This is the bust of Charles Darwin that used to be in Down House, his home in Kent. (It’s now in Cambridge University Library).
I prefer the profile view, though, because it brings out his essential gentleness as a person (which is most in evident in his anguish over the death of his daughter Annie — and which is a central theme in the recently-released feature film Creation).
Typically insightful talk by Clay Shirky at the Government 2.0 conference.
Thanks to Tom Watson for the link.
We went to see Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron’s film about two women obsessed with French cuisine. It’s based on a true story about Julie Powell (played by a waiflike Amy Adams), a lost young wife living in Queens in 2002 who fastens on Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as a way of giving purpose to her life. She decides that she will cook every recipe in the book (all 524 of them) in a single year — and write a blog about the experience.
Ephron’s screenplay weaves the lives of the two women — who never meet — into a charming tale. Julia Child is played by Meryl Streep in a performance that initially seems so over the top that one is reminded of the Monty Python portrayal of Mrs Jean-Paul Sartre. David Denby put it nicely in his New Yorker review: “Like a tall ship at full sail, she leans, tilts, and billows. Odd explosions of air—whoops, exclamations—come hurtling through the passageways. She runs out of breath, and then settles, mysteriously, like an old Bible that italicizes ordinary words, on a single syllable.” The effect is slightly off-putting at first, but it’s such a focussed performance that eventually one begins to wonder: maybe Child really was like this. After all, Streep is a great actress and she must know what she’s doing. Besides, the real-life Child was a very large woman (six foot two in height and with a presence to match). So I suspended disbelief and resolved to check it further when I got home.
At the artistic heart of the film is a conjecture: that cooking can change your life. Julia Child was the wife of Paul Child, a civilised and urbane minor US diplomat (played by Stanley Tucci) who is posted to Paris in 1948, just as Senator Joe McCarthy is beginning to stoke anti-Communist hysteria back home. She loved Paris and French food, but was lost for something to do (the couple had no children) and so eventually fastened on the idea of enrolling at the Le Cordon Bleu cookery school. After many twists and turns (nicely portrayed in the film and including Paul’s skirmish with McCarthyism) she wound up writing the book that introduced the American thinking classes to the glories of French cuisine. In a way, she was the Americans’ answer to Elizabeth David — except that Child was less fastidious as a person and took to TV like Fanny Craddock (and became just as famous). But, overall, it was an obsession with the details of haute cuisine that gave meaning to her life.
Half a century later, Julie Powell is drifting through life in New York. Married to a civilised, urbane magazine editor (nicely played by Chris Messina), she works by day in the office of a government organisation set up to deal with relatives of the victims of 9/11. The only thing she really seems to enjoy doing in cooking. She wants to be a writer (even wrote “half a novel” once) but is getting nowhere. Eventually she finds that one of her ghastly, power-dressing contemporaries has started a blog about her personal life which is going to be turned into a TV mini-series, and has the thought: I could write a blog too! But about what?
And therein hangs the tale. Julie starts a blog (using the old Userland software which powered Salon blogs and that I used to use before I switched to WordPress). Initially, nobody notices it (she’s a long way down the long tail), but eventually it gets some traction and one day the New York Times discovers it and — Hey Presto! — Julie’s on her way to fame and a book deal — and personal salvation. It isn’t all plain sailing, of course: she has reverses and crises (just as Child had) on the way; and even if she hadn’t, the dramatic demands of a screenplay would have necessitated them. But the story ends, satisfyingly, with the realisation that both women Came Through. And left the world a better place. And so we walked out into the twilight with the warm glow that comes from realising that Boeuf Bourgignon can change your life. (Which in my case, incidentally, it did. But that’s another story.)
But back to my original discombobulating concern: was Streep taking us for a ride? In the old days, we’d have no way of checking. Now, though, we have YouTube. So here’s a link to the trailer for the film. And here is the real Child on how to make an omelette:
And my conclusion? Streep did over-egg the pudding a bit. Or, as the French would say, un peu. Put it down to artistic licence; after all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggheads.
FOOTNOTE: Julia Child’s recipe for Boeuf Bourgignon (pdf) available from here. I’m afraid I disagree with her about the bacon rinds. Otherwise she’s spot on.
Mercedes are bringing back the Gullwing 300SL.
