Ivan Ehlers reminds me of how lucky I am to have been getting my Internet from a 4G connection rather than cable for the past two years. Apparently, since I get my signal from towers rather than a cable head end, Internet advertisers have no idea where I live, and the preponderance of ads I get are so flamingly irrelevant that it’s easy to brush them off.
Obviously, if I look for a price on shoes, I’ll get a flood of shoe ads, but that’s my fault. I should use magic secret non-traceable something or other for that sort of thing but I’m too lazy.
Meanwhile, since I’m a renter in New Hampshire, I don’t get creeped out by people wanting to install solar panels on my house in Rhode Island.
But, boy oh boy, do I disagree with this woman in Moderately Confused (AMS). If somebody’s grandmother is on the recipe, I know it’s going to be 75% about Grandma, 15% plugs for where you can buy the ingredients and 10% recipe, if you can scroll down far enough to find it.
With a bunch of stupid hearts floating up in the margin.
I realize that these recipe sites make more money if they can keep you aboard longer, but all I really want to know is what are some good spices to use and how long to leave it in at what temperature.
The guy who, if you ask him what time it is, tells you how to make a watch, seems like Calvin Coolidge next to these recipe people.
And, by the way, I suspect that cookbooks are probably in nearly as much trouble as phone books and encyclopedias these days. I have a nice shelf of cookbooks, but I haven’t opened one in a very long time.
(I had the great good luck to donate my encyclopedia to a home for troubled teens in the early 90s. You literally cannot give them away anymore.)
Speaking of things you can’t give away anymore, Jeremy Banx points out that, if the Elongated Muskrat is telling the truth for once, she’s got a week to dump this fellow before he becomes completely worthless.
Musk chose 4-20 to take away unpaid blue ticks because he has the maturity of a 12-year-old, though the threat may not be so much an issue of lying as it is promising something that he has no idea how to do.
Similarly, the state of Montana is passing a new law banning Tik Tok, to which the response is less an argument over free speech and free press than it is a simple, “Okay. How do you propose to do that?”
It’s like the wise men in James Thurber’s Many Moons, arguing over the best ways to hide the moon from Princess Lenore.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I just noticed that the McCoys cartoon is a rerun, but I’m posting it anyway because this pair, which ran a day apart this week, also coincided with my listening to a Bulwark Podcast in which Charlie Sykes spoke to Jeff Sharlet about his book, The Undertow, and how America is falling to pieces.
At one point, they talked about the phenomenon of rightwing incels (involuntary celibates) and MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way), with a combination of laughter and horror. As Sykes said,
There have always been guys who can’t get laid or who were mad at girls that won’t date them. But up until very, very recently, they didn’t advertise that. There was not a community of people who said, “I am a virgin because girls will not sleep with me or date me.” You generally kept that to yourself. You didn’t go on social media. You didn’t create a community. And this is one of the things where, okay, this feels kind of new.
There is, to be sure, a funny aspect to it, and I say that as someone who went to a college with a 7-to-1 male-to-female ratio, many of whom on both sides had gone to single sex Catholic high schools and were absolutely clueless about how to behave around each other.
I had any number of classmates like the fellow in Pardon My Planet, while the guy in the Flying McCoys — though I assume the cartoonists were mocking him — is on the right track. Learning to simply be inoffensive is a good starting point.
However, as Sykes and Sharlit noted, there is a growing crowd of people who find it easier to take pride in their lack of social skills, and, if you click on those incel and MGTOW links, I don’t think you’ll find much to laugh about.
As Charlie Sykes has also said, “a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.“
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Indeed we can, and I was struck by this Edison Lee (KFS) strip, because it coincided with something related.
About the time the strip ran, its colorist and co-conspirator, Anne Morse Hambrock, announced the relaunch of her Anne & God feature, with a free subscription sign-up to make sure you don’t miss her semi-inspirational work, a description I use because her imaginary conversations contain a down-to-earth way of addressing things that is pleasant but pleasantly free of the usual hot air:
Speaking of domestic disasters, Arlo & Janis (AMS) have spent the past week or so dealing with a destructive hailstorm, but I got an extra laugh out of this one.
It reminded me of a Colorado hailstorm that peppered our car with dents. Given the age of the car and the deductible involved, we shrugged it off, but we were concerned about the dents in the roof of our house, because we had just had it completely redone a few weeks before the storm.
The adjustor came out to do an estimate, but stifled a chuckle as he pointed out the odd symmetry of the dents, which, once we looked at them, did appear to line up, possibly because they were caused by the kneeling boards the roofers had used in the project.
Fortunately, I didn’t look like a fool. I’d let then-wife do all the talking.
Here you go — scratch that earworm that Arlo planted:
Since Charlie Sykes was a fervent Trumper, I wouldn’t listen to anything he says. No matter how much he says he’s now left ‘the dark side’. He is part of the problem, not the solution.
For 23 years, Charlie Sykes was one of the leading conservative voices on Wisconsin talk radio. But in 2016, he became alarmed by the rise of Donald Trump, and even more alarmed when his audience seemed to be much more Trumpian than he ever thought possible.
