Under the headline COME ON, LET’S GET IT RIGHT ABOUT THE LEFT yesterday’s Observer prints letters both pro and anti the thesis advanced by Nick Cohen’s What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way (excerpted at length in last week’s edition of the paper). One letter in particular made me smile: [Cohen]’s caricature of the ‘liberal-left’ […]
Read MoreHilary Mantel is a novelist. I haven’t read any of her books. I have read her review of magician Derren Brown’s Tricks Of The Mind in yesterday’s Guardian. Near the end of her mostly negative assessment she tries to set up a weak joke: she “hopes” that “no intellectual snobbery” will prevent Richard Dawkins from […]
Read MoreYou’ve probably seen this one already because it was on Metafilter and has been going around for a couple of days. I found it via Mick Hartley. If you haven’t yet done so, hop to the Surrey Comet Website, where readers have been invited to comment on a story about how town centre managers have […]
Read MoreClive Davis is discouraged from seeing Casino Royale, the new new Bond, by of this review by Cosmo Landesman. He shouldn’t be. Landesman fails to grasp even the basics of the (not particularly complicated) plot and then complains that what he thinks is going on is “absurd”. It’s worse than that: understanding what is actually […]
Read MoreRecently Shalom Lappin and I were interviewed by Ha’aretz about the Euston Manifesto. The published article completely confused and misrepresented our views, though I doubt this was out of malice; the reporter hadn’t brought his recorder so he took notes of our conversation in Hebrew and drank beers as he did so. I haven’t mentioned […]
Read MoreMiraculously, unlike Fisking Central, Tim Worstall missed this gem of a Comment Is Fatuous article today, one that neatly combines economic illiteracy, snobbery, and a reassuringly ethnic byline. It’s sad that an interesting question is obscured by article’s stupidity. But he didn’t miss this collection of Amazon reviews of Great Works, which should appeal more […]
Read MoreShuggy is complaining about Norm’s and my spelling of “defence” as “defense” and Christopher Hitchens’ spelling of “labour” as “labor”: Lenin does it. So does Pootergeek. As does Norm. Politically different, yet the same problem; they all spell ‘defence’ with an ‘s’. Which is an Americanism. I’m happy for the Yanks to do this but […]
Read More…who is usually as reliable as that bloke in the green polo shirt down your local in providing some lazy assessment of the day’s most widely discussed sporting matter. Today he manages to cram ten clichés (two, possibly three, of them misapplied) and three uses of the phrase “in terms of” into a half-page article […]
Read MoreIt would be so much easier to dismiss The Guardian if it didn’t employ some excellent writers. Its television critics, for example, are usually more entertaining than the programmes they review. The reason I still buy the paper on Fridays is because the “music” part of the film and music supplement actually covers popular music […]
Read MoreI do like it when I find an interesting discarded section of a newspaper that I haven’t read: the Friday film and music supplement or the Saturday review from the Guardian for example. I didn’t notice it at the time, but last Saturday The Guardian printed a review by Douglas Hurd of a book about […]
Read MoreThe original blog post was okay, but read on to enjoy the knocking out of James C in the comments beneath it by the flying fists of Tim Worstall and dearieme. I’m late to this, I know, but via Drunkenblogging, I read another example of inverted bigotry, even more extreme than James C’s: Muhammad Abdul […]
Read MoreAt 11:28 BST the top two headlines on UK Google News were: The Daily Mail: THE POPE MUST DIE, SAYS MUSLIM The Guardian: MIXED RESPONSE TO NEW POPE APOLOGY
Read MorePooterGeek brings you more linkiness with this report from John Pilger, writing for The Sports Offensive, ed. Jim Campbell. John Pilger travels to a Galaxy Far Far Away and discovers the reality behind the media distortions I am in Coruscant, capital of the “evil” and “corrupt” Galactic Empire. According to the propagandists of the Rebel […]
Read MoreLike a man trying to teach calculus to a hamster, Anthony “Black Triangle” Cox attempts to apply logic to the content of a front page of The Independent. For some reason I am reminded of Norm’s continuing struggles with The Guardian.