The new one has a 6.2 litre V8 (the original had an inline six-cylinder engine). Yours for £275,000. Don’t know what the emission figures are, but you can guess they aren’t exactly planet-friendly.
Well, well. Today is the ninth of the ninth two thousand and nine. Or 09-09-09. Or 999.
The University Library in Cambridge has, for decades, had a blank space in front of the steps leading to the main entrance. In recent years, this has become a jumble of untidy (and unsightly) car parking. So the Library commissioned a set of fourteen sculptures to reclaim the space. Until Friday last, they were a mystery to us library users because they were firmly encased in impenetrable wrapping. But at 6pm on Friday all was revealed. And very nice they are too: cast in bronze and with a lovely patina. The central four have an added feature — designed not only to interest small children but also to test the tidiness obsession of adults.
From Kottke.
Michael Stillwell pulled an interesting chart out of a book called A Farewell to Alms. It’s a table of the speed of important news reaching London. For instance, in 1805 the news of the Battle of Trafalgar took 17 days to travel the 1100 miles to London; that’s a speed of 2.7 mph. By 1891 when the Nobi earthquake occurred in Japan, it only took the news one day to travel 5916 miles, a speed of 246 mph.
Nowadays an email or a Twitter update can travel halfway around the world nearly instantaneously. The 2008 Sichaun earthquake occurred 5100 miles from London with the first Twitter update in English occurring about 7 minutes after the quake started. Assuming the message was read a minute later by someone in London, that’s 38,250 mph. Had the Twitter updater been right at the epicenter and able to send a Twitter message 30 seconds after the quake started and was read a minute later in London, that’s 204,000 mph. Five orders of magnitude improvement in 200 years…not too shabby.
In Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s entrancing book
Martial spoils apart, the great contest has left little trace. It was the beginning of coffee-drinking in the West, or so the Viennese maintain. The earliest coffee-houses, they insist, were kept by some of the Sultan’s Greek and Serbian subjects who had sought sanctuary in Vienna. But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moon of the Sultan’s flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They lark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.
Truly, you learn something new every day. I had always assumed that the croissant was the product of unaided Gallic inspiration.
Enraged by Quentin stealing a march on me in the gadget wars with his Mac Mini 9, I resolved to restore my shattered dignity. I bought a Dell Mini 9 on eBay (the cheap one with 8GB SSD and 1G Ram), a 2GB RAM chip and a RunCore 64GB SSD. This is more expensive than a standard SSD, but one’s paying extra for its killer feature — a USB interface.
And now I have an absolutely delicious little machine which runs Leopard like a native.
It’s an eerie experience running an Apple OS on non-Apple hardware. As Leopard launched on the Dell I was suddenly reminded that I’ve owned a version of virtually every Apple machine there has ever been — starting with an Apple II in the late 1970s. But this is the first time I’ve seen the apple logo launch on a machine that the company hasn’t made.
In terms of performance, the Dell is pretty good. The screen is ok. Anything that requires disk access tends to run faster than on my MacBook Air, but processes that are compute-intensive run slower. So this is not a machine for video editing, say. But then, neither is the Air.
The great thing about the Dell, apart from the psychic satisfaction it offers, is the form factor. It’s a nicely made piece of kit. And it fits easily into a camera bag, so it will go more places with me.
I’ve used a lot of NetBooks since the ASUS 701 first launched, and I love the concept. But until now, using a NetBook meant that one always had to accept some compromises either in terms of functionality or ergonomics. The Dell Mini 9 running Leopard means much fewer compromises.
Just listened to a terrific radio interview with my former Observer colleague, the wonderful Katherine Whitehorn, who has long retired from the paper but is now the ‘agony aunt’ of Saga Magazine. The conversation had moved on to the way readers respond to newspaper/magazine columnists. Katherine recounted how she had once had a letter from a man who lived with his wife in a largish house but the two of them nowadays hardly exchanged a word in the course of an entitre day. How could this dire situation be improved. Katharine suggested that the get a dog “because at least then they’d have to talk about who would take the bloody animal for a walk every day” — and was deluged with angry letters from readers saying “how dare you suggest introducing an innocent dog into such a dysfunctional family”.
And I thought: only in Britain could this happen.