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Mike Tarsitano is an American, but that's not his fault, and in spite of this handicap he still manages to be a generally amusing and intelligent person. I met him when he was going out with the cousin of one of my flatmates, and although their relationship didn't last all that long, ours did. He moved into our flat at some stage (though I'm a little hazy about the exact sequence of events -- it was all ten years or so ago, and there was a lot of shifting going on at the time). Mike told us that he came from a place called Nyawlins, which is apparently a big city in the south of the USA where they have jazz, cajun cooking, and a Mardis Gras. I believe it's somewhere quite close to New Orleans.
Mike's passion in life is spiders, and he spent his time at Canterbury University teaching them how to swim and stuff like that. The things they get up to in the Biology Department beggar description. Anyway, as far as I'm aware he's still doing things with spiders, but now he's doing them in Germany since our wonderful immigration people didn't think he was the sort of person we want hanging around in New Zealand. Apparently, being an expert on spider behaviour isn't nearly as prestigious as having a hundred thousand bucks, so poor old Mike got the boot. It was a great shame, but I have a cunning plan to remedy the situation -- I'm going to engineer some kind of terrible spider-related disaster (maybe involving the exposure of a spider to radiation, causing it to become gigantic and dangerous) so that Mike will be flown in by the government as a sort of spider-troubleshooter. He will save the day, and a grateful nation will grant him a generous annuity and honourary citizenship.
Hey, it could happen....