The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 5, or Grappa Is Italian For Poison

OK, so grappa is not really poison. It's just an after dinner drink that they serve in Italy. Wikipedia describes it as a "fragrant, grape-based pomace brandy" but I don't think that's really true either. Sure, it looks harmless enough...

Grappa (the shot glass to the right) just looks like a little shot glass filled with water. I tried to tell the waitress that I don't drink, but she spoke very little English and I wasn't about to give her the "no wanto to be an alcoholico" treatment. So when she gave me a free grappa with what turned out to be a limoncello chaser, I just smiled and said thank you. It being a small restaurant, I felt obligated to at least investigate the drink lest she watch me casually discard it off to the side of the table.

Well, the limoncello smelled strong, but pleasant. The grappa, however, smelled like someone misplaced their shot of rubbing alcohol. Later we came to find out that's because Grappa is like 40% alcohol. Jesus, I think I'd be better off drinking the rubbing alcohol.

Needless to say, not being a drinker I decided to let the waitress be offended if need be because I was not going to touch the grappa. I did down the limoncello, however, which lead to this...

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 4, or Cocks Are Big In Italy

Today's title is wordplay at it's finest, folks. First, the innocent layer: Mrs. Grump and I stayed in the town of Greve, whose official emblem is the black cock. In this instance, cock is just a rooster, plenty of which can be found around town.

You can't miss my gate. It's the one with the big, black cock on it.

Cock a doodle doo, indeed.....right?

Don't trust any wine that doesn't have a black cock right on the label.

I have to say I'd be very interested in seeing how the town would look if black cock took on the other meaning, especially considering that black stereotypes are alive and well in Italy...

That actually may be the most obscene picture that I show you today. And that's including the next pictures that prove that roosters aren't the only kind of popular cock in the area.

Can anyone please explain this sculpture to me in a way that doesn't include a man being forced to wear a Trojan War Helmet at clubpoint?

Insert joke about giving head here.

Pretty much everything about this statue deeply disturbs me.

So, like I said, cocks are big in Italy. But wait! There is also a delightful layer of irony in that sentence. If you notice, in terms of proportion, all of the cocks in the above examples are actually quite small. Mrs. Grump informed me that this was due to artists of the time feeling that a long ding dong would be in bad taste. So, it's cool for a dude to hold a severed head while in the nude, just as long as his winky isn't taking up too much space. Michelangelo's "David" is another good example of that mindset, but Mrs. Grump didn't get any pictures of little David. I guess she was trying to keep some semblance of scruples for our photo album.

Hm...never mind, then.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 3, or Even The Delinquents Are More Cultured In Italy

Ha! You thought I was going to skip today. Well I just had to wait until Mrs. Grump hooked me up with the rest of the honeymoon pics so I'd have some visual aids. Speaking of pics, it turns out the wife took 350 of the damn things during our trip. I'll have a few collections to show you, but there are a few in particular that I'd like to share.

Get a load at the ornate decoration here. It's obvious that this structure was pretty important to make the artist put so much care and attention to detail into it.

Or maybe it was just a fucking lamp post.

This is just plain awesome, especially when you consider this turtle is the base of a simple set of bars covering someone's window. I've been to Camden, NJ, where there are entire blocks of houses with bars covering any opening. But you won't find turtle one on any of them. Not even a frog. I think Camden would be in much better shape if their protecting window bars had adorable little animals on them.
OK...this is beautiful work, but it really depressed me when I realized it was graffiti. Mrs. Grump and I found it on a construction barrier in Florence, and it makes me ashamed of how we do graffiti in the States. We're lucky if the cock and balls drawn in Sharpie on the bathroom stall are realistic enough to include pubic hair.

Stay tuned for some examples of what happens when Italians actually get serious with their art. Marble, granite, and poorly-endowed, naked men will abound!

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 2, or Too Fat For A Fiat

Lufthansa's thoughtful wedding gift aside, there was a lot to be excited about once we got to Italy. Mrs. Grump and I had a full itinerary of things to see and do for our 10 days in Chianti/Florence. One of those things was a tour of Florence. But not just any tour. Mrs. Grump found a company called the Fiat 500 Touring Club. The premise here is that each group gets its own Fiat to drive as part of a convoy that tours Florence and eventually makes its way to a winery just outside of the city. Sounds fun right?

The catch here is that the cars are stick shift, and do not even have the technology that standard cars have that allows you to shift directly from one gear to another. No, I had to learn (in about 20 minutes) a technique called double clutching, which basically means twice the work for the same effect as a modern car. Oh, and I have to do all of this in a car built in 1964 that was made for a small European man/woman. So to recap: I'm expected to drive a matchbox car with antiquated technology through a foreign city that I've never even seen before. Let's go to the pictures, shall we?

The weather report said it was supposed to be sunny all day. It's comforting to know that Italian meteorologists are as full of shit as Americans. Also, note that this may have been the widest road in all of Florence.

Another shot of the back of one of our fellow Fiats. This was probably 99% of my sightseeing experience, lest I accidentally hit a squirrel and total our car. Actually, I came within about 3 inches of running over a little old Italian guy who was crossing at a crosswalk. Sure, any way you slice it he had the right away, but that would mean I'd have to come to a stop and then start a car that I'd spent the last 10 minutes stalling out just to get started. Needless to say I was willing to let this guy take one for the team.

