Anyway, this is my fourth trip to Rome in less than a year but will probably be my last time here ever so I’m soaking in it.

Around the Trevi Fountain:

The Pantheon

If I had to drive in Rome, it’d be in one of these:

Definitely not this because DEATH:

Seriously, Rome traffic, just no.

So here’s a dude in green capri pants, not giving a shit.

I’m sorry about this guys but what, DO YOU HATE ART?

Who’s a good boy?

I love the color, plus they have beer.

Late in the day, we walked down to the area of the ancient forum and Colosseum just to see from the outside, will go inside tomorrow, and finally the sky cleared after days of rain. Then the almost-full moon came out against the blue sky. And oh, it was pretty.

It’s hitting me how much I’ll miss Italy when we move back home in a few more months. I’ll be happier back home but I’ll miss this country for the rest of my life. So for now, I soak.

We’re heading down to Rome tomorrow and I’m gonna try to post from the train with my iPad just so I can say I did that once. Then I’ll have some hillbilly travelogue action. Meanwhile just wanted to post an open thread for anyone who wants to share their Special Feelings about scandalpalooza.

Also:

And also, of course I know about the tornado. I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, so…

A bright spot.

Stacy Tabb, you are my favorite person this week, and Primo’s, too, because he gets treats for posing, and my guests also like you a whole lot because of how much this hat on this dog has made us fall out laughing. Shiny isn’t a strong enough word for it.

I’ve finally charged up the new camera’s batteries and done my first test shots of Primo. I have not put the Jayne Cobb hat on him yet because that will be a special moment and I don’t want to ruin it with my ignorance of this new camera. It shall be this evening. For now, he begins to understand what his future will be.

And with them they are bringing my awesome new toy. I finally ordered a new digital SLR a few weeks ago (Canon t4i so that all my old Rebel filters and lenses will fit on it) and had it delivered to my visitors’ house, along with a sweet new sling-back carrying case, and it’s already all packed in there and ready to be one of their carry-on bags. By the way, it cost about 30% less than the same camera would’ve cost over here, after adjusting for exchange rate. Perfect example of the hugely higher purchasing power Americans have, the importance of which still seems to mystify so many people.

Anyway, what this means is that Primo is about to become the Hillbilly Blog Performance Artist he was born to be, just like dear old Sunny (PBUH). Behold her glory. I can’t get shots like this with my iPhone/iPad or old busted DSLR.

Awww I miss that big dumb sweetheart. That was 2008; she died the next year.

Anyway, Primo’s first high-quality portrait with the new camera will find him modeling the third thing my visitors are bringing to me, which is the Jayne hat that Stacy Tabb knitted for him. Oh yes. This is happening.

Meanwhile, my regular crappy iPhone pics will fill in. His happy face on our long walks through the big park where he can be off-leash is like a cute drooling little dose of Prozac.

It should be extremely easy to get photos from my new camera to computer or iPad (I have the iPad camera conversion kit that lets you load straight from an SD card) so I’m going to try to do the Hillbilly Travelogues for this visit as I go. We’ll spend a week in Turin and then a few days in Rome.

And then we’re spending the last 4 days in a place I’ve wanted to go back to since the first time I went there in 2009. My husband has no desire to go back, but my upcoming visitors have been telling me for years they wanted to go to this place so I’ve been waiting for them to come to Europe so we could go together…to Poland. Warsaw and Krakow and Auschwitz.

As for that last one, I know it might seem strange, concerning, or depressing that I want to go back to a place that made me cry for several days straight. I can’t explain it; it’s just important to me. I’ve studied the Holocaust my whole life, and when “Rupert” and I went to Auschwitz four years ago, we were rushed for time, and it rained, and I was so overwhelmed with what I was seeing that I didn’t really process it the way I needed to. When we moved from the UK to Italy almost 2 years ago, I spent the first 6 months reading the Italian versions of Primo Levi’s books about his Auschwitz imprisonment (halfway down this post is an explanation of how my dog came to be named after this great man), and I knew I had to go there one more time before I leave Europe. Levi’s purpose in writing his books was to make people remember, and I aim to help with that.

Anyway, I’m hoping this time I’ll be able to post stuff much more quickly, and the photos will be much better-looking. And that’s why this blog will be a lot more fun, or at least less boring, starting this Wednesday.

Also, I have good news about my impending move back to the States, but I’m not gonna post it here until I tell everyone in my family, and I’ve only known the details for a few hours so haven’t had a chance to email everyone. Let’s just say this information has already eliminated half of my depression; I figure my visitors will take care of the rest, and I couldn’t be more grateful for all of it.

Meanwhile, somebody sits on his favorite pig…awkwardly.

I’ve had that video bookmarked for 6 months and I watch it whenever I start to stupidly feel sorry for myself for “getting old” at the age of 41, or when a small pain in my hand seems like the end of the world and an omen that my entire body will fall apart tomorrow, or when I wonder what the point of existence is. Nana demonstrates the point.

It is profoundly depressing that so many people know more – and frankly, care more – about what some psychotic bitch named Jodi did to her boyfriend, or about how three girls escaped from a basement in Clevelend – alive – after some time in captivity, than they know about what the President and State Department did and did not do for one of our diplomatic staff in Libya, who are quite dead.

So, about that. Nice Deb has a great post about the truly remarkable bullshit the Obama administration engaged in when they blamed the Benghazi attacks on a stupid YouTube video.

Matt Welch at Reason.com has yet more:

Yesterday’s dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration’s storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a “spontaneous” demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims.

Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence — but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.

Fourteen days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered by Islamists, President Barack Obama stood up in front of the United Nations and declared that the “message” of a movie virtually no one will ever see “must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity,” that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” and that we all should “condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims.”

It should give even Obama’s strongest supporters pause that the same administration so wary about characterizing Benghazi as a “terrorist attack” was simultaneously so eager to characterize an artistic provocation as a (potentially criminal) incitement.

What follows is a partial timeline of statements made in the first two weeks after the attack, from government officials and media commentators who lent credence to the now-discredited notion that Ambassador Stevens and three other U.S. personnel died because of a YouTube video. If we are to robustly defend the American culture of free speech, it’s important to remember those who so quickly chose to throw the First Amendment under a bus…

All the links and italics are from the original. Be sure to read it all, especially where it gets into detail about the blatant and offensively obvious lies about the video and the “spontaneity” of the attacks.

And here’s something by Ace about the media’s part in all this. And be sure to read about Sharyl Attkisson, who CBS (her employer) apparently thinks is “wading dangerously close to advocacy”, by which they mean “fact-based journalism” because she’s the main reporter pursuing this story in the American press…even though she hadn’t reported on it in 5 months until earlier this week because of the House Oversight Committee’s hearings.

They’re not even pretending anymore.

But enough about a national press so deep in the tank for one political party that it would be funny if it wasn’t negatively affecting the course of Western civilization’s history, and who cares about a President and Secretary of State openly unafraid to lie to us (their employers) because of that knob-slobbery ass-covering they know they’ll get from the press, or about U.S. ambassadors getting murdered at their foreign outposts? Because OMG, did you hear that the Cleveland kidnapper played in a salsa band and ate barbecue with his neighbors? Squeeee! How craaaaazzeeee, right?