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      Rachel Roddy’s recipe for apple, pear and persimmon crumble | A kitchen in Rome

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    It’s crumble time, and in Rome that also means super-juicy persimmons join the usual suspects in this classic winter pud

    Every couple of weeks, I catch the number 8 bus (standing in, yet again, for the number 8 tram) to meet my friend Alice and go to a market in Monteverde. Slower than the tram, the bus isn’t a bad ride, curving up the ring road lined with 20th-century apartment blocks in edible colours: lemon, toffee, olive, custard, salmon, milk chocolate, cream, Smurf ice-cream blue … Conveniently, the bus stops right next to the market, which is known by the name of the square it fills: San Giovanni di Dio. There are big plans to redesign it completely, but for now this busy market remains a Tetris-like arrangement of iron boxes – a scheme rolled out in the late 1950s as part of Rome’s preparation for the 1960 Olympics, in which previously open markets were tidied up and vendors allocated boxes with rolling shutters that provided both storage and a stall.

    There must be 75 stalls of all sorts, but those run by smaller producers who sell their fruit and vegetables are particularly good. Especially at this time of year, when, like markets all over the northern hemisphere, they are piled with good-value greens and cabbages (and their miniature sprout cousins), celeriac, chicory, celery, beetroot and broccoli, squashes, mushrooms, chestnuts, apples, pears and glowing persimmon s, which in Italy (the fourth largest producer after China, Japan and Brazil) take the Japanese name kaki (柿).

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      Chocolate biscuits, cosy bedding and moments of calm: a sideways look at self-care

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025

    This week: feel-good January fixes, interior designer-approved bed linen and Grace Dent on the best extra-chocolatey biscuits

    What do the words “self-care” mean to you? A long scented soak in the bath? A winter run with a podcast as the sun sets? Box-fresh bed linen? It could even be all of the above, in one evening.

    Whatever your poison, there’s no denying a little self-care is needed at this time of year. We try to avoid jumping on bandwagons here at the Filter (particularly “Blue Monday”), but there’s little doubt that the short days, cold weather, empty bank accounts and current world events can drag you down.

    The beauty products and gadgets Sali Hughes tried, tested and loved last year

    The best heated clothes airers to save time and money when drying your laundry, tested

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      Charging firm warns over changes to electric car sales as UK hits EV target

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025

    Pod Point reports weak demand for new cars as it is confirmed no firms will pay fines over ZEV mandate

    A British charging company has said proposed UK changes to electric car sales could increase uncertainty over demand, as the government confirmed that the industry had achieved its sales targets for last year.

    Pod Point, which is majority-owned by EDF Energy, said weak demand for new cars meant it made revenues of £53m in 2024 from its sales of chargers and services, compared with a £60m target. The London-listed company’s share price slumped by a third on Monday morning.

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      Oliviero Toscani obituary

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025

    Photographer and art director who oversaw a series of controversial ad campaigns for the Benetton fashion brand

    The art direction and photographs of Oliviero Toscani were provocative not for what they showed – real life, he said, complex and contradictory – but where they were seen. The images, subjects ranging from a bloodied newborn baby to the condemned of death row, would have been unremarkable on the editorial pages of a classic photo-reportage publication such as Life or Paris Match. But they sprang out of the safe spaces reserved for prestige adverts at the front of fashion magazines, or were pasted up on big billboards.

    Toscani, who has died aged 82, regarded advertising as the most powerful medium, and claimed an artist’s right, like Michelangelo, to express his ideas in it. Like Michelangelo, he had a patron of papal benevolence, Luciano Benetton, who paid for the spaces where Toscani’s creations were seen. Benetton had co-founded a family firm that evolved into a company making mid-price fashion knit separates, with an international chain of shops. He wanted advertising that promoted an ethos for the brand, and in 1982 recruited Toscani as art director.

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      ‘Inside I was doing the Mario jump’ – how one artist became a key player in Nintendo’s story

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025

    Takaya Imamura worked at Nintendo for 32 years before leaving to create his own game, Omega Six. He shares anecdotes from those pivotal years at the creative giant

    In 1889 in Kyoto, craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a hanafuda playing card company. He called it Nintendo – a phrase whose meaning is lost to time according to Nintendo’s own historians, but which can be translated as “leave luck up to heaven”. In the 1970s, Nintendo eventually transitioned from paper games to electronic ones, making its own luck in the process. It has been a permanent fixture in living rooms across the world ever since.

    For budding artist Takaya Imamura, an art student who had been captivated by Metroid and Super Mario Bros 3 in the 1980s, working at Nintendo was a dream. “Back in 1985 when Super Mario came out in Japan, everybody was playing it,” he recalls. “I was at an art university, studying design at the time. Back then, game design wasn’t a thing … people didn’t even know what game creators were.”

