Some time ago, I got the 2012 issue of the Italian Yellow Pages to my home.

It's this:

It's just an handful of pages! It's completely useless, maybe there are just 3-4 firms for each category!

If you think that every firm paid 500-1000 euro to be included, it's not an advertising investment anymore. This is wasted money!

But, the makers are going digital! In this way:

WFT??? It's just a PDF conversion of the printed edition or something like that!

It's senseless to do something like that! Why not just list my search in an intuitive way, instead of presenting minuscule text without a decent search!

Well, today in Italy I saw something that cross the bounds of decency: advertising in homeworks.

It is quite normal: read a paragraph, then answer the questions. The problem is this: the paragraph actually is a press release from the Italian Postal Service!!!

Imagine to have an homework like this:

With nearly 100,000 places to buy stamps, ship a package or renew a passport, the U.S. Postal Service is expanding customer access to its products and services. It’s not about brick-and- mortar Post Offices anymore, as postal products move online and into retail outlets, grocery stores, office supply chains and pharmacies.

Then have to answer questions like "Where you can buy stamps?", or "How many offices are in the country"?

Product placement? Subliminal message? This kind of stuff should be illegal....

On this italian blog, today I come aware of a pearl of wisdom on the Italian ministry of education website.

Probably the Florence university researcher that wrote the article did not know English (well, on that course - biotech - the mandatory English exam it's just of the European level A2: Elementary English - can communicate in simple and routine tasks) so he translated using Google Translatore.

In this way, the title "From sheep to pecorino cheese", become "From sheep to doggy style" 

This is the original text from the Ministry website:

The project represents the implementation of a study at the local level already achieved by an individual dairy producers and confer, is developed through the use of components for the detection and recording of events, apply a methodology that uses hardware and software between their integrated.
Each collection rounds is uniquely identified through the development of a communication protocol based on GPS technology, with the possibility of recognition of the coolant tank manufacturers, tank truck and tank at the dairy.

This is the text in italian, automatically translated: (edits in bold)

The project represents the implementation of a study at the local level already achieved by an individual dairy producers and confer, is developed through the use of components for the detection and recording of events, applied a methodology that uses hardware and software between their integrated.
Each collection rounds is uniquely identified through the development of a communication protocol based on GPS technology, with the possibility of recognition of the coolant tank manufacturers, tank trucks and tank at the dairy.

There is a reason if I translate Dandandin.net by myself... yes, maybe it is not 100% accurate; maybe sometimes I write nonsense, sometimes it's tiring to translate my long posts, but at least I won't write nonsense like that.