09Jul07 — 9

Jib Jab

I left The Observer on the shelf at the supermarket yesterday because it had another load of bollocks about MMR and autism on the front cover. Around the blogosphere, people who A) know some science and/or B) can be arsed to use Google show the newspaper’s science editor how to do his job: lizardoid Eustonian Anthony Cox, sinister media Jew* Ben Goldacre, and capitalist pigdog Tim Worstall.

*[Before I get another one of these, I should point out that Ben Goldacre is about as Jewish as Claudia Schiffer: see this post.]

08Jul07 — 0

Words Like Weapons

Here’s a nice coincidence. Up at The Weekly Standard Website there is a piece by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan about the strategies being used by Coalition forces in the war against terrorists in Iraq. It’s interesting. Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber sneers—on the reasonable grounds that Frederick Kagan is obviously not a disinterested commentator, and on the stupid grounds that:

  1. Kagan is a “tabletop war nerd” who admits that helicopter rides are “cool”,
  2. the US military gives macho names to its operations—“Phantom Thunder”? ha!—and,
  3. the latest macho name is just like one they used in Vietnam [you know: the famous US military disaster that was just like Iraq].

The post and its comments demonstrate that when Crooked Timber contributors try to be funny they are as successful as when they try to be clever.

Meanwhile, I note, via Norm, Jeff Weintraub’s post about a French military operation which, instead of being devoted to killing, capturing, or driving out mass murderers, seemed to have been about protecting, arming, and training them. The French called theirs “Operation Turquoise”.

They’re much more our sort of people.

07Jul07 — 1

“Till Murder Us Do Part”

Here at PooterGeek we love reality mags. If I had to compile a list of British Women I Have Met Who Will Never Appear In One then new media guru Suw Charman would be in the top ten, but she’s the sort of girl who probably plugs her MacBook Pro into an Infinite Improbability Drive to recharge it so anything is possible. I’m not being ironic when I say that I am envious of her having made it into Take A Break. I hope she was in the one with the “WEDDING OF THE BEAST” cover story.

07Jul07 — 2

Passenger Ships

Also at that party the other day, one of the Young People told me that Passenger, featuring Richard Brincklow on keyboards, are high up on BBC Radio 2’s playlist. The next day, one of my spies inside the Passenger camp also passed on to me a delicious factoid.

Whenever Richard and I write or perform any music together it’s fair to say that what might euphemistically be referred to as our “creative tensions” or “musical differences” centre on my “Mr Pop” preference for slickness versus Richard’s “Mr Art” preference for musical experimentation. Well, Passenger’s new single is currently the second most requested track on Portsmouth FM after Angels, by that champion of the avant-garde Robbie Williams. I’d like to be the first to congratulate Richard “pop tart” Brincklow, accuse Passenger of selling out, and complain that they are nothing like as good as they were in the early days.

[If you think I’m taking the piss now, Rich, wait until you’re Wogan’s Record Of The Week.]

05Jul07 — 4

Dave The Rave

I listened to Gordon Brown’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as actual Prime Minister yesterday. If you put the substance of the “debate” aside (as the laws of contemporary British journalism require all commentators to do) then David Cameron made Gordon Brown sound a bit rickety. The good thing for our democracy is that, before most people made this judgment, they had to put rather more substance aside than is usually the case with PMQs.

But the challenge for a Conservative Party wanting to win the next election is much bigger than helping Cameron to claim Oxford Union-style debating victories. Many Conservatives are prepared to discard some of their beliefs if Cameron can lead them to victory. But Cameron doesn’t believe in anything. Despite our slightly different backgrounds, I can sympathize with Cameron on this. “Political science” is an oxymoron so I’ve acquired my views in this area by a process of elimination, starting with the things that are superficially appealing, but provably and obviously wrong—like Marxism or Objectivism—and moving onto subtler kinds of wrongness like multiculturalism and more elegant kinds of wrongness like monetarism. I’m not left with much, but I’m happy to fight for it.

Cameron is however handicapped beyond lacking philosophical commitment or philosophies to commit to: despite his debating tricks, he can’t even make a convincing case in the abstract, because he’s neither a swot nor a thinker. He can’t be bothered with the boring factual details and he can’t be bothered with that difficult argumentation stuff. Tim Worstall outlines a neat example today as reported in The Times:

David Cameron yesterday offered the music industry a unique deal—cut the glorification of materialism, misogyny and guns in hits and the next Conservative government would back an extension of the copyright on sound recordings from the current 50-year period to 70 years.

