Grim Up North?

Typical Bloody Scousers

You park the team bus outside Anfield on a Sunday and within minutes the wheels are off. (Now that our improbable “breakthrough” season has officially gone down the tubes, can Villa just return to mid-table mediocrity again, please? I can’t be doing with the misplaced hope.)

Read More

Bloke-tastic!

And now a post combining football and science: Imagine a robotic David Beckham six times smaller than an amoeba playing with a ‘soccer ball’ no wider than a human hair … with all of the action happening on a field the size of single grain of rice. Yes, it’s “Nanosoccer“: [S]occer nanobots, operated by human […]

Read More

Special End-Of-The-World Science Edition

Years ago, PooterGeek featured the “Exxxtreme Mini-Bears”, tiny, hardy, beautiful living creatures called tardigrades. Turns out they are even hardier than thought. Some of them can survive being sent into space. The “TARDigrades in Space project is, of course, going by the acronym “TARDIS”. How long before the BBC sues? This is also a lovely […]

Read More

I LOVE THE BLACK MUSIC

Recently, I was listening to a Marvin Gaye track via last.fm—is it just me or has their sound quality improved lately?—and I noticed this at the top of its user comments: white person wearing chinos on cruise ship LOVES THE BLACK MUSIC Which immediately made me think of Stuff White People Like, a blog that’s […]

Read More

Gravy / Train

Last week I travelled oop North to Wigan—TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE OF OUR POUNDS STERLING for a Standard Open Return on a smart, modern, and nausea-inducing Virgin Pendolino. There, I had to give (as I admitted to the audience) the hardest kind of talk: one where you stand in for someone who really knows […]

Read More

Ten Thousand Rolls In Blackpool Lancashire

Another storm, another surrealist beach installation: Ferry sheds thousands of biscuits Thousands of packets of chocolate biscuits have washed up on the Lancashire shore from a stricken ferry. The McVitie’s biscuits were being carried on lorries aboard the Riverdance, which ran aground off north shore near Blackpool on Thursday night.

Read More

Christmas Cuteness On Film

On Christmas Day, I posted a quick snap of my niece and nephew taken with my new freebie digital camera. I’ve just got some scans of developed film back from the lab so I can share a few steam-powered Christmas photos with you. Here’s Sam playing with one of his new remote-controlled dinosaurs: Sam and […]

Read More

A PooterGeek Appeal

I’ve been staying at my parents’ this weekend—thanks, folks—while I’ve been attending the National Wedding Show [of which more soon at the Wedding Photography Blog]. The show was on at the National Exhibition Centre, round the corner from their place. As a boy I never imagined that I’d grow up to spend working Saturdays, for […]

Read More

Shedding Preconceptions

I know more about science than either football or cricket. For my dad it’s the other way round. This means that our conversations about sport often lapse into arguments in which he’ll say something like, “Tom Finney would be a class above if he were playing today.” And I’ll say something like, “Do you know […]

Read More

Soft Southern Pulses

Yesterday I treated myself to a lunch of cod and chips from an eat-in/takeaway fish and chip shop in Brighton. I ate in. Having taken my order, the guy serving asked me if I wanted anything else. Nervously I requested mushy peas—a delicacy that only those living north of the Irony Curtain* truly understand. Amazingly, […]

Read More

Dis-missive

In a cunning flanking move, The Guardian responds to my post yesterday by publishing a letter from my Old Labour dad today. How can I sustain my free-thinking, post-Thatcherite, Left libertarian, public-private agnostic, open source-advocating online persona when my rellies are wandering around wearing metaphorical “Save Clause Four” T-shirts?: Maybe I’m naive, but what kind […]

Read More

Off His Back

You don’t have to be an Aston Villa supporter—or even a football fan (not that the two things are necessarily related)—to appreciate the miserable poetry of this eBay item description. It’s of a Villa away shirt dating from about a year after I could last reliably name all the members of the first team. [via […]

Read More

With Apologies To Monty Python

[Dull bell tolls. Ominous music plays. A young man dressed in black, carrying a rucksack and wearing a baseball cap approaches the entrance of a charming extended split-level end-of-terrace in Crouch End. He knocks heavily at the door.] CHARLIE: [answering the door]: Yes? Oh. Right. Have you brought a takeaway? Sorry about that. I should […]

Read More