Made this up after buying a nice piece of locally caught freshwater trout. I think that it would be even better if you were to hot-smoke it. Apply the rub between two and twelve hours before cooking.

Mix up the following then rub on to the flesh of the fish (enough for four servings):

• 1 tbsp sea/rock salt.
• 1 tbsp black peppercorns crushed.
• 1 tbsp ground cumin.
• 1 tbsp ground coriander.
• 2 tsp caraway seed.
• 2 tsp dried tarragon.
• 2 tsp dried thyme.
• 2 tsp chilli powder.
• Zest of one lemon.

To drizzle on top when cooked melt some butter in a pan, add the juice of the lemon you used above, a pinch of salt, one crushed clove of garlic, and a handful of chopped coriander. Simmer for a couple of minutes.

Enjoy!

Here is the archive of the lists Lorendiac posts here, and here is his latest piece! Remember, again, this list is written by Lorendiac, not Brian Cronin. - BC.

I once listed the various reasons why some people become superheroes and start looking for villains to smite -- and on another occasion I examined the options they have after they've subdued a villain in the traditional slugfest and then start asking themselves: "Now what shall I do with him?" (Those discussions, among others, can be reached via the links at the bottom of this piece.) But it recently occurred to me that I've never really addressed the middle portion of that process: Given that someone has already chosen to dress up as a superhero, just how does he go about finding those bad guys so he can smite them properly?

To put it another way, what's his preferred method of target acquisition?

Here are the answers I found for how the heroes and the villains may end up confronting one another.

(Obviously, there is no law which says a certain hero must use just one or two methods over and over. Some have developed styles which blend several methods together.)

11 Methods of Target Acquisition

01. Police Band
02. Spy Tech
03. Super-Senses
04. Hunted
05. Summoned
06. Detective Work
07. Pursuing One Long-Term Mission
08. Answering Appeals
09. On Patrol
10. Baiting the Trap
11. Chance Encounter

01. Police Band

"Hmmm. Bank robbery in progress, over on Fifth and Main? I'm only a few blocks away -- reckon I'll swing by and see what I can do!"

Modern law enforcement agencies have systems in place for rapidly spreading the word about current and recently-committed crimes. Some superheroes find ways of accessing that information network so they can react to emergencies which sound as if they require the hero's special talents. Sometimes that's as simple as keeping a police scanner handy to listen to current transmissions; sometimes the hero's methods go far beyond that.

For instance, Batman's friendship with Commissioner Gordon traditionally gives him access to anything the vast resources of the GCPD have already learned about the matter at hand (including material which has been provided by the FBI or other law enforcement oufits). Of course it doesn't always work that smoothly -- sometimes Jim Gordon isn't Commissioner this week, and sometimes he is but his relationship with Batman has fallen on hard times -- but we can usually assume this steady flow of information to be the default condition unless we are specifically told otherwise.

Furthermore, some superheroes have been employed as law enforcement officers, which gives them direct access to all sorts of data without needing to eavesdrop or hack into anything.

Sometimes the employers know exactly who they are hiring, and the hero is ordered to respond to the scariest reports that come over the radio. The Savage Dragon started his crimefighting career this way when he was hired by the Chicago police -- if bullets were just bouncing off a super-powered perpetrator instead of stopping him, they called in Officer Dragon to do what a regular SWAT team couldn't! Other superheroes who have collected regular paychecks from local or national governments, or even from the United Nations, in exchange for their "superheroic" activities, have included Plastic Man, Agent Liberty, the Avengers, Alpha Flight, the Justice League International . . . and, more recently, all of the Marvel heroes who chose to participate in the 50 State Initiative.

Sometimes the costumed stuff qualifies as "moonlighting" in the superhero's off-duty hours -- for instance, when Dick Grayson became a rookie cop in Bludhaven, his fellow cops didn't know he was also Nightwing in his spare time. Other superheroes who have tried to juggle a "regular law enforcement" job with an unoffical "costumed superhero" sideline have included the Golden Age Guardian (Jim Harper), Captain America (Steve Rogers), the Silver Age Flash (Barry Allen), the original Human Torch (Jim Hammond), and The Martian Manhunter ("John Jones" of the Denver PD).

02. Spy Tech

"Whoa! Look what just flashed up on this screen! The police don't know about it yet, but I do! If I hurry, I can get there before regular cops notice the problem, interfere, and maybe get themselves killed!"

This way the hero isn't just eavesdropping on what the police are hearing at the same time; he's often one step ahead of them because he has useful toys they don't!

The X-Men have sometimes been able to use Cerebro to pin down the locations of powerful mutants of interest, even if no one else in the world has noticed that these people are mutants.

Batman has also made heavy use of this approach, often via the services of Oracle (Barbara Gordon), who refuses to fret about the laws relating to wiretapping and hacking into private databases and so forth. At various times, Oracle's talents have also been available to Batman's apprentices, and to the Suicide Squad, and to the Justice League, and to her own hand-picked "Birds of Prey" agents. She likes to stay busy!

03. Super-Senses

"Eh? A few miles down the road, someone is firing an automatic weapon. Reckon I'd better check it out!"

Unlike "Spy Tech," this approach means the hero's ability to rapidly learn about things happening far away is not dependent on advanced technological aids. Instead, his "natural" perceptions go far beyond those of any normal person's physical senses.

Superman is the poster child for this one. For instance, if a large explosion happens anywhere in Metropolis when he's in residence, his super-hearing is probably going to pick it up while automatically ignoring all the miscellaneous "background noise" which doesn't sound nearly so life-threatening. Likewise, his X-Ray vision and telescopic vision can be incredibly handy!

