Euro Summer Quotes

Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs.

Another atrocity of summer is soccer. When the Euro Cup is on, it brings out the worst in people. It turns them into ravaging beasts who complain when a team they like, which they have done nothing to deserve, slips from grace and loses the match. An old man sitting beside me at the cafe was watching the men watch the soccer rather than watch the soccer himself. He found their reactions more entertaining than the game. "All this stuff and nonsense over men kicking a ball," he groused. "And they don't do any of the work themselves." I told him, "We should just have wars. Then we would not need sports." He laughed and quite agreed with me.

Tip: Like everywhere else in Europe (except the UK and Switzerland), the Netherlands uses the euro. What is up with you, UK and Switzerland? Euros are super cute! The bills look just like Monopoly money, plus they have coins instead of one- and two-dollar bills that accumulate in your pocket and can be used to buy a pair of wooden clogs. Kidding! Don't buy a pair of wooden clogs. You'll never wear them, and they are way too heavy to carry around in your bag.

Can you move?" he says, pulling out five euros from his wallet. He holds the bill over my head. "Here, this should help." My fantasy evaporates like dry ice on a summer day in the hottest of deserts. I shoot him daggers with my eyes and swat the bill. He actually thinks I'm homeless? "I don't need money." "Could have fooled me," he says, his eyes making an unabashed loop over my outfit, and then pockets the bill. Under my breath, I mutter, "Quelle bite." What a dick. "I heard that," he says in English, his lips pressing together into a thin line. "Crazy tourist." "You speak English?" "Yes, and it's obviously more refined than your limited French." The lilt in his affected voice, the precise English accent that would normally have me drooling, echoes in my head when I snap to. How dare he? He crashes into me and then launches insults like grenades? Bye-bye, meet-cute, this prince in disguise is as ugly as a toadfish.

Twelve years ago I left Boston and New York, and moved east and west at the same time. East, to a little village in Devon, England, a town I’ve been familiar with for years, since my friends Brian and Wendy Froud and Alan Lee all live there. It had long been my dream to live in England, so I finally bought a little old cottage over there. But I decided, both for visa and health reasons, living there half the year would be better than trying to cope with cold, wet Dartmoor winters. At that point, Beth Meacham had moved out to Arizona, and I discovered how wonderful the Southwest is, particularly in the wintertime. Now I spend every winter-spring in Tucson and every summer-autumn in England. Both places strongly affect my writing and my painting. They’re very opposite landscapes, and each has a very different mythic history. In Tucson, the population is a mix of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Euro-Americans of various immigrant backgrounds — so the folklore of the place is a mix of all those things, as well as the music and the architecture. The desert has its own colors, light, and rhythms. In Devon, by contrast, it’s all Celtic and green and leafy, and the color palette of the place comes straight out of old English paintings — which is more familiar to me, growing up loving the Pre-Raphaelites and England’s ‘Golden Age’ illustrators. I’ve learned to love an entirely different palette in Arizona, where the starkness of the desert is offset by the brilliance of the light, the cactus in bloom, and the wild colors of Mexican decor.

„Dear Fernandamama, I need to borrow some quick cash from you, about 900 Euros to be honest. This f...g Adam guy’s fines arrived on my name. He is paying your children and drugging them, this f...g godless Israeli criminal, with his f...g junkie friends and family, influencing your children is not good for our health, Fernandamama. You know. The coffeeshop. On my name. This f...g Adam guy is the reason why Martina is gone and the f...g coffeeshop, huh? I should have killed him when I had the chances, what do you say, Fernanda? Your silence tells me odes, Fernandamama since weeks if not months. Meaning, you know better if I should have taken care of Adam on time and closed the club last summer when you came to visit „us.” I need to pay for these Zaragoza fines Adam collected for my name Fernanda. I need my money to give it away to the landlord so that Martina has a home. You know, without my coffeeshop on my name. I hope you understand. I pay you back just like the 6-800 you landed us earlier. If Martina allows me to contact you, if I wasn’t a ghost in Barcelona made believe. You know. Thanks. Cheers, Tomas

These initiatives culminated in the Hague Conference of May 1948 with the creation of the European Council, followed by the first Assembly of the European Council in Strasbourg in the summer of that year, with the participation of around 200 delegates