I haven't posted here before but I wanted to send much love to the democrats for their emphatic victory in the midterms, many people of the progressive and/or feminist persuasion here in australia had their fingers crossed for them. I have been invited to a hastily-organised celebration party in fact and hope all blue supporters are doing something suitably celebratory.

I'm not an American, nor have I ever lived in the United States but the news that the Democrats took back the house made me leap for joy. The Republicans have failed the good people of the United States, especially women, and it's about time those people stood up and told them where they could stick it. It makes me incredibly happy that one of the world's oldest democracies is still showing people how it can be done :)

And as a side note: this is my first comment here, I've been reading for a while now - ladies, you are awesome!

Anybody got a link to McCaskill's speech? I missed it last night.

McCaskill's victory (yay!) speech is on cnn here: http://dynamic.cnn.com/apps/tp/video/politics/2006/11/08/sots.mo.sen.elect.claire.mccaskill.cnn/video.ws.asx?NGUserID=aa51230-11536-1156863729-2&adDEmas=R00%26hi%26legalmomentum.org%260%26usa%26511%2622102%2647%2603%26S1%26Y1%26

Thanks Madeline.

The Italian cars
The functioning of the Provisioning services was assured by an appropriate Management for the Sector and whose main task was that of co-ordinating the various services made responsible to offices under its jurisdiction: the statistics and reports offices for the registration of goods consumed and the persons present and the checking of replenishments, the kitchens, the feeding halls and hygiene; the restaurant and food stores management offices which were entrusted to the International Company of Wagons-Lit on the one hand (restaurants) and the Italian Federation of Agricultural Consortiums on the other (food stores).

Each of the ten restaurants was equipped with fixed installations, comprising a refrigerating and chilling unit (provided by the Stanzani & Co.) used to store edible provisions (with a constant room temperature of 0° to 10° C.) and capacity of 120 sq. m.; with a larder (also provided by Stanzani & Co.) chilled for conservation of meat and fish and for the preparation of certain dishes (constant room temperature adjustable right up to 15° C), capacity 74 sq. m.; with a whole range of kitchen equipment for the needs of the various sections, provided by the firm of Zoppas, i.e. cafeteria, washing of vegetables, cooking of dishes, washing of saucepans, crockery and glasses, cold dishes service, distribution service with 10 chilled shelves, 6 steam cookers, hot chambers, 4 shelves for dishes and 2 sliding trays.

The mobile fittings for kitchen and restaurant allowed the maximum number of diners to be served in each restaurant in a two-hour session by means of the " self-service " system. Each restaurant, in addition, disposed of equipment for cool and iced drinks, in the form of refrigerating units provided by Zoppas (from four to six) with a total capacity of 6,000 litres; refrigerators for small bottles provided by Coca-Cola, 16 in number and with a total capacity of 9.60 cu. m.; two refrigerators for ice-creams supplied by Motta & Co. with a capacity of 3 cu. m. for 1,000 bars; four fruit juice distributors with a total capacity of 60 litres; two small iced-water fountains (provided by the FIAT company).