A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
I fear this may not work, but I need some webmentions to style in my site redesign, so I am going to reply to a post not quite at random and hope that that shows up. It probably won't, which will relegate styling webmentions to the live site. Heigh ho.
Latest episode: Food facts are not the answer to fear of foods
Charlotte Biltekoff, author of Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge, on how industrial food and real food talk past one another.
https://eatthispodcast.com/real-food
2025-02-15
1 min read
Unfortunately Google was a good one to resurface from this day in 2006, and of course the original inspiration is still up. I played again, and the results were not nearly as interesting or varied as they were all those years ago.
I got over the grave disappointment of Apple’s Books messing my Notes and Highlights for long enough to discover that a solution had been close at hand all along: Calibre!
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/a-farewell-to-books
Grave disappointment. Cleanfeed has removed the ability to record left and right channels from its free tier, and there's no way I can afford €28 a month for separate tracks. I guess I need to rewrite my podcast instructions for guests. Pity, it worked well.
Yes: Can't stay to the end, and looking forward to it.
I bought a pair of “cycling" insoles for my non-cycling shoes (trainers) and on the first two rides, coming up the long hill to home seemed a lot less effort. Can that possibly be the result of the insoles? Or self-delusion? Not just a jump in fitness, I am sure.
Thanks to improved crop varieties, “From 1961 to 2015, global crop output was higher by 226 million metric tons”. Is that a lot?
Eat This Newsletter runs the numbers and is not impressed. Or might just be mistaken. You be the judge.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-264-curated/
As I continue to mull over Pixelfed, these suggestions from Matt Haughey make a lot of sense. Will they still do as after I am there? I expect so.
Brian has an interesting approach to inserting microformats from front matter that I could pretty easily emulate in Twig as I do my resign. Need to think through whether it would increase flexibility or tie things down.
Food, folklore and St Brigid
St Brigid’s Day, 1 February, traditionally marks the beginning of spring and the start of the agricultural year. There are special foods and other ritual celebrations, some of which delve in the pagan past.
Listen at https://eatthispodcast.com/brigid
It is too easy to connect the dots. Sugar craving, cheap ultraprocessed calories, cheap food for enslaved sugar workers, the hidden horrors behind plenty, information deficits.
I need a pinboard and some red string.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-263-connectivity/
Nice piece from Joe Crawford summarising his history of bookmarks and current use of LinkDing on PikaPods. Me too. The one drawback I have found it that editing my tags online seems to cost me dearly. But editing the XML offline is a huge pain.
Looking for free Seville oranges for your marmalade? Or any other food to forage? The latest Eat This Newsletter has you covered, with a link to Falling Fruit, an interactive map that aspires to be “the best tool available to the contemporary forager”. And more.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-262-forage/
I enjoyed Manu's post about photography and photographers he likes, and even more his page of photographs which has a very neat script to embiggen an image with a click and then smallish it again with another click. Very cool. Worth stealing?
Maybe:
2025-01-14
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20250114-W-AY68O8
1 min read
* On foot
* 41.879539, 12.449281
* 14 January 2025
* 426.1 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
One of the things I really like about Rabbit Quest: gives me a target to walk to that is out of my customary loop. This is on the other side of the park, which I do not visit often.
Latest Eat This Newsletter.: Two pieces about food and place, two pieces about the perils of industrial food, and one blast about why the food system is as rotten state as it is and, maybe, what we might do about that.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-260-consolidated/
Latest Eat This Newsletter, and the last one of the year. From pedants on pintxos to bread and circuses, all your food-adjacent reading needs.
Find it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-259-ring-out-the-old/ and while you're there, please consider subscribing.
2024-12-26
1 min read
Not to be overshadowed by Rita Hayworth and Gilda, the latest Eat This Podcast also looks into The Swedish Conundrum.
What are Swedes getting when they open a tin of “ansjovis”? Not anchovies. Or at least, not Engraulis encrasicolus.
2024-12-24
rabbit_quest #geohashing 20241224-W-AY68OD
1 min read
* On bus
* 41.889492, 12.491804
* 26 December 2024
* 425.45 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
My first drive-by rabbit. And I only noticed it once I was on the bus and looking distractedly at my phone. Probably doesn't count in the greater scheme of things, but what the heck.
Latest episode considers possibly the original pintxo. A plump Cantabrian anchovy, a spicy pickled guindilla pepper, and a juicy green olive, skewered on a toothpick. It's invention is contested, but not its name, nor the inspiration for that name: Gilda.
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/gilda/
The stories of Daniel Dennett
Interesting take on the roots of Dan Dennett’s ideas, which did indeed clarify some of them for me.
Under Robin Sloan's reading, I fail to see any distinction between cults and tribes.
2024-12-19
rabbit_quest #geohashing 20241219-W-AY68OD
1 min read
* On foot
* 41.876189, 12.460472
* 19 December 2024
* 425.37 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
I wanted to bag this rabbit because the house in the photo was derelict for years and falling apart because, we were told, the siblings who inherited it couldn't agree what to do with it. No idea how that was resolved, but it looks great now.
New newsletter: One bottled water company now owns Alhambra®, Arrowhead®, Crystal Springs®, Deer Park®, Ice Mountain®, Mountain Valley®, Ozarka®, Poland Spring®, Primo Water®, Pure Life®, Saratoga®, Sparkletts®, Zephyrhills® and others.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-258-gifted/
Back when I started podcasting, in 2013, it seemed sensible to include a page telling people that they could subscribe, and how. Is that still needed today? Does “wherever you get your podcasts” really cover it, or should I add links for all the apps and services?
Currently reading: The Amateur: The pleasures of doing what you love by Andy Merrifield, ISBN: 9781786631060
#Non-fiction
Maybe: It all depends on dinner.
Substack vs. Indie – The Homebound Symphony
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.
Underrated reasons to be thankful IV
Nuggets galore.
2024-11-26
rabbit_quest #geohashing 20241126-W-AY680D
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.
2024-11-20
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/
2024-11-19
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.