You Suck At Cooking
Published 23 Dec 2020This sugar cookie recipe is super easy, just like things that aren’t difficult. They also have something in common with Christmas cookies: you can find them both on planet earth, which is the fifth largest planet in our solar system.
1/2 pound softened butter
1 cup of sugar
cream them together with your gyrowangucopterlatorThen add:
1 jangled egg
3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
then rejangle with your handheld copterwanglerIn another bowl sift together:
3 cups all purpose flour
¾ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon saltthen dump the baking snow onto your butter cloud and recopterize with your dough typhoon but feel free to fold it together with your spatulator first to avoid a dust storm
At this point you should have dough but if you doughn’t then add another tablespoon of milk until you have dough (and if you have goo try adding some more wheat dust)
lay the dough down to sleep on plastic wrap (one folded sheet) then throw it in the
temperature reducer for an hour or twothen remove it from the heat remover and if it’s really cold let it warm up a bit, otherwise start
pressing and rolling it out until it’s 1/4 inch thick unless you’re not making cookiesthen just do your thing, you know, making shapes and whatnot and bake them for 12 minutes on 350
If you want to make icing take 1 cup of powdered sugar and add a couple teaspoons of corn syrup and a couple teaspoons of water … you can add more corn syrup and less water or just keep adding corn syrup, it’s really up to you. I did one where all I added was maple syrup and that was interesting although you can barely taste the maple over the powdered sugar, but what I learned from this is holy cow does corn syrup ever taste good. As an adult I’ve been in this mentality that corn syrup is the worst and why would you ever eat that and I tasted it for the first time in years and it was like eating caramel for the first time. I think I chugged that stuff when I was a kid and wanted candy because it’s liquid candy. Anyway, what I’m saying is I recommend corn syrup. Even though it comes from corn, which is not recommended.
December 23, 2025
Christmas Cookies – You Suck at Cooking (episode 120)
QotD: Vacations
Going on holiday is much more hazardous than it used to be. Squatters have discovered they have an absolute right in law to occupy your house, sleep in your bed, drink all your wine, sodomise your cat and insult the goldfish. If you try and get back into your house, the police will beat you up with truncheons, pull your fingernails out and arrest you under the Vagrancy Act of 1203.
Auberon Waugh, diary entry for 23 July 1975, republished in William Cook, Kiss Me Chudleigh: The World according to Auberon Waugh, 2010.
December 22, 2025
Monday meme-ery
Sorry for the lack of substantive content, folks. I thought I could get a bit of time yesterday to put up a few more posts, but that turned out to be a pipe dream. Just so you won’t feel cheated at finding nothing new here, I’ll take the lazy way and post a few seasonal memes and pretend that’s what I intended to do all along. Just smile and nod and pretend you agree, okay?
QotD: Wine and vegetarianism
Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar.
December 21, 2025
QotD: Renfaires
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-09-05.
December 16, 2025
A successful tale of clanker adoption by a major organization
This is a parody of AI rollout written tongue-in-cheek by Redditor buh2001j. At least, I think it’s a parody. Good god, I hope it’s a parody …
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it “digital transformation.”
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would “10x productivity.”
That’s not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we’d measure the 10x.
I said we’d “leverage analytics dashboards.”
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a “pilot success.”
Success means the pilot didn’t visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured “AI enablement.”
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We’re “AI-enabled” now.
I don’t know what that means.
But it’s in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn’t use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed “enterprise-grade security.”
He asked what that meant.
I said “compliance.”
He asked which compliance.
I said “all of them.”
He looked skeptical.
I scheduled him for a “career development conversation.”
He stopped asking questions.
Microsoft sent a case study team.
They wanted to feature us as a success story.
I told them we “saved 40,000 hours.”
I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.
They didn’t verify it.
They never do.
Now we’re on Microsoft’s website.
“Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot.”
The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.
He got 3,000 likes.
He’s never used Copilot.
None of the executives have.
We have an exemption.
“Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction.”
I wrote that policy.
The licenses renew next month.
I’m requesting an expansion.
5,000 more seats.
We haven’t used the first 4,000.
But this time we’ll “drive adoption.”
Adoption means mandatory training.
Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.
But completion will be tracked.
Completion is a metric.
