Cooking the book

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TH Huxley described science as “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by ugly facts”. The same might be said of biography. It turns out that the famous Mrs Beeton (she of the eponymous cookbook) couldn’t cook and didn’t write it.

If Mrs Beeton had been alive today she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale, the Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday.

The image of the original domestic goddess and author of the definitive book on cookery and household management has been tainted. The real Mrs Beeton was in fact a strip of a girl who could not cook.

The historian Kathryn Hughes has written the definitive biography of a woman born in 1836 who became a template for hardworking housewives.

Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead.

How did she come to write the seminal book? “The answer is she copied everything,” Hughes said. It took Hughes five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.

But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. “Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.” Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for…

Beginnings of wisdom?

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From today’s New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 31 — After 27 years in which the United States has refused substantive talks with Iran, President Bush reversed course on Wednesday because it was made clear to him — by his allies, by the Russians, by the Chinese, and eventually by some of his advisers — that he no longer had a choice…

Bet Cheney is spitting feathers. And as for Rumsfeld, well… And then there are all those far-right ‘think’ tanks. And Rush Limbaugh. Delicious!

Open Source XP

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This is an illustration from today’s New York Times showing how Chris diBona, Google’s Manager of Open Source Programs, uses a fancy little micro-PC when he’s on the road. Er, just one problem: the cool little gizmo — according to the picture caption — runs Windows XP. What kind of Open Source advocacy is that?

Finally, a real use for the Segway

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From Technology Review…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thieves used to break into as many as five cars a week in the parking garage at Los Angeles’ Union Station. Then the Metropolitan Transportation Authority came up with a simple solution: They put a security officer on a Segway Human Transporter. ”The first day that one of the security officers was on the device was pretty much the last day there was a break-in,” said Robin Blair, a transportation planning manager for the MTA, which owns about 19 Segways.

Although the electric, self-balancing Segway scooter never quite caught on with commuters the way its backers had predicted five years ago, the gizmo has found a growing market among law-enforcement agencies, with more than 100 departments around the world now signed on as customers and many others testing the device. The niche market, coupled with a burst of interest from Europeans struggling with gas prices much higher than in the U.S., have breathed new life into the Segway…

Recipe for disaster

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As an experiment, Steve Knopper bought a Dell computer and left it unprotected — and clicked on every dubious link he could find. He kept a diary. Here are the last few days.

Day 10: I download Kazaa, search for .xxx, .gif, .rar, .pif, and .exe files, and open everything. My desktop is soon stuffed with pornography, MP3s in Arabic, and pirated copies of Tomb Raider. Within minutes, Explorer has a grand mal seizure – 95 pop-ups and innumerable error messages. Hah!

Day 11: Incredibly, the Dell boots up. I’ve gotten some strange attachments that Yahoo, Outlook, and Eudora won’t let me open. I try copying some from my regular computer to the Dell using an external drive. Nothing.

Day 12: Upon firing up the computer, I get six Internet Explorer pop-ups, one WhenUWin Sweepstakes, and one “The Best Offers.” McAfee VirusScan says I have 25 potentially unwanted files, including W32/Netsky.q@MM!zip and two other viruses. SaferScan finds 1,002 porn files on my hard drive, and my Yahoo Mail inbox has 200 brand-new messages with subject lines like “Tired of dating games?”

Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.

It was a Windows machine, you understand.

Neocon mistakes

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Andrew Sullivan writing in TIME Magazine…

Fukuyama’s sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global friends as among our enemies–and make alliances as hard as they are important. That is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing the abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence and misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain inexcusable.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism of government’s ability to change culture at home and its naiveté when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad…

Yep to all three.

Prescott gives up Dorneywood

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From BBC Online…

Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott has announced he is to give up his grace-and-favour home, Dorneywood.

Mr Prescott lost his department but kept his £133,000-a-year Cabinet salary and two grace-and-favour homes after he admitted an affair with a secretary.

He said he had now taken a “personal decision” to give up Dorneywood because the public controversy over it was “getting in the way of doing my job”…

He’s doomed. Now for the really interesting question: who will get Dorneywood now? It used to be the country house allocated to the Foreign Secretary, but Margaret Beckett prefers to stay in her caravan when she goes to the country. So the hot money is on Jack Straw. He deserves a consolation prize, if only for saying that the idea of invading Iran was barmy.

The dark underbelly of the World Cup

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Julie Bindel had an interesting piece about an aspect of the World Cup not usually dwelt upon in the football pages.

With just 10 days to go until the first matches kick off, shops across Britain are heaving with World Cup merchandise: football shirts, whistles and scarves. And then there are the condoms. At 500 branches of Superdrug, there is a range of condoms tailored for England supporters. They are emblazoned with the slogan “Lie Back and Think of England” and decorated with the cross of St George.

It may seem reassuring that football supporters travelling to Germany are being encouraged to be sensible, but there is a pernicious side to the connection between the 2006 World Cup and sex. Alongside the beer tents and burger bars catering for a massive influx of fans to Germany, entrepreneurs are preparing to sell a product already openly on sale throughout Germany: women.

Germany has legalised its sex industry – Cologne opened the world’s first drive-in brothel in 2001. But with three million foreign football fans about to descend on the 12 cities hosting the tournament, entrepreneurs are laying on special facilities. In Berlin, for example, a 3,000sqm mega-brothel has been built next to the main World Cup venue. It is designed to take as many as 650 customers at any one time. Wooden “performance boxes” resembling toilets have been built, with condoms, showers and parking all laid on…

The really scary question is: where will these women come from? Answer: people trafficking.

After Blair

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Max Hastings, gushing about Dave ‘Vote Blue get Green’ Cameron in the Guardian.

Whatever happens in the months ahead, the circumstances of Blair’s departure will be at best undignified, at worst humiliating. Whatever Gordon Brown does on inheriting the mantle, he will find himself in the position of an aged Broadway star summoned to London to revive the fortunes of a flagging musical – deprived even of its custard-pie turn with the announcement that John Prescott is “resting”, as he surely soon will be.

The highlights of Brown’s early premiership will be supervision of a more or less ignominious retreat from Iraq, further increases in taxation, pressures on public spending and – if Brown is foolish – a lurch back to “old Labour values”. Leave morality out of this. As Blair always understood and the left never does, there are not enough poor people in Britain to elect a government. The majority of “haves” will always care more about what happens to them than about compassion for the less fortunate…