06Jun07 — 2

Mentally Unstable Man Attempts To Board Popemobile

The 80-year-old Bavarian, who has suffered a number of strokes, believes himself to be God’s representative on Earth and participates daily in what he and his followers claim is a cannibalistic blood ritual, during which they eat the flesh of a centuries-dead carpenter and travelling quack doctor. Officers have returned him to the high-security accommodation in which he is normally confined under 24-hour armed guard.

05Jun07 — 5

Einstürzende Neubauten

In The Ipcress File, Michael Caine plays Harry Palmer, a British intelligence operative. He is deprived of sleep and exposed to loud repetitive noises by enemy agents trying to break his will, erase his memory, and make him believe that he is a traitor. His defensive mantra in the film—“My name is Harry Palmer”—was, like most catchphrases, turned into something he didn’t say—“My name is Michael Caine”—and repeated by people doing impressions of him until he ended up saying it himself as a joke. The crowning irony is that he is one of the few truly famous people in the World who use their real names (in his case Maurice Micklewhite) rather than their stage names in private so, even if he had originally said it, it would have been doubly untrue.

Over the past few weeks, a gas company—or rather its small constellation of contractors—has been digging up my road. Half of it has been closed to traffic and pedestrians for days at a time. Now, the building next door to the one my flat is in is being gutted. Its occupants have moved out for the duration. Do you know what it sounds like when someone removes an entire window from a wall and throws it into the street? I do. The place I live in is pretty well insulated and the double-glazing isn’t bad—there’s a newborn baby living upstairs and I never hear him—but it’s what passes for summer here now and I have to open the windows from time to time. The noise is hellish, so bad that even my Mossad handler, a veteran of the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war, refuses to drop by any more.

Anyway. For my own future reference: “My name is Damian Counsell.”

31May07 — 1

Lefties Sell Out

Thank you to everyone who spoke at, helped with, and attended the Euston Manifesto Conference yesterday. Every seat was taken and then some. It was a superb meeting with some of the most interesting and thoughtful lectures I’ve heard in years—and that includes the stuff I thought was wrong. One of the best things about the manifesto phenomenon has been reading, listening to, and talking with others on the Left whom I disagree with profoundly about matters of life and death—and doing so in a healthy, comradely, and civilized atmosphere.

You’ll be able to hear one of the talks online/on the radio on Friday—and I hope download some/all of the others as MP3s.

(And of course plenty of people phoned and emailed at the last minute hoping for tickets.)

I’m going to have a lie down now.

29May07 — 2

Grey Matters

You expect celebrity kids to grow up into adults with dependencies; you expect 80s pop stars to turn into casualties: Gary Coleman, Michael Jackson, Jason Donavan; Adam Ant, Whitney Houston, Billy Mackenzie, Billy Idol, MC Hammer, Stuart Adamson… But the phenomenon that scares me is that of the thirtysomething swashbucklers of my youth—then celebrated for their own youth—hitting “real” middle age: Martin Amis, Simon Rattle, Harrison Ford, Richard Dawkins.

Yesterday morning I was at the gym, waving my limbs on various instruments of torture as part of my irregular but frequent efforts to shoo away Death, when I had another scare. (Death himself was propped up in the opposite corner, munching pointlessly on a full-fat chocolate eclair as he fingered the edge of his scythe with a marble phalange and kept a beady eye-socket on the sixtysomething geezer puffing away on a rowing machine next to him.) I glanced up at one of the TVs from the Nautilus™. David Gower was presenting the Test Match coverage. I mistook him for Richie Benaud.

(Later on the same day, I was surprised to discover that one of the regulars from the corner shop was away on paternity leave. Even the girl on the counter—who’s definitely too young to vote—was surprised. It turned out that the boy’s 16-year-old wife had just given birth.)

