Strong Verbs Are Just Better

From The Mandarin: Santow tips the bucket on AI slop

In a landmark speech delivered to the Sir Vincent Fairfax Oration in Sydney on Thursday, former human rights commissioner and now sought-after ethical adviser and academic Ed Santow delivered a serious wake-up call to assorted artificial intelligence cheer squad leaders and positivity meme flunkies.

Santow is positive about AI but also highly aware of its impact on societal functions, governance, and culture.

In a tightly woven speech that planted a deep stake in the necessity of the retention of knowledge and memory, Santow argued that “history matters on its own terms”, and its interpretation is also powering the next version of what we know as language models dip into the well.

“As AI disrupts our economy, politics, society and environment, I will make three arguments today:

AI might seem like it comes from the future, but it learns from the past, and so it also anchors us to that past.
Our history — or rather our choices about the versions of history that are recorded and remembered — influences how AI takes shape.
It is not enough that we expose AI systems to a ‘more accurate’ view of history; we must also draw the right lessons from history if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes and injustices of the past,” Santow said.
Exposure of AI to better feedstock is a difficult topic because, in large part, it assumes that the quality of inputs will self-correct problematic outputs. Yeah nah.

“Throughout history, we have built machines that are born like Venus — fully formed. When a car rolls off the production line, all it needs is a twist of a key or the press of a button, and it will work as intended. This is not true of AI,” Santow argued.

“AI systems start as ignorant as a newborn — perhaps even more so. A baby will search for its mother’s breast even before the baby can see. An AI system possesses none of a baby’s genetic instincts. Nothing can be assumed. All knowledge must be learned. The process of teaching an AI system — known as ‘machine learning’ — involves exposing the machine to our world.”

There’s a further problem, too, and it’s a systemic one. As internet pioneers like Vint Cerf noted, the great tech behemoth has trouble retaining both memory and history.

“The regime that should be in place [is] one in which old software is preserved; hardware can be emulated in the files so we can run old operating systems and old software so we can actually do something with the digital objects that have been captured and stored,” Cerf said in 2018.

“Think of all the papers we read now, especially academic papers that have URL references. Think about what happens 10, 20, 50 years from now when those don’t resolve anymore because the domain names were abandoned or someone forgot to pay the rent.”

That’s now happening.

But the warnings are at least a decade old.

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I am wary of the about-face in my thinking on Large Language Models. Right through my time in lit academia, I was unusually positive about LLM and its uses in my field. I do not have the skillset, for instance, to work with or for Digipal, but I find their stuff REALLY COOL. It was something of a frustration to my mentors (and me, tbh) that the kind of literary scholarship I wanted to do just... didn't call for these kinds of digital tools. Even in the literary composition realm - while I encountered some truly un-informed uses of LMMs - I was significantly more willing than most literature scholars to believe that LLM linguistics could make findings as to authorship, at least on a "more likely than not" level.

In part, that is because in first-year English I was assigned some readings (in a sub-unit module on functional linguistics for literary studies) which looked at how forensic linguistics, focused not only on easily-identifiable dialect words but on patterns of "filler" words and sentence structure, had demonstrated throughout the 90s that Australian police were influencing interview records, particularly from Indigenous subjects, in ways which ranged from outright fabrication to shaping/skewing interview reports.** The case made by pragmatics is that individual speakers' uses of function words, sentence structure, etc, are shaped by context (e.g. are you or are you not a policeman), but can also, with sufficient corpus, be distinguished among individuals. I don't really see any reason to suppose that Billy Shakes is any more unique than the wrongfully convicted Mr Kelvin Condren, or that imitators of/collaborators with Billy Shakes would be less detectable to an algorithm than false police reports. Oh, there are other factors - can't use punctuation for early modern texts, because the printers did that part; medieval texts have layers of author, scribe, oral retellings and subsequent copyings, etc. I've never yet encountered such an identification that I'd hang my hat on as absolutely conclusive out of nowhere, but such studies never come out of nowhere and texts always have some context you can look at. Likely enough to work with? Sure.

