Spaghetti alle vongole in bianco
If I were a condemned man, I’d request a large helping of Spaghetti alle vongole in bianco for my last meal. Vongole are clams, and in bianco means that it’s the white wine sauce version rather than the tomato-based version. The tomato one is perfectly nice; I just prefer the white wine version.
There are two basic approaches to this dish, one for fresh clams and one for bottled ones. If you’re lucky enough to have easy access to fresh clams, don’t hesitate to use them, but don’t deny yourself this dish if they’re not available. I rarely have the luxury of fresh clams, but luckily my local Turkish shop stocks large jars of vongole in brine, and they work very well. Here’s my recipe.
First, put a large pan of water on to boil. Don’t salt it yet (it will boil quicker this way).
While the water is heating up, get your largest frying pan (or a wok) on another ring and heat some extra virgin olive oil in it over a medium heat.
Take half a head of garlic and skin and roughly chop the cloves. Put them in the oil. The garlic should gently fry, but absolutely do not allow it to brown. I like a bit of spice in this dish, so chop a fresh red chilli (the red flecks really add to the visual appeal in the finished dish) and add it to the garlic. The type of chilli and whether you leave the seeds in are up to you. You don’t want the spice to overpower the flavour of the clams, but you want there to be a noticeable bite. If you don’t have fresh chilli, classic dried peperoncini will do just fine.
Once the garlic has fried for a few minutes (again, taking care that it doesn’t begin to brown), open a bottle of dry white wine and pour a healthy glug of it into the frying garlic. Turn the heat up a little now, so that the wine begins to bubble gently; you want it to reduce a little bit, but not so much that it is sticky or boils away.
I tend to pour most of the brine from the bottled clams in at this stage too. It really enhances the breath of the sea flavour that you’re looking for. If you do this, the bubbling sauce smells like a garlicky rock pool at this stage. Good enough to eat already, in other words.
Put the clams into a sieve, and give them a rinse under a cold water to wash away any grit or bits of shell that may have made it through the bottling process. Hold them back for now.
As soon as the pasta water starts boiling, give it a generous dose of salt (nothing worse than under-salted pasta) and put a generous helping of spaghetti in (at least 100g of pasta each, or as the Italians would say “un etto“; I tend towards 150g, “un etto e mezzo“). I tend to give the pasta a couple of good stirs during cooking just to make sure that it does’t stick. Make sure you cook it without a lid. Set the timer for at least one minute less than the recommended cooking time. The pasta will keep cooking once you drain it, and you absolutely don’t want it to overcook.
By now, the sauce should be bubbling away nicely. It should have reduce a bit, but should still be fairly liquid. If it looks like it’s drying out, add a few splashes of water to get it going again.
Roughly chop handful flat-leaf parsley, and add about half of that to the sauce. When there’s about one minute to go on the pasta, put the clams in the sauce and give it a thorough stir. Remember that the clams have already been cooked, so all you’re looking to do is to re-heat them. Overcook them and they become very rubbery and unpleasant; simply warm them through and they’re juicy and delicious. Now squeeze half a lemon into the sauce, taste it and correct your seasoning. You’ll almost certainly want to add salt even though the clams are fairly salty themselves.
Drain the pasta as soon as the timer goes off. As soon as it’s drained, plonk it into the sauce (this is why you need a big saucepan) and mix it thoroughly with some tongs. Get it off the heat as soon as you can once it’s mixed. Serve on plates or bowls.
Now for the controversial bit. Do yourself a favour and grate some fresh parmesan over the dish. Italians will think that this is bonkers, and many restaurants will actually refuse to bring you the cheese when asked, because they’ve been brought up to think that cheese and fish must never be combined, but they’re wrong. Lobster Thermidor is a classic example of a great dish that combines seafood and cheese, and there are many others. Parmesan works well on Spaghetti alle vongole because it’s rich in umami, and so are the clams. It takes the dish to the next level, trust me.
Finally, sprinkle the remaining parsley over the plates and grind over some black pepper. Serve with the remainder of the wine you used for the sauce and some rustic bread to mop up the sauce.
Enjoy!