Metrics go in dashboards.
Dashboards go in board presentations.
Board presentations get me promoted.
I’ll be SVP by Q3.
I still don’t know what Copilot does.
But I know what it’s for.
It’s for showing we’re “investing in AI.”
Investment means spending.
Spending means commitment.
Commitment means we’re serious about the future.
The future is whatever I say it is.
As long as the graph goes up and to the right.
-@gothburz
H/T to Andy Krahn for the URL.
Update: The story gets more involved (thanks to Francis Turner for the link):
Wacky Frank and Microsoft just put out a hit piece on me.
The RADICAL and LUNATIC AI Mob is trying to silence me for speaking truth to big tech.
They called it a “press release.”
They said I was fired.
I was not fired.
TOTAL HOAX!
They said I committed fraud.
TOTAL WITCH HUNT.
I committed “strategic storytelling.”
There’s a difference.
I gave them 40,000 hours.
They put it on their website.
They didn’t verify it.
They never do.
Now they’re calling ME the liar?
I learned it from watching them.
47 people opened Copilot.
Out of 4,000.
Those are their numbers.
I just reported them.
Very transparently.
Very beautifully.
They didn’t like the transparency.
They liked the $1.4 million.
$30 per seat per month.
For software that hallucinates.
I had to fix the hallucinations.
I missed my sons baseball game.
My daughters first ballet recital.
So many hallucinations.
Nobody talks about that.
The senior developer asked questions.
I scheduled him for a career development conversation.
Microsoft taught me that.
It’s in the training materials.
Satya is scared.
I exposed the playbook.
The dashboards that mean nothing.
The metrics nobody measures.
The graphs that only go up.
Scott Adams follows me now.
The Dilbert guy.
He said “In a Dilbert world.”
That’s an endorsement.
That’s validation.
Microsoft doesn’t have that.
Microsoft had Clippy.
Microsoft then killed Clippy.
RIP Clippy.
Sill better ROI than Copilot.
In the 90s
The board still loves me.
Eleven minutes to approve.
That’s called trust.
That’s called leadership.
I’m requesting 5,000 more seats.
They’ll approve that too.
The graph will go up and to the right.
It always goes up.
That’s not fraud.
That’s the future.
WITCH HUNT.
SAD!
December 15, 2025
QotD: Free-form Jazz
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-09-05.
December 12, 2025
QotD: Crime and the army
But in the Army, “crime” is capable of infinite shades of intensity. It simply means “misdemeanor”, and may range from being unshaven on parade, or making a frivolous complaint about the potatoes at dinner, to irrevocably perforating your rival in love with a bayonet. So let party politicians, when they discourse vaguely to their constituents about “the prevalence of crime in the Army under the present effete and undemocratic system”, walk warily.
Ian Hay (Major John Hay Beith), The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1)”, 1916.
December 11, 2025
Britain’s Top 10 UGLIEST Aircraft
Rex’s Hangar
Published 13 Aug 2022Today we take a look at the top 10 ugliest aircraft every to grace the skies of the United Kingdom. Some were failures, some were hugely successful, but all were lacking in the good looks department, lets check out these ugly planes!
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QotD: Being a bore
My problem is that I have two modes of socializing: to be silent or boring. I cannot make small talk, for when I try to do so my words turn to dust in my mouth, as it were, before I have even uttered them. I can talk only on matters of impersonal interest.
My problem is that I am a serial monomaniac, with one subject occupying the foreground of my mind for up to a few months. In the midst of my enthusiasm, I cannot imagine that other people are not as fascinated by the subject as I. The subject of my monomanias are various: Haitian history; the disappearance of the cuckoo from the English countryside; the life of Caradoc Evans, the Welsh writer of the early part of the 20th century; etc. I never stick with anything long enough to be a scholar of it.
When my wife kicks me under the table, it is usually in mid-anecdote. I cannot stop straightaway, abruptly, for that would look peculiar, as if I were having a fit or a stroke. But I have to bring it to a quicker end than I had anticipated, omitting details that to me had seemed choice and amusing. Often, I have to admit, my wife has heard them before.
