Old Lady Post: How much scratch does your boy make?

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Perhaps you're merely curious.

Perhaps you'd like a little reassurance that you aren't all that underpaid.
Perhaps you aspire to be a WAG and want to know which ones are the richest.
Perhaps you want to point and laugh.

Whatever your motive, courtesy of La Gazzetta Dello Sport, here are this year's numbers, arranged by team, from the poverty-stricken teams to the big spenders.

ADP and the Ladies in Bianconeri

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON MAY 12, 2010


The season is almost over and that means the summer transfer season is about to begin.  Please don't ask me when, precisely: I'm new at this.  Transfer rumors make me incapable of attending to the mundane details of life, such as retaining employment so I can pay the electric bill so I can do things like this here post.  Last year was bad, because ADP was going to China, MLS, Spain.  Pirlo was going to Chelsea.  Gattuso and Zambrotta were going, well, no one was sure where they were going, but they weren't going to stay at Milan.  That all worked out nicely in the end.  This year, the Bianconeri rumor mills have already informed us that Zlatan Dead Guy is returning to Juve, ADP is going somewhere or not, Gigi is going to Man City  Arsenal  anywhere they have a Champions League slot, and Giovinco is going to be loaded onto a space pod and blasted out into oblivion so tifosi stop questioning the wisdom of not allowing him to play.  It is only going to get worse.  When the transfer window opens, I am probably going to have to institute at least a partial interwebs embargo.  However, I am currently free to wallow wherever I want, and so I went to the Juventus blog on The Offside to listen to like-minded disappointees hurl rhetorical mud at zebra management, and lo and behold, whatever did I find there?

Dirtbunny News

Although you wouldn't know it from here, I do a lot of writing elsewhere for my friends who appreciate football. I've decided to go back and post some of those entries here because many of them are awfully damn good, even ifthey are crammed with inside jokes and whatnot.

Please consider them to be rated R, and if the f-bomb bothers you, well, there are a lot of f-bombs.

Also, my space bar is sticky, and sometimes I can't be bothered to fix every single one.  Please be patient.

It was a busy month chez nous.  My job got bigger and I had end-of-year craziness to deal with that was never my problem before.  Mr. D had to go to Pork Barrel University again.  We took a vacation for the first time in three years.  The old folks visited.  Football started, and so did both Champions League and Europa League, as well as qualifying matches for Euro 2012.  This year, this means more than just hours watching football and thinking unclean thoughts about football players because now I am writing about it for a online community of Serie A tifosi.  I'm responsible for covering Juventus, so I'm doing match reports after every match (one or two every week), and covering the transfer market and whatever other news may come up.  I love it, but it's a time commitment.  Aaaaaaand,  Kirby stopped walking, so he spent a few days in the hospital getting expensive tests, and his progress since then has been up and down.  When he's up, he can do pretty much everything, but his balance is tetchy and he's prone to falls.  When he's down, he can't walk, has to be carried everywhere, and has to be supported when he potties.  And no, we still don't know exactly what the cause of all this is, and yes there will be more vet trips (including tomorrow) so the doggie neurologist can assess his progress on his treatment plan.  The space bar on my laptop needs to be hitjust so, which means weird things happenwhen I write.  And there has been knitting.

Lame Yarn Post

I am in the black hole of knitting.  I knit and knit and knit and nothing much happens.  I've been working on pretty much all of my projects for at least two months and I have very little to show for any of it. Except these:

These are the Scottish Highland socks.  Mindless monkey knitting featuring STR.  No big deal.


I started a pair of socks for my sister-in-law in July.  I finished the first one this morning, but only after forcing myself to hunker down.  This is where I was before the weekend:

Now this right here, this is the big time suck:

Hm.  In the photo, you can actually see the pattern.  In real life, it's just a pile of fuzzy grey stuff that is lace and therefore, ALL TOGETHER NOW, looks like ass.  I can't believe I'm only halfway through.

Oops.  I forgot this:

Hm.  OK now that cheers me up. Nice lace, huh?

How To Make Vaffanculo Gelato

First of all, yes, that's a naughty word, so don't go looking it up if you aren't planning to use it.  Second, I invented this when I couldn't read the recipe and put in too much chocolate.  I'm sure that in theory, there is a point where you can put in too much chocolate, but this is not I repeat NOT too much chocolate.  Trust me.  

And finally, you may be wondering how this gelato got its name.  Well, on the one hand, it was a concoction born  out of a mistake.  Dirtbunny is so spectacularly good in the kitchen that even her mistakes are freaking awesome, so vaffanculo to the doubters and the haters.  Second, this is exactly the kind of gelato you will want to have on days when you'd like to say vaffanculo to everyone you know and the other 6 billion people in the world as well, just to make sure everything's covered.

1. Get out favorite recipe for Bacio gelato.
2. Leave out the hazelnuts.
3. Triple the amount of cocoa powder.  You can only mix so much in with the egg yolks, so the rest has to go in the pot in the beginning with the sugar and milk.
4. Finish making the custard, then cool, and freeze in the usual way.
5. Serve kinda soft and slightly melty.

Don't share this with the dogs.  It's so powerful it might kill them.

Marco Mercoledi

The 2010-2011 Serie A season finally started last weekend.  Juventus, um, lost, and now there's an international break.  That affects all the European leagues, so there will be no fresh football over this long weekend.  Whatever shall I do with myself?

                                                              
One thing to do is babysit der Kirbenhund.  He's still not doing so well and can't be left alone because if he starts attempting to wander around, such as, for example, to see where Bunny went, he could fall and hurt himself.  Like yesterday, when he fell and bit his lip and bled all over.  Poor baby.  Eric and I are doing tag-team telework and canine pharmacology.  The weather is supposed to be nice, so I hope he can have sometime outside (being watched like a hawk).

That's an odd expression, isn't it?  It means, of course, to watch something with carfeul attention, but it sounds a little like it's the hawk who is being watched.  I suppose the contemporary equivalent would be "watch like porn," but I'm not going to be the one to introduce that into the lexicon.