Daredevil's senses are not as far-reaching as Superman's (and he's conspicuously lacking in vision-based powers, for obvious reasons), but still give him a huge advantage, although he has usually preferred to keep that fact to himself and let his enemies assume he's just a normal guy in a red outfit.

In addition to superhuman enhancement of the "normal" senses, there are other ways for information to reach a hero from afar and alert him to problems he may want to deal with. Including clairvoyance . . . telepathy . . . and even precognitive visions which can tip him off to what's going to happen at a certain place and time -- or perhaps what might happen unless he interferes!

(The movie Minority Report took that last scenario to the limit -- precognitive visions about your future misbehavior could be used as the basis for your being arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced for the violent crime which you had never actually gotten around to committing in the first place!)

04. Hunted

"Well, that saves me the trouble of going out and looking for trouble tonight -- the trouble is looking for me instead, and it's loaded for bear!"

This naturally reminds us of Richard Connell's classic short story "The Most Dangerous Game," the basic premise of which has been shamelessly ripped off on innumerable occasions -- in movies, TV episodes, comic books, whatever. In this approach, the villain has decided: "I'm the greatest hunter in the world -- and I'm tired of tracking and shooting mere animals. What I need is a human quarry who's resourceful enough to give me a real challenge!" (Kraven the Hunter was a classic example when he debuted in the Silver Age.)

Some villains are not dedicated to "the thrill of the hunt" as a strong motivating factor in their daily lifestyles, but occasionally feel the need to hunt down and trap or kill a particular superhero -- or entire team -- for some other reason entirely!

For instance, while recently rereading (and parodying) the classic Dark Phoenix Saga, I've been reminded of a point which I had almost forgotten! The villainous agenda wasn't just to brainwash Jean Grey into deserting the X-Men and working for the Hellfire Club (or at least for Mastermind) from that day forward. Sebastian Shaw and his colleages of the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club also wanted to capture as many of the X-Men as possible (along with potential new recruits Kitty Pryde and Alison Blaire) so as to use them as guinea pigs in trying to isolate -- and learn to manipulate -- the genetic "X-Factor" which made all the difference between ordinary humans and super-powered mutants. For some reason, the never-clearly-explained methods which Shaw and his buddies had in mind were expected to be fatal to the living subjects, which explains why they were unwilling to experiment on themselves and preferred to round up other mutants instead. But once they had the key factor properly isolated, they believed they'd be able to start producing mutants to order!

Note: Looking back on it, my best guess is that the Hellfire Club of that era (around 1980) had never heard of the very similar work which -- according to a retcon several years later -- had already been happening for a long time in the island nation of Genosha. If Shaw and his cronies had been aware of it, they could have simply tried to make a deal with the Genosha government, or else swipe some of the Genegineer's research and technology for their own purposes. Either of which would have been likelier to succeed than the complicated stunts they actually pulled against the X-Men.

05. Lured

"Will you come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly . . ."

This is slightly different from "Hunted." The villain is still taking the initiative in seeking a confrontation, but this time the villain doesn't exert himself to go looking for the hero -- he merely "invites" the hero to come looking for him at a certain place and time! This can range from the tantalizing clues of The Riddler and his ilk, which often have double meanings and other dirty tricks concealed within them, to something as simple and straightforward as Norman Osborn kidnapping Gwen Stacy and daring Peter Parker to come try and rescue her on a certain bridge!

06. Detective Work

The following dialogue is quoted from "The Question Annual #1." Batman (Bruce Wayne), Green Arrow (Ollie Queen), and The Question (Vic Sage) are having a little chat. Batman has just finished explaining something, and now the others react.

THE QUESTION: How do you know all that?

BATMAN: I've spent years developing informational resources --

GREEN ARROW: I thought you just swung down from rooftops and cleaned bad guys' clocks.

BATMAN: Occasionally I do. That's approximately four percent of my activity. The rest of it is finding out things.

Writer Denny O'Neil was trying to make a point. Just because Batman's stories tend to emphasize the moments of frantic violence doesn't mean that's practically all he ever does! Those moments are likely to come after long hours of less flamboyant behavior as he uses good old-fashioned detective work to solve mysteries which have caught his interest. But the cerebral stuff doesn't look nearly so exciting on the comic book page, so writers tend to just quickly summarize most of the "lead time" which was necessary for Batman to know how to be in the right place at the right time to engage in the obligatory slugfest and then hand over his latest adversaries to the police!

(I'm a little surprised, though, that Green Arrow, who had already spent long years as a costumed crimefighter himself at that point in his continuity, hadn't realized that the occasional juicy news item about Batman beating up the Joker only represented the tip of the iceberg in how Batman budgeted his time. Unless Ollie was just being ironic?)

07. Pursuing One Long-Term Mission

"There's one target I'm really interested in attacking, in any way possible, until the problem is settled for good! If I just happen to stumble across other violent criminals along the way, I may take a few minutes to deal with them -- but I can't afford to waste time looking for random riffraff otherwise! Got to stay focused!"

Yes, sometimes the hero is obsessively focused on tracking down and punishing one person or evil organization. Making a clean sweep may take a long, long time, but he is strongly motivated to see it through. Of course such a large goal may also involve heavy use of Spy Tech, Detective Work, and other methods of learning enough to know where the enemy's vulnerable spots are in any given adventure.

