This is simply wrong: Harriet Harman has defended plans to make it legal for firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minorities job candidates. The equalities minister said firms should be able to choose a woman over a man of equal ability if they want to.
Read MoreAnother “shocking state of our universities today” story has appeared on the BBC news Website. A report from the Quality Assurance Agency says the degree classification system is broken. I smiled when I read this bit: The reports from the QAA raise some worries about the effectiveness of the external examiner system, in which examiners […]
Read MoreMy last post prompted a reader to send me photos of her tortoiseshell cats. [Thank you!] Such a flow of cat pics is of course unconventional in cat blogging, but it gives me an opportunity to point out that it’s only some of the much rarer male tortoiseshells that are the true chimeras, mixtures from […]
Read More[UPDATE: Edited to use the version of the body text that actually makes some sense with the originally posted title.] I’m not that old, so I’m often puzzled by people who make historical pronouncements in ignorance of recent, relevant history, sometimes history that happened within their lifetimes but not mine. Of course, as Catholic dogma […]
Read MoreFor a long time, PooterGeek’s homepage has been decorated with a school photo of me shot in, I think, 1979. I’ve taken the sensible advice of one of my readers and moved it. It’s still here, but on the “About” page where it doesn’t unbalance the new site design. The original print from which the […]
Read MoreStephen Pollard (under the title “Is the BBC out of control?”) and the Centre Right Blog at Conservative Home (under the title “Big Brother Corporation“) embed video of the recent, and undoubtedly threatening, ad warning unlicensed TV viewers of the completeness of the TV licensing authority’s database of UK addresses. In SP’s comments, Nicholas writes: […]
Read MoreLike me, Clive Davis is a product of one of those godless unions of black and white, but, because I am an expert on the conspiracy of sinister media Jews, when I took his byline photo I offered to make him look more Jewish in order to help his career. Now see what’s happened. I […]
Read MorePerhaps you remember this story that I read in a “true life confessions” mag in a waiting room?: MY SISTER’S BRUTAL KILLING INSPIRED MY BUSINESS PLAN It seems that, a couple of years on, a US entrepreneur has had the same idea and the result is a similarly Onion-esque report in Wired. Under the headline: […]
Read MoreThe “pictures” included a front-page one of the torturer dressed in a pink nurse’s outfit that stopped just above the tops of her black stockings For those of you not up to date with the PooterGeek soap opera, having been made redundant from my first permanent job in science (when the Medical Research Council closed […]
Read MoreLast week I travelled oop North to Wigan—TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE OF OUR POUNDS STERLING for a Standard Open Return on a smart, modern, and nausea-inducing Virgin Pendolino. There, I had to give (as I admitted to the audience) the hardest kind of talk: one where you stand in for someone who really knows […]
Read MoreThe last time I made an offer like this here it was very useful for me so I’m going to do it again. Before the wedding season starts in earnest, I’d like to experiment a bit with some new techniques on non-paying jobs (and burn up a few rolls of out-of-date and unusual film). If […]
Read More[photo by Vic] Yeah, hop in; course I’m going to the reception: I’m the photographer. You with the Japanese bride or the Swiss groom? Oh, you must be one of the Swiss then. Phew. You looked a bit British at first glance. No offence, right, but you Caucasians are a bit difficult to tell apart—‘cept […]
Read MoreOn Saturday, I was one of two customers in a tiny local deli until Nick Cave walked in, dressed head-to-toe in black and accompanied by his children in white judo outfits. I toyed with the idea of getting His Caveness to sign my olives, but that would have taken the weirdness one step too far. […]
Read MoreThanks in part to you lot, I have for some time been the top hit on Google for “film photographer“, which doesn’t do my business any harm. Anyone familiar with my style of photography will understand why I am disturbed by the news story on the BBC Website that’s currently in the number three position: […]
