Bread & Opinions: Similar in a Bad Way

Having just made a pile of bread crumbs from way too much bread stuck in the freezer I was thinking, pre-coffee I might add, that bread in all its myriad forms is quite similar to opinions we form as humans (and semi-humans like Putin and most of the MAGA crowd). It’s uncanny in a way how similar they are. Let me digress.

Fresh bread, untoasted of course, is a thing to behold. Depending on the quality of the ingredients, the skill of the baker and the recipe, you can mix  a pile of disparate ingredients into a dough, let it rise (or not, depending on the bread) and bake it hopefully to perfection for near-immediate consumption. (With maybe fresh butter if you’re not lactose intolerant, or if you indeed are lactose intolerant and don’t mind passing a ton of gas.)

Underbaked bread isn’t as bad as you think but be prepared for gaseous emissions from the  gluteal region.

Overbaked bread is usually worse, as the crust is either too thick or it tastes burnt. That’ll give you heartburn and I have enough of that already from looking at my credit card bill.

“Smart” Opinions

Opinions–good, bad, otherwise–are quite similar to bread in all its stages of existence. And underformed and underbaked opinions are no different. They’ll give you a stomach ache and useless worries, kind of like when your anxious, almost 84-year-old mother tells you you’ll get sick if you eat that! You usually eat it to spite her, but that’s another story for my many, many therapists and parole officers. But I digress again.

Take artificial intelligence as an example. People have formed all kinds of underbaked opinions on how it’s going to take over the world, make us redundant to the robots and set off a unintended nuclear war because billionaire douche bag Elon Musk said so.

Wrong.

A.I. is at its root a really good effort to predict a result or behaviour or action using energy-intensive servers and chips together with computing parameters to determine a likely outcome, based on whatever crappy, biased data it’s fed by the ‘data scientist’ (who doesn’t even wear a white lab coat! How can he/she/they/it be a so called ‘scientist’ without a lab coat and not being part of a shady ‘institute’? That’s my opinion of course, and it’s right.)

We don’t know what to make of A.I. yet as it’s still early days. ChatGPT and the rest of those generative A.I. bots are largely one-trick ponies that do nothing to tackle problems like drug discovery and modeling exceptionally complex structure. Not yet, at least.

Just take comfort in the fact that large, faceless, opaque, borderless, unruly, semi-lawful corporations and countries are at the A.I. helm with a deep profit motive or nefarious spying activities, and little government oversight or any regulation or forethought.  Like all problems, it’ll go away if we ignore it.

Mouldy Opinions

Like a bread, opinions can grow stale quickly, and if left in a dark, moist place, grow mouldy rather quickly. Those opinions, whether they contain non-GMO wheat harvested by virgins, healthy nuts, or even fancy-ass spring water from a depleted water table can turn green and thus smell up your garbage bin or worse, spread to other parts, thus requiring a severe clean with borax, thus using more water and cleaning products to pollute environment.

A good mouldy, stinky opinion is the rationale used by the founders of ‘Animaid Café’ a.k.a. ‘Hooters for incels‘.  (Thanks for sharing, Lars.) It’s perfectly fine to have young women dress up like servile, sexually objectified maids to entertain male clients with café foods. The world needs more of that as opposed to funding the NHS. Unsurprisingly, business is booming. Manchester males, you can be proud that you’re funding and perpetuating a place you think is ‘cute’ and ‘harmless’…

Anatomically Speaking

Opinions, however, should be more readily likened to a specific anatomical structure, namely, the ass hole. As stated by many hairy and sleep-deprived wisemen over the ages, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, some are smelly, some are not, some are hairy, some handle spicy foods better than others, and not too many people like discussing them in public unless they’re a specialist. (See any talk show on cable TV in the last 50 years.)

Opinions, unlike bread, are also like mouths, another orifice from which a lot of crap spews, albeit in less solid form than the aforementioned exit point. Yes, everyone has a mouth, unless it has been sewn shut by Chinese and Russian secret police, and much uninformed blather gets puts out in the universe (or metaverse if you can’t deal with reality, you coward).

Now, I’m not saying we should limit opinions to what I believe is fair, correct and acceptable. Who am I kidding? That’s exactly what I want. Me and a few of my closest friends and family. Get together once a week over fresh danish and coffee, maybe a nice plate of fruit and if they’re fresh –and not toasted — a dozen bagels.

Now I’m hungry. Well, that put a screeching halt to this rant. Thank goodness too.

Sincerely hungry,
Chef Jon