The 2011 Vintage Roadside Sign Challenge

via vintagesignchallenge.posterous.com Mary and I will be cataloging vintage roadsigns from across the US in competition with my dad and Mary’s cousin. We’re posting our findings on vintagesignchallenge.posterous.com. Follow the blog if you want to see what we find. Here are the rules: Signs must be photographed by Christmas Eve, 2011. You must take the photograph yourself and upload it to this blog. Once a sign is photographed and posted by someone, no one else can submit it as an entry. You must get out of the car to take the picture. It must be functioning as a sign. No Read more…

The City of Falling Angels

John Berendt, who wrote the wildly popular and very funny Midnight in the Garden of Evil about Savannah, Georgia, wrote another book called "The City of Falling Angels" about Venice. Like Midnight, the book is funny, interesting, and filled with a colorful cast of characters. Also like Midnight, it starts much better than it ends. Midnight was ostensibly about a murder, but it was hard to get into the details of it by the end when what you really wanted to do was just keep meeting interesting people. The same is true about Falling Angels, which focuses around the fire Read more…

Question for the day

Something I was thinking about in Italy … we translate Venezia as Venice; Firenze as Florence; Roma as Rome. And yet the non-major cities we don't translate. Siena is Siene, Volterra is Volterra, Vernazza is Vernazza. This holds true across most foreign countries it seems. Moscow is a rough translation of Muskva, for example, but Vladivostok is Vladivostok. Why translate large city names but not others? Why didn't we just call Firenze Firenze?