The people who build and operate TikTok are ghouls.
How will Labour leader and earnest Thatcherite Keir Starmer outdo the Tories’ cruel “no families for foreign care workers” proposal? Indentured labour?
Christmas Menu - first of the second thoughts
For Christmas Day, I’m thinking a starter of wild mushrooms preserved in olive oil, silken beancurd with chopped capers and dukkah, lamb’s lettuce alongside the friselle salad.
The original: Christmas Menus 2023 First Draft
Christmas Menus 2023 First Draft
First cut of menus for Christmas 2023. Work in progress. Main meal only. Vegetarian. Christmas Eve dinner to Boxing Day.
Christmas Eve
Food
- Sugared, chocolate-coated, gilded, and silvered Brazil nuts and almonds
- Chickpeas and cannellini beans with hispi cabbage and cavolo nero
- Frangipane
- Soft cheeses
Drink
- Sparkling water (eg, Vichy Célestins)
- Kir Royale with a twist of hibiscus
- Sparkling white wine (Maybe a Franciacorta)
- Sweet wine with the desert (Recioto?)
- Atlantic coastal brandy with the cheese
Christmas Day
Food
- Friselle with tomato, oregano, basil and rocket, chilli flakes
- Creamy risotto with butternut squash and Brussels sprouts, sage, dried Senise peppers
- Mince pies with brandy cream or brandy butter
- Hard cheeses and blue cheeses, nuts, dried fruit, charcoal crackers
Drink
- Sparkling water (eg Ferarelle)
- Negroni
- White wine (to be decided - or maybe a Puglian orange wine?)
- Dryish champagne with the mince pies
- PX or Port with the cheese
Boxing Day
If the weather is bearable, do this as a picnic.
Food
- Filo parcels with festive vegetables and smoked tofu
- Soured red cabbage with winter spices and bitter orange
- Stollen, brandy butter
Drink
- Sparkling water (eg S. Pellegrino)
- Mulled wine
- Brandy
So, last week’s OpenAI chicken coup was a grift to hype their Q* product.
Few things say global Britain more than a freight train of empty FreightLiners trundling to Tilbury.
More more puzzling still is why this cabbage is called a hispi cabbage in restaurants and a sweetheart cabbage in supermarkets.
The OpenAI game of thrones reminds us that in the broösphere you will be replaced by AI, not them.
Interesting that OpenAI’s backers and funders are keen to hang on to insubstantial TED-talker Sam Altman: it suggests that OpenAI in fact have nothing.
I wonder what causes the painful broken glass in the ears treble that I hear when listening to digital music. Is it my ageing ears, crap equipment, or the wrong settings? Or have people got used to sharp but lifeless, shallow and un-nuanced highs in pursuit of thumping bass?
A tugboat pulls a large float advertising pesto (of all things) past the O2.
Tories to ban themselves under new extremism proposals.
Revealed: plan to brand anyone ‘undermining’ UK as extremist
Britain’s elite institutions appear to be spectacularly incapable of producing a governing class able to run a modern country. Perhaps this explains the dominant reactionary thread that is woven through an establishment that aspires to rule the past.
Okta, the new way to spell disingenuous cowboys. Joking apart - whole governments trust identities to these muppets.
Working from home? Here’s a tip. Get yourself a cuckoo clock. Muji sell nice modern-style ones.
The Covid Inquiry so far - journalism and Oxbridge need a long period of sober reflection.
I was at a good Newham community event today on their People Powered Places strand. It got me thinking about transformative people. I had a (sad, ageing GenXer behind the curve) epiphany: I’ve been privileged to know some transformative people, and 9 out of 10 - I say again: 9 out of 10 - are women.
Bluesky asked me for my date of birth, but will only let me enter a date that is 1,000 years older than I admit to being.
The Economy
Over the years in the UK, “the economy” has become the central obsession of politicians. Not education or healthcare, not aspiration or a better life for “hardworking families”. So important is “the Economy” that politicians work tirelessly to cede all control of it: to multinational corporations and other assorted rentiers, Ciry spivs, and, of course, technocrats. The same people more or less who over the last 40 years drove “the Economy” into the ground.
These politicians and their highbrow friends in academia and the media then puzzle about widespread disengagement with politics and the rise of populism
The BA app for iPad is excruciatingly useless. All it presents is a screen to book a flight. No other options. If I enter a destination to book, nothing happens. Great work, British Airways!