For instance, back in 1980 DC introduced Tom Tresser, their first user of the heroic alias "Nemesis," who was dedicated to taking down a crime syndicate whose leaders were collectively called "the Council." Nemesis disguised himself as various people in his efforts to get in close to one Council member after another and find ways to bring each one down. That mission statement provided the backbone for all his stories of the next couple of years (mostly as a back-up feature in "The Brave and the Bold, with two full-issue team-ups with Batman along the way). In his last story of the Pre-Crisis era, Tom Tresser apparently died in a terrible explosion in the moment of triumph against the last member of the Council, and -- having finally completed his mission -- was not heard from again for about four and a half years before John Ostrander dusted him off for "Suicide Squad."

08. Answering Appeals

"Please! You're my last hope! I don't know where else to turn!"

Here the hero waits for the victim or other concerned parties to call his attention to a particular problem. I am told that way back in the Golden Age, the original Hourman (Rex Tyler) placed a newspaper ad in which he offered to use his powers to help those who needed his special abilities to solve a knotty problem.

I think Rex was offering to work for free (but I haven't read that Golden Age story, so I can't swear to the details of his ad.) But sometimes a hero is waiting for someone to offer to pay for his time and trouble in working on their case as a freelance bodyguard, investigator, or what-have-you -- and once he takes the case, he will give it his best. Heroes for Hire, the Power Company, Silver Sable's Wild Pack, Booster Gold, Mark Shaw (Manhunter), The Human Target, the Suicide Squad, and Firearm (an Ultraverse character in the mid-90s, if you didn't know) have worked along those lines.

09. On Patrol

"I feel bored -- time to hit the streets and poke around at random, hoping to find a violent crime-in-progress so I can derail it! Maybe a supervillain ripping open an armored car or something!"

It is truly amazing how often this one works!

Granted, sometimes a story starts out with a hero attempting this free-form approach, and then one of the other methods is used to actually bring about the major confrontation of that issue. Superman may be flying a routine patrol over Metropolis when his super-senses detect gunfire from below. Batman may already be out on patrol in the Batmobile when he hears a police report about a villain running amok, not too far away from Batman's current position. Spider-Man may be doing his web-slinging around Manhattan, just for fun, when someone suddenly attacks him, meaning to hunt him down and kill him for a bounty!

In all fairness, I should mention that sometimes a writer pointedly reminds us that "wandering round and hoping for the best" is not the most efficient way to catch dangerous criminals. For instance: When Harlan Ellison wrote a Batman story for "Detective Comics #567," the entire plot was about Batman's frustrated attempts to find an excuse to bust somebody that night, and his general lack of satisfying success!

(Batman did collar one little drug dealer, and then promptly got chewed out by the customer -- an undercover cop -- for messing up an ongoing investigation which was meant to lead the detective further up the supply chain so he could identify much bigger fish before the GCPD arrested everybody at once. That was a hollow victory at best.)

At the end of the story, Batman returned home and complained to Alfred that it was the worst night of his life!

10. Setting the Trap

"I'm betting that scumbag can't resist this big fat juicy target! When he comes into view, I pounce!"

In #05, "Lured," I pointed out that the villain may be seeking to get the hero to approach him on a battlefield of the villain's own choosing. The hero, of course, has the right to employ similar tactics to make the villain come to him.

The hero may use himself as very obvious bait, or he may disguise himself as someone else whom bad guys are likely to try to kill or abduct in the near future (The Human Target specializes in that one), or the hero may set up some other situation which a villain will hopefully find incredibly alluring, but will not assume has a superhero lurking in the shadows! (Granted, some villains have such swollen egos that they don't really worry about that point, because they're confident they can easily handle any hero who is likely to show up!)

Another approach overlaps with Detective Work. Some superheroes don't have the sort of material resources which Bruce Wayne and his ilk can muster to arrange a high-profile event from scratch, tailor-made to a certain villain's known tastes. Failing that, there's always the low-budget possibility of deducing what a certain villain already wants to do next (stealing a certain item or killing a particular person, for instance), and then just lurking in ambush for hours, praying that you understood the foe's agenda as well as you thought you did when you started this stakeout.

11. Sheer Coincidence

"Fancy meeting you here!"

This is the one where the superhero was making no effort to find a villain to fight, and the villain was not planning to attract a superhero's attention today . . . and yet, thanks to dumb luck (or "the mysterious workings of fate," or whatever catchphrase you prefer), they suddenly meet in the same time and place anyway!

This one probably happens almost as often as "On Patrol" -- which is incredible, when you think about it.

What are the odds that if a superhero goes on vacation to a tropic isle, he'll just happen to stumble across a villainous conspiracy or rampaging monster?

Or that if he travels to a small town to visit an old friend or relative, a murder will occur during the hero's brief stay?

Or that if several English-speaking heroes in plainclothes are taking a French class in Paris, some of their fellow students will coincidentally be supervillains, also in plainclothes?

In real life, you might say the chances of any of those problems arising at a moment when you just happened to be visiting a usually-peaceful environment were vanishingly small, so why worry about it? But in the worlds which our beloved superheroes inhabit, the laws of probability appear to function in an entirely different fashion from what we take for granted! (And no, I'm not even talking about stories involving those few heroes who explicitly have the power to distort the probabilities! With them, it would only be remarkable if unlikely things didn't happen at the drop of a hat!)

I am reminded of the time in "The Amazing Spider-Man #4" when Spider-Man had recently tussled with Sandman for the first time -- and had been humiliated, finally running away after his mask was torn open. (Stan Lee loved to have Spidey conspicuously fail the first time he faced a new villain . . . then regroup, belatedly develop a more intelligent plan than "I'll punch his lights out in ten seconds flat!", and go on to victory in the stirring rematch!)

