On a bus stop I saw an ad for Telekomunikacja Polska* and Orange and Dell computers. It’s accompanied by a lavish (read: finger-down-the throat) TV ad campaign. It’s a great offer: you can go to a shop (Orange’s I think) and – wait for it – buy not only a computer but also connection to […]
Reading through John Dickie’s highly readable Delizia! – The epic history of the Italians and their food, an episode jumped out involving a conflict of interest that would make modern day politicians – left and right – proud.
Platina, the author of one of the most popular cookbooks of the age (the mid-to-late 1400s), De Honesta voluptate et valetudine (Respectable Pleasure and Good Health), was a leading humanist in Rome, who has left us a good idea of some, perhaps, surprising approaches to cooking in Italy at the time. For example, the use of sugar was widespread, as a seasoning like salt – often being added to what we now consider savoury dishes like Lasagne. The distinction between sweet and savourty is a later invention – in the 1400s celebrity chefs were more concerned with the Galenic theory of the humours. Platina also gives us an idea of the average cooking time for pasta in the 1400s – an hour for vermicelli, and two hours for maccheroni…
The above image, which displays a mesmerizing swathe of esoteric technology, comes from a New York Times article that explains how IBM researcher Stuart P. Parkin is using nanomaterials in an attempt to create vastly improved electronic storage technologies and “to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of […]
Taking an opsimathic interest in the history of my hometown, I’ve been contentedly engaged by Maurice Craig’s landmark publication, Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City. Craig’s aphoristic style (“[In] Dublin luxuries have always tended to come before necessities.”) and interest in the wider intellectual milieu combine to produce a book that transcends the category […]
One should perhaps feel grateful after the state broadcaster RAI 1 finally decided to cover Beppe Grillo’s massive V-day protest, two days late. If there’s one thing worse than being talked about… The station’s increasingly confused idea of what ‘news reporting’ is meant that the coverage consisted entirely of two main stream political figures giving […]
Watching General David Petraeus’s attempt to sell President Bush’s surge strategy to U.S. senators, I’ve been distracted by the matrix of ribbons and badges adorning the general’s chest, the profusion of which would not embarrass the late Leonid Brezhnev. Some of this luxuriant military “flair” is glossed here.
The ins and outs of Polish politics are a bit too sleazy and trivial for most so there follows a comparison of Polish politics and normal, Irish politics. My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, will doubtless bristle at the description of Irish politics as “normal” but there you are… Phone Tapping Yes, it happens in Ireland […]
The disjuncture between what goes on and what is reported has rarely been so apparent. On Saturday, with little-to-no advance television publicity, an initiative got under way in Piazzas throughout Italy. The initiative was to collect signatures to propose a new law with three main clauses: 1) No-one fully convicted of a crime should be […]
The disjuncture between what goes on and what is reported has rarely been so apparent. On Saturday, with little-to-no advance television publicity, an initiative got under way in Piazzas throughout Italy. The initiative was to collect signatures to propose a new law with three main clauses: 1) No-one fully convicted of a crime should be […]