What I Cooked Last Night

Axl Rose : Regarding social media, I really don't understand what appears to be the general population's lack of concern over privacy issues in publicizing their entire lives on the internet for others to see to such an extent... but hey it's them, not me, so whatever. However, when so many seem to be making similar choices regarding their privacy to where it seems to become the norm, and in turn businesses use someone's lack of involvement with social media to marginalize or stereotype and stigmatize them, or use it as grounds not to hire someone, I feel it's extremely unfair and seems a bit Orwellian.

Just when I had almost despaired of the future of the English language, I found the above expression in one of the millions of political blogs that choke the internet like river weeds in the Murray; their endless barb-filled comments threads stretching out infinitely like a vicious thorny blackberry vine growing over an abandoned 1930s Dandenong Ranges house. (Yes, I'm practising for the Bulwer-Lytton awards .) Fine words butter no parsnips. Five words that might first have been uttered in the eleventh, fourteenth or sixteenth century. Who knows or cares? While Twitter is stale after a couple of years, a fine proverb thinks nothing of half a millennium. And will the word hashtag even make it to the year 2525? If man is still alive ... (Zager & Evans, 1969). Fine words butter no parsnips. Why? Because buttered parsnips were what you had before potatoes came along. There are plenty of ways to butter parsnips, from simply mashed with butter to baked with butter and honey, bu...

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 lengt...

Back of the bottle: Since 1698. Finest Scots (sic) whisky. Cutty Sark picture embossed in the glass. Front of the bottle: Follow us on Twitter.