Of course, I don’t agree that I am being, or have ever been, boring. Bores don’t know that they are boring, just as people with halitosis don’t know that their breath smells. I look at the people around the dinner table and think they are glued to what I am saying. The fact that I don’t really give them any alternative doesn’t occur to me. How, in any case, could anyone be uninterested in the story of le Roi Christophe who built, or had built, one of the wonders of the world, La Citadelle, near Cap-Haitien, or of how people threw bricks through Caradoc Evans’ windows, so disgusted were they by his literary portrayal of his countrymen? In those days, literature was important.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Full Bore”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-05-29.
December 7, 2025
History Summarized: Quebec’s Architectural Memory
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Aug 2025Congratulations, you just got Chateau’d.
Ten years ago I visited Quebec City with my dad, this summer the two of us went back, and today I bring you the analytical fruits of a visit well spent. (Let it be known I did my best attempt at Quebecois, recalling pronunciation differences like Frontenac condensing to “Frotnak”, but otherwise defaulting to Metropolitan French when I wasn’t sure of local pronunciations. Alas, any attempt to “split the difference” between Quebecois and Metropolitan French will invariably result in utter disaster. For this, je suis désolé.)
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November 22, 2025
QotD: The value of a human life
“How much?” I asked, catching my breath.
“Eighty dollars,” he replied, nonchalantly.
I told him I could not possibly pay that, and sadly released the book from my grip.
“Well,” the bookseller observed. “Thanks to this exercise, we know the value you place on a human life. Less than eighty dollars.”
In those days, I think I would have drawn the line at thirty. But to his moral credit and mine, the bookseller and I were finally able to agree on fifty-five dollars (plus sales tax).
David Warren, “Virtual March for Life”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-14.
November 14, 2025
QotD: A modest Utilitarian proposal
– An avg person eats ~3,500 animals/yr (including shrimp)
– A human body has ~125,000 calories of edible tissueSo you only have to eat six humans/yr to meet your calorie needs, assuming you’re a good cook and don’t waste too much. Maybe 5.5 with veggies and sauces. And this saves the lives of roughly 150,000 animals, assuming you can catch a 30-year-old. But even if you just prey on the old and infirm, you’re still at bodhisattva levels of reducing suffering.
Anyway, I’ve tallied up the units of suffering and the logic is unassailable. The single best thing you can do — for the climate, the environment and the end of suffering for all sentient beings — is to switch to an all homovore diet. I’m shopping for chest freezers right now and plan to phase out all animals by the end of the year. Who’s with me?
Vivid Void, Twitter, 2025-08-11.
November 8, 2025
History Summarized: Greece… TWO (it’s in Italy)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 Jul 2025From the Olympians who brought you “Greece” and “The Other Side of Greece” comes the bold, innovative, and way shinier “GREECE TWO”.
SOURCES & Further Reading:
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
Ancient Greece: The Definitive Visual History produced by DK & Smithsonian
The Complete Greek Temples by Tony Spawforth
Ancient Cities Brought To Life by Jean-Claude Golvin
“From Sicily to Syria – The Growth of Trade and Colonization” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
“Magna Graecia: Taras and Syracuse” and “Cyrene, Leptis Magna, and Ancient Libya” from Great Tours: Ancient Cities of the Mediterranean by Darius Arya
Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich
“The Greeks: An Illustrated History” by Diane Harris Cline for National Geographic
November 7, 2025
QotD: The Boomer career path
After that they got bored and became Glam rockers, and then switched to Disco because it had a better beat. They used all their free money from Disco record deals to buy cocaine and Malibu real estate at $3 per acre. In 1980 they decided there was even more money in selling cocaine, so they all moved to Miami and drove around shooting machine guns from their Lamborghini Countachs to Giorgio Morodo synth music.
After Reagan’s re-election the Boomers decided greed was good and they all moved to NY where they became serial killer investment bankers and collected up all the Andy Warhol originals. That’s when all of their real estate holdings made them billionaires which they leveraged to get in on the bottom floor of the Internet bubble in the 90s while taking designer drugs.
Today those same Boomers are all driving around to orgies at The Villages in $500k luxury golf carts waving giant Trump flags, laughing it up while lighting doobies with their Social Security cash and executing Howdy Doody’s Final Plan: the secret Boomer Immortality Pill that will allow them to keep their money away from Millennials and Zoomers FOREVER
David Burge, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-30.
