GOP_Tiger

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Pretty much the same food everywhere we went. It was all good, hot and fresh but the same dishes.

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Do y'all understand why this is? It's because of what tourists expect. There wasn't even a single restaurant in Venice serving pizza until a century ago. But today, almost every Venetian restaurant serves pizza, because it's the "Italian food" that tourists expect.

On my trip this past month, I even saw a number of restaurants serving pasta with Alfredo sauce. Y'all, Alfredo sauce was invented in one restaurant in Rome in 1950 and was completely unknown in Italy until the sauce became so popular in America that all the American tourists began asking for it in restaurants in Italy, and then these restaurants learned how to cook it. Very few ordinary Italians know what it is, but it's getting common in touristy restaurants.

You can still get plenty of unique dishes in different parts of Italy, but you have to be aware that touristy restaurants are going to offer the dishes that tourists expect.

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The best steaks in Florence should be cut from Tuscan Chianina cattle. A big T-bone or Porterhouse can feed several people. The waiter carves it at the table so you can compare the shell and tenderloin portions.

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Yeah, at the osteria where we ate it, the minimum t-bone cut was 1.2 kg (42 ounces). Florentine steak is meant to be shared.

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This is obviously a great target, but any day now without a refinery hit is a wasted day. Crippling Russia's energy sector has to be the top priority of Ukraine right now.

Maybe one was targeted and the drones/missiles were intercepted

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They made up for it by hitting two last night, though the limited pics that I've seen from the Yaroslavl plant imply minor damage.

But the Slavyansk-on-Kuban damage looks extensive, and that plant will likely be out of commission for a while.

In Ukraine's earliest refinery attacks, they were hitting a plant with a drone or two and causing enough damage to put a plant offline for a week or less. Now, when they hit a plant, it's generally with a dozen missiles and drones, and the damage is such that the plant faces months of repairs before production can be restarted.

Ukraine is on the verge of crippling the Russian economy.

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Looney was garbage which is why they sat him and played Deandre Jordan

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I would say that it was more that he was a poor fit with the rest of the roster. But, yeah, I wouldn't want him back for the veteran minimum, much less for $8 million. We should be about $12 million under the tax now, which gives us plenty of room to find a decent center.

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The interesting thing to me now is Kostiantynivka. Even Ukraine admits problems there. So, which will turn out to be more important - Ukraine drones hitting medium range and distant targets at a brutal rate, or the Russian push in Konstiantynivka which threatens the fortress cities? Both sides adapt, so it's hard to say for sure. But it feels like a new phase of the war.

Perhaps Ukraine would do well to use some of the drones against Russian troops at the front.

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Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Drones are much more effective over open fields than they are in a dense urban environment.

Even a year ago, Ukraine would much rather have defended in an urban area and used infantry to induce large losses for the attacking Russians. Bakhmut was famously a huge kill zone that Russia only took because Prigozhin had an unlimited supply of prisoners to sacrifice.

Today, even though Ukrainian infantry can still kill lots of Russian attackers in Kostaintynivka, many military analysts don't see the loss of the city as a big deal, because cities are no longer necessary to prevent any rapid Russian advancement. Ukraine can kill more efficiently with drones over open terrain.

Well, the minute that Russia allows fuel trucks to cross the Kerch Bridge, Ukraine will hit one with a drone and blow up both the truck and the bridge.

So, with the rail ferries destroyed, the only way for the Russian military to get fuel into Crimea is via the "land bridge" past all of the blown-up bridges and FPV drones.

At present, Ukraine doesn't have any way of planning an offensive to try to take Crimea. But it will be interesting to see if Russia can do anything to stop the bleeding there

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The reason that Ukraine didn't destroy the Kerch Bridge a second time was that it wanted all the civilians to go ahead and leave Crimea. That is now happening.

Once the civilians are gone, Ukraine will be able to attack many more locations without worrying so much about possible civilian casualties.

Certainly, Putin's original goal was to bring Ukraine back into the Russiky mir. That wasn't necessarily through complete conquest, as he would have been fine with replacing Zelensky with someone more willing to accommodate greater Russian influence.

But after that initial effort failed, it's clear that Putin would be satisfied with a conquest of the Donbas. The cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are key to that objective. Russia will see the war as a military success if those cities (and, thus, the remainder of Donetsk Oblast) are conquered.

From the Ukrainian perspective, those cities are equally important. Don't forget that the fight for Donetsk Oblast has been going on since 2014. It's weird to say, but land in Donetsk matters more to both sides than, say, Zaporizhzhia.

Seriously, if Russia were to conquer Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, they would then ask for a ceasefire along the front lines. Without those cities, practically no one in Russia or Ukraine will assert that Russia has "won" the war. A war ending today along the current front lines would not be considered a true victory by either side.

Herb and Murray both have to start, because they are the only possible starters who play any defense.

EDIT: Bey is also a decent defender.