Read MoreA couple of days ago, I was driving along the front at Worthing and saw for the first time the amazing spectacle of the drifts of wooden planks washed up in the recent shipwreck. This was days into the operation to clear the spill and long after sunset, yet the timber loomed unignorably two storeys […]
Read MoreOne of the reasons I’ve been quiet these past few days is that I’ve been working on a new Website for the journal Index on Censorship which went live over the weekend. The purpose of this post is to send some of my Google karma to their new URL: “indexoncensorship.org“. If you believe in free […]
Read MoreOne of the things that came up over Christmas was, as usual, my continuing unmarried status as the big four-oh looms. Three different members of the family interrogated me about my non-existent love life. Yesterday, I was offered an opportunity to do something about this as I was invited to a singles event: a Website […]
Read MoreApparently there exists an entity known as “Kate Lawler”, who won Big Brother and has since become a club DJ. For an organism in the contemporary UK celebrity ecosystem, the next three stages of development are as follows: [Big Brother winner → club DJ →] chick lit writer → Conservative MP → Alien Queen
Read MoreFor safety’s sake I usually stay in on New Year’s Eve. It makes no difference. There was the year when a drunk phoned me up in my bedsit in Oxford to accuse me of being in bed with his wife; I was on the bed alone with my guitar. There was New Year’s Eve 1999 […]
Read MoreRight now I am doing chores of such hellish tediosity that I am beginning to wonder if time has folded in on itself. That could be one reason why taking a break to watch this YouTube clip was so enjoyable. If you recognize all the Internet memes it references then you’ve spent too much of […]
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, my two favourite comic book superheroes were The Amazing Spider-Man and Iron Man. That’s the subsequent interests in biology and physics/engineering right there—not to mention their alter egos being a photographer and an anti-communist industrialist respectively. (In my own case, I was transformed into The Geek on a school trip to a power station, […]
Read MoreAs I admitted yesterday, I’ve taken part in Talk Toshiba‘s blogger outreach programme. I thoroughly approve of this sort of thing. Not only does it make bloggers feel even more important than we already think we are, but it allows us to play with shiny things for free. (It’s also a boon to those with […]
Read MoreTom Hamilton complains about being spammed by Naomi Klein’s people, looking for publicity for her latest volume of designer politics. (Exactly as I didn’t with Peter Cook’s book back here, I am going to divine without reading it that Klein’s book will be rubbish.) From Tom’s comments, it seems, they also pestered Tim Worstall, Mr Eugenides, and […]
Read MoreSorry about the silence. I’ve been working hard in Portugal and working hard here. Stevie Wonder says I look just like him in these shades My exact ethnic background isn’t immediately obvious from my appearance. Most Sierra Leoneans would call me “white”; most Brits wouldn’t. To a large fraction of the people on this planet […]
Read MoreIt’s one in the morning. About fifteen minutes ago, I got back from working hard at a delightful wedding. Thanks to Jason Hare, I’ve just read this piece by Stephen King about the joys of junk culture and listened to Petra Haden’s uplifting and progressively sillier cover of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. I’m grinning like […]
Read MoreI’ve just been on the phone with The Tax Man and we had a discussion in which we used the phrase “the bottom line” to mean “the bottom line“. Self-employment is weird.
Read MoreLots on. Things to say, but no time to say them. Sorry.
Read MoreOver the past couple of days of fairly intense work I have been excited every time I’ve checked in on the close race for the lead in the “Who’s the Messiah?” poll.
Read MoreBeachy Head[click image to enlarge it] I was eating breakfast in an hotel in Cambridge the Saturday morning after I shot that college ball. A tall, intense-looking man with a beard sat down at a table nearby. He pulled a hardback book out of his briefcase and began underlining paragraphs heavily with a soft pencil. […]
Read MoreThis has been online for so long and is so funny that it’s hard to believe that no one has sent me a link to it before. Perhaps this is because it’s a German health and safety video and, for the first minute or so, is exactly as entertaining as that description suggests. But it […]
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