No Mod Required

Here’s the big catch all post for links to cool shit in Italy. This will mostly be restaurant/bar/cafe links, but there are a couple of other things sneaking in as well, so if you’re thinking of going to Rome or Florence, maybe something here will be useful to you

First and foremost I want to recommend Vatican Art Walks. This was the first time we’ve ever hired a guide for anything in Europe and it was worth every penny. Scot, the owner, was our guide and he was nice, knowledgeable and definitely into the subject matter. We did a tour of the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. It took the better part of an afternoon and I walked away pretty much stunned. Most of that is obviously because of the incredible works of art there, but Scot certainly helped me along the path to stunned-dom pointing out things I would never have noticed on my own and providing the sort of detail and background that I’m always curious about in a place like that.

One other benefit of Scot’s experience in Rome was his restaurant recommendation for that night. We went to Ristorante Margutta, a vegetarian restaurant (!) on a hip little street near the Piazza del Popolo. It was fantastic. I had the best pasta of the week there and everything else was excellent.

Speaking of the Piazza del Popolo, here’s a great view of the Piazza from the Piazzale Napoleone:

Well worth the walk up if you’re there by the way. It’s a bit of a stretch for tired legs, but the view is awesome.

Continuing with the food, we also ate a small lunch at the cafe at the Musei Capitolini. Which is only really recommended if you’re in there already, but the view from there is excellent, encompassing a large swath of Rome and the food was pretty good for a museum.

Our final night in Rome we ate at the frenetic, but fun L’isola della pizza. It was no more than five minutes from our hotel and came recommended so it was a no brainer for our last night in Rome. It was surprisingly good. The food was excellent, the service was great and it was downright inexpensive. The lively atmosphere was also a bonus. The blend of locals and tourists all out enjoying themselves made for a really good time.

Capping our night that night we went to Gelateria Old Bridge, another recommendation from Scot. It was our one gelato experience for the whole trip and thankfully it was a good one. If you ever need to wait in line to get into the Vatican make sure to head over to this tiny shop to fuel up in advance…

In Florence we stayed at the impossibly cool Monna Lisa Hotel Firenze. This converted Palazzo is probably the coolest hotel I’ve ever stayed in. Everything about it was top notch. The service and food (breakfast) were excellent, the small bar was comfortable, the room was large (for Europe) and the location was fantastic (about five minutes from the Duomo.) It’s not cheap, but if money’s not your first concern I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Our favorite restaurante in Florence has to have been Ristorante Posta. For me, it was great as I had my one “got to have it” meal of the trip- a killer Bistecca alla Fiorentina, but everyone we were with had a great meal. Judy and I enjoyed it so much we went back on Friday for lunch…

That’ll do for now. I’ll add to this post if there’s anything that springs to mind after I hit “publish”

There’s absolutely nothing groundbreaking about the following code sample. People (who are lucky enough to have more time to mess around) have been doing this sort of experimentation for a while now. Thing is, this one is so simple and so plainly useful I just have to toss it out there for your (my?) enjoyment.

Check out the following sample. It’s just a simple show/hide, but I just love the simplicity of the code that runs it.

With a class="more" attached the DL, all we need to run the above is this


dl.more dd{
display:none;
}
dl.more:hover dd{
display:block;
}


There are two things I like about that:

1. It’s as simple as it gets. The only thing simpler than coding that would be not coding anything.
2. It makes sense. A lot of times those “more” links are the spitting image of a dt dd pair, except it’s unrelated tags in an arbitrary structure (something like DIV > P + DIV) so using ready-made structure just feels right.

Yeah, there are potential issues. The one that sticks out to me is it’s not accessible, since with no mouse there’s no :hover. That said, with any solution involving a mouse, accessibility becomes an issue, so it’s not better or worse than any other solution that doesn’t address the mouse-less users.

The other obvious issue is that IE6 doesn’t support :hover on anything but links, so there would need to be a script based solution to get this to work in what is still one of the biggest browsers out there.* But I can dream, can’t I?

*For this site, Firefox is actually the number one browser, followed by IE6 and then IE7. The combination of IE versions are still the dominant browser platform.

From the out of left field department…

I went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and while I was there I bought a piece of malachite. Why? Because it’s crazy cool looking, that’s why.

What’s Malachite? Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Malachite is a carbonate mineral, copper(II) carbonate hydroxide Cu2CO3(OH)2. It crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal system, and most often forms botryoidal, fibrous, or stalagmitic masses. Individual crystals are rare, but do occur as slender to acicular prisms. Pseudomorphs after more tabular or blocky azurite crystals also occur.

In other words, minerals are cool.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters for DVD While I enjoyed it (I’m a super fan of the show,) the best part of it was probably Todd James/Reas‘ animation at the beginning. Killer stuff.

The rest was just a really good, really long episode (with raw cussing.) Which is kind of what I expected it to be, so I’m 100% satisfied.

Why not check out some …

Tokyo Street Style

Japanese street fashion is five hundred flavors of awesome (which approaches the theoretical limits of awesomeness.)

I’m sure if I should be proud or alarmed that I know so many of them already. The funniest part for me is the Tay Zonday cameo at the end. That guy cracks me up and the illustration of him is absolutely perfect, right down to the twisted up jaw.

Buzzfeed just posted a full list of the videos referenced

One thing missing is the amazing Ottoman Humping Gangstas- which may be the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.

If you click on link today, make it this one. The ASCII view of reality is sooooo cool. The other filters look interesting, but the idea of an ASCII filter on reality is just too funny to keep to myself. I must spread the geeky coolness of it…

English Russia » The Matrix Goggles

via William Gibson

The ultimate example might be Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ being discovered in a Jesuit house in Dublin, but there are plenty of examples.

A lost sketch by John Constable, never recorded in the catalogues of his work, has tumbled with a cascade of other drawings and letters from volumes which the British Library has owned for almost a century.

British Library uncovers missing Constable

Back then, no one from Romania would have been able to read my interview with Darren Aronofsky. Now? Thanks to the power of the Internet and Romanian newspaper Cotidianul, they can. (click the link to see my article featured as page 24 of their “weekend select”)

I’m completely fascinated with the phrase written on his giant chest. It’s nonsense, but just close enough to having meaning that it’s a tantalizing mystery. Or just fun nonsense. Or something. Whatever it is, I like it, and that’s all that counts.

Regardless, you’ve got to love the giant Lego man in all his giant Lego glory. Just look at his head crushing talon about to destroy that poor Dutch woman.

I really want it to be some sort of Danish (Trojan) Horse. I’m not exactly sure which way the currents run up there, so who knows it that’s even possible, but I love the idea.

Here’s some Youtube video, if it were really a Danish invasion, this is where they’d jump out. Sadly, they don’t

It’s got something to do with this guy. What? I don’t know as it’s in a language I don’t understand:

No real than you are

Here’s a story on it:

Giant Lego man washed up on Dutch beach