The following day Peter Parker had to attend high school classes, so hunting for Sandman would presumably have to wait until late afternoon or evening. However! Sandman just happened to enter that same high school in an attempt to shake the police off his trail for a bit, and just happened to make his way into the very classroom from which Peter was briefly absent on an errand for the teacher, and just happened to start trying to bully the school principal into issuing a high school diploma for Flint Marko (since he had never completed high school before becoming a hoodlum). The principal flatly refused, which didn't go over well -- but he was saved from serious harm by the timely arrival of Spider-Man, bursting into the room after hearing the commotion and doing his quick-change act!

That's right -- of all the buildings in the Big Apple which Sandman could have picked as a place to hide, and of all the rooms which he then could have entered within the building he picked . . . he inadvertently ended up in the classroom to which Peter Parker would be returning any minute now! How's that for Sheer Coincidence?

Not that the improbability of the situation bothered me at the time I first read the story as a mere slip of a lad, and not that it really bothers me today, either! But when I wanted an amusing example of an incredibly coincidental encounter in a "classic" story, it sprang to mind!

Well, those were all I came up with on my own. If you think I completely overlooked another approach to the problem of finding someone to pummel with a clear conscience, please speak up! Of course it always helps if you can provide specific examples so I can better visualize what you're talking about.

As promised above, here are some links to many previous pieces I've perpetrated over the last few years, comprising what I have come to think of as my Numbered List series. Every once in a while it amuses me to think about some odd aspect of the superhero genre, and to try to list and explain all the different approaches I can remember for that sort of thing, or all the different reasons that ridiculous things keep happening.

12 Motives for Killing a Comic Book Character
17 Excuses for Bringing Back a Dead Character
16 Types of Retcons
19 Ways to End a Superhero's Romance
22 Ways to Show a Superhero Killing Someone
9 Categories of Continuity
5 Types of Superhero Team Members
Secret Identities: 10 Ways to Unspill the Beans
Superhero Finances: 10 Situations
13 Reasons to Use a Deathtrap
14 Functions for a Superhero Costume
10 Types of Superhero Successors
14 Ways to Rehabilitate a Disgraced Hero
14 Motives for Becoming a Superhero
12 Tricks for Keeping Superheroes Young
13 Reasons to Quit the Superhero Racket
12 Rationales for a Hero-Versus-Hero Slugfest on the Cover
What To Do With a Supervillain After You Catch Him: 12 Options
14 Motives for Becoming a Supervillain

14 Answers to “Why So Many Retcons?”

10 Types of Comic Book Forum Weirdos

Sony opens idyllic new retail store in Nagoya, Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Matt Cutts / Gadgets, Google, and SEO:
Clarifying a couple points  —  [Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion.  I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.]  —  Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google's Arrogant Leaders.

Nigel Slater visits Suffolk – and returns with a batch of smoked food recipes

Even before you turn into the narrow opening that is Baker's Lane, you spot the winding trail of grey smoke against Orford's white winter sky. Turn sharp right, and you see the rickety smokehouse, as black as tar, leaning drunkenly against the side of the open shop, with its noticeboard of local events and Gillian Eustace's romantic watercolour of the same scene on an altogether sunnier day.

Richardson's smokehouse is one of several in this part of Suffolk, originally started as a way of preserving the local mackerel catch, and now a source of all manner of smoked fish and meat to locals and visitors alike. Smoking food has been in the area's blood for centuries, just as it has in the Highlands of Scotland. Business is thriving too, (a local company, Pinney's, has just opened a smart new shop on Orford's small, busy quay that is also worth a look). But it is the "mom 'n' pop" simplicity of Steve Richardson and Veronica Buckley's diminutive smokery and shop that appeals to someone who also tends to potter along in his own particular way.

The scent of wood smoke has always intrigued me. The scented candles at home smell not of tuberose but of the fireplace. The ball of tarred string in the gardening cupboard has an addictive smoky quality that insists I pick it up and sniff it each time I open the door. And I value smoke for its nostalgia quotient too, that whiff of the garden on the day after bonfire night, visits to rambling country houses with fireplaces the size of my kitchen and of the Gypsy children who used to get on my school bus each morning filling the old coach with the essence of their bonfire. Any food that smells of it is certain to get this cook's attention.

An untidy pile of fat oak logs is heaped on the floor of the Richardson's yard. Steve reckons they might just last a week. Each pile has to be humped and chopped by hand. He insists on oak and will never have any truck with the modern commercial alternatives. Now is the quiet season for the bloaters, trout and salmon that hang in one of the two tar-black rooms, but come summer, there will be queues outside. Even on a stiff February day there is a steady stream of callers for Veronica Buckley's mackerel pâté and venison sausages, and desperate pleas for more fishcakes. "Sorry, not today." Regulars brave the ice and frost for the smoked chorizo and duck breasts, though how the proprietors cope with the cold in the open-fronted building in winter is anyone's guess (after a couple of hours I was so frozen I took off to next door's Crown and Castle for the comfort of a parsley-flecked fish pie and a roaring fire).

While my initial interest is with the products hanging up in the two intimately proportioned smoke rooms, it is impossible not to notice the long, ongoing love story among the kippers. "We are business partners now," says Roni firmly, even though it is quite clear they adore one another. She admits to a few ups and downs over their 30 years here, first as a couple and then as a company, which you get the feeling is something of an understatement. The rickety smokehouse could tell a tale or two.

