I think I found out why rossa was mad. 

An apt-get update on the 18th downloaded kernel 2.6.32-65-generic, so 2.6.32-58-generic, which what was previously chosen as a working kernel, had moved down in the grub ordering.

It turns out the grub configuration accepts strings, so I changed it to GRUB_DEFAULT="Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-58-generic", ran sudo update-grub, and Rossa now seems to boot happily.