Tim “Bloggerheads” Ireland uses the exciting new medium of citizen video to put the boot into a Labour candidate and gives me the biggest laugh I’ve had all week.
Read More29Apr07 — 2
Politics
27Apr07 — 8
Let Them Eat Cake
Earlier this week, I was walking down the road with a couple of bags of Labour Party leaflets when a woman from a drugs project approached me with a clipboard. She asked me lots of questions about drug-related crime and drug-related violence and drug crime policing; she even asked me if I had a drink […]
Read More24Apr07 — 4
Stabbity-Stab
YESTERDAY EVENING: I’m outside the House of Commons with Bloggers4Labour supremo Andrew Regan, his sister, and another friend. We’re on our way to Andrew’s [very successful as it happened] Labour blogging meeting in one of the Commons committee rooms. As you’d expect in these Times Of Terror, every visitor gets scanned and searched. Naturally, I […]
Read More29Mar07 — 1
Shady Character
Having enjoyed “Guido Fawkes’s” (dis)appearance yesterday evening on Newsnight over my lunch today, there’s only one thing I’d change about my post on political blogging from last week: I’d call it “Squeaky Man”. I recommend this Google Blogsearch as well. In particular, whilst ranting about Tories, “Hamer Shawcross”, another anonymous watcher-of-parliament, captures something of Fawkes’s […]
Read More22Mar07 — 30
Shouty Men
To date, most of the political blogs that employees of the old media have paid attention to have been noisy, gossipy, and abusive ones. This makes sense: the people in the media who read them also tend to be noisy, gossipy, and abusive. Such sites don’t threaten the old order and the blogs’ proprietors are […]
Read More21Mar07 — 0
Equal Opportunity Comedy
Following on from the blue-faced Tories, via, Paulie, whom I thank for calling me a thogger—he’s one too—I read this amusing post about red-faced Tories from the enigmatic but entertaining “pete“.
Read More21Mar07 — 1
Smurfed
In my kitchen I have a PC made from bits of other, now dead, computers. It’s a sort of Millennium Falcon machine: looks crap; runs fast. Partly this is because it’s running Linux of course, but I haven’t had time to tweak the installation properly so it does have one or two wrinkles. One of […]
Read More08Mar07 — 24
Say It Loud: I’m Chippy And Proud
“Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that […]
Read More22Feb07 — 4
Gordzilla: Final Wars
Andrew Skudder might be cunning, but Gordon Brown is as cunning as the Fox’s Glacier Mints Professor of Cunning at Cunning University, Scotchland. Who better for him to challenge him for the leadership of the Labour Party than the elected face of conspiracy theory Michael Meacher? One quick phone call from Brown to George W […]
Read More20Feb07 — 7
Yet Another Test Post
If this entry also appears at Bloggers4Labour then thanks to Andrew Regan, the evil genius behind that site, and to the cunning Andrew Skudder for restoring PooterGeek’s feed to the collective. UPDATE: I’m boring, I’m beige, I’m back, and my pants are as tight as a Scissor Sisters track.
Read More14Feb07 — 7
Tin-Eared
Yesterday I had two meetings in London, so I spent a bit of time on the Tube. I am fascinated by posters on the Underground. There’s an hilariously “retro” one for the Cyprus tourist board up at the moment that I imagine being devised by two sideburned ad execs, fresh from lunch in the pub […]
Read More11Feb07 — 1
Shocking Revelations About David Cameron’s Schooldays
Despite attending The Best School in England™, the Leader of the Opposition only managed four As, five Bs, and a C in his ‘O’ levels.
Read More29Jan07 — 7
Worzel Gummidge Watch
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 More22Jan07 — 0
Leggo!
