December 2003

30Dec03 — 0

Bashing The Bishops

Yesterday “Dr” David Hope, the Bishop of York, and “Dr” Tom Wright, the bishop of Durham, “contributed” to the debate about whether Tony Blair was right to go to war against Saddam’s regime. At the same time they contributed evidence to my case for the teaching of reasoning skills at British universities. PooterGeekers who know […]

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29Dec03 — 1

Yuck

[warning: spoilers] Now, if you’re looking for sick-makingly sentimental (as opposed to just cuddly), then according to the Times the upcoming Julia Roberts vehicle Mona Lisa Smile sounds like just the thing. I might be interested in Ocean’s Twelve, though. UPDATE: Outside the UK you now have to be a subscriber to read most Times […]

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29Dec03 — 1

“Mum, I’m Stuck!”

Marvin voice: Brain the size of a planet and all the readers want from me is pictures of pandas. No, Leasey, there is nothing “feminine” about my finding the badly-designed bears appealing. And as for Maoi, you can’t have a panda for your birthday, but you can have some panda wallpaper for your desktop. This […]

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28Dec03 — 2

Ahh

Am I going soft? I don’t normally do animal pictures, and pandas are such a biological mess that they seem to be a flesh-and-blood refutation of “intelligent design“, but the new panda born at San Diego Zoo is just absurdly cute.

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28Dec03 — 0

Book Review Round-Up

Newton’s Swing is a lean, but consistently interesting, New York thriller. To summarize it in the style of SavaPoint: A man is upset when his beautiful wife is shot dead in their apartment while their son is in bed. It has two faults: the author occasionally crosses the line between striking description and writerly fussiness […]

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27Dec03 — 0

A Gift For Précis

Savapoint is a source for cheap software and hardware. Even before the savings on sales prices, the Savapoint Website provides completely free entertainment for visitors. Some of the perfunctory descriptions they offer of the movies they sell on DVD are a scream: The Hours: “A story of three women living in different time periods of […]

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27Dec03 — 0

Worse

The numbers of dead and injured as a result of the earthquake in Iran are now looking even more terrible than before. It’s this kind of thing—rather than, say, a lousy program on ITV—that people should refer to as “appalling”.

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26Dec03 — 0

Balls

Ah, the Midlands. On the long drive from my sister’s today—thank you for your hospitality Clare and Steve; and for your snot, Maisie—I listened to a strange football commentary. The game was a local derby between the football team of the spiteful little town I grew up in, Tamworth, and that of Burton-on-Trent, just up […]

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24Dec03 — 0

Focus Group Results

As a result of extensive user consultation the PooterGeek Steering Committee has settled on this new executive blue look. Apparently the purple was pretty hard on the eyes. (It also had the effect of making visitors think their monitor was on the blink.) Don’t you just hate the way the word “executive” is used as […]

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23Dec03 — 1

Better Off There

Courtesy of Maoi I have been reading Twisted 6, a collection of newspaper articles by Filipina newspaper columnist Jessica Zafra. Maoi has annotated the text in her beautiful handwriting so that I can understand Zafra’s native references and lingo despite my ignorant Anglo background. (For example, I’m not sure if the adjective from “Philippines” has […]

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22Dec03 — 1

Back On The Blog

PooterGeek is more-or-less back in action now. I’m fairly happy with the layout, but I think I might play around with the colour scheme over the next few days. Your comments on the new design are welcome. The cartoon pie-chart at the top of this Guardian article sums the whole ‘Blogging scene accurately.

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16Dec03 — 1

Starbuckled

Maoi took Amber and me out for her graduation dinner last Friday. [Thanks, Maoi!—I’ve been trying to email you, but your destiny.net account is bouncing.] After good food at Light we bustled off to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The film has such a clumsy title because it is bolted […]

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16Dec03 — 0

Rule-Of-Thumb

If ever you are worried about a knotty moral issue, it often helps to check on what the Vatican thinks. I take this as a vote in favour of the American handling of Saddam to date.

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16Dec03 — 0

Saudi Ambassador A Clone

TinFoilHat emailed to warn me that Zionist scientists, funded by the World Bank and using technology copied from crashed flying saucers, have replaced the Saudi Ambassador to the United States with a clone. He even speaks Yiddish Saudi ambassador accuses Iraq war opposers of ‘chutzpah’ [Associated Press] Countries that opposed the US decision to invade […]

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16Dec03 — 0

Innit?

Over at the London News Review there is an aggressively insightful series of articles about Urban English (UE) and popular music. I liked this bit about date rape advocate and chart-topping dancehall DJ Sean Paul Henriques—“a middle class, mixed-race Jamaican”—toning down his nastiness to appeal to white fashion victims: It would seem that Sean Paul […]

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