The prize for winning the Wimbledon Women’s Title will finally match that for the men’s title. (It is the last of the Grand Slam titles to make the move.)
The first female chef to be awarded a Michelin three star rating (and only the fourth-ever), is Anne-Sophie Pic. Sample dish: sea bass caught in coastal waters and steamed over wakame kelp, served with gillardeau oyster bonbons, cucumber chutney and vodka and lemon butter sauce.
Over on Comment is Free I’ve a piece on the Australian decision to ban incandescent light bulbs – you might think I’d be simply in favour, since it is said it will eventually save 1% of national electricity use. But there are issues – one this is no replacement for more substantive, bigger action on say, the coal industry, and two, the fact that some people may be simply unable to afford the bulbs, and find themselves having to choose between light and food.
The Carnival of Feminists No 32 is now up on Bumblebee Sweet Potato, and what a period she had to cover, with the huge American row over two feminist bloggers, Amanda from Pandagon & Melissa from Shakespeare’s Sister. If you haven’t heard at least a snatch of that, you must have been suffering a long internet outage… but catch up with the latest and best commentary in the carnival.
But roll up, roll up, if that doesn’t appeal, there’s a lot, lot more… about a forced renaming of the Vagina Monologues (I mean, hello!), reproductive rights, and much more.
Don’t waste time over here – do go over and check it out ….
But ah, before you do, I will not that I am looking for future hosts, so if you’ve been thinking about it, now would be a great time to speak up.
One day in Avignon and a feast of art…
First up is the Petite Palace, which faces down on to the square in front of the Palais de Papes, and is a very model of Renassaince lightness and balance after its weight.
What it houses, however, is what has to be described as a rather specialist collection of pre-Renaissance (mostly religious) art. There are really only so many broadly Byzantine-style Madonnas with gold backgrounds you can look at before you start to glaze over. (It was not entirely surprising that staff outnumbered visitors about three-one.)
The room I found by far the most interesting was the first, which out of keeping with the rest houses a disparate collection from roughly the Palais period.
It is a time of tremendously disparate influences. You go from the “Le signe des gemeaux” from near nimes, very much degraded classical marble carvings to grotesque column heads that are very “medieval”.
But the highlight is definitely the frescos from the Maison de Sorgues at Vaucluse, with naïve but delightfully lively hunting scenes and court scene. In one a greyhound-type hunting dog is straining at the leash; while another much heavier hound-type is obviously exhausted, its tongue hanging limply. There’s artistic talent there, but the trees have individual leaves on neatly spaced, splayed branches as children draw them and there is no sense of perspective.
The colours must have been spectacular; the once green hose of a page give a hint of this. But they have been faded and much-greyed by time.
Generally faces are sketched in, but again the artistry shines through in two lovers in a corner of one forest scene. They are surely about to kiss, but another young man is listening in from behind a termite mound.
Then, continuing the artistic feast, on to the Musee Calvet, which is Avignon’s primary art museum.
To start at the beginning; the prehistory section, which is recently remodelled and moodily lit (not quite to my taste), but a very fine collection, beginning with the stone stelae of which much is made of the Stele du Rocher des Doms, found at the centre of town, “proving” its ancient roots.
The commentary says these (although only 30-50cm in height) were part of the megalithic phenomenon and reflected changes in Neolithic society after about 3,500BC, when social hierarchies increasingly developed. They had three periods – an early one of just simple stones, then stones marked with chevrons and recesses. Finally you get those with stylised human faces, dating from about 2,800-2,400BC.
Then you get into the bronze age, where the collection really shines, as with this spectacular dagger.
There’s also a brilliant collection of bronze age axes that are really works of art in their own right.
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A considerably better than usual newspaper history of the pancake. (I.e. not just done from last year’s clippings.)
So enjoy, from the 1750s…
…in upper-class dining rooms, a new culinary invention began to drive diners wild: known as ”quire of paper”, this new pancake was made with a cream-rich batter, cooked as vast and whisper-thin as possible on charcoal-fired stoves. Traditionally, it was served with sugar, butter and a scrape of nutmeg and with bowls of thickened creams redolent with the volatile oils of lemons and oranges.
The world: 1.9C hotter than an average January.
Then this was in my inbox this morning – attributed to Gavin Schmidt, an atmospheric scientist who works in James Hansen’s team at NASA GISS….
…radiative forcing which the planet is experiencing just now is roughly the same as the current CO2 levels, but only because of the massive cooling effect from sulphour aerosols (which are very short-lived, and which we can expect to decline dramatically if we move to a low-carbon economy). The full radiative forcing from all the greenhouse gases is around 460 ppm CO2e now, but if you add forcings from black soot and ozone, it’s around 560 ppm CO2e.
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