Nooooo! This has been a major 
for me ever since we had a temp guy called Nigel join our team at work last year, and my manager kept talking about making plans for him! Damn you Black Mirror! 
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That reminds me of the Bill Hicks number about the Judas Priest double suicide trial where he includes a ficticious dialogue within the band obviously not knowing any names of the guys in Judas Priest saying “I got an idea, Ian*, Nigel let´s kill the fucking audience!”
These seemingly were his “go-to english male first names” so I guess they´re pretty common. 
*Sorry, forgot there actually IS an Ian in Judas Priest, which was just luck I guess but there never was a Nigel!
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Today is January the 8th. In Italy, since the year 2008, it’s the “ASCANIO DAY”.
Let me explain.
There is an iranian (yes, from Iran) song whose lyrics sound like italian words, put there almost randomly, in a funny way.
The original song is “Pariyah - Shahram Shabpareh”
The refrain lyrics, italianized, is:
Hey, lascia entrare Ascanio, dall’8 di Gennaio,
Perciò, limarla è tosta: esce, ma non mi rosica!
[Hey, let Ascanio come in, from the 8th of January,
therefore, to iron out her is though: she comes out, but doesn’t suck!] 
If there are any iranian users, please write down the original lyrics, because if you search for “Pariyah Shahram Shabpareh lyrics” you find only the italianized text!!! (at least in Italy)
Edit: found it! Lyrics in iranian, translation in english and in italian (real, not fake!)
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/shahram-shabpareh-پریا-lyrics.html
For many years, I used to think the pizza baker from next door to us was italian, just because he was a pizza baker. But then we found out that he was actually from Iran. One of the nicest people I´ve ever known, too.
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I’ve got this stuck in my head:
You know, in my home village (~10,000 citizens) we have 17 pizzerie. 16 of them are managed by italians, mostly from Naples, but one is managed by an egyptian, which uses a non-standard pasta for pizza, and… to my taste, his pizzas are the best, even better than the standard ones!
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Many of the pizza bakers we have here are actually from the middle east or turkey. They often add pizza to their menue because they know not everyone likes Kebap. We did have lots of italian immigrants in the 60s but many of them went back again. There were also lots of people coming from yugoslavia opening restaurants with their traditional cuisine and people from greece (probably fleeing from the miltary dictatorship in the 1970s) and vietnam (boat people) also opening restaurants over here. That influenced the international cuisine we have here.
To be honest at the start of the refugee crises I began to wonder what traditional syrian kitchen might be like! 
Most pizza places here are Turkish too.
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We’ve had nothing but rain so far this winter, but you know… instant karma’s gonna get you.
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I’ve got a soft spot for Iran. We’ve been to a Persian snack bar once, and I suspect the couple that ran it were from Iran as well. Very friendly. The food was … interesting. Something green with bits of meat. Didn’t taste bad, but OTOH no prizes for looks.
Our favourite pizza restaurant was run by Croatians. They baked on a wood fired stove 
.
I personally don’t trust those take-aways that do both kebab and pizza. I usually stick with the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well!
Maybe not so different than Persian (see above). I’d give it a try, though!
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I´m talking about Pizza Ragazzi on the Fischmarkt btw, if you know that. It was run throughout the whole 00nds by the same guy. Was my favourite pizza place for as long as it existed.
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The only one I’ve been to regularly is Pizza und Pasta, since it was close to work. Might have been in one or two other pizzerias, but can no longer tell where exactly, much less how they were called.
Ah, at the Arcaden (across the cemetery, I believe). Never been there.
You haven’t missed much. The one noteworthy thing is that their pizzas are too big for regular pizza plates. We normally shared two amongst three of us when we went there for lunch. Given the size, the filling is pretty meagre though. All in all good enough to get fed during work, but not necessarily a place to show up with your loved one(s).
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Forget rain, we’re in a deep freeze now…
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U guys didn’t like the song?
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