Warfare

Explosives Experts

Brighton city centre, one block from the sea front: I am walking along the street on my way to deliver some film to a developing lab when I notice that two police have been called to deal with an abandoned suitcase. It has been left flat on its side in the middle of the pavement […]

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Comic Booked

Yes, even Hello! magazine would have difficulty finding his good side, but you have got to admire the Beeb’s front-page photo of Abu Hamza: This time you may have triumphed, Captain Britain, but I shall RETURN! Muaha-ha ha-ha ha HA HA HA!

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Ignoring A Stamping Child

I don’t agree with a lot of what she says, but I think Mary Madigan at Exit Zero has a very interesting angle on Iran: What should we do about Iran? We should do nothing. Seriously. When a belligerent little foaming-at-the-mouth nation shouts about nukes, they expect us to pay attention to them. This encourages […]

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Philip Mountbatten: Comedy God

You must pay attention to the adverts on BBC Radio 4 over the next few days. They are running one that sets a new standard in bathos—and proves that at least one stratum of society is impervious to the “reality” media’s will-to-emote. It starts with a dramatic re-enactment of the last communications from the radio […]

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I’m Condi. Fly Me.

Hi! Welcome to the CIA Airlines check-in desk. Could I ask you to itemize your hand luggage as you place it on the belt, sir? Er, one holdall of shoes, running gear, and toiletries; one suitcase of casual clothes; one suit carrier containing three identical black suits and ties with matching Ray-Bans; one attaché case […]

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Channel 4: Nathan Barley Does Foreign Policy

For anyone else who has a Godwinian objection to my recent Channel 4 post, Never Trust A Hippy presents further relevant data: The trailer prior to tonight’s (UK) Channel 4 Dispatches programme ‘America’s Secret Shame’ (part of a series of programmes about the war in Iraq) featured the series’ money quote. It was spoken to […]

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Final Revisions

Yesterday’s serious press carried near-full-page advertisements for Channel 4’s new substation “More4“‘s screening of Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s acclaimed cinematic imagining of the last moments of former German head of state Adolf Hitler. These advertisements read: “It’s a happy ending. He dies.” But just how happy an ending was it for the once-proud nation that was […]

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That Angela Merkel Speech In Voll

Guten Morgen, meine Damen und Herren, Herr Prime Minister, Frau Blair, Herr Straw, Brenda, und so weiter. Vielen Dank fur den Freiheit, ihre grossen Europaischen subsidiese zum Integraztion wir lumpen Ossis, und den neuen Robbie Williams Album—mit his dimplich Grin, er ist viel sexyer als David Hasselhof. Wir, die Britischen and die Deutschen, sind sinze […]

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The True Story Of A Breach Of The Geneva Conventions

[Location: Fallujah, I-raq. Dateline: November 2004; well past your bedtime. US Rangers and special forces operatives advance on a complex of residential buildings believed to be crawling with the enemy. Watching one entrance through night vision goggles, Sergeant Steve “The Rock” Jenovich leads a half-dozen of his best men into what they believe will be […]

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Gutted

Living in my disconnected bubble as I am at the moment, I managed somehow to become convinced that the England-Argentina “friendly” was today. So I stayed in yesterday evening and continued to sort through three years of photographic, prints, negatives, and scans. Par-tee! Even if I didn’t see it, it’s nice to know that one […]

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Easy, Tiger

One of the extracts from novelist John Fowles’ diaries in the Guardian today neatly sums up the attitude of a certain kind of educated observer to the War On Terror: Rushdie fuss. Eliz in a paranoiac state, that I might support him. This is a clear moral choice. From what I have heard of him, […]

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The Man In The Unfurnished Flat

I’ve put all my bedroom furniture together now, and my bedtime reading over the past few days has been Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle. [Typically, Penguin publishes the book inside two different tarted-up covers, but with the same nasty old typesetting inside.] As “what if the Axis won the War?” novels […]

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One Use For A Dead Cat

Your meagre anecdotes insult Bast, Perfumed Protector, Cat Goddess. The one you call “Little Mo” has paid the ultimate price for your failure to show sufficient respect. Until all households of the Infidel West are part of the Catiphate our martyrdom operations will continue. Until the sacred lands of the desert again flow with milk […]

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Carry On Up The Khawr Abd Allah

[BASRA. Outside a terrorist hideout, two undercover SAS men wait for their final instructions from their Mahdi Army handler. They are sitting in a Morris Minor dressed in Lawrence of Arabia costumes and wearing blackface. One is wrapped in a girdle of fake sticks of dynamite, stamped with the legend “ACME”.] FIRST SAS MAN: Durqa […]

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Choice Quotes

Glenn McGrath: “I think I was saying 3-0 or 4-0 about 12 months ago, thinking there might be a bit of rain around. But with the weather as it is at the moment, I have to say 5-0.” Jeff Thomson: “England will lose the five-Test series 3-0 and the margin will be worse for them […]

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And So It Ends

A coloured guy, a lesbian, and a Jew settle down to enjoy a game of cricket… Before the great battle begins today I must remind you of what is at stake, not merely a century-old sporting trophy, but the pride of the English-speaking ‘Blogging world. …And the coloured guy says to the lesbian: This is […]

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With Apologies To Monty Python

[Dull bell tolls. Ominous music plays. A young man dressed in black, carrying a rucksack and wearing a baseball cap approaches the entrance of a charming extended split-level end-of-terrace in Crouch End. He knocks heavily at the door.] CHARLIE: [answering the door]: Yes? Oh. Right. Have you brought a takeaway? Sorry about that. I should […]

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The Chav Hunter

I have observed before that Cambridge has Goths like other cities have pigeons. Thanks to The Guardian online (in turn thanks to Pashmina in her comment at Quinquireme), I have discovered what they get up to in the summer months: shooting townies.

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Gunmen Are From Mars

Reading 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?

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Walken For President

AYATOLLAH KHAMENEI is man-handled into his office. Waiting for him are four associates, standing: CONDOLEEZZA, RUMSFELD (an old Wise-guy), VICE-PRESIDENT SCHWARZENEGGER, and BRITISH PRIME MINISTER BOB HOSKINS (a fireplug pitbull type). PRESIDENT WALKEN sits in KHAMENEI’s recliner KHAMENEI is knocked to his knees. He looks up to see a smiling WALKEN. They pick him up […]

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Nice Fisking, Shame About The Title

I 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 […]

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A Lie

BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme five minutes ago in its report on the 60th anniversary of the dropping of The Bomb: “In the United States there was a steely determination to triumph [in the war] in the Far East by whatever means, at whatever cost.”

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Deferred Gratification

When I was a boy and my written German was quite good, I used to have a pen-pal in East Berlin, a young soldier. We would scribble symbols over the seals of our letters to each other, hoping that we’d be able to tell if the authorities had opened our correspondence. Today I was completely […]

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