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It’s old news now, but the best thing I read at the tail end of last week was this about AI creep Sam Altman’s disrespect of olive oil. (He was caught cooking with some expensive olive oil that’s meant for dipping and finishing, despite owning a bottle of cheaper olive oil that would be more suitable for cooking.)
I remember when Michael Caine was on Desert Island Discs one Christmas, and he shared his recipe for roast potatoes, and his use of olive oil meant my da lost all respect for the cockney actor. To be fair to Caine, the supposed low smoke point of olive oil isn’t the problem some people think it is, and his wife’s a vegetarian so of course he wasn’t going to use goose fat. (I wonder what vegan cross-channel swimmers and steam rally wrong’uns use instead.)
The dredging up of that memory inspired me to roast some potatoes, on one of the warmest days of the week, and the results were OK, but I misremembered and did the opposite of several of Poppy O’Toole’s top tips so I look forward to trying again.
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I sometimes do dribs and drabs of consultancy work, sorry if that sounds a bit wanky. I’d like do more, but it’s less simple for me than just suckling at the teat of programmatic advertising/surveillance capitalism, as lonely as that is. I wish I had the equivalent of like a theatrical agent.
For non-disclosure reasons, let’s say I was offered some work by a manufacturer of red pepper hummus. As a leading critic of red pepper hummus, perhaps I could work from within to make it tastier. But I feared that I was being set up to fail, that red pepper hummus was intrinsically disgusting, I didn’t know how to make hummus on an industrial scale, and wasn’t I ideologically opposed to its manufacture? So after some dithering I chickened out, which is boring.