I had a copy of The Daily Telegraph (aka The Torygraph) because it’s always worth reading the opposition press on a day of Labour Party smugness. [TEN YEARS OF A CHANCELLOR WHO KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING, YOU TORY BASTARDS! TEN YEARS! HE MAY BE A ONE-EYED WONK FROM PLANET MEDDLE, BUT HE’S OUTPERFORMED EVERY SORRY […]
Read MoreDisplaying his usual deftness, cuddly old Boris takes on the question of religious dress in schools in today’s Telegraph. You could summarise the first part of his contribution thusly: “That Shabina Begum: even dressed like a pillar box you’d do her, wouldn’t you?” And, as usual, he has a point.
Read MoreFor a while I wondered if she was a parody, so broken and infantile and hackneyed were her arguments. Now I only ever read her when someone writes about her. Madeleine Bunting‘s intellectual and moral development has been so corrupted by the ideological diseases of our time that she is hardly qualified to read out […]
Read MoreBrighton and Hove’s local newspaper is called The Argus. Its staff don’t have much to write about: the football team and its struggle for a stadium, resident micro-celebrity Zoe Ball and her slightly more famous husband Fat Boy Slim. I think I’ve only bought a copy twice. Yesterday was the second time. Why? Because of […]
Read MoreContinuing the follow-ups to this, thanks to siaw in the comments for drawing our attention to this fine attack.
Read MoreOoh, it‘s turning grievous for Younge as Kammo gets in there too.
Read MoreFirst blood to Tim.
Read MoreFlicking through the opinion pages of the Guardian this morning I can see there are going to be some busy bloggers today. I predict that, by lunchtime, David “we pick on Israel because it’s a democracy” Clark will be lying slumped over his PowerBook, killed in the Drawing Room with the Knife, by the Professor. […]
Read MoreAbove the usual manufactured outrage headline on the front page of the Daily Mail this morning I read the following smaller banner: He’s quizzed over £350 000 “bribe”. Their home is remortgaged three times in four years. Yet not once, says Tessa Jowell, did she ask her husband: “What the hell is going on, darling?” Crikey. […]
Read MoreBored with an England football coach who hardly ever loses a competitive game and irritated by his getting more sex with hot foreign babes than they ever will, tabloid journalists (and many of their readers) finally get what they wanted all along: England’s new manager to be homegrown: British or Irish candidate with ‘passion’ a […]
Read MoreVia Botheration comes this nice Charles Kennedy, er, come-back recorded by The Independent reporting on his meeting the people: Mr Kennedy was greeted warmly… ‘I love you, Charles,’ said one elderly lady pushing to shake his hand. “Don’t start any tabloid scandal,” he said.
Read MoreAt least two of the broadsheets have had agony columns that invite readers to respond with answers to other readers’ problems. A few years back one (I think it was the Guardian) printed a letter from a woman despairing of her live-in boyfriend ever “growing up” and marrying her. The majority of the female contributors […]
Read MoreI’ve written before here about how Armando Unfunnucci‘s consistent inability to raise a laugh with his “humorous” Guardian column used to bond me with complete strangers on the Tube. Now he’s returned, replacing decaying homophobic bore Richard Ingrams on the back of the main section of The Observer. Today his closing flourish of wit was […]
Read MoreGEORGE GORRAWAY MP: Yes, m’lud. That is indeed myself, naked before one of the sons of the Rightful Ruler of that noble yet tragically violated Arab nation, attempting to excite his flaccid member by gently stroking its tip with my moustache whiskers, whilst simultaneously drowning two screaming Kurdish orphan children below the surface of the […]
Read MoreHave you ever had that experience when you’re quietly browsing a public library and you (foolishly) strike up a conversation about one of the books on display with one of the other regulars—a slightly intense-looking middle-aged man in a sweater—and you gradually realise you are engaging with someone from the other side of the reality/fantasy […]
Read MoreOn the front page of educationguardian the headline is “Segregation, 2006 style” as “Figures on the ethnicity of students in higher education show a disturbing racial divide amongst universities” Inside the cover, Trevor Philips, Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, complains about the “institutional racism” that keeps blacks “students of African-Caribbean heritage” out of […]