What’s happened here is embarrassingly obvious: Cameron has started with two lobbies: the music industry, which wants more money for old rope—and would be an excellent source of rich, glamorous, and stupid party donors; and the Mary Whitehouse brigade, which wants to stop people swearing and singing about sex, drugs, and violence on gramophone records—and would be an excellent source of votes. His way of reconciling their apparently conflicting demands—PARENTAL ADVISORY stickers are outdone only by charity record status as in-store sales boosters—is to trade one for the other.

As Tim points out, Cameron seems to have reached his policy conclusion without attempting to accumulate any relevant data or use them to draw logical conclusions. It is a triumph of political matter over mind. It’s the only kind of triumph he’ll be able to claim between now and the ever-faster approaching day when the Tories ditch him. And they’ll ditch him because he has strained so hard to be electable that he has become unelectable. Trying to sell the (wo)man in the street such simple old-fashioned bargains when the world has become rather more sophisticated will only keep you in business for so long. Just ask Fopp.

04Jul07 — 5

Tweaked Banner

If you are seeing the text of the PooterGeek header image as two sets of the same letters overwriting one another then hit “reload”—that’s CTRL-SHIFT-R on a proper Web browser and F5 on Internet Explorer—and it should sort itself out. If you are then still seeing double then upgrade to Firefox.

01Jul07 — 1

World Of Wonga

I caught up with wongaBlog this morning. I enjoyed this post about Jonathan Edwards’ reflections on his conversion from Christianity to atheism. It’s all downhill from here, Jonathan. Believers might be wrong, but believing often makes for happier and more successful people; and I enjoyed this marvellous rant about anti speed camera campaigners. My apologies in advance, Andrew, for any bloggertarians you might find frothing in your comments.

27Jun07 — 5

Philosophers: 2 — Scientists: 0

Last Friday I found myself stuck in a room in a Cambridge college waiting to do a photo job so I took Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations down from a shelf and, as an intellectual dwarf perched on Hindsight the Giant, sneered at it. Certain things he said appear absurd in the light of certain experimental results. As I’ve argued here before, if you’re familiar with the physics and physiology of vision, a lot of his Remarks On Colour is very silly indeed—though, amongst the silliness, it draws attention to some real and interesting questions. Not all of the relevant science was published after he had reached his conclusions however and Wittgenstein had enough scientific training to have been able to grasp it.

I react this way to the work of quite a few celebrated philosophers—and I am talking about the ones worth taking seriously, not more recent comedy “philosophers” for whom imprisonment in quotation marks is perfect justice. It’s a shame that we no longer mean by the word someone who understands what we now call science as well as meaning a thinker in a more general sense. But scientists who think badly can be just as, if not more, wrong.

By coincidence, I read two replies by philosophers to scientists yesterday and, in both cases, the philosphers seemed to me to be right. Norman Geras takes on Paul Davies, whose God And The New Physics was a lovely, clear introduction for the layperson to some exciting physics, but included some lousy arguments for the existence of God. Jonathan Derbyshire takes on Marc Hauser, in reply to Hauser’s reply to Derbyshire’s review of Hauser’s book, Moral Minds, in Prospect.

I have another interest in the latter because Prospect magazine has been paying me to train its staff and to set up its excellent blog. The blog has been excellent because of their hard work. I was holding off recommending it here until Prospect‘s in-house designer had made over its look, but go read it now because, even if the layout isn’t very exciting yet, the content is good. The sort of blogospheric conversation Derbyshire and Hauser are engaged in is, I think, one of the things they were hoping to encourage.

22Jun07 — 4

Ash-ian Babes

The Labour aristocracy does seem to be attracted to “sexually highly charged black women“. Not being one of Jackie Ashley’s admirers, I missed her toe-curling tribute to Diane Abbott in The Guardian—where else?—when it appeared last week, but I caught up with it via Peter Briffa:

[Diane Abbott MP] was, and is, a cheerer-upper. She was never the cautious, quietly hard-working type. In an early interview she cheerfully announced that her happiest experience was making love in a cornfield with a certain well-known television executive.

…

She showed how ridiculous is the notion that, by electing more black women, or Asian women, or any other under-represented category, you get dull people. Oona King, like Abbott, managed to attract plenty of opposition among other Labour people; but again, King has been a big character in public life, before and after she lost her seat at the last election. And the third of the black women, Dawn Butler, is one of the very few MPs I reckon could go into any teenager’s room and engage them on their own terms. She is one of the few genuine stars of the last intake, an engaging speaker and better in most ways than any new male MP of any colour.

As one of his commenters points out, the lumping together of non-whites as a mass—albeit a “vibrant” one of course—is patronising. It’s worse: it’s typical of the kind of ignorant prejudice that poisoned Britain in the 70s. If Ashley were barely literate [hmm] and had never travelled more than a couple of hundred miles beyond an exclusively white council housing estate in the Midlands then it might be forgivable. In 2007, surely it takes more than Ashley’s excellent connections to get away with writing this kind of stuff in a “progressive” newspaper—let alone getting paid for it?