I am very wary, therefore, of my current tendency to reskeet dunkings upon AI, sweeping statements about the "word association machine", etc. There are, in addition to fascinating historical uses of LLMs, very important practical ones! I would like to see those continue and be improved upon!***

I don't think I'm 100% wrong about generative LLMs producing "slop" at the moment, that's pretty clear. But I am concerned that I'm plugged in to a social media feed of academics and wonks who not only see all the current problems but also seem to be unaware of or walking back on the previously attested promising uses. So. I am not recirculating nearly as much as I read, and I am trying to weight my reading via sources like The Mandarin, rather than via Academics Despairing or other versions of the BlueSky Hot Take mill.

The article above says that Santow is "positive about AI". I rather wish it had covered what Santow is positive about, because from what they've quoted from him as to the things to be wary of, he seems to have a nuanced grip on things.

* A stand-out was a linguist using the out-of-copyright editions in the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, apparently unaware how much editorial shaping went into them, or that they are not at all up-to-date, or, upon quizzing by one of my colleagues, that the poetic texts might predate the manuscripts and differ significantly from spoken English at the time of the manuscript composition while also not reflecting spoken English of the putative poem composition date.

** I don't have my 2005 syllabi to hand anymore, more fool me. I do not think that the article we were given was Diana Eades, "The case for Condren: Aboriginal English, pragmatics and the law", Journal of Pragmatics 20.2 (1993) 141-162, but it definitely cited that article and Condren's case. Condren is a QLD case and I think the article I read was about a cohort of WA police transcripts - but that article I just cited is useful in that it has a good-enough overview in the unpaywalled abstract to illustrate my point.

*** For instance, PHREDSS, the system which monitors presentations to NSW emergency departments and produces a read-out with alerts of Public Health Interest, is an LLM. You can find a fairly readable evaluation of its use in regional NSW in relation to large gatherings and public health disaster response on the Department of Health and Aging's website. What I know from my Sources in stats is that the surveilance model is designed specifically for how emergency departments use language and record presentations, and then even the simplest-seeming uses for public health are looked at by experts in both this kind of stats, and epidemology.
The example I was given by my Sources was "pneumonia": in 2020, every day our good friend PHREDSS delivered unto the NSW government its ED data, tagged by presenting condition and location. Pneumonia was a leading indicator for COVID-19 at the time. However, someone has to check and weed out the "person didn't actually drown but they got water on the lungs" kind of pneumonia. (Given what I now know about the frequency of aspiration risks in the elderly and people with chronic illnesses, it's not going to be the surfing accidents that are the main reason you need a human to look at it: it's that if you get a statistical spike in pneumonia admissions from aged care homes in X region, you could be looking at a viral outbreak or you could be looking at some systemic failure of care leading to a whole bunch of elderly people aspirating and it not being addressed appropriately, leading to pneumonia.) This 2015 article looks at the ED-side data capture problems relating to "alcohol syndrome", and whether such data has "positive predictive" value for public health, if this sort of thing tickles your brain.

I have not had the werewithal to make link-roundups relating to either my local jurisdiction or the Global State Of Things.

If I had been regularly LinkPosting, I would nevertheless have said that if one read almost exclusively Aus content, OR one has not been keeping up with any of the global developments in this field: one could do worse than the dw_news post re Mississipi. It is, in a way which I appreciate, quite heavily tilted to the "we cannot FUNCTIONALLY do the thing you have asked" side of things.

Behold, A Link.

Courtesy of a recent subscriber bonus episode (preview here of Gender Reveal, I have discovered Mal Blum, who has a new album out (I think I had previously had their country-ish EP on a list of queer country music that I was slowly working through, but never got to that one). I am enjoying it.



I like this song and was amused by Mal and Tuck discussing people taking it too literaly.

The music video is... weird, though. It seems average-good, close-ups on the singer appropriate to the song. But the group choreography is... weird. Perhaps just "niche indie artist can't afford really cutting edge music video"? But am I wrong in thinking that it felt like the choreographer did not know what kind of person Mal is or whose gaze to showcase them for?

I may have to go back and look at some of Mal's older music videos and form Opinions.

I spent most of this past weekend hyperfocusing on little pixelated men (Age of Empires). I have also contemplated my family-ish medical-logistics. I have considered where I might fit within this. I must now contemplate my own, after seeing specialist 1 and finding out he can't do much until I've dealt with the domain of specialist 2.

I do not have solutions.

I do have this recommendation, which I have seen aggregate-classiified as both country and punk:



I saw, somewhere deep in the #proofofcat or #caturday feed on Bluesky, someone recommend this in response to a "look at my asshole cat who just waltzed back in after I've been putting up Lost Cat posters for days". The recommender was a friend of one of the band members, and apparently the song is about a prodigal cat.

