What's The Smell of Parsley?

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As it's Sunday, any regular visitor to these pages might well expect The Sunday Night Cooking Post. Well, not this week, as Jane for once wasn't working and we instead went out for lunch to the Bull in Biwmares. Opting to order slightly - only slightly, I might add - more than the usual snack to eat, we decided that tonight's roast will instead be cooked tomorrow evening. This will be a kind of trial run of our intended Christmas lunch: Guinea Fowl, with  lots of my signature roasters, air-fried "Sweet Kingdom" carrots [already tested these - they work a treat], and a selection of other bits of vegetable matter, all lubricated with one of my usual meat sauces.

However, that brings me to the title of this scribble, "What's the smell of parsley?" which of course is a quote from Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood". The question was posed in Captain Cat's dream to him by one of his drowned shipmates - FIRST DROWNED, in the text - to which Captain Cat's somniloquial response to this last utterance of his dreamed, dead friends is '...Oh, my dead dears!'. I wanted to double-check the exact wording and placement of the 'parsley' reference, so I pulled one of my copies of the poem from the shelf and thumbed it open randomly. At exactly the right page. I swear. This has happened to me so many times over the years, with so many books and in so many contexts: just weird, but there you go...

Anyhow, my strangled point here is that I decided to Google 'What's the smell of parsley?' to see what would come back. On the first search return page, there was only one reference to the phrase in the context of Thomas' poem. All the others were for recipes involving parsley, with the first entry - as is usual with Google these days - being the AI response to the question, which was gloriously literal, discussing the various culinary uses and health benefits of the herb, and contrasting it with the flavour and health benefits of cilantro [coriander to us Brits]. It would seem that all we need to fear from AI might just be that it is just so literal - and prosaic - in its interpretation of the pool of knowledge and experience that we humans have built over the millennia that it is just, well, boringly functional. It's just unfortunate that some of humankind want to misuse that technology to further their own ends, in much the same way that they already exploit anything and everything they can so to do, as with the 3D printing of firearms by erstwhile terrorists and general loons. It's not the fault of AI or 3D printing per se, but rather that of a subset of their progenitor class: mankind itself. Philosophise your way out of that particular paper bag of infinitude if you will, I'm having another glass of wine...

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