Just as Abbott was preparing for her anniversary, the government’s Office for National Statistics caused a rather bigger stir by revealing that not only was Britain’s birth rate on the rise again, but that women from minorities were a big part of the reason. More than one in five babies are being born to women originally from outside the UK, 147,000 of them in 2006 alone – almost double the percentage in the mid-90s.

The country is changing very fast and it is controversial. It raises issues of proper equality between men and women who came originally from patriarchal and female-oppressing cultures. It raises questions about the importance of excellent education and career opportunities for girls. Then there’s the veil, arranged marriages, forced marriages and even “honour” killings. These are all now matters for domestic British political debate. They are not exotic issues for foreign correspondents to come back and tell us about.

If only we had more colourful women in parliament then we’d be able to discuss these questions properly. There’d be the bonus that, with those negresses around the scene, you’d never be far away from a laugh and a good time—and, whether the soundtrack is blaxploitation or Bollywood, they have a marvellous sense of rhythm.

21Jun07 — 1

Bismillah!

Did anyone else hear that BBC news soundbite from a representative of the emergency services reviewing the effects of the sub-tropical storms that hit parts of the UK this week? Amongst other things, he described them as “very, very frightening”.

If so, did you manage to resist singing, “Thunderbolt and lightning / Galileo! / Galileo!”?

(And why don’t we make Bohemian Rhapsody the British national anthem? After all, everyone knows the words, it was made famous by Queen, and composers don’t come much more diverse than a gay Parsi Indian Zoroastrian born in a British colony in Zanzibar.)

21Jun07 — 0

The Whitney of Witney

British Spin fisks Dave’s “comeback” speech:

First up, He keeps on with some horribly mixed metaphor.

“then, brick by brick, you build your house. That is the plan I laid out when I became leader of this Party and that is exactly the plan we’ve been following.

We started by preparing the ground. We stopped fooling ourselves that we’d get a different result with the same old tunes.”

What is he talking about here? The barn raising scene in Seven brides for seven brothers?

…

“what a life it can be if we enable people to make the most of the modern world.”

Also, I believe that children are the future. Treat them well and let them lead the way.

21Jun07 — 1

The PooterGeek Argus Headline Collection: Hove Special

I admit that I have, in the past, given my readers the impression that the more genteel half of Brighton & Hove is a sleepy, geriatric, upper-middle-class, conservative place. Indeed, one resident commented here:

After all the effort I’ve put into making Hove sound like the hipper and more cosmopolitan sista of Brighton, you’re making us sound like coffin-dodging, powder-wearing Eastbourne.

In the interests of balance I have been collecting stories revealing the gritty, urban underside of the home of the Alan Titchmarsh fan club, and share them with you today. For example:
HOVE PLAGUED BY BLUE BADGE THIEVES
In the face of such criminal activity, some Hove residents have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect their disabled identification:
Hove guard dog
But there’s no limit to the desperation of the town’s crack-crazed gang-bangers:
HOVE ROBBERS FLEE IN TAXI
You’d think there’d be some peace to be found in an English garden, but, such is the growing global warming eco-threat, no refuge is untouched:
Hove caterpillar invasion
And today’s tale from the scarred centre of the post-apocalyptic, Bladerunner-like sprawl that is the south coast of England adds sex to the mix:
HOVE PORN STAR JAILED
With the interests of the thoughtful public uppermost in my mind, I somehow managed to isolate a safe-for-work still from the opening of the perpetrator’s latest erotic video, Horlicks II: Rest Home Nights:
geriatric pillowfight

[UPDATE: The last story is, as you would expect, written up in the newspaper in a way that combines tabloid cliché, hypocritical lip-smacking salaciousness, and deep sexism—quite possibly by a female journalist.]

19Jun07 — 13

The Decline And Fall Of Radio 4 Comedy: Part XXV

Right now Jo Caulfield is on, doing a routine about Friends Reunited—you know: that Website that was all the rage in 1999. An actor is putting on a nasal voice and pretending to be the school nerd reciting his online profile while she reads between its lines. No, the programme isn’t a repeat.

Next week: tune into hear the host share with us the amusing revelation that her spell checker keeps suggesting that she replace “Caulfield” with “Coalfield”.

How do things like this get commissioned for national broadcast?

19Jun07 — 2

Totalitarian Political Nanny Statism Gone Mad

Over at Samizdata, California is becoming a “totalitarian” state because an overwhelming majority of the residents of the city of Berkeley voted for comprehensive regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and because San Francisco can fine pet owners who don’t feed their pets properly and fortune-tellers who don’t have a licence to practise. Britain is becoming “totalitarian” because private clubs will no longer be able to discriminate on grounds of sex and people won’t be able to smoke in public venues. The US is threatened by “totalitarians” because a “libertarian” had to wait 45 minutes for his train. Scientists at the Food Standards Agency are “totalitarian” because they want to put vitamins in bread.

