Months ago, when it was on general release, Hind told me that I would enjoy Dirty Pretty Things. A friend of Sonya’s had recommended the movie to her too. So the two of us watched it on DVD yesterday afternoon. It’s an excellent, low-budget drama/thriller about the lives of refugees in contemporary London; a little […]
Read MoreMy first photographic commission: everybody enjoyed an amazingly hot, steamy, dazzling evening of “Afro Cubism”, dancing at Club Afrika to Martin’s band last night. Half the Campus seemed to be there, and, once again, his posse had somehow managed to gather together all the brown people in Cambridge in one room. Sadly these were probably […]
Read MoreIt’s a bit parochial, this one, but who cares? I now have a mandate to please myself 😉 . This morning Allan Brigham, Britain’s only celebrity road sweeper, emailed me John O’Farrell‘s latest piece for The Guardian. There are two youth tribes that dominate the City of Cambridge. Fortunately they have complimentary seasons. In Winter, […]
Read MoreThank you, PooterGeek readers, for your response to yesterday’s ‘Blog entry. I’m genuinely touched. I think we can call it three votes for this page to continue its tradition of cranky, queenie, venting. Four, if I count the off-board response which simply quoted Judith’s post, punctuated with the repeated incantation “exactly“. Ironically I have a […]
Read MoreYesterday evening I had an interesting debate with Wiqqi. He made some valid criticisms of PooterGeek. He feels that this ‘Blog is “incredibly camp”. Guilty as charged, m’lud. He says that, instead of gentle dissection of my opponents’ views, I tend to go for “intellectual bludgeoning”. It’s a fair cop, guv’nor. He also thinks I […]
Read MoreJudith sent me a link yesterday and I rewarded her with an email rant implying that she was being over-sensitive. (I was so ranty that I spelt “brilliant” with one ‘l’ and attached a random possessive apostrophe to “Conservatives”; pretty serious stuff by my standards.) I suppose it shows that I am ready to argue […]
Read MoreCrikey. PooterGeek generated some controversy with my work colleagues today. You devote whole posts to attacking Robbie Williams and Oasis and the kids stay silent. Link to an analytical Marxist at a redbrick university or disrespec’ Wittgenstein in passing and they’re bursting into your office demanding satisfaction. The point that I was making about Wittgenstein […]
Read MoreI keep recommending ‘Blog entries from Oliver Kamm—another Leftie with principles—to my friends. Coincidentally, today in another excellent entry, he links to Norman Geras’s ‘Blog, as I did yesterday. How many times do we have to explain it to you, you bigoted, anti-American pinheads? Update: There is a problem with the link above. I think […]
Read MoreNick recommended this piece by Edward Said to me. I must admit that he did so with serious qualification: “It is tainted by intellectual snobbery, but my more fundamental objection is its failure to address or even mention ethics and the need to recognise absolute wrongs in the face of cultural relativism.” . Nick was […]
Read MoreRead the article quick, Sonya, because, goodness me, there’s a queue to give Edward Said a good kicking. Here’s a thwack from Norman Geras, Leftie lecturer at Manchester University, and a thump from Brad de Long, economist at Berkeley.
Read MoreYesterday evening, driving back from Marlborough, I listened to Robbie Williams’ last night at Knebworth, live on Radio 1. As I passed the venue itself I reflected that a third of a million Brits schlepping out to some old pile to listen to the King of Pastiche Rock was the lowest point in UK popular […]
Read MoreAren’t these heartbreakingly beautiful?
Read MoreToday I managed to double the time the AA reckons it takes to get from Cambridge to Marlborough. At least when I got there the warm, kind and generous Miller family and lots of friends were waiting for me. Pictures to follow.
Read MoreI’m listening to Radio 4’s classic serial—and they do mean “classic“: it’s an adaptation of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. I browse over to the Radio 4 Website to get some details on the programme and my mouth gapes as I read the following: “…was Caligula the eval [sic] man history has painted him?”
Read MoreAnother one for my darling sister. I haven’t visited Heartless Bitches International for a while. The most recent “bitchitorial” is all about the horror of being a parent for real. Brace yourselves.
Read MoreHappy anniversary, Clare and Steve! Some of your wedding and christening pictures are finally up over at Love And Bent Spoons. Now, perhaps you can do something useful with your absurdly long state-sponsored summer holiday and add some captions. (Your username and password will arrive in your email.) (10 comments on PooterGeek—so far—in one day. […]
Read MoreI browsed Amazon.co.uk today, thinking of picking up the This is Spinal Tap DVD, and I noticed two interesting things about the page for the This is Spinal Tap CD. First: the famously “blacker than black” album cover can be clicked on for a larger version. (Yes, but is it art?) Second: if you scroll […]
Read MoreThe latest scores from Google look like this: Damian.Counsell: 755 Claire.Berlinski: 721 Your move, Claire. >:->
Read MoreAfter laughing at my crap driving today, Leasy (pictured here*, not being a slapper with Adam) and her friend tried to explain to me the difference between “slag” and “slapper”. The English to American Dictionary agrees with them. [Scroll down to the relevant words on this page—they’re next to each other there.] *I’d credit the […]
Read MoreWelcome back from your hols, parental phenotypes. I’ve been out a lot, but will ring soon, I promise.
Read MoreMaoi introduced me to a couple of photography sites that make my anti-expensive-hardware attitudes look mild by comparison. The Holga is—as the young people would say—a complete munter of a camera, yet, in the right hands, takes pictures like these. Maoi herself owns a Colorsplash, which I referred to as looking like a travel iron. […]
Read MoreNot a good start to today: I drove into work and, while attempting to park, drove through a fence. If you’re reading this Auriol, Viv is OK. There are some fine scratches on her bonnet which are so superficial they mostly wipe off; I’ll examine more closely later in the week. One of those plastic […]
Read MoreAsk not how I came to be visiting this page; ask instead why a lesson in how to distinguish spiders from flies by counting the number of legs they have is illustrated by two six-legged spiders.
Read MoreNow boy George has returned from his tour of Africa, an email from Claire on Friday reminded me that I haven’t commented on the recently shortening life expectancy of Charles Taylor‘s thugocracy, another positive spin-off from Britain’s intervention in Sierra Leone. Here’s a Time article surveying the Anglosphere’s interests. Oh yes, and another old African […]
Read MoreJudith sends a link to this clever little historical parody by military historian Victor David Hanson from the National Review Online.
Read MoreAuriol sends a link to more depressing reading from darkest Africa in which she is interviewed by the Scottish Sunday Herald. It seems like a proper serious Sunday broadsheet, too, with serious news from all over the globe. Judith might be interested in this other article about single mothers in Israel.
Read MoreI aspire to an permanent state of smugness, but I occasionally find it uncomfortable being wise before the event. Following my last WMD ‘Blog posting, I flicked through my correspondence from around the time of the original one. On 18Feb03, in an email to about a dozen fellow members of la Résistance, hiding in attics […]
Read MoreAs if you ‘Blog readers needed telling, there are people out there with too much time on their hands. One of them has prepared The Hand Puppet Movie Theatre; and, especially for Leasy, here’s a link direct to his related Animatrix adaptation. Masterly. Still sillier and more obscure, Kim sent me a link for those […]
Read MoreBack in February I put what I was worried was an already-tired link to the famous Weapons of Mass Destruction “error message” in my ‘Blog. (Scroll down to the 13Feb03 entry for the original reference.) It has recently re-emerged as the sort of phenomenon even grandmothers know about [ 😉 winks at Judith*] and I […]
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