Read MoreIn October 2005, PooterGeek features two posts and twenty-two comments celebrating sheds. In December 2005, the creator of Shedboatshed wins the Turner Prize for Art. Even Dave F’s joke is recycled by a Professor Sam Shuster on the Guardian letters page. Once again, my people, we surf ahead of the wave. On a surfboard made […]
Read MoreThis story appeared on the BBC News Website yesterday: “Pakistan’s government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out “President George W Bush”. “The anonymous poem, called The Leader, appeared in a recent English-language course book for 16 year-olds. “ The Pakistani authorities […]
Read MoreThree months from now clueless articles about “Generation @” will be appearing in British Sunday newspaper supplements. [via Slashdot]
Read MoreTim Worstall [thank you, Tim!] recommended PooterGeek in his article about ‘Blogging today in the Times. This would be wonderful news except for my continuing lack of Internet access at home, the absence of any kind of post on PooterGeek today, and my having allowed my “Best Of” section to become months out of date. […]
Read MoreNo time to ‘Blog properly today. [Insert your own joke about the current quality of PooterGeek here.] So I’ll just make one observation about the Guardian, because it’s a quick and easy way of filling space. There’s a piece (in G2?) today about how the Women’s Institute is shedding its mumsy, Home Counties, jam-making image […]
Read MoreIn a cunning flanking move, The Guardian responds to my post yesterday by publishing a letter from my Old Labour dad today. How can I sustain my free-thinking, post-Thatcherite, Left libertarian, public-private agnostic, open source-advocating online persona when my rellies are wandering around wearing metaphorical “Save Clause Four” T-shirts?: Maybe I’m naive, but what kind […]
Read MoreI have been feeling so cut off without broadband that I’ve been paying to read The Guardian recently. By way of atonement I have once-again applied PooterGeek’s patented Future News technology to bring you the best of next week’s editions of that proud organ—so you don’t need to buy it. The Silencing Of The Damned […]
Read MoreMichael Brooke takes Enid Blyton’s testimony.
Read MoreOn Thursday, as I drove from my appointment at the dole office JobCentrePlus, Cambridge looked beautiful enough to break your heart. Compared to Oxford, you don’t see people in gowns much here, but I passed a line of them walking very decoratively along The Backs that afternoon. The sun was shining low—through trees that hadn’t […]
Read MoreI am always raving about The Economist on PooterGeek, partly by default. Although most people think of it as a magazine or a journal, it’s one of the very few newspapers in Britain that lives up to the name. Because, for example, more millionaires read The Economist than any other international publication there’s no need […]
Read MoreJackie Danicki has been on a roll lately. Her last two posts about women and life—“Truman Capote and the rewards of the mundane and unexpected” and “The real meaning of ‘equality’, and why most feminists are anything but ‘pro-choice’“—have been gems. A lot of female newspaper columnists follow the “Polly Filler” template of complaining for […]
Read MoreReading the extract from the Evening Standard article that Norm quoted today, I was distracted by the phrase “a self-help guide for would-be terrorists”. Huh? What’s it called? Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway? I’m OK, You’re Kuffar? Who Moved My Caliph?
Read MoreI think I’d have enjoyed this article rather more if it had been called “The Rhetoric of the Stupid“, rather than “The Rhetoric of the Left”, but you can’t have everything. No one who has any time for the views of a bunch of Jew-hating, wife-beating, Muslim-killing, gay-hanging, Koran-thumping mass-murderers is any kind of man […]
Read MoreMy last post was provoked by the continuing gloatiness of Australia’s cricket fans and it linked to a normblog post that looked suspiciously like an example of such behaviour. Truth was he was just being sarky so I’ve changed the link. My apologies to Norm, who isn’t a bad loser—though I very much hope that […]
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