Fusion, Wolverhampton style

Artichokes

Translation

The best way to confirm that translation isn't just shifting sense from one word to another but wrestling with, and reflecting, cultures is to take a look at packaging. We've just picked up two fabulous new Bialetti pans from our local supermarket - yes, we collect the points - and I was reading the instructions. They're what you'd expect. Prepare the cookware, cook over moderate heat, etc. There are seven of them and they're presented in seven languages: Italian, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Looking at them it's clear that what we do with our cookware in all these countries is pretty much the same. With two exceptions, both of which appear in the English version.

The first, small but significant, is the instruction: DO NOT USE UNDER BROILER. This one isn't that hard to explain, although there may be British cookware users who don't know that grill and a broiler are the same thing. But it's interesting that this should be the only instruction in CAPITAL LETTERS, as though English-speaking readers needed that kind of emphasis to grasp an essential point.

But the really interesting difference comes at the end of the English text. It starts CAUTION (also in CAPS) and continues: For safety, please keep pet birds out of the kitchen. Birds' respiratory systems are sensitive to many kinds of household fumes, including the fumes from extremely overheated non-stick pans. This appears only in English. What can it mean? That allowing pet birds into a kitchen filled with excessively overheated non-stick pans is a practice so quintessentially English that the information needn't be given in any other language? Who else but a Brit would have parakeets among the pots and pans? Or is it that the budgie lobby in Britain and the States is so powerful that Bialetti is obliged to add this warning?

PS The sad-looking bird in the picture won the Wet Budgie Contest. I know no more.

PPS I can't not italicise cookware. I'm sorry.

Indecent? No, too much salt...

This is the Heinz ad you won't be seeing on television, because 200 people complained, so you may as well see it here. (This is four times the number of people who complained about Joan Rivers calling Russell Crowe a 'fucking shit' on Loose Women. Make of this what you will, but Loose Women is daytime TV and Heinz ads are on every fucking hour of the day.)

Hmm. I'm not totally happy about 'Mum'.

Yum

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less
I love this. From the Onion.

Davidone

No one seems to know who did this. Just as long as they keep their hands off Cellini's Perseus, seen below from the front and behind - gloriously, almost fetishistically lit, so that he looks like one of those body-buffed CGI Spartans from 300. David's no slouch as a sex object, despite this final humiliation and his second life as a fridge magnet complete with wardrobe. But I've always had a preference for the rather rougher trade feel of the Cellini, and the fact that the faces of Perseus and the Medusa look almost identical, with the latter a slightly smaller version of the former, as though Cellini were trying to tell us something about power, as he does in his Autobiography. A few years ago, it was possible to get to within a few feet of the sculpture during its restoration and it was extraordinary to see how distorted the proportions are when you stand eye- or chest-level to it. It wasn't designed to be seen that way, of course, but even from below the sheer weight of the arms and legs is impressive. Just try slipping a pair of magnetised knickers over those thighs.

Smalltown baroque

This wonderfully bold decoration comes from the Mission San Xavier del Bac, just outside Tucson, rising from a patch of desert as though it had once expected a community to form around it, as I imagine it did, although what kind of community it might have wanted is hard to envisage with charity. The interior is probably typical of churches of this type, relying heavily on paint and plaster and memories of the old world to make up for the lack of more precious materials and models closer to hand. It reminds me very much of the chunky flamboyant provincial baroque of a couple of churches I saw some years ago in the small Sardinian town of Tempio Pausania, which also sticks in my memory for having as one of its local delicacies the nearest thing I've ever seen outside Britain to a Melton Mowbray pork pie.

The world the missionaries found here doesn't get much of a look in, which isn't surprising. Tyla pointed out the sad juxtaposition in the right transept (see below) of an admonishing saint, maybe Xavier himself, and the devout, rather cowed figure of a native American, hands clasped before him in a posture that might be called the missionaried position. The sculpted and painted column that separates them has more life than either figure and I can't help wondering whether local help might not have been called in to do some of the purely decorative stuff. I'd like to think so.

And talking of cultural contamination, what about this curious little artefact, spotted in a gift store in the historic section of Tucson, squeezed in between feathered headdresses, tomahawks and gilded shells for holy water. It combines the Renaissance trope of the winged head of a putto with some distinctly native American features. As if that weren't enough, it also manages to look remarkably like John Travolta in Hairspray, another challenging example of aesthetic syncretism (or maybe not).

Buon appetito, says Jamie

Jamie Oliver plans to open a string of 'authentic, rustic' Italian restaurants in Britain's high streets, according to an article in today's Guardian.

That'll be 'authentic' as in spaghetti alla carbonara... with cream? Oh dear.