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I don't know if these recipes are repeated. I don't have an index or a contents page or labels or tabs or a like button or a follow-me-on-twitter thing with a bird-with-outstretched-wings logo, as if twitter lets you break free of the multitudes and soar alone in a soundless, soaring space where you hear nothing but your own wings beating the air ...

Didn't someone make a record about that once?*

Now the bird imagery is used to drag millions of humans down into a kind of subterranean worldwide typing pool where they issue forth messages not much longer than the grunting of cavemen, and some of their grunts make the front pages of newspapers. Nuts.

But then I got dragged into it, because I had to write some tweets for clients. They couldn’t even do their own grunting! So I set up an account - "Instantly connect! Follow your friends and your favourite celebrities!" - to see how it worked. Apparently it’s not about character count (140) but message byte length, i.e., some words such as café add extra bytes. I suppose it’s not that hard. Shakespeare had to stick to 14 lines per sonnet; or at least whoever it was wrote them for him.

OK. Now let’s figure this out and discover what kind of tar pit we’ve gotten ourselves into. There are currently, according to sources, between 290 million and 340 million tweets worldwide per day. Let’s be conservative and take the lower figure: 290 million tweets at 140 characters each. That’s 301,890,000,000 characters.

At an average character strike of four per second (again, conservative – many people type much slower) that amounts to an aggregate 75,472,500,000 seconds spent tweeting every day.

Now it gets scary. Those seconds equate to roughly 2300 years. Mankind is spending a combined 2300 years daily on Twitter. No wonder people are glued to their devices.

*

Spaghetti with anchovies and fetta

Cook spaghetti in salted water.

Extract twelve anchovies from jar and partially drain them on absorbent paper. Slice two very ripe tomatoes into segments retaining all juice and seeds. Crumble a piece of very good fetta into pieces. Chop a spring of parsley very finely. Chop a clove of garlic very finely and combine with the parsley. When spaghetti is ready, drain and add tomato, garlic and parsley mixture, crumbled fetta and anchovies.

*

*On the wings of an eagle I find myself lifted through the sky
Lifted up above the world to see
Can you see me
Can you see me

As the birds migrate and the wind is raised
I'll see the eagle soaring
Although I'm just a pawn in nature's game like you
Wah hoo wah hoo, wah hoo ...

One of my favourite songs ever, thanks to a lush orchestral backing with wah wah guitar notes that set your heart a-twitter ...