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      ‘An unmitigated joy’: why Married to the Mob is my feelgood movie

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    The next entry in our series of writers recommending their favourite comfort films is a tribute to Jonathan Demme’s zesty gangster comedy

    There’s no more perfect song to open a movie than Rosemary Clooney’s Mambo Italiano in Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob. It’s a delightful nonsense song that mimics Cuban mambo music while spilling out lyrics that are about as authentically Italian as a suburban Olive Garden. It’s Demme’s way of announcing that his gangster comedy will be a zesty, multicultural puttanesca that may evoke The Godfather and other genre standards, but mostly indulges in the cartoon kitsch of Long Island goombahs. The film that follows isn’t quite a parody, a spoof or a satire. It’s merely an unmitigated joy from start to finish.

    There are so many fun touches around the edges of Married to the Mob – the colorful production design, the expertly curated new wave soundtrack, the endless gallery of big and supporting players – but as Angela de Marco, a housewife fed up with her two-timing gangster husband and the hornet’s nest of gossipy mob wives, Michelle Pfeiffer holds everything together. She had shown some comedic flair in earlier films like Into the Night and The Witches of Eastwick, but as with Melanie Griffith in Demme’s previous feature, Something Wild, Pfeiffer seizes the opportunity to impose a fresh confidence and charisma in the lead role. Her Angela is determined and street smart, but also eager to break out and have a good time, which is not something a mob wife numbed by Valium is permitted to do.

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      Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025

    Large, gruesome, brutal and gluttonous: Donald Trump is the archetypal ogre. So how did he manage to stomp back for a second term?

    The animated film Shrek opens with the eponymous hero wiping his bottom on a book. Shrek then emerges from the toilet and we follow his swamp-savvy morning routine. He bathes his huge and oddly luminous body in mud. He brushes his teeth with slime. He kills fish for his supper with his flatulence. So far so good.

    But Shrek’s life is about to be interrupted. Lord Farquaad, the punctilious local potentate, is rounding up various misfits and banishing them to Shrek’s swamp. The film has Shrek put up “keep out” signs; he dreams of building a wall; and he frightens anyone who comes into his swamp with fierce-but-fake-but-fierce shows of aggression. But it’s no good. Shrek soon feels himself overwhelmed by “squatters” (as he calls them) and is furious.

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      The gig economy: ticket inflation is getting worse, so where does all the money go?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and the Gallaghers’ ill-fated dabble with dynamic pricing have put the spotlight on how much we’re willing to pay for live music. But, on the other side of the equation, the costs can be exorbitant and the risks are eye-watering

    The news that Oasis were to reunite sparked a wave of euphoria across the nation at the end of last summer. But the nostalgia balloon was quickly punctured by the discovery that the tickets, initially priced at £148.50, had suddenly leapt to £355.20 due to dynamic pricing. The outcry quickly sparked a new debate about what constitutes a “fair” price for gig tickets, with the band themselves fanning the flames: Liam Gallagher told those bellyaching about the lack of transparency to “SHUTUP” and buy “Kneeling only” tickets for £100,000 instead.

    Dynamic pricing, where the cost rises in real time in lockstep with demand, is hardly new. Parallels are often made with the surge pricing used on budget airlines and taxi-booking apps, although in the case of gig tickets, dynamic pricing means the price can rise in the few seconds it takes for consumers to complete their booking. Bruce Springsteen was caught up in the issue in 2022 for his US tour, as were huge acts such as Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Coldplay and Blackpink for their UK shows.

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      Poem of the week: The Day of Judgement by Jonathan Swift

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 20 January, 2025

    The stinging wit of the great satirist is at its scalding best in this nightmarish fantasy of the end of days

    The Day of Judg e ment

    With a whirl of thought oppressed,
    I sink from reverie to rest.
    An horrid vision seized my head,
    I saw the graves give up their dead.
    Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
    And thunder roars, and light’ning flies.
    Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
    The world stands trembling at his throne.
    While each pale sinner hangs his head,
    Jove, nodding, shook the heavens and said,
    ‘Offending race of human kind,
    By nature, reason, learning blind;
    You who through frailty stepped aside,
    And you who never fell, through pride;
    You who in different sects have shammed,
    And come to see each other damned;
    (So some folks told you, but they knew
    No more of Jove’s demands than you);
    The world’s mad business now is o’er,
    And I resent these pranks no more.
    I to such blockheads set my wit!
    I damn such fools — Go, go, you’re bit!

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