Paris Match's (or was it L' Express?)airbrushing of Sarokozy's love handle has been the buzz of "exposing journalism" in recent days. Some have emphasized how this fits into a recent trend in which leaders bare their breast or otherwise display their physical prowess: from Putin to the well known fatigues or runs of GW.

Once again, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, if you excuse my ... Look at this Mussolini fighting for wheat.

And how about a naked emperor (Trebonianus Gallus at the Metropolitan Museum)?

The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio

A muezzim's cry over bass, drums and violins? Or a Tunisian counterpointing with a Senegalese singer sided by sax trumpet and some kind of Brazilian ukulele? I guess this could happe in NYC, and indeed this happened last night as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

But I would have never guessed that this could have arisen from the Roman Sq. (Piazza Vittorio) where my grand-mother used to lure my 5 year old self
with Hungarian salami and other forbidden foods, and where the Russian emigrees, who had dubbed the place "round market," used to shop on the cheap. The market was disbanded in the early nineties and the area soon became. Rome's China town.
The area was and still is considered relatively unsafe and grungy. From the crucible of ethnicities the space for new sound appeared.
Last night I heard World Music, if there was ever anything representative of the genre this was it. I have ofted styled my native country as provincial. Last night I was proved wrong!
And happily so!
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld.

The day after π-day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_day) let me celebrate the other, unsung hero of transcendental numbers, I mean the number e, of course. If π is the poet of numbers, e is their workhorse, straddling pure and applied math, bearing the burden as the ... base. Let me propose an e-day! Let's see possible candidates: Obvious digital patterns: February 7 (with e-minute at 6:28 PM) July 2 (European) April 15 (Euler's taxing b-day) April 4 (Napier's death day---grim!---his b-day is unknown) Shall we vote? By the way, if MIT bakes the πs, Wall St. should foot the e-party's bill given that e is the foundation stone of quantitative finance ...

And after that we can establish Transcendental Day. I propose February 3 with trans-minute at 2:06 PM. (e^π ~ 23.1406926327793... the simplest function of the two giants of transcendence that has been proven transcendental, aka Gelfond's constant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_number)

Today (March 7, 2007) Izvestia (after ITAR-TASS) revealed that Jenna Bush signed a contract with Harper Collins to publish Anna's Story: a Journey of Hope http://www.izvestia.ru/news/news128867/ The contract is worth 300K to her. (Radar had caught the news in late January, but the Russian details have more ... pulp and perhaps less friction) According to Izvestia the book is a fictional journey of edification of a 17 year old HIV-positive single mother (anything else?), apparently inspired by Jenna's relief work in South and Central America. Its title and contents remind of (and hearken back?) Obama's Audacity of Hope One can't avoid speculating that this is another step into the making of a Bush Dauphine. She still has ten years to be eligible for a presidential ticket. Precocious campaign! (Talking about overworked kids, can you imagine a politico toddler fighting for a minimum play-time, or against quotas in minority dolls?)