Times are Europe/Rome, the same as Prague.

Thu 29 Oct · today

• 09:00–09:30 · 🩸 Blood test, Synlab · Jankovcova 1518/2, Praha 7 · order 2026058765, paid, fasting recommended
• 12:00–13:00 · 💬 Lorenzo & Inna coaching session · Microsoft Teams

Fri 30 Oct

• Nothing timed.

Sat 31 Oct

• Nothing timed.

• JP Kontakt desk, order 20/2026/4730 (VSS 180/70 height-adjustable, white, with assembly) · still no delivery date · your 27 Oct email to prodej@jp.cz has no reply yet · JP: 466 052 030
• Intimissimi orders 2003989511 + 2003989496 · the 23 Oct reminder said five days left, so the window looks to have closed around 28 Oct · if they're still waiting, worth a call to the shop
• Nothing else · no other parcels expected

Ukraine

• 🕊️ Oleshky truce holds. The localized ceasefire in occupied Oleshky (Kherson) held its first 30+ hours with no violations, both sides' ombudsmen said. Evacuees are due to travel via Anapa to Gomel, Belarus, on 31 Oct; how they get back to Ukraine isn't spelled out.
• 💥 Strikes elsewhere. Russia launched 88 drones and a ballistic missile overnight; strikes killed 2 and injured 17 in a day. Three drone boats hit a cargo ship off Bulgaria.
• 🇺🇦 Ground and diplomacy. Zelensky says Ukrainian forces are retaking ground in several operations; the Netherlands pledged a €500M package, and Finland's and Norway's leaders phoned Putin to urge an end to the war.

Iran

• 🇶🇦 Qatar's draft. Qatar presented a new draft deal with a seven-day sequence of steps; a senior Iranian official dismissed it as "unacceptable ideas", while FM Araghchi said Iran is still giving diplomacy a chance and pushing its own 7-day plan.
• 🛢️ Gulf package. Gulf states are working a bigger package: Hormuz reopened within four days of sanctions relief, plus Houthi pullbacks in Yemen. The US wants UN inspectors back in first.
• 🗳️ Israel and costs. Israel voted on 27 Oct; exit polls show a majority against Netanyahu's coalition but no clear winner. CENTCOM puts US war costs at $47.1B so far; the IAEA says Iran hasn't tried to repair its bombed nuclear sites.

Garlasco, the castle tower (Awd, CC BY-SA 3.0). Wikimedia Commons

• Sempio videos on TV. Rete 4's "Verità nascoste" aired self-recorded videos of Andrea Sempio taken from his seized hard disk, including remarks on rape and women. His lawyer says the material was already in the case file since May and calls it "mostrificazione".
• New defence evidence. Defence lawyer Liborio Cataliotti says they hold new exculpatory evidence they'll produce only before the judge.
• Trial request. Mattino 5 reports the Pavia prosecutors could request trial (rinvio a giudizio) within about ten days. That's a press report, not an official filing yet.

• 🎛️ Bitwig. Nothing new; 6.1.4 (13 Oct, rekordbox library integration) is still current. No worthwhile new tutorial from the last two days.
• 🎚️ Traktor. Nothing new; Pro 4.5.1 (July) is still current. No new tutorial worth flagging.
• 🐧 Ubuntu tip: run heavy jobs politely. ionice -c3 nice -n19 rsync -a $HOME/Music /media/backup/: the copy then only gets disk time when nothing else wants it, so the desktop stays snappy.
• 📦 Package: iotop. sudo apt install iotop, then sudo iotop -o shows only the processes actually reading or writing disk right now. It's the quickest way to find what's thrashing your SSD.

Settings from the keyboard. You don't need to hunt for the account button: open the command palette and pick "Open settings" (or press Cmd+,). It lands on General, and the tabs across the top are General, Computer, Vault, Usage & Billing and Updates; Vault and Usage & Billing show only when your account has them. Handy when you just want to flip something like Settings → Theme without leaving the keyboard.

