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I hate to give up the spotlight, but I received some important news from San Diego that had to be reported. Shining some light on subject of broken street lamps I have occasionally been accused of having a particularly "litigious" nature. Administrators at Stanford frequently assumed I was in Law School, as they figured no one else would go to such lengths to clear totally illegitimate $10 charges off of their student bill, and one prominent Nobel-prize-winning physicist at Stanford even suggested that my skills were wasted in physics and that I had a much brighter future in law. Well, now we see where I get it from. I am especially proud to see my father's name in the esteemed San Diego Union Tribune (the fourth largest newspaper in the country that endorsed John McCain for president ), and even more proud that it wasn't associated with any accounting or auditing scandal, which I always assumed would be the case. In an ironic twist of fate, I have been involved in...

As I write, it is roughly 33 degrees outside my apartment and it has been lightly snowing all week. Earlier this week, it was really snowing. The only way I could describe it would be to say: it is like watching a Green Bay Packers game, except you got cold and wet, too. This isn't the first time it has snowed since I arrived here (it snowed on Dan, Chris and I a couple weekends ago), but it is significantly more intense this time. Of course, Lausanne is at fairly low elevation and is next to the largest lake in continental Europe, so the weather is almost certainly much more severe up in the mountains. Thus, the light snowfall we got a couple weeks ago corresponded to a huge amount of snow up in the Alps, which can mean only one thing: winter sports! A couple weekends ago, Loren, Chris and I headed deep into the "Alpes Vaudoises" for some winter fun. Fortunately, there are plenty of mountain resorts in the French speaking portion of the country, so it was easy for...

Like all true Italians, my lifelong dream is to get into the olive import/export business. Oh sure, I may have toyed around with the idea of growing artichokes, or avocados, or maybe even basil, but deep down, my heart has always been set on a field of olive trees, producing all the oil and fruit I could possibly desire. One might think that living in a small apartment, as I currently do here in Switzerland, might preclude me from living my dream. But, as the French say: au contraire, mon ami! As mentioned previously on this blog, my colleague and friend, Serge Reymond, is the part-owner of a reasonably-sized country home in France. In addition to wonderfully scenic and terrifying surroundings, he also has a fair number of fruit trees in his backyard; amongst quince, fig, and citrus are a half-dozen small olive trees. When I mentioned to him my great desire to cure and marinate my own olives, he offered me the use of his entire olive harvest this year. Fig. 1: In ancient Greece, cu...

One of my many favorite "horrible" TV shows in the last couple of years has been VH1's The Pick Up Artist . If you've never seen this show, well, you probably aren't missing anything, but go ahead and click on the link if you haven't eaten anything recently. Here's how the show works: there's a "Master Pick Up Artist," named Mystery, who has spent the last few years of his life mastering the "art" of picking up women and the show is a reality series in which a group of guys compete to become the "Next Pick Up Artist." Mystery is either really crazy, really smart, really full of it, or all of the above. Just a quick look at his picture might make you lean towards "crazy," but if you watch the show, it certainly seems like he is roughly as successful at picking up loose women at bars as he claims. Don't worry, though, I don't watch the show because I'm a dedicated disciple of his attempting to lear...