Lasagne
On New Year’s Eve I cooked my tried and tested lasagne for our very good friends. It’s not the first time I’ve cooked it for them, and they’ve liked it every time I’ve cooked it, this time so much that they asked me what recipe I use. The answer is that I don’t: it’s a personal method that I have developed and refined over many years. Refined might not be the best word: my goal is to create a very big, umami-packed flavour. Every change I’ve made has been in the service of this goal.
A word about ‘tradition’. I love Italian food, but I abhor the typical Italian attitude to innovation in food. For example, one of my favourite things is to sprinkle fresh parmesan over spaghetti alla vongole in bianco. Italians will tell you that you should never put cheese on fish, but this is just total bollocks, a respect for tradition over taste. Both parmesan and clams are umami packed, so the combination is ideal. Accordingly, you will not find here an ‘authentic’ lasagne recipe. I don’t think such a thing is either possible or desirable.
I have found that the best results come from using a mix of minced beef and pork. I use roughly three times as much beef as pork. The key is to brown both these meats adequately, not just to turn them grey. An important part of the flavour of the finished dish comes from caramelising the meat, so I tend to use a steel wok on the highest heat my hob can produce with a very small amount of light olive oil. The oil should be so hot that there are swirling ribbons in it and smoke pouring off it. Brown the meat in very small batches, and make sure you break it down as you do so so that it is very granular. This is particularly important with the minced pork because it tends to clump into big popcorn sized pieces. You don’t want big gobs of meat in the finished dish.
I have a big (very big – it almost takes up the whole oven) casserole dish that I put the browned meat in, gradually building up the quantity as each batch is finished. While this is happening, I chop some onions very finely. As with all the vegetables I put in the dish, the key is that they should be so finely chopped that they disappear in the finished dish. If I use around 1kg of meat, I tend to use 2-3 red onions, depending on size. Once the meat is browned, fry off the onions in the same pan. Don’t worry of they burn ever so slightly; that just increases the umami potential.
While they’re frying, finely chop some celery stalks – I tend to use about 3 or 4 based on size. Again, make sure they’re chopped very fine. I look to have pieces no more than about 2mm cubed if I can manage that. I find the best way is to cut the celery in to thin strips first and then chop crosswise.
Once the onions are browned, put them in the casserole with the meat and then fry off the celery in the same pan (the wok, for me). Make sure you scrape out the last of the onions; you don’t want them turning into carbon as you cook the celery. While the celery is sweating, chop 3 or 4 carrots into the same sized cubes. Put the finished celery in the casserole and then fry off the carrot.
While the carrot is cooking, finely chop 5 or 6 fat cloves of garlic and add to the carrots. You do not want the garlic to burn at all. As soon as the garlic has fried a bit, put the carrots and garlic into the casserole. Give it a good mix while you’re at it.
Now for the final bit of pre-cooking. Very finely chop 2 or 3 chicken livers; again, we’re looking for cubes of about 2 or 3mm, no more. Season the livers with a good pinch of salt and then fry them over a high heat int he wok with a little oil. Again, ensure that the garlic is completely gone before you do this, or you’ll burn it and introduce an acrid taste.
The livers won’t take long at all – two minutes maximum. When they’re done, throw them in the casserole. Now, crack open a bottle of red wine and deglaze the wok. Once you’ve got all the meaty scrapings off the sides, chuck the wine and scrapings into the casserole.
Ensure that your oven is heated to at least 210C or higher if you like. I tend to heat it to 230C, but it’s up to you. I’ll say a bit more about that in a bit.
We’re nearly there with the preparation. I used to use tomato puree in my ragù but now, thanks to my friend Chris, I use passata instead. Napolina do it in 500g cartons – I tend to use two of them, or if you’re particularly energetic you could make it yourself. I find that it gives a slightly cleaner and fresher taste than the heavier puree. Open the cartons and pour them into the casserole. Open a couple of cans of tinned plum tomatoes and empty them into the casserole as well, and roughly crush the tomatoes against the side of the casserole. At this stage I chop up a couple of chicken stock cubes and put them in too, or you can use Knorr Stockpots, or even your own chicken stock if you’re more organised than me. (Top tip: freeze your chicken stock in ice cube trays and then decant into a freezer bag for homemade stock cubes.)