I bought the whole album and am enjoying it.

Recommendation: the first episode of the "Ill Concieved" podcast, which promises to be a podcast about natalism. Their first episode is Promise Keepers.

Note: I had a complex reaction to this content. The dominant one is actually a sort of relief in finding someone in 2025 of vaguely my demographic digging into this. I recognise Promise Keepers. I don't think I know anyone who went to a Promise Keepers rally (I'm not even sure if there WERE such rallies in Aus), but I definitely heard people talk about the Important Movement which Ill Concieved delightfully describe as "700,000 Dicks Out For Jesus".

However. I was a left-ish, liturgy-friendly Protestant growing up around charismatic and Pentecostal-leaning evangelicals. I dealt with this by Reading Up, particularly once I got academic library access and could search the keywords which my confirmation mentor had mentioned. Marion Maddox's "God Under Howard" is in my top five formative books, I reckon. I also read a fair bit of Karen Armstrong, which I realise is not the BEST one could read, but several points which were jarring to me in that episode come under the heading of "wait, Karen Armstrong can and does explain this, I'm open to other explanations but you're just saying it's Odd?".

Consequently, I ended up posting a mini-essay in skeets. I reproduce it here with corrected punctuation.

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Recommendation: this.

Additional note: it’s a little weird to me, someone who dealt with growing up around charismatic evangelicals by researching as much on the history of both Pentecostalism and evangelical movements as I could get my teenage hands on, to hear @ junlper.beer repeatedly surprised about the multi-racial makeup of Promise Keepers. “Revival” style evangelical movements in the US have historic roots in African-American evangelical movements, and Pentecostalism in the US traces back to a Black revivalist preacher in early 20th c LA.

Pentecostalism didn’t get integrated into “mainline” evangelism until the 80s or so - many regarded them as indecorous, which no doubt had a lot to do with race. But folding Pentecostal practices and beliefs in with other charismatic evangelicals allowed the charismatic sectors of some of the major denominations to really strengthen their dominance over the evangelical cultural landscape.

( Summary One: you thought the filioque dispute was difficult, you thought reformation predistination disputes were arcane, you try not to think about Arianism... I give you: subdivisions of charismatic and pentecostal protestantism )

Summary two: some Protestants will do literally anything to avoid endorsing sacramentalism, including... whatever the fuck happened with Pentecostalism.

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*Obligatory citation to Marion Maddox's "God Under Howard".

Last Sunday I had lamb, but had to go get more ingredients before I could make Nagi's slow-roasted middle eastern lamb shoulder. I ended up running too late to make it in a slow-cooker, and still short a few items, so I had-hocked it a few ways. The leftovers turned out amazing though, kept going all week.

( Spiced Lamb Shoulder )

Nagi serves hers with lemon herb couscous. I (being gluten-intolerant) recommend basmati rice, cooked with at least half the liquid being stock. You may wish to add sultanas to the rice.

Recommended toppings:

( Yoghurt sauce )

( Ful Medames )

Serve: Lamb on a bed of rice, with roast vegetables and the two dip/sauces.

Leftovers 1: Same thing, minus the yoghurt if you're taking it to work to reheat. If carrying it in a container to reheat, do include an orange wedge, and a dash of extra water, to infuse with the rice.

Leftovers 2: Ful Medames on celery sticks, as a component of Girl Dinner / Picky Tea.

Leftovers 3:

( Lamb and Feta Pizza )

Leftovers 3b: Leftover pizza.

Leftovers 4, which I made at the same time as the pizza:

( Spiced vegetable and bean soup )

Leftovers 4b: soup. Mix yoghurt sauce through if you're taking it in a container to work.

Leftovers 5: Wraps/soft tacos/thingy with fuul medames and lamb. If you have leftover mushroom / zucchini from the pizza, toss that in here. Add avocado if you have any.

Leftovers 6: at this point just "uses for ful medames", but ful medames mixed with Jack M's banana chili ketchup makes a good spread base for breakfast burrito.

This has been: a week of lamb and things that go with lamb.

Apparently I haven't made one of these since mid-2024. I remember getting wildly overwhelmed by not being able to keep track of what podcast episodes I've particularly enjoyed. I can't easily just save a pinboard pin from apple podcasts, the way I save links from my phone browser. For a while I was trying to cross-post to Twitter, then Mastodon, and now I try to remember to use highly-reckons at bluesky.