Veronica is known to all except Steve as "Roni" or "Ron". "Steve hates it," she laughs, "he always uses my full name." The smokehouse at Orford has been in Steve's family for three generations. His grandfather preserved local fish here and their son is keen to take it on when Steve and Roni retire.

When you look at the rows of beautiful ochre game, plates of pork and apple sausages and links of chorizo, it seems odd to think this tall, slightly gruff Suffolk man started out as an engineer, earning good money on the oil rigs, rather than the artisan he is now. It took the shock of redundancy, followed by a swift kick up the backside from an exasperated Roni – "he drove me mad hanging round the house all day, so I sent him back to live at his grandparents' house" – to get Steve lighting up their disused smokerooms. It must have been like starting up a classic car after years on bricks in the garage.

At first he smoked his daily fish catch, the two of them meeting up to hawk it around the local pubs. "To be honest it was a bit of pub crawl," admits Roni, and you can see them reeling home, having swapped their kippers for more than a few pints of Adnams. But the reputation for the quality of their softly smoked kippers and mackerel grew and soon they decided to open the stall next to the smokehouse.

I suppose it was inevitable that the list grew from what Steve had on the end of his line and soon they were experimenting with everything from whole pheasants to heads of garlic. The smoker was up and running, so why not see what happens when you hang a row of partridge or slide a half stilton on the top shelf of the smokehouse and leave it for six days. (Answer: something that looks like a giant pork pie.)

I say smokehouse but there are actually two side by side. The first is a cool smoker, for ingredients that are usually cooked later by the customer so require smoking but not cooking. The second room, the hot smoker, is for anything likely to be eaten without further cooking once you get it home. Kippers get a bit of both treatments – they are gutted, brined for a couple of hours, then cold-smoked overnight before being given a short final blast in the hot section. Steve has perfected a system where the fish retains as much of its oil as possible, leaving the flesh moist and sweet. Rather than hanging, they get their final treatment on flat racks that allow them to hold on to their precious oils.

The sight of the moist flat fish, their skin glistening silver and gold, leads to a discussion on the method of cooking. "I hope you don't jug them," says Roni, who quite clearly disapproves of the popular method of lowering kippers into just-boiled water to cook them. "They lose all their oil that way," and I mentally change how I plan to cook the day's purchases. I am assured that a brief ride in the microwave gives the best result. Not being a microwave kind of a cook, I will just have to take my chances under a hot grill.

The effect that oak smoke has on food is subtly different to that of other woods. In my house, smoked goodies often come out at lunchtime on a Saturday, laid out in their paper, a sort of smokehouse picnic. There will be soup of some sort, and maybe a bowl of crunchy slaw (wonderful with a clove of smoked garlic in the dressing) and then maybe a whole mackerel in its skin, a link or two of sausage or maybe slices of wood-infused chicken. For no particular reason I associate such flavours with the cold months. Perhaps it is the hint of the fire left at the heart of the food, or the singed edges on a fist-shaped lump of ham hock. Who knows? And no matter how good the trout or the duck that has been inside the smokers of Orford, I still want to cook with them, crumbling mackerel into a potato gratin; tucking smoked garlic inside a roasting chicken; tossing a few slices of sausage as Roni showed me into a weekday pasta supper. Yes, such delicacies are for eating in their naked simplicity, but good for the cook in us, too.

I had been here once before, almost a decade ago, and came home with a purchase of their shimmering pink and gold smoked trout. On that occasion, I wimped out of the smoked Long Clawson stilton, which I believed to have been smoked for six hours. "Six days, more like," laughs Roni, who finally gets me to try some. Up to this point I have been less than open-minded about smoked cheese. I have always found it smacked of too much smoke and not enough of cheese. One smoked cheese had often tasted pretty much like another. Until now.

The stilton here is a subtle revelation and I suspect it is this subtlety that is the clue to much of the couple's success. At home, I crumbled the mahogany-skinned cheese into a salad of red cabbage and some seriously sour pickled onions. A shot of pure gold on a grey winter's afternoon.

Steve and Roni are particularly proud of the ham hocks from local pigs, which arrive ready smoked and are then marinated in black treacle and cider. They are boiled, then flash-roasted till their edges turn the colour of molasses. It is true they resemble blackened elephant's feet, but only to look at. One of these has been the cornerstone of my cooking this week, my host's recipe for a very basic but gorgeous stew with potatoes and lentils. I have often used a ham-hock soup to keep the cold at bay, but the smoke adds another dimension, altogether deeper and more characterful.

Whether it is a brace of quail or local fish, the day's smokings are listed on a blackboard at the entrance to the shop. Despite the trays of oak-coloured whole mallard, hot smoked pigeons, chickens and duck breasts; haddock, whole trout and bloaters, Steve sorely misses the local eel that has been a mainstay of their business for years. Rarely does a day go by without someone asking about it. Only when the local reservoir is up and running again will it return to the menu.

Passing round toast thickly spread with the most heavenly smoked cod's roe I have ever eaten, he looks off into the distance towards the pile of logs that give heart and soul to his products and to his working life, no doubt working out whether it will last him till the end of the week

Click here for Nigel Slater's smokehouse recipes

• Food & drink

An old south London boozer gets a dramatic new lease of life as the chef behind the Eagle lands in Stockwell

The Canton Arms, 177 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 (020 7582 8710). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £75

There is one item served occasionally at the Canton Arms, a re-opened pub in Stockwell, south London, which best sums it up. That is the foie gras toastie. It is the meeting place of scuzz and appetite, the logical answer to the question: "What do you get if you cross a real old boozer in one of London's more energetic districts with a bunch of greedy people?" That the Breville sandwich toaster, which is to Stockwell what the Smeg oven is to Dulwich, should have been turned to such a purpose fills my congested heart with glee. For those who want to rant at me about fattened goose liver, go find someone who's interested. From endless conversations with chefs it's clear to me that, in the grisly business of animal husbandry, properly administered gavage is not deserving of any particular bleating. And anyway, I was tormented by two guard geese that my parents kept when I was a kid. Eating their liver is my revenge.