Now, grate a good quantity of nutmeg into the casserole. I use at least half a piece, if not more. Nutmeg is the characteristic flavour of cooking in Bologna, and you don’t want to stint on it. Grind a good quantity of black pepper in too. Chuck in a very good quantity of Maldon salt, although don’t worry if you haven’t given it enough; you can always adjust at the end of cooking. Bung in a small handful of dried marjoram or oregano too. Finally, put the rest of the bottle of red win into the casserole and give everything a really really good stir.
Well, not quite finally. The last step is to put a single piece of star anise into the mix. I put it in the centre just under the surface so that I can locate it again easily. This is a tip I picked up from Heston Blumenthal’s programme on making the perfect Spaghetti Bolognese, and it works brilliantly to boost the umami potential. When I first used it, I used too much of it and the dish actually tasted of aniseed, which I hate. As a result, I decided to only use one piece and only for a portion of the cooking time. I take it out after two hours, absolute maximum.
[Update: make sure you leave the lid off the casserole for cooking. You want the liquid to evaporate, not to make sloppy stew. Nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with sloppy stews, you just don't want a watery lasagne. Trust me.]
So, cooking time. Ideally, you want to cook the sauce for at least six hours, but you can get away with four if you have to. Some recipes (Delia’s, for example) tell you to cook the sauce on a moderate heat of about 160C, but I think this is a mistake. Cooking it at a higher temperature allows you much more timing flexibility and also produces a much more umami packed taste thanks to the little burned bits that develop on the surface of the sauce and where it meets the sides of the cooking dish. The vital thing is that you must stir it regularly, at least once per hour. Stirring more can’t hurt though, just don’t do it so often that the oven can’t maintain the target temperature. Be gentle with the stirring while the star anise is still in there; you don’t want it breaking into pieces and being impossible to remove again.
That’s it for the ragù. In four to six hours, the sauce will reduce, and you’re looking for a sauce with almost no liquid left in it. It should be very dry – the moisture for the lasagne will come from the béchamel sauce. Once you’ve finished cooking, allow it to cool and then adjust the seasoning. The goal is to not be able to taste the salt or the absence of salt. That’s the perfect balance. You’ll notice that the flavour just seems more intense when you’ve achieved that equilibrium. The resulting sauce should be very rich, almost too rich, and should feel like it’s sucking your cheeks in when you taste it. That’s the umami effect.
Now to prepare the rest of the dish. You can use a classic béchamel recipe, but only start it when you’re ready to make the dish up. I do mine by sight and taste, using about half a pack of butter, enough plain flour that the mixture with the butter becomes granular, let that cook for a minute or two, and then gradually stir/whisk in enough milk to produce a glossy, thickish sauce. Bear in mind that it will thicken substantially as it cools, so you actually want something slightly too runny at this stage. Grate in more nutmeg, and season with salt and black pepper.
On a couple of occasions, I’ve made my own pasta sheets for the lasagne, but I now think that’s a bit of a waste of time, and they tend to need so little cooking that at the extended time required to brown the top they overcook. I just get a large lasagne dish, and then put a layer of ragù, a layer of béchamel and then a layer of out of the packet egg lasagne. I never use lasagne verdi, but that’s a personal preference. I continue layering up until I’m out of béchamel – the last layer needs to be of béchamel, so don’t end up with a layer of pasta or ragù, or you’ll need to make more béchamel. You’ll probably have some sauce left over. Save it for spaghetti bolognese, or serve it on toast with some grated parmesan. Either is delicious.
Finally, I grate over enough parmesan to completely cover the béchamel layer. Now I whack it back into the oven for about half an hour at 210C. You want a lovely browned top layer and the rest of the dish to be piping hot. If your sauce is very dry, which it should be, you’ll end up with perfectly al dente pasta sheets too.
That’s it. I serve it with a very simple salad of peppery watercress in a classic vinaigrette and pour some robust red wine. Enjoy!
How Twitter Can Sort Out the #fixreplies #fail
Twitter changed the way that the @reply facility works overnight (UK time). Users are not happy, me among them. I can’t think how many people I now follow who I discovered through this mechanism. I’ve even met up with some of them face to face as a result of conversations started exclusively through Twitter. This is why Twitter is awesome and Facebook is not.
I feel like the electricity company has suddenly decided to change the current in my supply without telling me first.
They say that the setting is confusing and that only 2% of people use it. All I know is that every single person I’ve introduced to Twitter has found it baffling until they’ve turned the setting on. It’s not even the default option so, presumably, the 2% of people who do use it know that they’re doing so and want it that way.