Whatever, I clearly can't catch up now, so let's look at some recent listening.

Music:

Apparently, this is about Bob Hawke. It is telling that I had to look this up, as it could describe any number of Australian politicians before and after Redgum's day:



On the subject of blokey music, would you like a song that sounds like 90s queer-ish britpop is being belted in a scrappy Aussie pub, only it's extremely queer?



Podcasts, Fictional: Lately I have been watching Dimension 20: Fantasy High (eg, today, I sat on the parental couch and painstakingly sewed a trouser-hem, grumpily used resistance bands, and got through 3 episodes of the sophomore year series). At the end of the freshman series I had WITHDRAWALS and yet had too many chores to do that couldn't be done in front of a TV.

Enter, Worlds Beyond Number, a high fantasy RP adventure DMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan. The tone is very different - there is a little leavening humour, and I wouldn't say it's DARK per se, but it's not a comedy. Something it carries off very well is that the DM and players had conducted a campaign zero, prior to starting the main campaign - so they know backstory that the audience doesn't. This feels very different to the DM knowing things that neither the players nor the audience know - it feels less like "fly on the wall watching your parasocial pals play DND" and closer to an audiodrama, I guess, while still having the the narration and choice-reaction-improv aspects.

Podcasts, informative:

I really enjoyed Margaret Killjoy's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff two-parter A madhouse against the Nazis.

The first episode, which is the one I've linked, actually looks at Françoise Tosquelle's life in and flight from Catalonia, and his early innovations in the field of psychiatry during the Spanish Civil War. Tosquelles was with the POUM, the same anti-stalinist anti-fascist group George Orwell volunteered with, in anarchist-controlled parts of Catalonia. The history of shellshock>PTSD as I know it (and I've been reading up a bit lately), filtered through mainly UK/US histories of both war and medicine, doesn't talk about much between WWI and WWII. But out there in Catalonia, Tosquelles was working out that his traumatised soldiers needed to stay in community, in or near their homes and/or the communities who had been housing them as volunteers.

So Tosquelles set about setting up psychiatric hospitals close to the front. Local monastic institutions worked with him, providing the physical infrastructure and some staff. But where would he get nurses? Insead of sending for medically trained nurses from the cities or appealing to the red cross, he looked to the local area, and enlisted other professionals to do shifts as psych nurses (in this context, doing jobs that would be later specialised to social work or occupational therapy). Apparently lawyers were common (keen to support, not usually keen soldiers), as were artists, writers, teachers and... sex workers. You see, anarchist Spanish regions had usually legalised sex work and set up worker-owned brothels. The soliders were already their client base. So Tosquelles went around looking for women who wanted a second job: they couldn't see the same clients in both roles, but one imagines they already had a good understanding of the psychological fragility of the war-traumatised soldier.

By the end of episode one, Margaret has followed Tosquelles over the Pyrennes and into a refugee camp in France, where he promptly sets up a makeshift psychiatric unit under dire conditions, before eventually being sought out and transferred to work - not initially as doctor, oh no, just a nursing assistant - at a nearby asylum. The second episode follows the asylum's radical transformation during the Vichy regime (with no ration cards for mental patients, the patients, staff and doctors began to work together to pool resources, trade labour on local farms for produce, get locals to teach foraging classes - and meanwhile radically restructure the heirarchy of the institution), with the spectacular highlight in Margaret's eyes being their work (colletively agreed upon by all at the hospital) housing and even running guns for the resistance.

I really enjoy Margaret Killjoy's take on this, as I have some of her other health-focused work. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them I think is that as a trans woman she's both acutely critical of pathologising institutions, but also... hardly anti-treatment, anti-medication, etc. (The other axis, and this isn't true of all anarchists any more than it is of all trans women, that I think I particularly appreciate is a streak I'm starting to see in the anarchist-leaning podcasts I follow, where the commitment to something radically better, no better than that or that or anything else on offer, seems to come with an openness to positives that aren't Total Movement Success / Total Revolution.)