And in Europe, jack-booted safety Nazis use Big Brother eye-in-the-sky technology to deprive a free-born man of his sacred historical right to eat spaghetti while driving a Heavy Goods Vehicle.

Bloggertarian bollocks at eleven.

18Jun07 — 3

Free Shoot

If you are having a reasonably smart and public evening party/reception/dinner in the near future and would like it to be captured on film, gratis, then contact me. I want to test out some new flash techniques and don’t want to do so on a paying job. That’s the catch: there could well be a lot of poorly lit shots. Sometimes in life you get what you pay for.

18Jun07 — 6

Geek Rock

Last week, Steve Wright interviewed Paul McCartney on BBC Radio 2. At one point, Wright asked him about his latest single. The track is exactly what you would expect of Lord Macca of Loch Kodak: completely insubstantial and terminally catchy. It’s called Dance Tonight. It’s about how everybody is going to dance tonight—and have a good time, yeah. So Wrighty mentions the interesting thing about it: the prominent mandolin-playing. This triggers a Macca anecdote.

“Yeah, so I was on me way back from me publishers, laike, eh, eh, and I walked into this guitar shop and, as I always do, y’know. I asked if they had anything for a left-hander [wobbles head from side to side, and pouts]. And the bloke in the shop says, ‘We’ve not got any guitars, but we’ve got this left-handed mandolin,’ and I says, ‘No, thanks,’ and he says, ‘Wait a minute, try it out, you might like it.’

“So I tries it out, laike, [runs hand through implausibly coloured hair], and after a while I’ve got a few chords and it sounds nice. So I says, ‘Arright, I’ll take it’, laike, y’know. And I practised for a while and I thought, ‘Yeah, I might put this on the album, laike.'”

So he did.

I love the thought of the manager of the establishment coming back from lunch, noticing the conspicuous, dust-framed, vacancy on the wall and saying to the staff behind the counter: “Fuck me. Did you lot finally sell that bloody left-handed mandolin?!”

And Dave The Guitar, who’s been waiting for forty-five minutes and rehearsing this moment in his head for every last second, mumbles, without looking up from his copy of Kerrang!: “Yeah, Paul McCartney came in while you were out and bought it. I sold him half-a-dozen packs of strings too, and a shoulder strap with a comedy parrot on it.”

Anyway, via Jim P, here are the awesome Wrong Trousers on YouTube with the best version of Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star ever.

Harp solo!

15Jun07 — 1

One-Man Gospel Choir

Go here [requires Flash video]. Skip the intro by clicking on “SKIP” in the bottom right-hand corner. Then click on “Video” and choose the first example: “Don Lewis demonstrates…”

13Jun07 — 5

Reductionism

This civil engineering computer simulation [YouTube video] of one of the September 11 impacts is all the more shocking for being created without factoring in the explosions or heat damage. It also omits the fleeing spectating Jews, holographically concealed missiles, and shaped charges planted in the tower by giant lizards. Scientists and engineers, eh? They’re all working for the Military-Industrial Complex.

(On the subject of physics, this is good too.)

11Jun07 — 5

Through The Magic Door

I’ve been away for a few days so you’ll have to wait while I catch up with other things before there’s any new content here.

When I got back from my travels, I found a mosaic of Labour Deputy Leadership-related letters forming a junk mail welcome mat. Ooh, look: there’s a picture of Peter Hain shaking hands with Nelson Mandela. Wow, a female MP is abusing her access to party mailing lists to boost Harriet Harman and admits she is doing so because Harman is a woman. Hey, Alan Johnson can do that txtmsg speak.

I care even less about the Deputy Leadership election than Tom Hamilton—who at least cares enough to have written about how little he cares about the Deputy Leadership election. But—and you care about this even less—I’m going to put a ‘1’ next to Hilary Benn’s name and nothing anywhere else.

While I’m on the subject of party politics, dismissive as I’ve been about the supposed influence of Tim Montgomerie, I have to admit that I’ve become a frequent visitor to Conservative Home. I’ve been dropping by not only to laugh at the way the grammar schools issue has blown up so spectacularly in David Cameron’s face, but because it’s a interesting and attractive Website. Shame about the commenters:

Africa Aid while people in the UK cannot get Cancer drugs treatment?

The British government ministers are dishing out British tax payers money on Aid for Africa while the UK government rations and refuses to pay for Cancer drugs treatment to British taxpayers?

Why cannot the likes of Bono, Geldorf, Gordon Brown give their own money to aid for Africa.

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