Except it wasn't available the night I went. They were fresh out of foie (though trusted friends say it is great). Instead I tried the haggis toastie, the crisped white bread giving way to something peppery and dense and meaty all the way from Dundee. That bar snack could also stand as a marker for this pub, which is a co-production between people involved with the Anchor and Hope in Waterloo and Great Queen Street in Covent Garden. In the kitchen is Trish Hilferty, alumnus of the Eagle in Farringdon and the Fox in Shoreditch, all of which name-dropping speaks of a hugely attractive type of food: rustic, solid, big flavours, no ingredient frottage. That is exactly what you get. To see it spread to this quieter corner of town is a marvellous thing. Not least because I live a mile away.

One achievement is that the team has managed not to chase the old clientele out. This isn't some gussied-up, ersatz version of a pub, new scrubbed for the emerging middle classes. It remains what it always was, with a bar at the front full of regulars deep into their pints and the dining room out back. They've given the place a lick of paint but done little else. The menu is admirably short, with four starters and mains supplemented by a couple of specials.

It was one of those specials that we chose: the six-hour braised shoulder of blackface mutton for four, at £48. No matter that there were only two of us. We were a big two, and we reckoned we were equal to the task. It arrived as a casserole dish, a folded tea towel placed underneath as a heat mat, so we could help ourselves. The sheep had been taken to that point when it could be carved with a spoon, the liquor speaking of a virtuous interplay between aromatics and meat. It is true that this was something I not only could make myself, but had literally made myself just two weeks before. However, it requires some effort, and I was grateful that Hilferty was the one taking the strain. It came with pickled red cabbage, still with its crunch, and new potatoes. It was proper dinner.

Our starters needed only to play a supporting role, but they did so much more than that. The house terrine, thick and dense, served with still-warm Melba toast and cornichons, was an exemplar of its kind, especially so at £5.40. Even better were softened leeks, under the classic tangy sauce gribiche – a mayonnaise-style sauce, punched with chopped pickles, a julienne of boiled egg and fresh green herbs – that had me sweeping around the plate with the edge of my fork.

We finished with a startlingly light treacle tart and "little chocolate pot", the only desserts on offer. Such brevity shows extreme and very welcome self-confidence. The mostly French-Spanish wine list starts at £12.50 a bottle and offers significant choice below £30. It is, like the entire operation, without pretension; they are absolutely not trying to be all things to all people. They are only trying to be themselves. Unlike with many places I review, I will definitely be returning, probably often. Hell, that foie gars toastie just has to be tried.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place

It was only last autumn that a law was passed barring dodgy restaurateurs from using tips to top up staff pay to the minimum wage. Now the government has launched a campaign on the issue. With the law change, a code of conduct was introduced by which employers are meant to announce publicly what happens to tips. If they don't, us punters are now supposed to ask before tipping. While it feels like law enforcement on the cheap, the cause is unarguable. So before you cough up the extra 10%, find out where it's going.

• Restaurants
• Restaurants

The New Yorker's theatre critic has divided US theatregoers with a furious assault on Irish writer Martin McDonagh's hit new play

Controversial playwright Martin McDonagh is used to creating headlines in Britain and Ireland with his dark tales laced with black humour and flowing with stage blood.

So his attempt to crack the American market with his first play set in the US has caused an understandable stir on Broadway, where Christopher Walken has been persuaded to play the lead role. But trying out an American setting as opposed to an Irish one is proving a challenging exercise.

The play, A Behanding in Spokane, has a typically bleak and violent McDonagh premise: an ageing killer, played by Walken, is looking for a severed hand that he lost many years ago, then he meets a couple of con artists in a dingy hotel room who tell him they have the precious appendage.

Some reviewers have judged that McDonagh – whose other plays include The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman and who also directed and wrote the hit film In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell – fails to understand the American psyche as well as he does that of his fellow Irishmen. "He seems to have lost his hitherto unerring sense of direction in the busy, open country of the United States," wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times. USA Today called it: "...hardly McDonagh's most fully realised effort". Then there was the New Yorker. In an extraordinary and withering review, the magazine's theatre critic, Hilton Als, laid into the play for being overtly racist. "I don't know a single self-respecting black actor who wouldn't feel shame and fury while sitting through Martin McDonagh's new play," began Als's review, which is probably one of the most negative pieces of theatre criticism produced by the magazine in recent years.

Als, who is black, took umbrage at the play's use of racist insults by Walken's character, who is openly and proudly prejudiced. "A Behanding... isn't in the least palatable; it's vile, particularly in its repeated use of the word 'nigger'," Als wrote. He then went on to compare the play's lone black role, Toby – played by Anthony Mackie, the star of The Hurt Locker, to the racist caricatures of black Americans that populated American cinema in the 1920s and 1930s. "The caricature he [McDonagh] presents in Toby, the young black male, as a shucking, jiving thief can't be excused," he wrote, before lamenting that he believed that Mackie and other black actors have to take such roles in order to get higher-profile work. "The sad fact is that, in order to cross over, most black actors of Mackie's generation must act black before they're allowed to act human," Als wrote.