At any rate, I trundled off to do some further reading afterwards. This essay by Ben Platts-Mills was clearly one of Margaret's key sources. This interview between Platts-Mills, Camille Robcis (a scholar of the psychiatric movement which arose out of St Albans after the war), and Martine Deyres, who had made a docummentary about St Albans, is also worth a read - I particularly appreciated Martine Deyres' comments about how St Albans was, yes, physically and politically isolated during the Vichy regime (allowing its survival), but that the psychiatric community and the leftist-communist community was very well networked, even during the war. One of the key resistance fighers who was there during the war - his grandfather had been a previous director at St Albans, and as a communist in the 30s, this chap had known of Tosquelles' work in Catalonia.

Finally, Margaret describes herself as a "simple girl" and not a theory-head, but she does a good job of breaking down the wild inter-group tensions, and paradigm-shifting historical differences, between and across far left history. She says she ended up reading more about Tosquelles in the context of Theory than she wanted (I'm guessing because Camille Robcis is really the only anglophone scholar to have touched on him), but there were questions *I* had that she put aside, and some basic Theorist Facts I didn't know (like Franz Fanon's career trajectory). I found this article on the APA blog a great supplement there.

In fact I shall leave with a blockquote from that post (Gregory Evan Doukas, 2023):

Institutional psychotherapy also attended to the ways that institutions not only are shaped by but shape human action. Many make the error of associating institutions intrinsically with coercion; institutional psychotherapy took seriously the capacity of institutions to instead empower. The institutional psychotherapy advocated by Tosquelles also differed from anti-psychiatrists who rejected all neurological bases for mental illness. Evidence of this is that they often prescribed medication. Following Lacan, who Fanon argued in his medical dissertation was correct when asserting that “madness is a pathology of freedom,” the Saint-Alban school argued that the goal of therapy was freedom. This meant that the job of the psychiatrist was to reinstitute the social in the human personality. For Hermann Simon, an important influence on Tosquelles, this necessitated a “more active therapy,” one which took advantage of the organization of the hospital, the land it was on, and the patients’ families and social networks (22). It required revolutionizing the hospital staff and breaking down both physical and logistical barriers, de-carceralizing the institution. The nurses were asked to take off their uniforms and dress indistinguishably from the patients. “Walls” separating the administrative and medical divisions of the hospital were torn down; everyone who worked there, including the patients, began to take responsibility for running the institution and playing an active role in the healing process.

Let us talk about the training I am supposed to deliver, as one of many deliver-ers.

Context: we have one (1) new person started today. He has a full caseload as of 1 May; while I was on leave, Boss G re-allocated some April work from Various Of Us to New Person. I think he has avout 2 weeks before his "deadline 2: file scanned for decision-makers" points start hitting (and deadline 1: notices of listing has already been done).

1-2 weeks before I went on leave, Boss G sourced from the team a) volunteers to cover a list of induction topics she had come up with, to match her developing Procedural Guides and b) any further suggestions.

I volunteered for "adjournments". I was aiming to avoid the "core essentials", since I had not exelled with those myself, but adjournments? I have made several "find out the hard way" errors.

Colleague L then raised "hmm, this list doesn't include evidence gathering".
Me: Agreed, although it could fit in with one of the existing topics. I also note there isn't a slot for "late papers / file management after scanning", I can cover that".

I MEANT: I think this topic would mesh well with "adjournments".

I GOT: slotted for "file managemnt and late papers", tomorrow, and "adjournments" on Thursday. I agreed, although I was a bit "hrmm": "file management" is slotted after "allocations / The Spreadhseet" and before "notices of listing", which sort of makes sense but "late papers' does NOT make sense before Notices of Listing", and frankly I would have assigned "evidence gathering" to one or other of those not grouped with late papers.

I considered: how can I make this chain? I will find out what M is doing for "allocations / the Spreadsheet" and try to orient my session around "so, let's build on that".

THEN TODAY: I realised that I am booked in to WFH on Thursday, the day I am supposed to explain Adjournments. But while I was away, a file turned up on my desk, re-allocated, in pristine "weird, a new adjourned matter" state, notices due out Thursday. I sent a TEAMS mtg invite with short agenda and note that I would leave an Example File on New Person's desk on Wednesday evening and he could look at the hard copy while walking through What one Does with it.
THEN NEXT: I explained this to Boss, who was like... "or you could move it to Friday morning? There's time".
ME: Uh... hrmm... I'll ask him what he'd rather.

ALSO TODAY: I found out that Boss had reallocated two of my files to New Person (good, that makes space for the unexpected adjourned-reallocated file). One of those has actually been administratively relisted, and I could quickly send "notice to vacate and relist" BUT it was one where I hadn't been able to contact the care facility and send them a direct notice. I am INSTRUCTED to tell/show him what to do about this file.

