• Sat 17 Oct: Nothing timed on the calendar.
• Sun 18 Oct: Nothing timed on the calendar.
• Mon 19 Oct: Nothing timed on the calendar.

(Heads-up for Tue 20 Oct: MUDr. Král at HemoClinic, Na Poříčí 1041/12, Praha 1, 19:45, appointment at 19:50.)

• 📦 Alza 1063088225 — 3× Stérimar Nasal Hygiene 100 ml. Ready in AlzaBox P3 Žižkov – Fibichova (Žižkovská věž), Fibichova 1586/11. Code 289 567, paid. Pick up by Sun 18 Oct 23:59.
• 📦 Alza 1063088224 — Hylo-Dual eye drops 10 ml. Delayed; Alza now expects it in the AlzaBox by Sun 18 Oct 09:00 at the latest.
• 📦 Alza 1063088226 — Nidelo Dynamic Grip socks (white, 37–41). On its way via DPD (13915113261468) to the same Fibichova AlzaBox, expected Mon 19 Oct by 20:00.
• 🛍️ Intimissimi 2003989511 + 2003989496 arrived 13 Oct at Intimissimi Náměstí Republiky 1; the store holds them 10 days (until about 23 Oct). Skip if already collected.

• Ukraine, overnight: Russian missiles hit Zaporizhzhia (three residential buildings damaged, at least two injured) and Kherson, where a 64-year-old ambulance driver was killed and 12 hurt (Kyiv Post, UNN). On Friday, strikes hit nine regions and wounded at least 15 (AP).
• Ukraine, politics: In Brussels, Zelensky condemned the US–Russia diesel deal and called Moscow's stance a "parody" of peace talks; EU leaders signalled a likely new loan for 2027. Starlink access for Ukraine's military was restricted midweek and then restored, per UK defence secretary Streeting; Reuters reports the order came from inside the White House. A CNN source says Ukraine has run out of Patriot interceptors. Kyiv hit the Ryazan refinery after dropping the energy ceasefire (Reuters via Investing.com, Guardian).
• Iran (day 231): At least nine commercial ships attacked near Hormuz since Sunday; the container ship GFS Pride sank (CENTCOM). Iran's army says the strait reopens only if the US leaves the region; the US blockade stays, and planners have weighed more strikes, including the MOAB. Trump has signalled no attack before the 3 Nov midterms, and Lavrov visits Tehran on 19 Oct (CNBC, NIAC).
• Red Sea / Saudi: Houthis kept firing at Saudi Arabia; Riyadh intercepted missiles over the Red Sea, one heading for the Yanbu oil terminal, and publicly blamed Tehran.

• On Fri 16 Oct, Andrea Sempio's lawyers Liborio Cataliotti and Angela Taccia filed a brief plus five expert reports at the Pavia prosecutor's office, rebutting the case closed on 28 Sep. Their main points: the killer's dotted-sole shoe prints are size 39–41 while Sempio wears a 44; palm print 33 contains no blood; and the DNA under Chiara's nails is mixed and degraded, a match that geneticist Marina Baldi calls "vera ma parziale" (Corriere, Il Giorno).
• Next: prosecutors have up to nine months to seek a trial, but La Stampa says the request could come as early as Monday. The defence may raise a constitutional challenge, since Alberto Stasi already has a final conviction for the same murder.
• Video: Sempio gave interviews to Tg1 ("Ho paura dell'arresto ma non c'entro nulla") and to Sky TG24's Diletta Giuffrida (Sky TG24).

• Bitwig: Studio 6.1.4 (13 Oct) adds rekordbox integration: browse your rekordbox library in Bitwig and open tracks as projects with BPM, key and Hot Cues intact (needs an active upgrade plan and rekordbox 6+ on macOS/Windows). Stem separation is promised for this winter (Bitwig). Tutorial from this week: Bitwig's own "rekordbox Integration in Bitwig Studio: How It Works" (video page).
• Traktor: No new release; Traktor Pro is still on 4.5.1 (9 Jul 2026), and no new tutorial worth flagging in the last two days.
• Ubuntu tip: Check how much disk the system journal uses with journalctl --disk-usage, then trim it with sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M. To keep it capped for good, set SystemMaxUse=500M in /etc/systemd/journald.conf.
• Package: moreutils (sudo apt install moreutils). It adds small tools: sponge lets you edit a file in place through a pipe (grep -v foo f.txt | sponge f.txt), ts timestamps every output line, and vidir renames files in your editor.