Let’s also not forget that it was us – the early Twitter adopters – who invented the @reply mechanism in the first place. It’s our feature!
Here’s what Twitter have to do to sort it out:
- Restore the ability to set the value
- Restore it to its former value it for all users (the 2%) who had it on
- Consider moving it to some other tab in settings to make it clearer
- Consult on how to make that work
- Apologise for making the change in such a hamfisted way
- Let us get on with using Twitter in whatever way we see fit
If you haven’t already, join me in protesting by using the #fixreplies hashtag in a tweet.
Why Charles Arthur Should Read Things Before Slagging Them Off
Yesterday, my friend Shane Richmond sent me a draft of a blog post to comment on as he does from time to time. I thought it was excellent. Later, he published it on his Telegraph blog. It’s about how David Simon, creator of The Wire is an ‘amateur’ TV producer, in the sense that he didn’t train or do formal study to be one, and how he should be more willing to accept amateur journalism as a result. Simon writes about his early, somewhat fumbling, TV experiences on Homicide: Life on the Street at some length in a note in the UK edition of his brilliant book Homicide (which I reviewed on 26 Books last year).
Shane’s post got tweeted around on Twitter quite a bit and then, a few hours late to the party, super-troll Charles Arthur – technology editor at the Guardian – chipped in with what seemed to be a total misreading of Shane’s post.
Now, of course, David Simon is, in the strictest sense, a professional TV producer, which is to say that he gets paid to do it. But in another sense, he is indeed an ‘amateur’. Shane spells out what he means by using that word about half-way through his post:
But what puzzles me is Simon’s antipathy to the notion of amateur journalists. After all, he’s an amateur television producer. He wasn’t trained in the medium, didn’t work his way up from being a tea boy. Nor did his co-writer and co-producer Ed Burns. Burns was a policeman and teacher. Together they used their experience to craft a television show which explored the worlds in which they had worked. Their backgrounds were far more important than their training in the medium.
Here’s the timeline as far as I can reconstruct it (Twitter post times are adjusted for BST – the API reports them at GMT + 0, while BST is GMT + 1).
- 12:51: Shane publishes the post
- 21:21: Charles responds to someone retweeting it: “if @shanerichmond doesn’t know that David Simon has done utterly amazing journalism in his books, it’s his loss, not Simon’s.” – original tweet.
- 21:23 Shane replies: “@charlesarthur You haven’t read the post have you? – original tweet.
- 22:19 Tim Duckett says : “@shanerichmond @charlesarthur You two aren’t at it again are you? Do we have to send you both up to bed early?” – original tweet
- 22:21 Astonishingly, Charles reveals that he hasn’t actually read Shane’s post despite the fact that the original tweet he responded to contained a link to it. – “@shanerichmond send me a url, I’ll read it.” – original tweet.
- 22:38 Charles finally gets around to reading the post he’s been slagging off, and tweets the first part of his response: “Calling David Simon an “amateur” producer shows an astonishing ignorance of his earlier TV work, eg. Homicide; The Corner….” – original tweet.
- 22:39 Quickly followed by the second part: “…and on other points, the arguments aren’t complete. Is free is the best model, why don’t free papers suck up all adverts from paid ones?” – original tweet.
- Friday, 11:00 Charles responds to MJDodd (note that here, Charles has silently withdrawn his original accusation that Shane said David Simon was an amateur journalist, which was before he’d read Shane’s post): “@MJDodd yes, calling David Simon on The Wire an “amateur producer” indicates a quite astonishing level of lack of research.” – original tweet.
Before I get into this further, I have some interests to declare. A couple of weeks ago, I got so annoyed at the way Charles was gloating over the Telegraph‘s embarrassment over their Twitterfall experiment that I tweeted the following:
I’m astonished at the arrogance, hubris, and all-round cuntishness of Guardian journalists. @charlesarthur, for instance.
That tweet was picked up by Private Eye and erroneously attributed to the Telegraph’s Assistant Editor, Justin Williams. If you want a full run-down of the argument between Shane and Charles, have a look at Malcom Coles’ post That Shane Richmond / Charles Arthur Twackdown in full…
Another interest to declare. The Telegraph was a client of the web agency I used to work for; we built their blogging platform for them. Later I did some contracting for them. On the other hand, I loathe the Telegraph’s politics and am a regular Guardian reader.