Here we are parked outside the winery where Mrs. Grump got to do a tasting and I got to get my heart rate back down under 100 beats per minute. I like how our Fiats make the Volkswagon bug on the left look like a frigging Hummer. Honestly, though, all whining aside, it was at this point in the trip that I really started to enjoy myself. I'd gotten a handle on the car and now we got to see how wine is made by some of the best in the world. I don't even drink but it was really interesting to learn about the process, and how people rate wine beyond saying "This is great" or "This tastes like piss."

The best news of the day was that when we left the winery, the rain had stopped and we could actually stop to take a gander at some of the sights. Here we are parked in our little convoy near an overlook of Florence. I think, if necessary, our group could have easily taken on the Hell's Angels.

Even if everything else had been a complete disaster, this view would have made the whole trip worth it.


And here we have one last picture of me. Note that my head is in fact looming above the sunroof. When the cover was on it looked like a scene from Harry and the Hendersons. And in case you're wondering, due to my paranoia that one of the 3 people who read this blog will somehow affect my professional career should I include my actual identiy, any picture of my face will be replaced with Taylor Hicks. Why Taylor Hicks? Because for the last 3 months or so, I've been told that I look like Taylor Hicks by Mrs. Grump's family, the bartender at my wedding, and a couple that we had just fucking met during our honeymoon. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go kill myself.

This Week In Non-House Hugh Laurie: A Bit Of Fry And Laurie Pilot

In a fine example of my strong work ethic, I've decided that I should also bring back some non-House Hugh Laurie on top of my chronicling of my epic adventures in Europe. It takes real grit to search Youtube for 3 minutes and write a paragraph about the first clip that catches my attention.

This week we get to the start of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The pilot for the show came out in 1987 and the series lasted all the way to 1995. By British standards, that's a run that would put The Simpsons to shame.

The clip I chose for today, "The Word 'Gay'", is pretty much your classic example of Fry and Laurie's humor, which is basically just to take the stereotypical British facade and make it as silly as possible. I guess the cultural norm has a lot to do with the direction that comedy will take. Here in the States, for instance, we have a cultural hang-up with sexuality. So, naturally, a lot of our comedy has to feature at least a boob or two. For Fry and Laurie, acting goofy is their version of T and A. So enjoy this week's clip, if for nothing else than to hear my new favorite word, "assbandit."

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 1, or Kiss Mein Weinershniztel Lufthansa

As promised last Thursday, I'll be spending every weekday for the next two weeks covering my honeymoon with the newly minted wife to the Chianti region of Italy. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this yet. I've been given specific instructions by Mrs. Grump not to just bitch and moan about everything, so I guess I'll just give some this and that about the sights, some of the stories....and fuck it there will also be a lot of complaining.

Today's post, in fact, will be a heavy dose of venting at the sauerkraut slurping assholes at Lufthansa Airlines. And before you say anything, yes, I'm well aware that ranting about airlines is about as fresh as a knock knock joke. But I'll be damned if ever single complaint ever said, written, or sung about the airline industry isn't one hundred percent justified.

These polesmokers at Lufthansa are responsible for taking a trip that had been relatively smooth and taking a nice healthy scheize all over it. We flew out of Philly, but had a two hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany. As we boarded the bus that would shuttle us to our connecting plane to Florence, we realized something was wrong when the fully loaded bus sat motionless for about 20 minutes. Our suspicions were confirmed when we were told that the pilot for our flight was sick, and that we had to return to the terminal while other arrangements were made.

Well, apparently the "other arrangements" were for the entire flight to go fuck themselves. They just canceled the damn thing, and told us that a portion of the passengers would get the remaining seats on the next flight to Florence. Well, in another piece of good news, it turns out that Mrs. Grump had been included in the next flight but I had not. That's all I need. Mrs. Grump goes to Florence by herself where she's surrounded by gorgeous, olive-skinned men with sexy accents. No dice.

So I mention this foul up to the workers at the gate, but they tell me they don't have any control over who gets chosen for the next flight. They did seem to have the authority however, to rip up Mrs. Grump's ticket right in front of me when they realized she would not be going without me.

So our next move was to get our tickets transferred to a flight four hours later that would take us to Bologna, Italy. And since Lufthansa really goes the extra mile, they agreed to get us the rest of the way to Florence by bus.

But we couldn't get the tickets from the people at the gate, which I found odd considering they just gave tickets to all the people who got on the next Florence flight. We had to take a journey that literally had us go through customs three fucking times just to get a new boarding pass for the flight to Bologna. To put that in perspective, we didn't go through customs a single goddamn time when we got to the Bologna airport.

What the fuck, Germany? You are the country that brought us Mercedes, BMW, and, uh....less pleasant forms of meticulous planning and efficiency, but you can't even think far enough ahead to have a pilot on call for the days when the scheduled pilot couldn't keep his fucking hands off the Beck's and Jagermeister the night before? Or, failing that, perhaps you could hire employees that don't react to unexpected problems by turning into quivering piles of fucking stupid. Congratulations, Lufthansa. You really set the tone for our honeymoon by making my wife cry and giving me a migraine. Danke schoen, you bunch of pricks.

