Despite featuring the towering talent of Morrissey, this year's “alternative rock” Lollapalooza tour in the States has had to be cancelled because of poor ticket sales. You mean the young (ha!) people don't want to hand over their hard-earned to witness the still-fresh and boundary-breaking virtuosi of the Pixies and Sonic Youth? Say it isn't […]
Read MoreJoin me on the bleeding edge of radio broadcasting, where Tony Blackburn and Cliff Richard form a radical alliance against corporate music programming. No, I'm serious. The cheesy, 61-year-old Blackburn is a true rebel and has put his job on the line to prove it. I find myself in the disturbing position of supporting him […]
Read MoreThere's an important post about the latest developments in the Darfur region of the Sudan over at Black Triangle.
Read MoreIn the latest Spectator, Jonathan Keates reviews Adam McQueen's new biography of William Lever, the philanthropic founder of what became the Unilever empire. Apparently one of the earliest marketing slogans for Sunlight soap was: “Buy our soap or your husband will divorce you” Lever can't have been all bad; he "survived a dirty-tricks campaign by […]
Read MoreThe headline alone is worth a 'Blog post, but Christopher Saigal, one of the medics involved in the ground-breaking study showing that "Sex Life Can Improve When Obese Men Lose Weight" is going to wish he'd been on the media training course when his colleagues start reading this quote out aloud in the doctors' mess: […]
Read MoreA friend of mine reckons Ashcroft is “one of the worst Republicans alive” and often posts evidence to my inbox in support of her case. Here's today's submission. [Requires New York Times registration. Do not apply to irritated skin.]
Read MoreSince moving from New York to The Jewish State a few years ago, Judith has discovered that popular prejudice about the country's inhabitants is wrong in many ways. One less important example is that Israelis repeatedly demonstrate to her and her husband (ex-Wall Street workers both) their chronic incompetence in the supposedly competitive field of […]
Read MoreThe taste police are patrolling the superhighway and, as far as I'm concerned, they're on a mission from God.
Read MoreAs requested by Timbeaux, here's my report on the new software running this site: WordPress (WP). Like a zombie twin, my original Movable Type installation is still shuffling along in the same directory of the same server, delivering old pages to the local people. Despite this, PooterGeek coped fine with the Geras-lanche of outsiders yesterday. […]
Read MoreHe torments the Greens and he has a Right-wing 'Blog called “The Edge of England's Sword“. I once half-praised and half-condemned an occasional contribution from Iain Murray's wife, Kris, but this outburst from her yesterday was completely and hilariously sharp. [Yes, that was intentional. I pun and am proud, thank you.]
Read MoreThis isn't looking good for Rumsfeld. I certainly hope so anyway. [New York Times link—requires registration and small buccal sample; honestly, it won't hurt at all.]
Read MoreIt was appropriate, given my last post, that I should watch England's alternately dazzling and comical game against Croatia perched next to a pair of extremely knowledgeable American lesbians. They admired “Cole's overlap play” like the girls on the other side of me admired James's torso when he took his shirt off at the end. […]
Read MoreMany column inches have been devoted to the latent homosexuality of football, from communal baths to post-goalscoring kissing. I am skeptical. In England, the game is, like me, boringly straight. I am listening to Radio Five Live—or “Radio Bloke” as it is often mocked. One of the presenters of the England-Croatia match, Alan Green, has […]
Read MoreFriends of the PooterGeek might be interested in more photos from Paris. The rest of you will probably want to skip the boring pictures of buildings… … and look at Eitan being cute… …or Claire and Judith being cute…
Read MoreLast week, Backword Dave sneered at Eve Garrard's cool, analytical dismantling of Amnesty's recent pronouncements about the Iraq “war”: “I gather Ms Garrard is not a regular blogger, so she may be excused understanding of the ground rules, but if you want to say that something is 'no part of Amnesty's remit,' a link is […]
Read MoreI should explain my last 'Blog entry for American readers. In the UK, “Asian” is generally taken to mean South Asian, coming from the Indian subcontinent—for example Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi—so I had to use “Oriental” to refer to my being mistaken for Singaporean or Chinese, say. “Far Eastern” tends to be used to describe […]
Read MoreSorry for the thin 'Blogging; I'm still moving the furniture around in here, though I did take a break earlier this evening to visit our local cheap-and-cheerful Chinese restaurant. I have just paid in advance at the counter. The girl behind it looks at me quizzically. I smile. “Are you British?” she asks. “Yes, I […]
Read MoreOur Man in Washington sends this story [may require registration with the Washington Post's database of child sex offenders, can help in weight reduction only as part of a calorie controlled diet]. PooterGeek is most famous for its “Naked Harry Potter” page, where posters purporting to be minors demand sexually explicit images of the juvenile […]
Read MoreTony Hadley of Spandau Ballet, Boy George of Culture Club, Kim Wilde of, er, Kim Wilde; the list is far longer than it should be, but the the top of the roll of annoying 80s has-beens competing for a timeshare on another fifteen minutes is the neck-snappingly overrated Morrissey [helpful of them to name his […]
Read MoreYesterday evening my officemate Jo and her fiancé kindly shared their home, food and television with me for the England cock-up. I have mentioned my officemate Jo's brother Paul before. He is a bit of a “character” as we English say, though he himself is married to a foreigner (Japanese) with whom he has produced […]
Read MoreHow I'm going to miss them. The “Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq” and their completely misleading Cambridge University crest are to morph into “Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq”. It's about fifteen years too late for most of the dead, guys. You're in good company: that was Rumsfeld's problem too. Never mind, nice to have you along […]
Read MoreThat Norm and the other denizens of TypePad disappeared for a while yesterday, but we still had this Norm to entertain us. [You might have to lower the resolution of your screen to make its tiny text readable.]
Read MoreBy way of apology to Backword Dave, maybe there is some empirical evidence of Bush's economic failure. It just doesn't affect the numbers—or, indeed, the people—anyone cares about.
Read MoreOne PooterGeek regular might be interested in this organization. Do you think they deal with very, very close neighbours?
Read MoreThomas Friedman has some advice for the Israelis today. PooterGeek's Israel correspondent's on it. [May require free registration with the New York Times; contains small moving fonts; not suitable for dyslexics.]
Read MoreIn the age of Google it is so important to name your children wisely. I am grateful that my parents christened me as they did. Imagine you are Michael Henson, Professor of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, respected for your work on bioreactors. A fellow academic goes looking for you and stumbles […]
Read MoreA US correspondent writes to ask just how badly Labour did in the council elections on Thursday. For tactical reasons (ha ha ha) I have been forbidden until now to share with PooterGeekers just how terribly the election campaign has been going. Now that I can, the thesaurus on my desk is not helping. I'll […]
Read MoreYou will never believe who owns the “jihad.net” domain. A bunch of obviously talented and intelligent people—refugees from the newsgroup “alt.dinosaur.barney.die.die.die”—have constructed a vast fantasy universe around the idea that Barney the Dinosaur is not a boring but harmless children's television character; he is, in truth, “the demon B'harne”, a threat to all mankind who […]
Read MoreImagine you are Satan, Father of Lies, the Tempter, the Old Gentleman, the Archfiend. You are planning your biggest head-to-head with your former employer, the Almighty, since that discussion on the clifftop with ol' JC. You aim to bring the whole breadth of humanity to the edge of Armageddon. To marshall your demonic hordes in […]
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