Take a model, not a super skinny one, and chuck her in a bathtub full of spaghetti sprinkled with tomatoes and basil. That’s an anti-anorexia message, right?

This is the latest lip service to the toothpick model scare as Milan buckles down (or up) for Women’s Fashion Week, which runs from Feb. 16-23, latest images from Milano Moda Donna here, calendar in PDF here.

The brainchild of up-and-coming designers Dario Di Bella and Giovanni Premoli, the stunt had the placet of city officials, who have previously made noise about losing the stick figures lurching down catwalks in Italy’s fashion capital.

“There’s no reason fashion models have to be a size four,” Dario Di Bella, who works for label Premoli, told Italian papers. “It wouldn’t change anything about the way the clothes look or the overall image of our brand. “

Rental mannequins on show for the almost-naked lunch were size eights, as will be the ones doing their little turns on the “young designers for young people” catwalk February 20, organized by the city, where Premoli will also show. No word about what happened to the pounds and pounds of unwanted pasta used to make the weighty statement.

Renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci, who worked in Milan for 17 years, inspired 2008 Carnival festivities here.

The best part? A huge confetti-making machine in Via Mercante. It takes old newspapers and turns them into free packs of coriandoli (“confetti” in Italian means almond candies used as wedding, birth or graduation favors) for the kids.

Inspired by his machines (like the wooden models in the Tech & Science museum here), it theatrically shreds newspapers then whooshes them up a clear chute. They are packaged and sent down through another chute outside, where a young lad in costume hands them out.

Italy’s most stylish city celebrates Carnival fashionably late. Milan follows its own calendar, according to the Ambrosian Rite (named after patron St. Ambrose), so the party ends here on Saturday (“sabato grasso,” fat Saturday) and Lent starts on Sunday.

Other Leonardo-related activities include kite making in the Via Palestro Gardens, makeup and hair in the Galleria Emanuele.

Saturday’s parade (floats, bands, etc) starts at 3 p.m. (from Via Palestro) and the festivities carry on after it winds up in Piazza Duomo ending with an acrobat/dance/fireworks extravaganza that starts at 10:30 p.m..

Keep an eye out for silly-string slinging teens and costumed tots; clubs are the way to go for adults who want to dress up.

More Carnival celebrations around Italy here and, in Italian,here .

MILAN, Italy — For the first time, Democrats living abroad from Auckland to Ontario are voting over the internet in a global primary. And a few states may allow expatriate voters to vote online in the general election come November.

For now, expat voters will, in effect, add an extra state to this year’s Democratic National Convention. These voters without borders will elect 22 delegates, weighing in with about as much influence as Montana or South Dakota.

Voting is currently open only to Democrats. Republicans Abroad split off from the Republican National Committee and can hold neither in-person nor internet votes in the primaries. For the estimated 6 million Americans who live overseas, red tape and the vagaries of far-flung postal systems leave traditional paper absentee ballots with all the accuracy of a message in a bottle.

Americans abroad requested nearly a million ballots in 2006 elections, but only about a third were cast or counted, according to a government report.
More from Nicole Martinelli at Wired News.

A building code infraction of five inches closed Italy’s parking lot of love, about two weeks after it opened.

Instead of accepting the usual DIY certificate of the layout, inspectors took tape measure in hand to check out Luna Parking, in Bagnolo Cremasco about 25 miles southeast of Milan.

Turns out that although the 38 semi-covered stalls were fine, the distance between the security booth and the entrance wall is five inches too narrow. While they were at it, they discovered the bathroom signs were too high.

So they closed the place down.

Unusually precise Italian bureaucracy?

More likely that local Catholics, who staged a church vigil for park-n-ride sinners before the grand opening, had their prayers answered.

This is the latest safe place for nookie to shut down.

Marco Donarini, out €300,000 euros for the faulty lot of love, told papers he found the episode “incredible.”

Aspiring Michelangelos will have to hold the charcoal: artist models have put back on their clothes to protest working conditions. In a note sent to news agency ANSA, unions representing these workers decry the “precariousness” of these jobs.

Live artist models were once state employees but over the last eight years they’ve become freelance workers striking a pose on yearly contracts.

Traditionally a job for the young, broke and shameless, only in a country “founded on work” do professional posers expect a job for life.

The protest may be worth a few pics: a “performance” at Rome’s Sapienza University, in the square in front of the Faculty of Letters at 9:30 a.m., Jan. 17.