Charlie does not want to recall his support of the rhetoric of the republican party which led them to confirm Trump as their candidate. As with many Republicans, trying to distance themselves from the craziness, we just saw where MTG the Chair of the committee on homeland security praises the male Christian racist, anti-American airman who stole secret documents and leaked them to impress his friends, want to rewrite their history.
You can pin on Sykes some of the blame for Darth Snotwalker and the recently ended partisan Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but Sykes was a Never Trumper.
Unfortunately, by the time Wisconsin Republicans could vote in the 2016 primary, the choice was down to Trump and Ted Cruz. Cruz won that primary, for all the difference that has made ever since.
I would add David Frum and Jennifer Rubin to the list of people who have retained their traditional conservative views and thus turned on the MAGA extremists. I think having some conservative voices rise in opposition to the crazy is a valuable way to reach swing voters.
Mike, Thanks so much for the shout out! Sadly, that is just a tiny peek at the trash currently reposing in my van….
Think of it as a security feature. My van has so much trash in the front that it looks like you might get rabies just by opening the door–no telling what’s living in there.
As an MSNBC viewer, I’m well aware of Sykes’ former prroclivities, but I’m also cognizant of the fact that he sounds pretty non-conservative these days. If we can’t accept that someone has seen the light, or recognized their former sins, how can we claim to be a Christian nation? Rather than dismiss his observations, I simply marvel at how far he’s come in such a relatively short time. (And “any enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the axiom that seems to apply here.)
Heck, I thought she had married him for his coonhound.
Modern day incels seem to have developed a disturbing tendency to shoot up night clubs -or leak military secrets.
Not only is my car not likely to get stolen, I’m never called upon to give rides.
Another reason recipe sites tell you all about grandma and the best way to fold the eggs is that it makes the material able to be copyrighted while a mere recipe can’t be copyrighted just like ideas or facts. (See: https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/)
That’s interesting, and something that I didn’t realize but that makes perfect sense once I read it. Still, you could protect your copyright without turning it into War and Peace, and the part you would most want to protect — Grandma’s secret ingredient — is the part you can’t anyway.
On the other hand, if you fill it with so much blather than nobody can even find the recipe, you don’t have to worry about them copying it! 😉
(Hi, John!)
Can even the cruft be copyrighted if it comes from an AI?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/muffins
I was hornswaloggled recently by several recipe sites while attempting to get the volume of a listed ingredient. Talk about clickbait hell. Now I understand why I was defeated and will only go to the trusty cookbook shelf from now on.
This is a bit long, but I think it is worthwhile to spread the word that AI is coming 😉
As for recipes, GTP-4, now built into Bing’s Chat, can do the analyzing for you. For example, I submitted the following:
I had a discussion with two friends about recipes on the internet. One of my friends told me, “You know it’s going to be a good recipe when someone’s grandmother is pictured.” My other friend responded, “I disagree. If somebody’s grandmother is on the recipe, I know it’s going to be 75% about Grandma, 15% plugs for where you can buy the ingredients and 10% recipe, if you can scroll down far enough to find it.” He went on to say, “I realize that these recipe sites make more money if they can keep you aboard longer, but all I really want to know is what are some good spices to use and how long to leave it in at what temperature.” I suspect that you could help me get to the bottom of this debate. Please look for three different recipes labeled “grandmother’s.” Then look for recipes for the same dish that are not labeled “grandma’s.” Calculate the number of words on each recipe page and compare the ones labeled grandma’s with the similar recipes not labeled grandma’s, and put the stats in a table. Finally, give me the shortest recipe.
Here is the link to the response (good for 90 days): https://sl.bing.net/sBYJ5qgBrg
When it comes to chicken and dumplings, the not-grandma’s recipes were consistently wordier:
Recipe Label Words
——————- ——— ——
Grandma’s Apple Pie Grandma’s 1,012
Classic Apple Pie Not Grandma’s 1,057
Grandma’s Chicken and Dumplings Grandma’s 1,033
Easy Chicken and Dumplings Not Grandma’s 1,098
Grandma’s Banana Bread Grandma’s 1,021
Best Banana Bread Not Grandma’s 1,045
The problem I have with Grandma’s recipes, is that I am of the current grandma’s generation, and thus have eaten lots of food prepared by current grandmas and grandpas. I realize that these are supposed to be our best recipes, which improves their chances of actually being good. But what makes good food changes, one does not want to follow a 1960s cookbook exactly, as we’ve changed what we like to eat. Check to see when the first Pizza place came to one’s area. Eat a slice of pie, follow it with a slice with a homemade crust. Know anyone who makes homemade pie crust these days? Us grans know that adding on the fat and salt will improve the taste, is that what we really want? And hey, open up those cook books, lots of fun reading in them – really!
I don’t know. I was born in the 1980s and I still like using recipes from the 1960s as written now and then. A few years back my aunt got me a used copy of the old DoubleDay cookbook from the 70s and I’ve been wearing that thing out. ?