more precisely to the basis of chaos theory.
Chaos is the most congenial aspect to me, but actually I didn’t want to talk about this … not this time, at least.
Antonietta Gatti is perhaps known to most as “the wife of” despite her respectable curriculum. Her skills add up over time, and I would list, almost a bit to summarize, this recognition: she has been awarded the title of Fellow of the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering for her contribution to the progress of science. The various national societies of biomaterials and bioengineering have tens of thousands of members worldwide and the union of the various companies has elected Dr. Gatti to be part of the elite of scientists that consists of 32 members, and she was part of a parliamentary commission of inquiry as a responsible consultant. I know, difficult to read, but I found her report very interesting, perhaps because I live in a highly polluted area: here the mortality rate from tumors is terrible:
She deals with nanopathology or pathologies induced by micro and nano-sized particulate exposures, i.e. powders with dimensions less than 100nm (0.1 microns) but her research has become difficult due to the reduced availability of a suitable microscope.
Her flapping wings has not changed the world yet, but she has been able to reach the hearts of people who have made it possible to buy a new electron microscope with their donations.
Let us not stop at the fact that individually we cannot make a difference, let us not stop flying lightly on the difficulties, each of us can be the butterfly of change, let’s believe it, and do not let ourselves be crushed in the mud.