The problem, for those who read recipes on their iPads, is how to keep the precious device safe from the various fluids and other hazards likely to be found in kitchens. The solution (apparently) comes from Chef Sleeve. The triangular box in which the disposable bags come doubles as a stand.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Interesting piece in The Atlantic.

There are politicians who don’t cheat on their wives, movie stars whose marriages don’t end in divorce, and professional athletes who aren’t womanizers, but a pro bodybuilder turned Hollywood star turned governor?

Arnold Schwarzenegger never had a chance.

His impending divorce has been the talk of Southern California drive time radio for at least the last week, and I’ve yet to encounter anyone surprised by the news. It’s because we remember. Eight years ago, on the eve of the special election that won him the statehouse, the Los Angeles Times published a scathing story about his groping problem. “The initial Times report told the story of six women who said that the star had touched them in a suggestive or aggressive manner without their consent,” James Rainey recalled this week. “Eventually, a total of 16 women, 11 of them giving their names, described physical humiliations suffered at the hands of the man who was running to replace Gray Davis as governor in the recall election.” 

Today the newspaper has finished what it started.

“Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, separated after she learned he had fathered a child more than a decade ago — before his first run for office — with a longtime member of their household staff,” says the front page story. “The staff member worked for the family for 20 years, retiring in January.”

I never look at photographs of Schwarzenegger without thinking of Clive James’s wonderful description of him looking like “a condom stuffed with walnuts”.

It’s not often that one feels genuine sadness when a politician dies, but I felt it this morning when the news came through that Garret Fitzgerald died last night. He was one of the very few Irish politicians who was a genuine intellectual — a fact often illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of him emerging from an exhausting all-night EU negotiation session and expressing the view that while the resulting deal might be ok in practice “the question is whether it works in theory”.

He was for many years an academic at University College, Dublin and benefited from an unusual clause in the terms of employment of lecturers in the National University of Ireland (of which UCD was a constituent college) which gave staff unpaid leave of absence to hold public office while keeping their academic posts open. So even when he was Foreign Minister or Taoiseach he always had the possibility of returning to academic life. Perhaps that’s what gave him such a sublimely distracted look.

He was a mass of contradictions: the son of two heartland Irish nationalists, he ought to have been a visceral anti-Brit. But he was exactly the opposite — which perhaps helps to explain why he was able to overcome the damage done to Anglo-Irish relations by the antagonism between Charlie Haughey and Margaret Thatcher. In that sense — as former President Mary Robinson pointed out on Radio 4 this morning — there was a strange resonance in the fact that he passed away on the night when the British monarch was making a speech down the road in Dublin Castle, at a banquet to which he had been invited.

Searching for images of him this morning, I was struck by this one (from Wikipedia), in which he looks eerily like my maternal grandfather — who was a devout Fianna Fail supporter and probably disapproved of Garret (who led the opposing political tribe, Fine Gael). The nicest personal memory I have of him comes from a day when I was heading for Davey Byrne’s pub off Grafton Street in Dublin. I suddenly saw Garret walking towards me, accompanied by one of his grandchildren, a young girl who was holding his hand and talking animatedly to him. What was striking was the fact that he was entirely engrossed in what she was saying, and paying no attention whatsoever to what was happening on the street. It was a lovely encapsulation of the fact that while he may have been a statesman and a world figure, at that moment he was, purely and simply, a loved and loving grandfather. May he rest in peace.

LATER: Nice round-up of tributes on Politico. And the LRB has put up a list of the articles he wrote for the magazine.