Als appears to be the only major critic who reacted to the play's racial themes so viscerally. Few other reviews paid its use of racist language much attention, instead focusing on Walken's performance, which has been widely praised amid early whispers of Tony awards. But Als's remarks certainly hit home with the play's British producer, Robert Fox. "It was absolutely vindictive. Although Hilton Als's comments are meaningless in the scheme of things, because the show is doing very well, I think his remarks were entirely inappropriate and irresponsible," Fox told the Observer.

Fox said he thought Als's criticism was in itself an injection of racism where none was merited. "It was racist in that it was racially intolerant to write those things. He doesn't identify himself [in the review] as a black writer. I think it is extraordinary. I know people who have written to the New Yorker about it already. It is completely out of order," Fox said.

Als did not reply to emails or an interview request from the Observer. Nor did the theatre or Mackie have an official reaction. "We have no comment, nor does Anthony Mackie," said a spokeswoman for the production.

Some Broadway experts, however, agreed that, while the work does contain racially provocative material, it is unlikely to cause widespread offence, especially with audiences there to see Walken. "I can understand why an African-American may approach the play with a little reticence, but I don't think that is McDonagh's intent," said Dan Bacalzo, managing editor of Theatremania, a top New York theatre website.

Bacalzo defended McDonagh's right to put racist language in the mouths of one of his characters as he tries to take on American themes. "For Americans race is more important than class, so the material is appropriate for him to tackle when dealing with America," he added.

• Race issues
• Theatre
• United States

With 400 million users, will the social networking service end up eating itself?

Is Facebook now "too big to fail"? I don't mean in the sense that the taxpayer would have to pick up the pieces if it went under, but in the sense that the social networking service has achieved a position of such dominance in the online ecosystem that its eclipse is unthinkable. Is Facebook, in other words, the next Microsoft or Google?

The question is prompted by a couple of milestones recently passed by Facebook. The first is that it now has more than 400 million members. The second is industry gossip predicting that its revenues for 2010 will exceed a billion dollars. Other straws in the wind are estimates of the size of the "Facebook economy" – ie the ecosystem of applications, services and products that has evolved around the service; and the moral panics it now triggers in the mainstream media – a sure sign that they fear a competitor.

In the real world, if an enterprise – a bank, say – becomes "too big to fail", then that's a failure of regulation because it means that normal competitive forces have been disabled. A capitalist economy can't function efficiently if enterprises are immune from the consequences of their mistakes. That's the "moral hazard" that the Governor of the Bank of England was so keen to avoid when the banking crisis first broke.

In the online world, the pressure exerted by network effects – ie the way the value of a product or service increases in direct proportion to the number of people who use it — constantly threatens to produce winner-takes-all outcomes. It's one of the paradoxes of networking technology that the aggregation of billions of free choices made by millions of free agents can lead inexorably to the emergence of a single, monopolistic behemoth. We saw that with Microsoft's dominance in the operating systems and office software markets; we saw it again with Google's dominance of the market for search and query-based advertising. Are we now seeing it with Facebook in the social networking sphere?

History suggests not. In the world of technology even giants can stumble – or fail. Once upon a time AOL was the reigning online behemoth. At its peak in the 1990s it had 30 million paying subscribers (which at the time was a significant proportion of the online population in the US and Europe) and thought itself big enough to take over Time Warner. There was even a schmaltzy movie – You've Got Mail – based around its email service. Now it's a business-school case study in hubris.

AOL was also a study in corporate strategy from which the Facebook founders learned avidly. Initially they conceived of their service as an AOL-type "walled garden" – which implied trying to keep subscribers inside that controlled space. If one of your Facebook friends sent you a message then you had to be logged in to read it.

When the irritations of that became apparent, the Facebook server began sending messages to your normal email account telling you that your friends had posted messages – but you still had to log in to read them. Now you can reply to the messages from inside your usual email system.

By gradually breaching their walled garden, the Facebook founders have managed to avoid the fate of AOL – so far. Their boldest move was the launch of Facebook Connect – which allows external services like Twitter to interact directly with subscribers' Facebook accounts. What this means is that people can interact with their Facebook friends without being logged in to the site. This has triggered an avalanche of development as companies strive to cash in on the network effects of such a large subscriber base. The metamorphosis of Facebook into a platform on which other people do interesting stuff was not just a smart move; it was also a necessary one, because social "networking" is intrinsically self-limiting. If you have too few friends then people think you're a loser; but if you have too many, they think you're either a social slut or a self-publicist. As we know from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar – see My Bright Idea, page 26 – the cognitive capacity of the primate brain limits the size of the social network that an individual can develop. Last year a study by Facebook's in-house sociologist calculated that the average number of friends in a Facebook network is 120. And when it comes to real, intensive interaction, that number shrinks dramatically. It turns out that the average Facebook male interacts with only four people and the average female with six.

So if Facebook is to continue to grow, then it needs something more than social networking to sustain it. We are, in the end, just naked apes. Becoming a platform will keep it going for the time being. But it won't make it too big to fail. If you doubt that, just ask AOL.

• Facebook
• Google
• AOL

[Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion. I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.]

Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google’s Arrogant Leaders. The two assertions that used my comments as material were “Google’s wealth means Google ‘gets it’” and “Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow.”