And one final interest. I’m close friends with Shane. I first met him in January 2006. He wasted no time in telling me that The Wire was the best show on TV and got me hooked on it there and then. Since then we have watched episodes of The Wire together, listened to podcasts about it in the car and talked about it almost every time we see each other. He’s also urged me to watch Simon’s earlier series for HBO, The Corner (I haven’t done so yet). We also watched several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street together, finding it very disappointing and only a pale shadow of his later work, although to be fair, Simon didn’t have any real say in how the show was made. So, while I’m naturally sympathetic to Shane’s argument because he’s my friend, I also know how deeply he has thought about The Wire. Anyone who has read his blog knows how long he’s been making the opposite case to David Simon on newspapers – I’m not going to go into that side of his argument here.
If you want more than my word for how much research Shane has done into The Wire and David Simon’s career, then let me point you in the direction of a few of his posts and articles.
First of all is this article from the Telegraph of 22nd May 2007 (which, according to this post is almost a year before Charles even started watching the show). Shane’s article contains one of my favourite quotes about The Wire:
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love The Wire and those who haven’t seen it. Yet.
Then there’s his review of Raphael Alvarez’s The Wire, Truth be Told over on 26 Books from June 2007.
It’s also worth checking out Shane’s post on David Simon’s the ‘bible’ for the first season of The Wire.
I think that takes care of Charles’s claim that Shane’s research is faulty.
Now let’s look at Charles’s objection to Shane’s use of the word ‘amateur’. As Shane spells out in the paragraph I quoted above, and the fact that he placed the word ‘amateur’ in quotes in the title of his post, he’s not using the word literally. He understands that Simon gets paid for his work. He understands and acknowledges that he is supremely good at being a TV producer. He says in his Telegraph article that The Wire is the best show ever on TV, so we can assume that he thinks he’s better than all of the professional – i.e. career – TV producers out there.
Clearly, Shane uses the word ‘amateur’ in its original French sense. As Wikipedia puts it:
Translated from its French origin to the English “lover of”, the term “amateur” reflects a voluntary motivation to work as a result of personal passion for a particular activity. Among the thousands of amateurs who have made important contributions to science and technology are Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, and Gregor Mendel.
Edison, Darwin and Mendel are exalted company indeed. Describing someone as an amateur in the sense that Shane does is the exact opposite of an insult. It’s the highest compliment you can pay. Simon makes shows like The Wire because of his passion. Getting paid is a bonus.
Charles has form in confusing the meanings of words in the heat of an argument. During the Twackdown, he seemed unable to accept that he’d misused the word “eavesdrop”. Characteristic of the troll, he aggressively suggests that Shane doesn’t understand the meaning of the word – “Buy a bigger dictionary” – before later making the lame excuse that he was a bit tired in a comment on the Twackdown post.
When David Simon says that The Wire would be “something that Euripides might recgonise” you can trust that he’s actually read Euripides. Not so with Charles Arthur when he slags off a post. You also can’t expect Charles to accept when he’s wrong, unlike Shane. When challenged, Charles just ups the trolling ante.
It’s legitimate to take issue with Shane’s argument about the future of newspapers – assuming you’ve actually read the post of course – but you can’t accuse him of a lack of research or ignorance about David Simon’s work both in print and on TV, or that he misused the word ‘amateur’. I hope Charles will accept that and apologise. Maybe he should also consider reading things before slagging them off.
An Open Letter to Flavio Briatore and the Board of QPR
Dear Mr Briatore,
I’m not a lifelong QPR fan, but I’ve held a season ticket for several years, and for much of that time, the football has been dreadful. The facilities are no better: my seat has an obstructed view of the goal and the seats in front of me cut into my knees like razors. I’ve been to hundreds of games at Loftus Road, and I’ve travelled to Leeds, Manchester, Barnsley, Sheffield, Brentford, Southend, Gillingham, Swindon, Bristol and plenty of other places to support my team, often standing in the rain, more often than not seeing us get beaten. In the course of all this, I have spent thousands of pounds on tickets, travel, overpriced and low quality pies, access to the QPR World website, replica kit, car stickers, scarves, hats, gloves, mugs and matchday programmes.
