Comments Swedish police are investigating a case of an open can of surströmming which was hurled through the bedroom window of a 52-year-old Motala man. The strong-smelling local delicacy has a deserved reputation as a potent biological terror agent, so the offence is a very serious one. Just as serious as the comments:

Had a swedish colleague some years ago. He explained and then demonstrated to me the finest points of eating surströmming.

First you keep the freshly made can for half a year minimum. It's "good for consuption" only when the can starts to have bulges showing an increase of internal pressure. When the bulges stop increasing, it's good, which takes you to a year, year and a half old can.

Then you make a rye bread sandwich with butter, potatoes, onions and surströmming, potatoes and onions balancing the strong fish taste.

The "older" way is much simpler : get the fish on a plate, put onions and potatoes if you have them, dip with bread and eat along with firebrannwien ("spiced" vodka).

No herbs or color admitted, it should be grayish with a white counterpoint.

As long as you dislike the taste of surströmming, you keep on drinking and eating.

When you start thinking around the lines of "surströmming is not so bad", you have reached an optimum drunkeness point and you should avoid both surströmming and vodka until you get down a bit and enjoy the bliss (also, at this point most women will become more attractive to you... ).

If you suddenly like surströmming a lot, you are definetly pissed and should also refrain as you reached a dangerous point with a near future full of rotten fish and ugly girls (this is a direct quote of my friend).

Laurent_Z

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The Scandinavians sure know how to boggle the mind with fish. (Lutefisk is fish marinaded in lime (the drain cleaner Americans call lye, not the citrus fruit), by the way). I genuinely regret not having had the chance to try the stuff when I was in Oslo recently. I'm actually a vegetarian, but I'd have made an exception for something so bizarre.

Geoff Mackenzie

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Or pickled beluga. Yes, you heard me--it's whale skin/fat chunks in a kind of oil and left on an Alaskan shelf for, oh... a year will do.

Thank goodness I've never gone up to that part of the US.

Pyros

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Or, you can try the ultimate one:

Icelandic sour shark. http://www.isholf.is/gullis/jo/shark.htm

Best consumed with lots of Brannivin. The brand of this is "Svartadaudir" (Black death).

Other funny delicacies is norwegian Smalahovud - Sheeps head. The wool is burnt off and the head is cooked in the oven. It's served whole...

I have a theory that most countries creat an absolutely horrible delicacy that they press on visiting foreigners so they can watch the poor sods trying to eat while not running for the great white phone.

Johan-Kristian Wold

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Actually the idea there is to store the excess fish catches of summer in a coating of *ASH* so that the sodium in the fish is replaced by potassium in the ash. That way, the fish will not rot or ferment !! The fish is usually stored buried in the ground. Around the turn of winter, the stored fish is dug up and eaten for the rest of winter and into spring.

This process is also used in production of the Chinese "century eggs" !! However, this process aids in the conversion of sulphur compounds in the food to hydrogen sulphide in your tummy and, thus, making you a very unwelcome company in most places !! You may also be classified as WMD and treated accordingly !!

Ishkandar

In a bid to cater for those who experience armoire ardour, Marks & Spencer has launched a new range of lingerie models with "modern curves, soft-looking styling and durable hardwood feet". There is as yet only one model, available in fudge.

Absolutely what I was looking for , for a bit of heavy domestic use in the lounge. I think a comfortable position in front of the telly would be good so I don't miss my favourite programs whilst I'm indulging in heavy use.

Chris G

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All of a sudden the Asus Eee lady bores me - from now on The Register should find a way to have this model in as many stories as possible.

E.g. "eBay bans negative feedback from sellers" could be illustrated with this image because, of course, people sell lingerie on eBay. Stories about Apple could be illustrated with this image because women buy laptops. Stories about the National Programme for NHS IT could be illustrated with this image, because she looks a bit like a nurse.

A story about taser guns, or electrical weapons, would benefit from this image because, in my neck of the woods, we call M&S "Marks & Sparks". Royal stories = Spencer = Marks & Spencer. And so forth. That covers most of the bases. Paris Hilton = woman = Marks & Spencers lady. You're creative people - create! And enable!

Ashley Pomeroy

I'm afraid that's unlikely to fly, Ashley, although we are in talks with Paris Hilton for a similar deal. Watch this space.

Here it comes

I wouldn't mind rummaging in her draws!

Sorry - I'll get my coat.

Iain Gilbert

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Never tells you the important stuff. "sits perfectly in the contemporary living room" is all very interesting I'm sure, but does it lie down easily in the bedroom? I wouldn't buy one without knowing this.

TeeCee

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Hardwood feet are, I trust, not bloody freezing when she gets into bed.

Mr Larrington

We were sent a particularly marvellous example of the kind of tortuous mistreatment of language that can result from extended strategy boutique cross-fibre base-touching in the presence of far too much joss-stick smoke. It's possible there was something else fishy in the incense burners too. Enjoy Symbiotic Ephemeralization.

My Buzzword Bingo card spontaneously combusted and burnt my desk. I'd sue somebody or other if I could be bothered.

