A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Maybe: It all depends on dinner.
I can easily see why people would choose Substack in preference to what I do here — and indeed, if I had to make my living solely from writing I would almost certainly be using Substack myself. (Also, I would almost certainly be living below the poverty line.) But every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup.
All you really need to know
This is madness. I have 653 different tags on my ~4000 bookmarks in linkding. Fully 267 of them have a single entry. Clearly I urgently need to procrastinate by cleaning everything up.
Nuggets galore.
1 min read
* On foot
* 41.882431, 12.455121
* 26 November 2024
* 424.57 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
Just across the road from my barber, whom I had planned to visit in any case.
Bennett's Law says that as poor people have more money they shift from coarse grains to fine and then to animal proteins. But it isn't really a law, more a regular occurrence. Today, the first empirical test of Bennett’s Law, with researcher Marc Bellemare.
https://eatthispodcast.com/bennetts-law
Trawling around after briefly noting Cooklang as a way of marking up recipes, I came across a recipe for gnocchi sauce that called for 300ml of cream as well as a burrata cheese and thought to myself, talk about gilding the lily.
1 min read
Links are powerful — that's why Instagram and Twitter and Threads punish and limit them, and why Substack tries to take credit for them. And that's why "wherever you get your podcasts" is such a radical concept — like email, it's a medium that the tech tycoons don't, and can't, own. People can read your writing "wherever they get their email".
Anil Dash lays out the future of S*bst*ck https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/
1 min read
Needless to say, it was hard to glean any of these alleged meanings from the works themselves. Rather, they could be discovered only from the descriptions on the wall, which read like the everything-is-connected code-breaking ravings of an overeducated cabal convinced that a hidden semiotic language of resistance lies below everyday objects, camera angles, orientations, and gestures made so very many times before.
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/12/the-painted-protest-dean-kissick-contemporary-art/
Much to agree with, much more to be bemused by.
After years of using it for spices, I put my coffee grinder to work grinding, er, coffee because a friend gave me some French Roast beans from The Philippines. The coffee is good, with more than a hint of cumin.
Long reads from Eat This Newsletter. Modern industrial production for better and worse. A review on dietetics so you don't need to read the book. UK farmers sharpening their pitchforks; I'm not convinced. And more.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-256-lengthy/
1 min read
* On bicycle
* 41.884605, 12.475028
* 10 November 2024
* 423.74 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
I went out for a long bicycle ride this morning, having vaguely noted that there was a Rabbit to be bagged not too far from the route. On the way back I dismounted, got as close as I could and took the picture. It was a great ride.
Very cool. A new website dedicated to taking your bicycle on a train (in Europe). Sort of The Person with a Saddle in Seat 61. There's mention of it being crowd-sourced, which would be interesting. Instant follow.
https://cycling-on-rails.com/blog/2024/11/05/train-bicycle-guide-started.html
Eat This Newsletter today ranges from big stories in India and Europe to little gems about candy floss (aka cotton candy) and asparagus.
Oh, and a titan of industrial food calls for mandatory nutrition labels.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-255-gamut/ and while you are there, consider subscribing.
Almost identical to my own journey, although I haven't scoured ALL the places I might have left a bookmark. I should watch the tagging video, because I know I am too lax about tags, and have too many tags with only a single item. AI could fix that, right?
I've often dreamed of handing headphones to people playing their shitty phone-based noises out loud, but never taken it beyond a dream. Terence Eden could be living the dream with his two quid shitty earphones.
Current me thanks past me for due diligence.
[Unable to login to Monocle](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/unable-to-login-to-monocle)
New episode: How the Spanish learned to love anchovies
For hundreds of years, the people of Spain wanted nothing to do with anchovies, except perhaps as fertiliser for their fields. Today, they eat more anchovies than anyone else. How did that happen?
https://eatthispodcast.com/anchovies-spain
After a week away seeing family and mostly ignoring the online, it is very good to be back home and online.
I don't know why they call it a potato. Tuber would be just as alliterative, and instructive to boot. Still, an interesting read.
Last week was National School Lunch Week in the US. The latest Eat This Newsletter wonders why there is still no such thing as a universal free school lunch.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-254-deja-vu/ and think about subscribing there.
Truly baffled by someone who has a kind of About page that links to their various online presences, and the one labelled “blog” takes me to a Substack signup. Whatever else you may think it is, a newsletter is not, on its own, a weblog. At least, not for me.
#IndieWeb
For some reason, we both woke at our normal time and then slept on for another 90 minutes. TGIS
Fun and instructive.
There is a tide ... which ... delivers anchovies. I was so happy to learn that Peter Rukavina had both taken the plunge on anchovies and shared a blog post about them for me to explore. I’m also stealing his description: a “salty fishy kapow-offering friend,” although, hold the fishy.
Latest episode: the divisive anchovy.
Love them? Get practical advice that can make them even better.
Hate them? the failing probably is not yours.
Listen at https://www.eatthispodcast.com/anchovies/ and subscribe wherever et cetera.
I knew most of this history, as a relatively long-time user of Known, and I contribute to the project via Open Collective. A new version of Known would be even better than a functional exporter, but I would settle for that if I have to.
Later: And wishing I hadn’t. Very poor food, over-eager service, surrounded by tourists who must be the ones responsible for theis being, apparently, No 7 out of 12000 Rome restaurants.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter
- Nutrition experts who feed off big food
- The tomato in India
- Tainted turmeric
- Cloves, with a hitch
- 陈麻婆豆腐: is the story true?
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-253-conflict/ and please consider subscribing.
Yet another plea for proper micropayments that don't gouge payer or payee. Even Patreon has been going down the tubes in this regard. I still fondly remember the original flattr. Couldn't someone, somewhere, please reinvent that.
1 min read
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20241004-W-AY6808
* On foot
* 41.886121, 12.444012
* 4 October 2024
* 420.9 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
After recent storms there were a few trees blocking my way, and I couldn't get that close anyway.
Eat This Podcast latest episode: Crunch Time — Insects Are Not Going to Save Us
Dustin Crummett, executive director of The Insect Institute, tells me why he thinks the puffery about eating insects to save the planet is largely hot air inflating a bubble.
https://eatthispodcast.com/no-insects
I find it odd that anyone who found the Gutenberg editor in WordPress “deeply frustrating “ would not switch to ClassicPress. Maybe they looked and decided it wasn’t for them; if so, I would love to know why.
I've long known that the sky is polarised, but today I discovered while waking along the beach that rainbows are too. I happened to tilt my head to one side and a rainbow that had been faint and short became much brighter and extended across more of the sky. Strange.
I wish there were some kind of tool that would do a diff between two audio files so I could string together all the ums and ers and I means I've cut out and send them to the person that others praise for being so eloquent and fluent.
1 min read
* On foot
* 55.169166, -6.777712
* Tuesday 24 September 2024
* 420.25 ppm CO2
* [OpenStreetMap](https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=55.169166&mlon=-6.777712#map=14/55.16843/-6.78612)
I’ve been looking for baggable rabbits, but this graticulette is mostly sea, and even this one was out of reach except at low tide, which wasn’t for about another 6 hours.
Ayjay and lots of other good people wish Word would die in a fire. Me too.