I have, although not much. I’m dying to go to Cinque Terre and Bolzano, and my bio father’s family is from the south. Maybe when I get fed up with my job I’ll just go over there for a few weeks and work my way up.

The Dutch G is reminiscent of the hard northern German CH - kind of a rattling in the back of the throat. Khhhow-da. I was in a car going past the city from which it gets the name, said it with the American pronounciation, and was very crisply corrected by my Dutch friend.

They were in Naples - worked for Admiral Boorda in the 90s. They didn’t take me with them, unfortunately - dumped me on relatives for the duration instead. But my mom picked up a lot of the pronounciations and passed them on to me.

YEP. Family was stationed in Italy for several years.

Heh. A friend told me I was being pretentious for saying “gouda” with the correct Dutch pronounciation.

I’m from a Sicilian suburb of western NY. I think gabbagool is hilarious, but I can’t stand the sound of mootzarella. Dunno why, I grew up with both.

Argh, remembered too late to edit Bella’s pronouns.

She managed that as Lyanna Mormont in GOT, too - she was the best thing about that season and one of the reasons why I was looking forward to this.

Yeah, I was excited when I first encountered one because I thought I’d be able to get a facsimile of regular Lime Coke (which I loved in the bottle back in the 00s, and I hate the diet kind) and it just tasted like disappointment no matter how I tried to finagle the proportions.

Even unsweetened, restaurant tea barely qualifies as tea.

I had salted egg popcorn in a Universal Yums box a year ago or so, and I liked those pretty well, so when I saw these in an H-Mart (there are also salted egg  salmon skins, HARD PASS), I got a bag. These are way too eggy on their own - crumbling them up into somethng else, sandwich or not, sounds like a far better use.

> Worchestire sauce

I have bought many of these no-nos in the past, BUT, I do pay attention to the person’s specific tastes. I have friends who proclaim themselves to be coffee snobs, so I find out what they usually drink, go to my other friends who roast coffee for a living, provide this detail, and they make suggestions that go over…

Yep, had the same takeaway re: it being very similar to Dark in a different setting. I enjoyed it, but it felt like almost the same show.

Mine too. The live album is great - Baltar’s Dream is wild.

So Game Of Thrones was loosely based on the Wars of the Roses; House of the Dragon appears to be loosely based on The Anarchy - Stephen vs Matilda (also the time period in which Brother Cadfael takes place, if anyone read/watched that).

I’m going to Reykjavik in December - a six hour nonstop flight for me, substantially closer than Alaska! - primarily to see the Christmas market and a Golden Circle tour, but I am sure hoping there will be northern lights as well.

The Plummer family is swimming in an obscene amount of talent.

I didn’t watch that until the 00s, and the amount of chain-smoking she did in that film was astonishing.

One afternoon, I was petting my cat and found a small lump on her jaw. I knew right then it was game over. I took her to the vet and he was unimpressed with it, confirming my gut feeling. We tried a few things just to cover the bases, but she went from fine to dead in three weeks, and I cried every. single. day.…