Valleywag has either misinterpreted what I said, or I didn’t express myself clearly, because I don’t believe either of those claims. I’ll try to explain the intent of what I said, in case I wasn’t clear during the podcast. I’ll address the latter claim first (“Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow”), because I certainly don’t believe that “Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow.” I think Google benefits the most when users understand what Google is doing and why; I also think that user trust in Google (and by extension our privacy policies) is paramount to our success.

A good example is our Google Ad Preferences page. As one blog concluded a couple days ago: “Google’s Ad Preference Manager, with its persistent opt-out plug-in, offers precisely the kind of robust opt-out that privacy advocates have always demanded.” And it’s not that we’re shy about talking about privacy; Googlers Alma Whitten and Nicole Wong recently talked privacy for an Ars Technica article that came out earlier this week. It’s a long article, but an example useful fact is that if X is the number of people who visit the Ad Preferences page and opt out, 10X people don’t opt out and 4X people actually edit their categories to improve the targeting relevance of the ads they see. Let me say that again: four times as many people change their settings to make their ads *more* relevant than opt out of interest-based targeting. I think the Ad Preferences page is a good example where users get more transparency and control regarding their privacy.

Another example where Google helps your privacy (rather than sacrificing it) is the Google Dashboard. This is a single site that gives you an overview of what information Google has from various services, and allows you to edit and to manage settings. This is another example where Google is trying to give more information to users, not less. I could point out lots of examples where we try to debunk privacy misconceptions. Where we actively fight for our users’ privacy. Or where we talk about privacy and engage in debates about user privacy. And of course there’s Google’s full privacy center (with videos!) at http://www.google.com/privacy.html . Suffice it to say, I don’t believe that Google “must sacrifice user privacy to grow.”

Okay, what about the other claim that Valleywag used me for: “Google’s wealth means Google ‘gets it’”? Ryan Tate wrote “It’s a truly bizarre moment, in which Cutts defends some horrendous management decisions based on Wall Street trades.” I don’t agree with that either, so let me try to clarify. Eric Schmidt joined the company in 2001. The first time I got to meet Eric was at the weekly TGIF meeting where he was introduced to the wider company. He answered questions for an hour, and I thought his answers were spot on. He was one of the original authors of lex, a well-known Unix utility that I had used in the past, so I knew that he was also a solid engineer and technologist. Schmidt also had experience at large companies (Sun and Novell).

All in all, I was very happy and impressed that Eric was joining Google. When I went home that day, my wife asked what had happened at work. And I replied with something like “I think the value of our stock options just went up a lot.” What I meant by that was that I thought Google had recruited the perfect person to lead the company from start-up to the next level. I still believe that. Eric has been a truly great CEO–and I’m not just saying that because for the last several years he has worked for $1 a year. Maybe I didn’t tell the anecdote well or clearly, but my intent was to explain that I think Eric Schmidt has been a great CEO right from the beginning of this decade, not to defend any decisions “based on Wall Street trades.”

If you want to listen to the full podcast, it’s available, but I hope this post helps to clarify.

Here in Austin, I just finished introducing SparkHelp, the project Mashable has decided to support for the Pepsi Refresh SxSW Challenge. We’re competing against two other teams over the next few days to help get our idea $50,000 in funding, which will help make it a reality.

After lots of great submissions from our readers, we settled on SparkHelp’s simple and timely concept that we think stands to make a huge social impact with the resources of Pepsi and our support.

Here’s how SparkHelp explains their concept:

“SparkHelp’s idea is to encourage local communities to band together with a Foursquare meets Craigslist application. The idea is simple: anyone can place a call for help and anyone can answer that call. Help can be sought for anything: fence repair, car repair, computer work, dog walking, etc.”

With the increasing popularity of location-based apps on smartphones, think about being able to turn on SparkHelp when you have a couple hours free to find a project in your neighborhood – from the simple helping a neighbor in need to helping build a local playground. This makes getting involved simple, timely, and free of any long-term commitment.

We think this vision can be realized with a $50,000 grant from the Pepsi Refresh Project, allowing the team behind SparkHelp – lead by Brian Milner – to build its website as well as the apps for all of the major mobile platforms.

The winner will be chosen based on which project gets the most tweets that include its own unique hashtag. Our hashtag is #RefreshMashable – if you believe in the SparkHelp concept, be sure to include it on all of your tweets until voting ends on Monday, March 15th, at 11:59 CT. You can follow the voting in real-time on the Refresh SXSW Facebook Page.

Also, if you’re at SXSW, your registration bag includes a “VOTE” button with room to write in the project you’re supporting – you can add the #RefreshMashable tag there as well (find me if you need a sharpie!). The SparkHelp team has also setup a Twitter account where you can track progress and activities. Thanks for your support!

Brian and I also got a chance to appear on the Derrick Ashong Experience on Oprah Radio earlier today to talk about the project. Here’s a snapshot:

Tags: pepsi refresh, sxsw, sxswi

TomTom iPhone app hits 1.3, gains real-time traffic and Google local search originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.

Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).

As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.

SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.

One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.

During today's SXSW keynote, social media research Danah Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so.

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Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead and users care about it - both online and offline - and often react quite violently when their expectations of privacy are broken.

Looking at the example of Google Buzz, which she called a "privacy fail," Boyd argued that Google didn't do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had.

Google's mistakes:

• Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world.
• Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn't want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz.
• Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to.

To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don't necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups.

It's also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there - while you don't expect others to be there - and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends.

Users generally don't handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was "everyone." People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn't understand the privacy settings.

Public by Default, Private by Effort

By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences - something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators.

Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn't mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook's news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place.

• There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users.
• Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn't mean they want to be seen.
• Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.