Read MoreI guarantee that the myth of the decline in 4×4 sales will be all over the media within a month. Tim Almond’s simple debunking of it won’t. [When you view Tim’s article, is it accompanied by Google advertisements for cardiology journals? It is when I do, but I read it while I was running Microsoft […]
Read More“If our readers thought we put climate change on our front pages for the same reason that porn mags put naked women on their front pages, they would stop reading us.” –Ian Birrell, The Independent They’ve certainly stopped reading, Ian, though I suspect this is because your rag has become what someone neatly described as […]
Read MoreWhen I was a kid I was fascinated by a 3-D photo viewer called the View-Master. Last night as I lay in bed with my ThinkPad having finished off my latest post on the Wedding Photography Blog, I followed Design | asides from my blogroll there to the Magnum Photos site and experienced the same magic I […]
Read MoreFollowing this news, I’d just like to point out that the photograph of Ms Knightley accompanying this PooterGeek post should have been captioned “Keira—who ate all the pies?”
Read MoreFollowing Blognor Regis’s coverage of the Hollywood-style comeback of Floyd Landis in the Tour, I did a Google News search for the latest and I found this real story from the online version of The Gainsville Sun: LACK OF LANCE HURTS AREA INTEREST By Elizabeth Hillaker Special to the Sun July 21. 2006 6:01AM As the Tour […]
Read MoreMarvel at this unintentionally revealing Guardian story about the lengths middle-class parents go to to get their children into church schools. It opens with a Jewish mother admitting that she feels hypocritical attending Church of England services so that her two kids can get into the local church school. At least she is honest about […]
Read MoreInstead of being out-and-about taking photographs, I mostly spent the weekend sorting through heaps of receipts and card statements and other dead-tree crap. This explains my writing new posts on a Saturday and Sunday for a change and responding promptly and grumpily to visitors here until the small hours of this morning. The bleep of […]
Read MoreDear Keith Flett If I promise to set you up with your own blog, will you promise never to write to a newspaper again? Yours sincerely Damian Counsell Brighton & Hove
Read MorePlastered across the front of the Observer this morning I read: “PRESCOTT EXPLOITED ME—SAYS TEARFUL EX-MISTRESS.“ Woman starts affair with prominent married politician and gets screwed over. As a story it’s up there with “DOG BITES CHEWY PLASTIC BONE!” but the punters never tire of it. There’s a reason why men like John Prescott behave […]
Read MoreI’m in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. I’ve just come from lunch with an editor at The Economist(, dahling). My mobile rings. it’s the other person from the newspaper I was supposed to meet earlier. She’d been stuck in the City, talking to men-in-suits. I move to the back of the shop and […]
Read MoreThis is still a favourite PooterGeek post, and the Argus keeps coming up with more gems, though sadly I don’t always have my camera with me. [click image to enlarge]
Read MoreThere’s a fascinating rumble going on at Tim Worstall’s place about legal status of certain battlefield practices. Here’s the quote from a Telegraph article that Tim set it off with: Lt Col Glyn Harper, a professor at the New Zealand army’s Military Studies Institute, who co-authored the book, In the Face of the Enemy, said […]
Read MoreI thought this piece was an April Fool’s joke, but it’s dated the third: hyperbole, cliché, metaphors so mixed you can’t tell where the crescendos end and the whirlpools begin. But Stephen Pollard has a point. I couldn’t get into the Tesco carpark today for the customers panic-buying in the wake of the chaotic chaos […]
Read MoreWas this Guardian letter really a parody by the Harry’s Place mob? Please tell me that Chris Martin supporting the Tories was a spoof. Disillusionment with Labour is bad enough, but to lose respect for Coldplay and their music would exacerbate the situation. Michael Pritchard Watford
Read MoreJAMES NAUGHTIE: You’re listening to The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. In our radio car in Norwich we have the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. Good morning, Mister Clarke. CHARLES CLARKE: Good morning, Jim. JAMES NAUGHTIE: In a minute I’m going to be asking you about today’s news that the UK’s prison population is larger […]
Read MoreChris, you’re a bright bloke, well-read, great company and all that, but this is plain daft. The Silly Bunt’s article was a steaming pile of cack and responding to her adolescent nonsense about “the Enlightenment” (and her many justified critics in blogland) by wibbling on about “Paolo Mattia Doria’s contemporary five-fold distinction” is a bit […]
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