Les

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All it needs is random capitalisation of specific letters in random words, a few instances of "CyberAIntel" and "NEUKlearer" thrown in, and you could pass it off as a treatise written by amanfrommars!

Well I, for one, welcome our new gibberish-speaking overlords!

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Looks fine to me. "Can't see what all the fuss is about" might be a little simplistic but surely a serious attempt to re-invent a holistic language methodology deserves a more sympathetic treatment? It's not easy to enhance meaning-centred technologies whilst simultaneously retaining a radical, extended paradigm to disintermediate incompatible outcomes. Especially when the benefits of a harmonized, team-based culture (contd. p94)

Joe Harrison

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You don't understand it? As my old dad used to say:

A slight inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic closure of an optic, to an equine quadroped deprived of its sense of vision.

GrahamT

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My favourite term is pseudo-arbitrary. Awesome. It's good of them to point out that it would probably be inadvisable to attempt to create an infinite number of Symbiotic Innovation Nodes though; that could have been a real productivity killer if left unclarified.

Geoff Mackenzie

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Perhaps the wierdest thing about this document is that according to the title page at leaset it was written in Australia.

There was a time when when ausies would beat you into a pulp for using long words like "maramalade" and "corragated" in public.

What happened Bruce?

James Anderson

We ran a rather long article - too long, in fact, for some of you, and you let us know it - on the byzantine and cult-like practices that go on in the upper echelons of the Wikipediadministration. It led to a discussion on the very nature of news (don't ask us, we just do this for the beer money):

All news and information is biased because it comes from people. If they are on salary, they must please their employers, or at least avoid offending them. If they are writing for free, they will certainly please themselves, as bloggers and El Reg posters routinely do. If they are somewhere in between, like Wikipedia, they must hew to Wikipedia customs as enforced by the tribal elders or be suppressed.

What Wikipedia does is expose the social dynamics of a laudable attempt to somehow democratize the construction of "impartial news and information". The question is not whether the process is flawed: it obviously is, and always will be due to its necessarily social (and therefore political) nature. The real question is whether the Wikipedia process is likely, on average, to provide better (less-biased) information than we get from the mainstream, bought-and-paid-for media.

I, for one, appreciate the news about tussling over Wikipedia article edits because it proves that there is at least some translucency (if not transparency) to the process. Corporate marketeers and the mainstream media are professionally opaque in this regard, yet their news is routinely accepted and reported on here, so I think that it is a bit of a cheap shot for El Reg to snipe at Wikipedia as it frequently does.

That said, I don't consider the current article to be sniping, but simply an interesting window into a social enterprise that attempts to democratize the provision of unbiased information.

Marshall MacLuhan did us all a great favor by pointing out that "news from nowhere" is an illusion; lack of knowledge about how sausage is made is no guarantee of hygiene. In summary: I wish we all treated mainstream media with the same suspicion lavished on Wikipedia.

John Benson

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The problem with most articles on wikipedia is that the bias is hard to spot unless you already know the subject/content inside out. With mainstream media it tends to be more obivous and there will be other articles with a different bias making it easy to spot contentious areas.

Wikipedia results in a mess by combining the two and removing the cues we all use to help us decide for ourselves. With wikipedia the cults form because if you have no interest or contention with the vast majority of articles except your own pet areas, you can work on a quid pro quo basis to either viewpoint where contention exists resulting in a mixed democratic consensus, which shouldn't occour in an encyclopedia or a democracy. Planes taking off from conveyor belts would be fascinating if wikipedia wasn't computer/geek based to see how it played out.

peter

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The article was comprehensive, but it reveals very little. A page on a pretty harmless and insignificant cult is sub-par because its main editor is part of the cult. But then most Wikipedia articles are sub-par, particularly the ones of minority interest - like those on harmless and insignificant cults. This is mainly because of the incoherence and lack of effort which is to be expected from a free and freely-editable encyclopaedia. Where there is effort, it's naturally going to be because the author has a vested interest in a lot of cases (either pro or con).

If you want people to put effort into diligent research who have no vested interest in the subject, guess what? They're going to want money. So if you want reliability, pay for it.

Spleen

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Good article! A few requests

1) Please work in an uncomplimentary comment about a leading libertarian, Macs, or Global Warming/Climate Change (either pro or con) into any lengthy article. Surly there's room for a little something, and that'd add an extra helping of wackos.

2) By the link to the author's name could the Reg add a little icon displaying the author's "Reader Cynicism" level? I think it'd be a big time saver. Commentors could save criticisms displaying only mild amounts of stupidity for hacks with low RC levels, where they'll actually have some effect. Criticisms of remarkable stupidity could be saved for the most cynical hacks.

3) A pop-up box that appears before going to the second page of a 3+ page article. It could say "Warning: Long article!" and offer the choices "I want to continue reading." and "Take me directly to the comments, I'd rather offer an uninformed opinion."

Thank you.

Mike Hoagland

Some good ideas, Mike. We'll see about implementing them once the Paris Hilton deal's sorted.

Back next week. ®