They certainly weren’t irresistible today, but Arsenal, at their best, still astonished. There were times when they made Man Utd look like an infants school team in midfield; shame they couldn’t finish anything. The simple truth is you can’t afford to make a mistake like Sol Campbell did at Old Trafford. Man U’s talent and […]
Read MoreOne of the co-workers of tech company cubicle drone Dilbert in Scott Adams’s inspired eponymous cartoon series is a fierce and talented engineer called Alice. She responds to the sexism and stupidity of her co-workers with extreme violence. She has triangular hair. Apropos of nothing, yesterday’s Economist magazine profiles Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer with […]
Read MoreI’m not very good at parking. I have written here before about my driving my friend Auriol‘s car through a Genome Campus fence. Today I discovered why everyone avoids the cornermost parking space of the Campus’s underground car park when, moving into it, I managed to shuffle back and forth enough times to wedge my […]
Read MoreIt’s amazing what you can pick up at the supermarket these days. [unmanipulated crop of the original scan, taken at the main Cambridge Sainsbury’s]
Read MorePooterGeek Snr sent me this today. Yours’ll fall out one day, grandad.
Read MoreFirst of all I hung out with Claire as she researched her new book, talking to various bright Cambridge dons about Europe and Britain and religion and immigration and anti-Semitism and the state of the World today. Her questions were so good and the resulting conversations were so long and wide-ranging that there is far […]
Read MoreThere will be some ‘Blog posts before the end of today, I promise. Come back this evening. I’d also like to say, in passing, that you’re all looking particularly gorgeous, even though it’s a Monday.
Read MoreA running theme here is my depression at the state of British sexual mores. (Or it might be my depression at not getting more sex in Britain.) I’m told that sex can be extraordinarily pleasurable and life-enhancing. Unfortunately, having acquired a professional interest in surveys of sexual habits in the early 90s, I can tell […]
Read MoreLocation, location, location: not living in an area of the World currently suffering under UN monitoring means that these are the two most frightening things that happened to me yesterday… 1. My guitar teacher wants me to learn the off-beat strumming of Supertramp’s Give A Little Bit. To do this I have ripped the song […]
Read MoreTen years ago when I was in a funk metal band called Tick Tick Boom, screaming about terrorists (as opposed to now, making jokes about them on the Web), our terrifyingly loud, half-Indian drummer Neil Kumar cultivated a running gag about how, one day, Frank Sinatra would cover some of our angrier numbers in a […]
Read MoreThe British don’t do dating. They get pissed and shag. Americans do do dating. Here are some pages of advice for women, explaining the elaborate formulae men use to help them decide when to call a woman after the first date. I realise this is of purely academic interest to readers, but here’s how I […]
Read MoreJust back from Leasey’s where she didn’t have to strap me into the harness to watch a chick flick starring Cher. With my psychosexual make-up, the incantation “Winona Ryder plays a Jewish girl who desperately wants to be Catholic” is more effective in overwhelming artistic judgement than “Halle Berry runs around wearing a leather catsuit […]
Read MoreClaire recommended this book to Judith and me today. From the review she pointed us at it sounds fascinating and, as Judith pointed out, one of its themes is one of my long-time obsessions, namely that the the pursuit of happiness is not a right.
Read MoreI used to have a Sega Game Gear.I bought it from an affluent, young family who begged me to take it away from them before it destroyed their lives. They’d got it for their son, who turned out to be more interested in catching toads and sitting in cardboard boxes. Mummy and daddy then became […]
Read MoreOne of the nice things about writing this ‘Blog is that, even on the quietest days, there’s a fair chance that my dad will drop by, so that PooterGeek will get one hit at least. Some of you probably know that he has had radiotherapy this year. Yesterday he was told that he now seems […]
Read MoreI don’t believe that adults find it harder to learn than children; just that adults find it harder to be wrong. Learning is about being wrong over and over again until you are almost right. As I get older I find it harder and harder to make things that I’m happy with. There are presently […]
Read MoreIf being successful with women is about getting a lot of them to have sex with you then the secret of success is telling the right lie at the right time. [I would say that, wouldn’t I?] I’ve watched experts in action. Their methods are simple: intoxicate and deceive. They know what a woman wants […]
Read MoreLast week I was invited to the swankiest academic dinner offered to me since I graduated from my first place of higher education. And, for the first time since then, it seemed to be free-of-charge. Naturally, I filled out the faxback form straight away and, er, faxed it back. Having achieved fuck-all since I left, […]
Read MoreHak Mao pleads a lack of eloquence, but she says all that needs to be said today. I’m with her all the way—though obviously I’ll need to learn a bit of Cantonese and find some undiscriminating women first.
Read MoreMy friends will, I think, smile wryly at the news that PooterGeek is the sixth hit on Google for “beneficial effects of marriage“. [I could explain the “Alanis” reference here, but why bother shooting a fish in a bucket when plenty of people have bagged it already, including this guy? He’s wrong about her singing […]
Read MoreI sent an email to a “friend” yesterday: “Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 From: Damian Counsell Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803 To: xxxx@xxxx.net Subject: p.s. I have more Gmail invites than I know what to do with, so am welcome to suggestions. x“ It got what it deserved: “Date: Wed, 8 Sep […]
Read MoreNo, British moths are not in decline; the ones Dr Conrad’s looking for are all flapping around my bloody flat. And he can come round and collect them at a mutually convenient time.
Read MoreI am in a UK airport branch of Dixons. I am trying out the keyboard of an ultra-portable notebook computer to see if it’s large enough for me to touch-type on. An American tourist approaches with his eleven-year-old-looking son. He smirks at his offspring and then says to me: “That’s small enough for you to […]
Read MoreAnd now a perfect contrast from the grumpy copper: “Alcohol plays a large part in my professional life, many people I meet are under it’s influence, and those who say they aren’t usually are. I heard the other day that Russian police officers simply hose down their drunks (with a high pressure hose) and release […]
Read MoreI didn’t watch the England game yesterday evening, thank God; I went to a barbecue held by a couple of nice people I know—calling them friends would be an exaggeration, though I certainly wouldn’t be ashamed to do so. N is an old-school, self-taught computer whizz with an interesting life history. I know him through […]
Read MoreThere are two kinds of wasted young talents: those who seek the guidance they need, but aren’t given it; those who are offered all the guidance they need, but reject it.
Read MoreThere were two other things I enjoyed reading in the edition of The Independent‘s “Review” that I mention below: Andy Gill’s record reviews, of course—he has this anachronistic tendency to write about the music itself and listen to black artists (without making excuses for them)—and a review of yet another book by a middle-class mother […]
Read MoreRight. My sister‘s coming to stay with me today, so you lot can spend the weekend reading other ‘Blogs or dead trees or just talking amongst yourselves. How about this? “The so-called ‘Iron Lady’ of the international stage, Margaret Thatcher was, for the most part, a pragmatist in domestic matters, who disguised the timidity of […]
Read MoreYou know that “chicken” they manufacture?—the stuff that sticks to your teeth when you eat it, the stuff made by lobbing live birds into the air intake of a retired Concorde turbine and spooling the output around an industrial bobbin, before binding and compressing the collected strands into “chunks”, and bleaching them with some waste […]
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