Back Just In Time For Halloween

Hey assholes! I'm back from the honeymoon to Italy, which means 2 things: 1) I can save time on my blogs by just saying Mrs. Grump instead of Mrs. Grump-to-be (oh and I have a lifetime partner, soulmate, etc). 2) I have plenty of European adventures to describe and, more importantly, to bitch about. Starting Monday, I'll be posting ten days worth of sharing my thoughts on what's great and what sucks about traveling to Italy.

Today, however, I need to warm up the old blogging muscles so I'm going to give a shout out to my favorite holiday: Halloween. And to do so, I'll be hitting you up with a list of some spookiness that can make your Halloween just a little bit more...er, Halloweenier? Ugh, I really do need to shake the cobwebs off here. Anyway, on to the list!

Halloweentastic Movie: Stir of Echoes


Most people go for the obvious classics on Halloween, especially the John Carpenter movie of the same name. And while I'm usually an 80s slasher guy, there is something special about Stir of Echoes that keeps me coming back for more. A large part of that is due to a great show by Sir Kevin Bacon, who plays a man who's been hypnotized and gains the power to see a ghost trying to give him a message. More importantly though, is that the movie is just plain creepy. There's not a lot of gore, which is admittedly not often a plus for me. What it does have, however, is enough tension and atmosphere to make a freaky goddamn movie. Even after repeated viewings, it still gives me chills.

Halloweentastic Television: Psych-"Tuesday the 17th"


I was going to let my geek flag fly here with a nod to Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel, but I can only take so much of people laughing at me. Fortunately I've been watching the third season of Psych today and my favorite episode came on. If you aren't familiar with Psych, basically it's a better version of The Mentalist that came out before The Mentalist. In the epidose "Tuesday the 17th," fake detective Sean Spencer is asked to solve a mystery at a camp where there was a mysterious death years before. It's essentially just a nod to every great slasher horror flick of the 70s and 80s. Even if you wind up not liking the show, you can play a drinking game where you drink every time there is a horror reference.

Halloweentastic Book: The Dragon Factory


I did a post on Jonathan Maberry a little while ago and I mentioned that I was looking forward to his new book, The Dragon Factory. I used down time during the honeymoon to finally get around to reading it, and it's another winner from Maberry. It's filled with evil science run amok, and a great group of love-to-hate-em villains to make great matches for the good guys lead once again by Joe Ledger, one of my favorite horror/action badasses. If you're anything like me, you'll probably want to start off with the first book of the series, Patient Zero, but if you're not bothered by starting from the beginning than you probably won't lose much in terms of understanding what's going on in The Dragon Factory. It's just a lot of good, bloody mayhem.

Halloweentastic Short Story: "Masque of the Red Death"


I'm actually not a big fan of a lot of Edgar Alan Poe's work. My tendency towards the spooky made me really want to like him, but to be honest he gets a little too up his own ass using big, highfalutin' words to be truly scary. Or maybe I'm just one of the dumber people to bullshit his way to an English degree. Either way, I just can't get into most of his stories. Masque of the Red Death is different. Poe claimed that a short story should elicit one emotion from beginning to end, and "Masque of the Red Death" does that perfectly. The tale depicts a group of aristocrats who isolate themselves in a castle to protect themselves from a plague, when they are confronted by a silent stranger. The only emotion that I felt throughout the story was one of impending doom. There really aren't any surprises, but that doesn't make it pack any less of an impact. Take five minutes at around midnight tonight and read "Masque of the Red Death." Good luck getting to sleep afterward.

Halloweentastic Video Game: Friday the 13th


Ok, so let's just get something out of the way. As video game experiences go, this game is pretty fucking stupid. As a counselor at Camp Crystal Lake, it's your job to protect the campers from hockey-mask donning zombie hillbilly Jason Voorhees. And if that seems like a bad idea for a game, well you're pretty much right on the money. It's repetitive and it was made for the original Nintendo so the graphics suck. But I can't help but like this game and for some odd reason it actually still kind of scares me. The soundtrack is actually quite eerie for something that sounds like it was composed on the dial pad on a telephone. Plus, the game tells you what cabin you need to go to in order to find Jason, which surprisingly adds tension as you wait for the moment when he's going to pop on screen. Although, since this is what he looks like in the game...


I guess it's hard to be too intimidated. But what can I say, it's an entertaining homage to one of my favorite horror franchises. I'm kind of obligated to like it.

So there you go. Just a few things to darken up your All Hallow's Eve and to get me writing again. If you've got any suggestions for me I'm always looking out for new things to give me the heebie jeebies. Otherwise, I shall see you all again on Monday, where I'll be starting things off by tearing Lufthansa a new asshole for fucking Mrs Grump and I over at the start of our honeymoon. I know, airline humor...that's some original shit right there.

Oh, and just in case "Masque of the Red Death" doesn't keep you up tonight, enjoy this Halloweentastic costume: The Tron guy.