History

25May07 — 0

Prolific

Thanks a commenter at Maximum Bob, I discovered that yesterday was Talk Like Bob Dylan Day and, thanks to a video on the Talk Like Bob Dylan Day site, I discovered that Bob Dylan wrote every single popular song of the last forty years.

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23Mar07 — 14

“Racism is still very, very vibrant”

Last week I mentioned celebrity “people of colour” talking “po-faced rubbish” about slavery. I don’t have the time to wade through it now, but please do skim the drivelling of “Ms Dynamite” on the subject over at the BBC News Website. I’m proud to say I didn’t pay the BBC to pay this woman to […]

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16Feb07 — 3

Reach For The Pie

I’m sitting here eating a microwaved vegetable biryani in front of my computer, having returned from a Ginsters-fuelled morning shoot of a band at Shoreham Airport, a cute, art deco building surrounded by dodgy Italian mopeds of the sky—not just propellor aircraft that look like they are powered by elastic bands, but helicopters that were […]

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12Feb07 — 7

Retroactive

I’m in Dixons Currys.digital, buying a new computer keyboard. What sounds like a competent cover version of Starship’s We Built This City is playing. For a moment I wonder if it’s the start of one of those godawful trance retreads of 80s guitar hits. You know the sort of thing: Owner Of A Lonely Heart/Max […]

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21Jan07 — 0

Who Moved My Deep Freeze?

Today, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago: “The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?“, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the […]

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21Dec06 — 2

Making A Connection

According to The Times: [DAVID] IRVING ATTACKS AUSTRIA AFTER BAN Surely he knows enough history to have arranged for some of his far-Right friends inside the country to organise a peaceful takeover instead?

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13Dec06 — 3

Parachute Pants

hammertime 2 —originally uploaded by gigiagius. Fresh from Iran’s Holocaust conference here’s a screen capture from a revisionist film showing the Nazis for the fun-loving japesters they really were. (And this is neat.)

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06Dec06 — 3

Not German Efficiency

I am notoriously sensitive to people revealing the plots of television series and films. As pharma geek Anthony correctly diagnosed, I watch things long after their broadcast/release, often via Amazon’s cheap and cheerful rental-by-post system, and I don’t have a TV. A side-effect is that many of my reviews here are out-of-date, but at least […]

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30Nov06 — 8

NO2INSANITY

Sometimes your first instinct is to sympathise with a particular cause until you meet the people who believe in it—and find them in your local park dressed in black polythene bags and engaged in a one-sided debate with a squirrel. Like Eurosceptics [Euroskeptics?], anti-ID card campaigners have a whole array of sound, rational arguments at […]

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04Oct06 — 0

Two More Apologies

In response to the previous PooterGeek post I received an email from a reader in Dulwich who wishes to make it clear that, despite buying property there, the Thatchers never actually took up residence in her neighbourhood. I’m sorry for suggesting otherwise. I’ve also toned down the language I used about Susan Greenfield back here […]

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03Oct06 — 1

WebThatch

[Through a tiny RealPlayer window it is difficult to make out the gloomy interior of a top-of-the-range Executive Home in Dulwich. The scene brightens as a fluorescently-lit life-support pod opens and we catch a glimpse of a giant electromechanical hand lowering a pulsating mass of hair onto MARGARET THATCHER’s scalp. One lower petal of the […]

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05Sep06 — 1

The Satisfying Sound Of Leather Hitting Trouser

As you’d expect from an embittered wannabe academic like me, I enjoy immensely reading reviews in which genuine scholars demolish the latest fashionable nonsense published by trend-chasing academic presses. Here Ben Goldacre casually and rightly puts the boot into an absurd attack on evidence-based medicine—it’s “fascist” apparently. Here Shalom Lappin does a grand and rigorous […]

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21Jul06 — 6

Test Drive The New Volkswagen Pantheon

One of PooterGeek’s current side projects is The New Uxbridge Encyclopedia Of The Classical World, a vital and relevant guide to what has often been dismissed as a dead discipline, specifically designed to appeal to comprehensive school pupils. Just like the compilers of the OED, the staff of the NUECW welcome submissions from the general […]

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19Jul06 — 3

Hot Wheels In Hot Pants

Sorry it’s been quiet. I’ve been working my way through hundreds of photo scans. Once I’ve finished I’ll be back in action here and on the Wedding Photography Blog. In the meantime I couldn’t help but notice something familiar about one of the snaps I took on the river in Cambridge at Hot Wheels Helena‘s […]

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12Jul06 — 6

Fear The Gobblers!

Today’s featured Wikipedia article reveals that velociraptors were probably covered in feathers, stupider than cats, and the size of turkeys. Once again scientific accuracy ruins a fun night out at the cinema.

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16Jun06 — 0

How Cool Is This Man?

I’ve just had one of those “ain’t life sweet?” moments: finally, after a long hot drive home from my parents’, I got to eat my dinner whilst I listened to the BBC Radio 4 Front Row special about musician and producer Quincy Jones. Asked about his famous Las Vegas live recording with Frank Sinatra, he begins: […]

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01Jun06 — 0

Your Fifteen Minutes Start Now

The blogtacular Grammar Puss sticks it to Sandi Thom, a “politically aware” songstress who keeps it so real that her marketing people have to invent an up-from-the-Net overnight sensation story to give her some street cred. And dontcha love the way the bint confuses fashion statements with actual achievements? Of course she’d rather sing out […]

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06Apr06 — 2

Flayme Werre!

One of my toff friends lectures history. She’s been looking for good blogs in her subject area lately and “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog” is her favourite so far. I can see why. It’s clever and it’s funny. (And even funnier now she has explained some of the jokes to me.) As I am in […]

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21Mar06 — 2

Like Yesterday

The Anonymous Economist draws my attention to this amazing story: James McGaugh is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he’s stumped. McGaugh’s journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter […]

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01Mar06 — 8

The Da Vinci Lode

It takes nerve to claim in public you originally extruded the pseudohistorical baloney that was the meat in one of the worst-written bestsellers of all time, but if Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh win their case against Dan Brown it could be the beginning of a long haul. On the “3 for the price of […]

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26Jan06 — 6

We Must Be Told The Truth About Primitive Knob Jokes

All English comprehensive school desks must by law be engraved, somewhere on their surfaces, with stylized representations of human primary or secondary sexual organs. Why is it whenever some new prehistoric cave art is uncovered it’s always men with spears pursuing unfortunate savannah ungulates? Why do they never find badly-drawn pictures of genitals or breasts […]

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25Jan06 — 5

Know Thine Enemy

I was going to post the following when it first appeared on Jonathan Derbyshire’s ‘Blog. Norm’s post today reminded me that I hadn’t. Derbyshire makes a point that even militant atheists should concede: As Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality, the principle of human equality articulated in the Second […]

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