āInternet food policeā Cook Suck is good fun. Iāll keenly defend peopleās right to eat whatever sub-diarrhoea terrible food they like, and even to publish photographic evidence inexplicably on Facebook ā but Cook Suck writes very well about it when they do.
A quirk ā well, apparently, a long-standing feature ā of Unix graphical environments is being able to copy and paste text by some surprising combination of selecting text and clicking the middle mouse button. If you ever mindlessly select text while reading, are a fan of scrolling with a scroll wheel (who isnāt?), and are generally some kind of neophyte, this makes it all to easy to do accidentally. And so it was that I accidentally pasted one of Cook Suckās profane outbursts into a collaborative Google Doc a few years ago.
Cool story.
Loyd Grossman follows me on Instagram, which is my one interesting fact about Instagram. (āLoyd Grossmanā here means the actual former Masterchef and Jet Bronx & The Forbidden frontman, and not the brand of cooking sauces named in his honour.) More to the point, I follow him, and the steady mixture of art and gastronomy is excellent value. When the subject is edible, the captions inevitably contain adjectives like exemplary, superb, outstanding, and sensational. Thereās an opportunity, there, for some data science (well, maybe just a Wordle) and/or some machine learning (well, maybe just a Markov chain).
The adjectives are well-warranted, as Grossman goes to some nice restaurants, and the pictures ā like frankly everything Iām shown by Instagramās algorithmic timeline ā look delicious. Curiously, thereās never any sauce from a jar ā and thatās OK! I can actually look at a picture of some sorrel dressing without my own life seeming bland by comparison. Even though it is.
For maximal self-esteem, itās definitely good to laugh at people ā presumably privileged people ā who do silly things. American Exchange Students in Italy Start Fire by Cooking Pasta Without Water:
Due to an error in translation, a previous version of this article erroneously stated that the firefighters comforted the students by claiming that they didnāt know how to make pasta, either. This was not the case and we regret the error.