HOORAY, CLEAR GOALS:
First: Colleague M will show New Person what the macro-level planning looks like for "here are all your files".
Next: I will
- familiarise New Person with The Files (PREFERABLY NOT BY LECTURING HIM)
- give New Person an explicit task, ie, "send a notice of listing to this care facility"
THEN: R, who was my induction buddy, will walk him through how to send notices of listing (from scratch)

That leaves, of the things I was supposed to cover tomorrow:
- essential evidence seeking (which either M or R might cover anyway)
- Standard Late Papers (ie, what happens when your essential evidence comes in less than 7 days from hearing)
- Exciting/Alarming Late Papers (easily covered under Adjournments)

ERGO:

1. I talk to Boss G tomorrow morning and suggest that instead of asking New Person if he would prefer "TEAMS on Thursday or in person on Friday" I ask him if he would prefer "this week, or deferred to around about when your first file-due-out-for-scanning deadline is" for our second meeting.
1.a. I try to raise this in a way which exhibits my Pedagogical Wisdom but also defers to Boss G's known "good at induction and training" reputation. If I do have to, or choose to, go back to ESL teaching, I'll probably want Boss G as a referee.

2. Were I drawing up a CELTA-standard lesson plan for tomorrow it would go like this:

- Hello, my name is Edmund, and I talk too much

- The Learning Goals this lesson are: "I know what is in a file" and "I have at least one clear task for the file(s) I have inherited from Ed"

3. After providing a somewhat more normal human version of the above, I reckon I will
a) note that he has worked for NCAT before: so he knows SOMETHING about case management and files. I not only talk too much but wish to KNOW many things. Ergo: have a look at these files, tell me what you understand from them / how they seem different / what questions you have.
b) actively get up and walk away to make tea - offering him a choice from my selection of Office Tea / Coffee Bags

My thought is that item a) re-directs my Explaining Instinct toward what New Person actually knows; and item b) prevents me looming, while providing slightly more scaffolding than just leaving him alone at his desk to read his assigned files might.

4. I return and
- we discuss comparative file structure
- one file I printed and loosely tucked in several "generic correspondance" emails not sent to the members: see if he knows where they belong; if not, explain; thence foreshadow conversations he may have with the stakeholders based on those emails
- I verrry lightly run over the "types of evidence and what if they're late" questions
- Zero in on "this case: I sent the vacate-and-relist notices, but I haven't called the care facility" - his one specific task is, subsequent to colleague R's "notices of listing" training (or in it!), to call the care facility and get contact info and then send them the notice

5. When shall we two meet again: would he prefer this week? Or would he prefer to postpone "adjournments" and "more details on late papers" to just before or just after his first "file out to scan" deadline?
5a. Noting that if he would like me to shadow/hover/etc while he does the Call The Care Facility step, I can do that!

WAIT: None of Boss G's advance plans involve the telephone splitter. The telephone splitter was actually an excellent part of the induction I recieved. Raise this also with Boss G.

I appear to have drafted this but not posted it. This was drafted evening of 31 March, NSW time. SOME THOUGHTS and SEVERAL OUTCOMES have happened since. Please stand by.

I pulled some paneer out of the back of my shelf in the fridge, and the hermetically sealed packet had expanded with mystery gases. That was clearly no longer food. Faced with a choice between Palak Aloo, Palak Feta and Palak Halloumi, I chose the latter.

And it was pretty great, actually. Definitely better than Pallak Feta, more satisfying than Palak Aloo, and, I reckon, better than BAD Palak Paneer. (Probably because of the salt quotient in halloumi.)

And unlike pretty much every other halloumi dish I cook, the cheese was fine when reheated! Amazing discovery.

(I also adulterated it by adding a can of cannellini beans, and about a cup of pre-cooked brown lentils. We might be talking about spinach-and-pulses tomato-based stew with curry spices and halloumi at this point. But it was pretty great, so... No regrets.)

On the one hand, I bumped into my housemate's family when I was wearing only a towel.

On the other hand: since the time in undergrad when I narrowly dodged out of the way and avoided meeting Gough Whitlam in a towel (I was in the towel. Gough Whitlam was in a wheelchair), it's hard to feel embarrassment about these things.