Aloha!

Looks like a reprieve for #2 daughter and best pal Y - they might be able to jet off to Hawaii for a bit of a summer break with one of Y's kin.

Pity about Greece - I'd rather liked the idea of folks calling out, "Yassou, Yasi!"

While on matters Greek, went with A to see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Very much a teenage girl movie but what fascinated me was that I at long last know what and where Santorini is - it's that ridiculously picturesque white and blue tourist paradise overlooking a bay from the side of a mountain.

Fooled by the -ini suffix, I always thought it was some tourist-ridden **ITALian** resort.

Beautiful place. I always wondered where it was and what it was called.

Alex Bledel plays the girl who goes to stay with her grandma, so there's plenty of "Ya Ya" addressing and noble Greek papou profiles.

The love interest in the book is "Kostos" (surely, it'd be Costas, or was that judged too effeminate-sounding for US ears?), played here by a bloke who looked Greeky enough in a buff biceped way, but who spoke with a lisping *Dutch* accent.

I kept nudging A and hissing, "That bloke is *Dutch*, but when we looked him up, turns out Michael Rady is as American as Pittsburgh steel.

On "Picking up the Greek Accent", Rady says somewhere:

"We had four days. They flew a dialect coach in from London and we just sat there morning, noon and night, all day long working the accent. We’d go out to lunch and I had to use the accent. It was very intense, very intensive."

In that case, there's a bit of an excuse but one has to wonder about the dialect coach.