Hello World

To honor the cowardly but successful Azurri, I declare this to be Italy week.

I celebrated by finishing Heat : An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. The book is written by a New Yorker editor who writes a profile of “Molto” Mario Batali and decides to quit his job to work in Batali’s kitchen. And then he moves to Italy to learn how to make pasta and butcher cows and pigs.

Short review: It’s an easy, entertaining read (his description of conversations with Marco Pierre White is hilarious) that will appeal anybody who cooks or, like me, prefers to cook vicariously through professionals. If you’re not interested already, don’t bother, but if you are interested already I can pretty much assure you of a good read.

And, unrelatedly, I’ve got to take a moment to tell you guys how great T-Mobile is. My phone has been acting up recently, so yesterday I went to the T-Mobile store to ask them about it. I decribed the problem to the guy, and he said “that’s a known issue and it’s covered under the warranty–we can’t replace it here but we’ll mail you a new phone right away.” He didn’t demand to see the problem in action or make me get a notarized affidavit, and I didn’t have to sign anything in triplicate. They just fixed my problem. That experience, plus the fact that T-Mobile is still the cheapest cell provider, with the coolest phones, is why I’m going to stick with them in perpetuity. Unless anybody else offers me a slightly better deal, of course, in which case I’ll drop them in an instant.