New Ocean game, part 1

I have an idea – something to add spark and excitement to the everyday:
I show a photo of a plate of food. You guess either the name of the restaurant (Madisonians, this one’s for you) or the type of food on the plate(s). If you are correct, you get the honor of knowing you are correct! If you think my game is getting too easy, feel free to take me out to dinner at a new and fascinatingly different place and you will see the resultant photos displaying the exotic fare.

Tonight I ate this, somewhere in Madison:

hint: it was delicious!  

Ode to baristas everywhere:

12 oz
non-fat
latte
extra hot*
no foam**
that’s it
it’s not hard
get it right
please????

Bottom line, there are a number of baristas around town who would not have a chance at this.

* If I don’t say this, chances are four to one it will be lukewarm. Actually I prefer just plain old normal-hot, not McDonald’s-scalding, but please, not lukewarm.
** I like foam just fine: why else bother frothing if not for the foam. But if you start messing with foam, you get carried away and stop pouring milk, like, after the mid-point. I have connivingly figured out that this instruction will keep you from muckin’ with the milk level.

Poles hanging in (the line to the Vatican) and hanging on (to the hope that the Cardinals will send back something of John Paul II)

I read the Pope’s Will and Testament – the whole text, written first in 1979, amended over the years.

It is interesting to read the will of a person who had no property to dispose of. Or, what he chose to dispose of (his private notes), he willed to have burned. [A legal Q: can you read as you burn?]

As to the disposition of his body – initially he stated that the Cardinals, in consultation with the Poles should decide. But then he changed his mind. In 1985 he wrote (I’m paraphrasing now) – about that “consult with the Poles" bit? You don’t have to. Did he sense that there would not be agreement? That Poles would not, could not let go of the possibility of having him “return” to Krakow?

If you read the entire text, you will come to the last paragraph (a tautological statement if I ever saw one!), in which John Paul II remembers his early life – his parents, school friends, his days as a laborer during the German occupation. Perhaps Poles will feel gratified that his last written words were about his home. In search of symbols, maybe in this text they’ll find some to take back with them from Rome. For they seem to all be there: Poland appears to have emptied out and traveled south this week. Thankfully the Italians saw what they were up against (who understands passion better than the Italians...): even though they were forced to close the line to view the Pope (at 14 hours of waiting time, it was bumping into tomorrow’s funeral: you don’t want to finally get there and find the Pope gone), the Poles are being allowed through.

As a new commentator said this morning: the Italians know what they’re doing this week.