There's a Security keys row in Settings › General. Press Cmd+, and it sits in the General tab with the account and security controls. That's where security keys for your account live. If the row doesn't show, it isn't available on your account or build yet.

• $500M+ for species on the brink: Nine funders, among them Re:wild, the Bezos Earth Fund and Rainforest Trust, launched the Species Recovery Alliance at COP17 in Yerevan, pledging over $500 million over five years. Separately, 17 governments led by Colombia and Armenia launched the CARES coalition to speed up recovery work (Re:wild).
• Bison pass 1,000: American Prairie's free-roaming herd in Montana counted 1,016 animals after this year's calf count, its first four-digit total in over 20 years (Good News Network).
• Otters go home: Two captive-born Neotropical otters, trained to hunt and to avoid people and dogs, were released into Peri Lagoon in southern Brazil. Camera traps saw them foraging and using dens with no deaths over 89 days, and the protocol is published openly so others can copy it (study summary).

On this day in 1814, a 22-foot vat of porter burst at the Meux Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. Somewhere between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons of beer flooded the St Giles slum, and eight people died. The brewery stood where the Dominion Theatre is now, and the accident pushed British brewers off giant wooden vats (Wikipedia).

Piero della Francesca, Madonna del Parto (c. 1450–65), Musei civici Madonna del Parto, Monterchi (Arezzo).

What you see: a fresco about 2 × 2 metres of the pregnant Virgin standing inside a brocade pavilion. Two angels, mirror images of each other in pose and colour, pull the curtains aside as if opening a stage. Mary rests one hand on her hip and with the other touches her belly through a gap in her gown, eyes lowered, calm and grave. It's one of the very few Renaissance images of Mary visibly pregnant.

Context: Piero painted it for the little church of Santa Maria di Momentana, outside Monterchi, on a hill tied to old fertility cults (his mother's family came from Monterchi). It survived the church's partial demolition in 1785, earthquakes in 1789 and 1917, and a wartime stand-off when locals refused to let it be moved. After the 1992 restoration it went to a museum in the town's former school, and where it should finally live has been fought over ever since.

Sgarbi on it: in April 2023, as culture undersecretary, he argued it should stay put, saying that «le ragioni prevalenti della conservazione e la qualità della esposizione raggiunta nella sede attuale sono insuperabili», and proposing a perfect 3D replica for the original chapel instead (Arezzo24, 2 Apr 2023).

Why it matters: Piero turns a sacred mystery into pure geometry and stillness. The symmetry of the angels, the tent as a tabernacle, and the human gesture at the centre make it one of the most intimate religious images in Italian art.

lugubrious (adj.): looking or sounding sad and gloomy, often to an exaggerated, almost comic degree.

• The waiter announced, in a lugubrious voice, that the kitchen had run out of tiramisù.
• Fog hung over Žižkov all morning, giving the tram stop a lugubrious, film-noir look.

• sobota (SO-bo-ta): Saturday. V sobotu mám volno. (On Saturday I'm free.)
• trh (one syllable, "trrh", where the rolled r works as the vowel): market. Na trhu mají čerstvou zeleninu. (They have fresh vegetables at the market.)

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (Le anime morte, 1842). Chichikov tours the Russian provinces buying up serfs who are dead but still on the tax rolls, to borrow money against them. It's a grotesque, very funny satire of greed and paperwork, the ancestor of Švejk's absurd bureaucracy, with Pirandello-style masks on every landowner he meets.

Il sorpasso (1962, Dino Risi). Vittorio Gassman's loud, charming braggart drags a shy law student (Jean-Louis Trintignant) on a Ferragosto drive down the Aurelia in a Lancia Aurelia convertible. It's the peak of commedia all'italiana: a portrait of the boom years that's hilarious until the last minutes, which hit hard.