A bison herd on the range (NARA, public domain). Wikimedia Commons

• 🦬 Bison home on a former bombing range. Thunder Valley CDC released 50 bison onto a roughly 40,000-acre Oglala Sioux range in the Pine Ridge badlands, land once used for US military target practice. Around 300 people watched, and more animals are planned. Prairie Public / SDPB
• 🦌 Southampton Island caribou are doing well. The herd, restarted from just 48 animals in 1967, sat at 12,054 in 2019 and 12,651 in 2023. A new Inuit-knowledge study finds healthy animals, strong calf survival and far less brucellosis. Nunavut News

The Orloj's astronomical dial (Godot13, CC BY-SA 4.0). Wikimedia Commons

Prague's Orloj on Old Town Square was first installed in 1410. That makes it the oldest astronomical clock in the world that still works.

Image: Didier Descouens, public domain. Wikimedia Commons

Tintoretto, Giudizio Universale (c. 1562) · Madonna dell'Orto, Venice

A towering canvas in the choir of Tintoretto's own parish church in Cannaregio, where he is also buried. Opposite it hangs his Adorazione del vitello d'oro. The Judgment isn't a tidy court scene. Bodies, skeletons and souls pour and tumble through a flood that seems to drag everything downward, painted with the fast, slashing brush and stage-like lighting that made Tintoretto the most theatrical painter of 1500s Venice. He took the commission for a very small fee, the kind of move that won him walls while rivals waited.

Philippe Daverio, in his documentary on Tintoretto, called the church «fenomenale» and described the Judgment as a «groviglio di corpi mescolati con gli scheletri, aspirati verso un destino irreversibile, ricchi, lussuosi e poveri». He also pointed to the painter's «ottica innovativa» and «gioco prospettico».

Daverio's words as transcribed in the Adgblog study sheet on his Tintoretto documentary, 25 Jan 2009. Adgblog

Why it matters: Michelangelo's Sistine Judgment had just set the standard. Tintoretto answered it with motion instead of monumentality, and painters from El Greco to Rubens learned from that.

obstreperous: noisy and hard to control; stubbornly resisting.

• The obstreperous toddler refused every coat we offered.
• One obstreperous shareholder dragged the meeting past midnight.

• šála (SHAH-lah): scarf. Vezmi si šálu, venku je zima. (Take a scarf, it's cold out.)
• rukavice (ROO-kah-vi-tseh): gloves. Nechápu, kde jsem nechal rukavice. (I can't figure out where I left my gloves.)

Leonardo Sciascia in 1966 (Carla Cerati, public domain). Wikimedia Commons

Leonardo Sciascia, Il giorno della civetta (1961)

A man is shot boarding a bus in a Sicilian town, and Captain Bellodi, a northern carabiniere, runs into a wall of silence. It's short, dry and bitterly funny, with Pirandello's sense of how truth gets bent by everyone who touches it.

Get it: Amazon.it · Adelphi, Gli Adelphi 203 (2002)

Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (1976, Ettore Scola)

Nino Manfredi plays a one-eyed patriarch hoarding his insurance money in a Roman shantytown while his huge family plots to get it. It's savage, grotesque comedy with no sentimentality at all, and it won Scola Best Director at Cannes.

Nino Manfredi in a still from the film (public domain in Italy). Wikimedia Commons

Trailer: original trailer via HD Retro Trailers on YouTube

Where to stream: Italy (Ugly, Dirty and Bad): with a subscription on CG TV Streaming; rent or buy on Amazon Video and Apple TV (rent also on CG TV Streaming). Czechia: not listed on JustWatch. JustWatch IT

Venice Special (Biennale): Great Art Cities Explained · Great Art Explained (James Payne, UK) · English, 24 min

Payne's city guide to Venice's art, made for the 2022 Biennale. It's a well-paced companion to today's Tintoretto if you'd like the bigger Venetian picture in one sitting. YouTube

• You Can See Everything (Uvidíš všechno) · opens at Flora today · 18:00 on Thu 29, Fri 30 and Sat 31 Oct.
• Artificial, The Social Reckoning and the Elon Musk documentary · not in Flora's program through 31 Oct.