Daily Slow Chat

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1. Last night the wind in Palermo was extremely strong,I was fighting with the scooter to stay upright and more or less in a straight line…a good workout for the arms anyway!

   Anyway today things have calmed down and the schools have reopened for today…no more weather alert.

   Did anyone follow the story of the Norwegian guy who has just finished cycling around the world? It took him nearly 4 years… quite an incredible story.

2. There’s a strange situation on the wikipedia article on polls for the next Hungarian elections. There’s such a large discrepancy between government aligned pollsters and opposition aligned pollsters that there’s two graphs showing the data from either side. This does not seem to have happened in Hungary in previous elections (I’ve not even seen something like this happening in the US despite Trump’s relationship with pollsters).

   The aggregate of both sets of data place the race in dead heat so far, but I heard the seat distribution is a bit gerrymandered, so even a small Tisza popular vote victory may not be enough.

   If you want to read the page here’s the [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Hungarian_parliamentary_election).

3. Giulio Cesare was sooooo amazing. I am walking around with like 5 hours of sleep today, but totally worth it. Despite the near 4-hour total time, there was a massive standing ovation at the end (which honestly you don’t see in Germany often enough). Jakub Jozef Orlinski and Sandrine Piau are both stunning. There’s also a livestream on the Elphi YouTube channel, if anyone’s interested (I can recommend some arias 🥰)

   In the intermission I explained how baroque arias work to my husband. These are so called “da capo arias”, composed of three sections. The first section is a whole song with accompaniment, ending in the tonic key. This is basically the aria and if you sing it by itself, you’re not missing anything. The second part is composed to contrast with the first section, both in mood and tone, but also the key and sometimes also the tempo. Then there’s a sign “da capo” which means you go back to the beginning and sing the first part again. This is where the singer shows their artistic prowess, adds embellishment, improvisation and ornamentation. No two versions of a baroque aria are exactly the same, which is something I am sorely missing in classical music nowadays. The thing is, the entire lyrics for the whole aria (which may add up to 7.5-8 minutes) is like two sentences. So there is not much plot advancing going haha. This was also the time when coloratura was still very prevalent, so the singer may be singing the same word for like a minute. By the time she finishes singing the word you have already forgotten what word it is (and so has she).

   On another but sad note, as I was taking a sketchbook out of my shelf yesterday, another one got tangled up (damn spiral binding) and fell into the bucket of leftover aquarium water that my husband had set aside to water plants. Now all my drawings and empty pages are ruined. How sad.

4. I was busy watching Rally Sweden so I missed the start of the Finland v. Sweden men’s hockey game. I turned it on about midway through the 1st period, and 30 seconds later Finland scored. Good timing.

5. I’m having one of those ‘Carnival Special ‘ sweets that I mentioned yesterday… this is stuff we usually eat sometime between yesterday (Fat Thursday) and next Tuesday (yep ..Fat Tuesday).

   Today it’s pignoccata,a traditional Palermitano carnival sweet.

   It’s pretty good but a little goes a long way!

6. Did any of you ever hear about Powerpoint parties? Apparently it’s when a group of friends gather and make short ppt presentations about whatever topic they fancy.

   Would you participate in something like this? It sounds kind of fun, actually. I would talk about… I don’t know. Kimchi, probably.