Via things magazine, I discovered an article in the Archinect about how when the people of the virtual community Second Life are given freedom to build whatever they want they recreate suburbia.The author of the piece broadcasts his own prejudices. I hate shopping as well, but I winced at this: [L]ike most utopias, [Second Life] […]
Read More19Jan07 — 3
Needle
When I used to work for the Medical Research Council, I did my best not to bore people with it on this site. I took up the name “PooterGeek”—ironically, the suggestion of a summer student—so that when people searched for my name on the Web they would find biomedical publications to download rather than movie […]
Read More18Jan07 — 11
M Night Shyamalan’s Signs Of Sense In The Unbreakable Global Village
[A New England meadow. A delicately beautiful Indian woman in a simple smock dress picks daisies with which to decorate her hair.] INDIAN WOMAN [singing to herself as she gazes into the forest beyond]: “बिछड़े अà¤à¥€ तो हम, बस कल परसों,” “जियूà¤à¤—ी मैं कैसे, इस हाल में बरसों?” “मौत न आई, तेरी याद कयों आई?” […]
Read More16Jan07 — 4
Beige Man In White House?
Barack Obama has registered to form a presidential exploratory committee.
Read More15Jan07 — 5
They Run The Media, You Know
Jeremy Paxman gets hate mail from BBC viewers who incorrectly believe him to be Jewish. Christopher Hitchens claims to be Jewish, but his brother Peter claims not to be. Most people assume Nick Cohen is Jewish, but he says he isn’t. Several of my best friends are Jewish. If I keep fixing their computers for […]
Read More13Jan07 — 6
A Weekend Trip To The Recycling Centre
I’m busy so, instead of writing my own stuff, I’ll just point at the efforts of some other bloggers. This at Fisking Central is a point worth making over and over again: Utopia doesn’t refer to a better world; it’s used to describe a perfect world. Belief in human perfectability—and its accompanying rejection of all […]
Read More22Dec06 — 2
Demos Appoints New Director. English Language Surrenders.
Following the Madeleine Bunting farce, Demos is keen to emphasise the academic credentials of her replacement. Accordingly Demos’s press release announcing the appointment of Catherine Fieschi makes more references to her PhD than if it had been written by the cover designer of a self-help book. It also quotes her reaction to getting the job. […]
Read More20Dec06 — 3
Clear Blue Water
First there was my shaking hands with Thatch. Then there were the disagreements about common ownership of the means of production. Now I’ve been linked by the Adam Smith Institute’s blog. My dad’s never going to talk to me again.
Read More17Dec06 — 7
Lembit Opik Is A Media Construct
I refuse to believe that this man exists.
Read More06Dec06 — 40
HOW CAN PPL BE SO CRUEL TO BLOGGERS? :-(
Justin of Chicken Yoghurt is wearyingly obtuse in the comments at Never Trust A Hippy. In response to this from Paulie: The prize for the most telling response to the Tim Toulmin /Alistair Campbell dialogue and call for a ‘blogger code of conduct’ surely goes to Chicken Yoghurt. His response is that the blogosphere…. “…hasn’t […]
Read More30Nov06 — 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 […]
Read More21Nov06 — 1
Things To Do
I’m busy catching up after my cold so it’ll be quiet here for the next few days. Read this excellent post by Paulie. Read this and imagine Oliver Kamm throwing a custard pie in Neil Clark’s face forever.
Read More21Nov06 — 5
Euston Invocation Of The Week
From a review entitled “Understanding Borat” on the blog The Libyan Observer: Moreover, nowadays, when the Jewish State’s influence within the American administration is academically and historically established (The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt) when the support for Neoconservatism that has lead to a genocide in Iraq is largely endorsed by the Zionist […]
Read More17Nov06 — 3
AOR Rewrites
Squander Two is a clever fella and his impatience with irrationality is (almost) always welcome in my comments boxes. He is also a new father who has endured rather more worry than most recently. I hope his wife recovers completely and quickly. He probably came up with this brilliant revision of Alanis Morissette’s Ironic during […]
Read More09Nov06 — 1
Registering Complaints
I hadn’t noticed this until I read Tom Hamilton’s post at Let’s Be Sensible, but the Devil’s Kitchen calls the Mr Eugenides essay that I blogged about “one of the finest posts ever written“. Does Eton College do refunds? Also, having read the latest post at Never Trust A Hippy, I must revise my slur […]
Read More
Recent Comments