Nick Kristof in the New York Times on the choices facing Obama in Afghanistan:
For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.
Reminds me of this great graphic showing us what everything costs (via Daring Fireball)
Back before the days of “Iron Chef”, “Masterchef” and “Hell’s Kitchen”, television’s top food expert was a very tall, slightly ungainly, woman who sounded a little drunk. She was Julia Child and in the 60s she taught America how to cook. In an era where tv dinners, pre-prepared sauces and easy cake mixes were top of a busy housewife’s shopping list, Child produced the almighty tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking which went on to sell millions of copies and make her a legend.
A little later on, 2002 in fact, New Yorker Julie Powell started an online project to reproduce every recipe in the famous cookbook (over 500 of them) in a single year. Nora Ephron’s new film Julie & Julia skilfully merges the two stories, freely noting the parallels between them, and managing to produce a warm and witty film that honours the remarkable Child.
Four films are on the agenda this week and only time will tell this early in the season whether they are going to be genuine title contenders, gritty battlers hoping for a shot at mid-table obscurity or no-hopers doomed to a season of heartache and inevitable relegation. Please excuse the laboured football metaphors but the best of this week’s releases is set in the world of 1970s English football (all fags, booze and Deep Heat) and I let the mud get under my fingernails a bit.
Based on the 2006 surprise hit novel by David Peace, The Damned United is about the bizarre 44 days in 1974 when mercurial British football manager Brian Clough tried to manage Leeds United. Opinion is divided about whether the possibly mentally unbalanced Clough was actually trying to destroy a team he hated from the inside or whether he had genuinely let his ambition (and competitive streak) get the better of his judgement and the book successfully manages to get deep inside the head of a man who is unravelling under the pressure but the film isn’t as ambitious.
Our Education Minister sets the bar for young New Zealanders so low she may actually get over it herself:
[via @publicaddressnz and Stuff]“If they do nothing other than teach our children to read and write and do maths and be good socialised New Zealand people then they’ve done a really good job.”
If I could have another life to live, simultaneous with my own, I would probably spend most of it playing Sports Interactive’s Football Manager (aka Championship Manager). While I tend to scoff at those who get excited at Beatles Rock Bands and am baffled but impressed by those who take games seriously, I cannot deny my achilles heel and so every year I download the demo of the latest version and then force myself to not buy the full game in order to stay sane.
The 2009 version introduced half-time and full-time team talks, allowing you to gee-up or dress-down your team depending on your psychology, theirs, and the state of the match. Motivational options included “Show your disappointment at the team” or “Tell your players to do this for the supporters” and you could single players out for criticism or praise (“Tell Cole that you are delighted with him”).
Twickenham in 1961 might well have been the most boring place on Earth. The 60s haven’t started yet (according to Philip Larkin the decade wouldn’t start until 1963 “between the end of the Chatterley Ban/and The Beatles first LP”) but the train was already on the tracks and could be heard approaching from a distance if you listened closely enough. Middle-class teenager Jenny is studying hard for Oxford but longing for something else – freedom and French cigarettes, love and liberation.
In Lone Scherfig’s An Education (from a script by Nick Hornby; adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir), Jenny is luminously portrayed by newcomer Carey Mulligan (so adorable that if she’s ever in a film with Juno’s Ellen Page we’ll have to recalibrate the cuteness scale to accommodate them both) and she gets a hint of a way out of suburban English drudgery when she meets cool businessman David (Peter Sarsgaard) and he whisks her off her feet, to the West End and to Paris.