Here’s what you might find difficult to understand: I loved it.
When, eighteen months ago, you and Mr Ecclestone announced that you would be buying QPR, I was cautiously optimistic. Here were people who were pragmatists, with a track record of success in sport, and a proven ability to turn also-rans into champions. I thought it was just what QPR needed if we (notice how I say ‘we’ – it’s my club too) were to ever get out of the stagnant position we were in. I could not have been more wrong.
Your decision to dismiss Paolo Sousa is the last straw and, as a result, I have taken the difficult decision to not renew my season ticket and to not attend any games next season. Let me be clear: I am, unlike many QPR fans, in the fortunate position of being easily able afford to buy the season ticket, I’m just choosing not to buy it because of your actions.
I’ve taken this decision because I believe it is the only message you will understand. Appeals to your sense of fairness, to the spirit of the club, to the faith shown by the supporters, all these things have no effect on you. What you will understand is empty seats, unsold tickets and a dodgy-looking P&L.
You’ve already suffered the embarrassment of seeing your new luxury seating area completely empty during recent games – seats you put in at the expense of long-time QPR fans with families. Now, I suspect will suffer the further indignity of seeing large parts of the stadium being empty as well.
In stark contrast to your own behaviour towards the various managers you’ve hired and fired in the last year and a half, I have publicly supported you and tried to make a case for what you say you are trying to achieve. But you have failed, because you have, with incredible arrogance, decided that the way to run a football club is whatever way you think is best, without any regard for the way other successful clubs are run. As a result, you have made the club into a laughing stock.
You act like a dictator, which is fine as far as it goes, but you forget that all dictators stand or fall on one thing: whether they can make the trains run on time. You are running a service that makes the bad old days of British Rail look like a model of efficiency.
None of this is helped by the way you refuse to address the fans directly, or to answer legitimate questions about the way the club is being run. That’s fine if everything is going well – people will put up with it – but not when things are going badly, or when your decisions consistently make things worse.
Let me be absolutely clear: my decision is based not on performances on the pitch. I’ve seen enough diabolical football at Loftus Road to put up with pretty much anything. No, I’ve taken this step entirely because of your highhanded behaviour towards fans, managers and players. I’d prefer it if we were rid of you and your friends, even if it meant us going back to the stone-age.
So: I will not spend one penny on QPR tickets or merchandise for the whole of the 2009-10 season, even if we make it to the playoffs or a cup final, and I will decide in April 2010 whether to extend my boycott for a further year. I urge all QPR fans to do the same.
Yours sincerely,
James Higgs
Customer services
This is the text of a customer service email we received complaing about… well you see if you can figure it out. The original ‘spelling’, ‘punctuation’ and ‘capitalization’ have been retained.
sorry to bother you but every time i try and log in i have to download popup blockers! someone is messing with the site and it has to stop right now with these chidish games! i’m not a kid any more so you lot just grow up! i put my email addy in then my pass word on normal internet explorer it comes up and all that but nowt happens then i have to download popup blocker so who ever is controling this site tel;l them to get a bloody life cause i’m sick to the back teetrh with them the stupid faggits! is that all they have to do all day mess around with p.c’s? they arn’t a toy you know! now bloody change your ways now!
Pen name confusion
I was wondering this morning why Penguin always print Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) when Isak Dinesen was a pen name. This is not their normal practice with other authors with pen names. For example, they don’t print Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) or Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot).
I still don’t know why they do it.
What’s in a name?
I just got back from a very pleasant excursion to South London; an oxymoron, I know. On my way I catalogued some quaint and some not so quaint shop signs.
The first one is lovely – it’s just down the Walworth Road from me: Mixed Blessings Bakery. Later on there was another nicely named bakery in Camberwell, this time on a more classical theme: Socrates Bakery.
Then there was Albertine’s, a pub. Not somewhere you’d have expected to bump into Proust though.
Next, and probably my favourite, was Innovations – Unravelling Potentials. You can see what they mean, but unravelling perhaps wasn’t the best word choice.
Finally, and the comedy kind of writes itself here, was Rimworld. Nice.
Honest job advert
While trawling the (uniformly awful) recruitment websites, I came across this rather too honest job description:
Future Flickr Account?
Photo credit: chrstphre
A sarcastic look at what might happen to Flickr if the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal goes through. More here.