27May07 — 2

Today In Your Super Soaraway Sunday Madeleine

BUY OUR MADDY MEMORIAL NECKLACE, FEATURING A VIAL OF MADELEINE’S MOTHER’S TEARS

EXCLUSIVE: SEE THE WALLET PHOTOGRAPH THAT INSPIRED THE ABDUCTION

PIRATES‘ KEIRA TELLS OF HOW AGONIZING HER AGONY WOULD BE IF SHE HAD CHILDREN AND HAD ONE TAKEN AWAY FROM HER

RING THIS NUMBER TO DISTRACT THE INVESTIGATION

DAGO COPS “INCOMPETENT AND XENOPHOBIC” SAYS TABLOID JOURNALIST

25May07 — 1

Chopped Liver

Yesterday evening I watched The Libertine. It’s diverting and stylish; there are some lovely, elegant, theatrical speeches; but there’s not as much sex as I’d hoped for. Johnny Depp doesn’t go over the top and John Malkovich is even more pleasingly restrained. I wouldn’t go out of your way to rent it though.

I was puzzled by the respective performances of the two female leads: Rosamund Pike as the Earl of Rochester’s wife and Samantha Morton as his mistress. Rosamund Pike is supposed to be the posh, pretty ex-Bond girl and Samantha Morton the Oscar™-nominated Serious Actor, but, despite her having far less screen time than Morton (and her being slightly younger), Pike’s performance outshines Morton’s. In a corny role for a woman, Pike is far, far more convincing than Morton in her more unusual one.

Delivering her important opening declaration of ambition, Morton sounded like she was reading off an autocue. It was so bad I wonder if they accidentally put in the wrong take. I can’t believe she was that awful. I’ve seen her do other things better. What went wrong? (The irony is that Morton plays an actress.) There are various horror stories going around the Web about the film’s stop-start funding so perhaps money problems had something to do with the final cut.

24May07 — 0

Missing The Point

I had to go into London yesterday morning. Before I set off, I foolishly put on The Today Programme while I was in the shower. As I’ve said here before, John Humphrys’ encounters with politicians raise my blood pressure, not because his aggressive questioning succeeds in exposing the lying lies of lying liars, but because it lets them off the hook. Currently there’s an interesting post and discussion at Never Trust A Hippy about “BBC impartiality”.

23May07 — 4

Pull Up To The Bumper

One of the dangers of teaching your children to read at an early age is that they will just pick up anything that’s lying around the house or on the shelves of the local library and start reading it because it’s got words in. This inevitably leads to questions about the words. I clearly remember when I was a little boy asking my dad:

“What’s a “prostitute”?”

Despite his Catholic upbringing (and mine), he replied, cool as you like:

“Someone who sells sexual favours for money.”

A Playboy advice column once cynically stated: “Any man who claims never to have paid for sex is either a fool or a virgin”, but, desperate as I have often been, I’ve never resorted to buying “sexual favours”—even when, after a gig near an airfield, I was approached by one of the most beautiful women ever to strike up a conversation with me. Just as I was beginning to think I was the man, an American flyboy who had been in the audience warned me quietly that other pilots who had been foolish enough to fall for the [tabloidspeak]”stunning redhead”[/tabloidspeak]—woke up the next morning with lighter wallets and wiser heads.

But I am becoming more and more annoyed lately by the government information ads I’ve been hearing on local radio warning me of grave consequences if I am caught “kerb crawling”. They make me want to drive my red hatchback slowly into a red-light district as a protest (and a feeble attempt at innuendo).

This made me smile though:

In an effort to curb his town’s prostitution problem, the Mayor of Padua announced a new law that would see a 50 euro fine to any car spotted “stopping traffic” by accosting a lady of the night. About one hundred protesting prostitutes marched on Padua in response. To add to the furore, the organised sex workers decided to offer free nookie to all those who had been fined. All the nicked cruisers have to do is show the receipt of their fine, and they get a pink sticker in exchange. Currently, about 90 per cent of the prostitutes in Padua are offering their services gratis to those exhibiting this sticker.

22May07 — 2

I’m A Grumpy Eustonard

I’ve not mentioned the Euston Manifesto Conference here yet because it’s been another pile of unpaid work for yours truly and I’m buggered if I’m going to add to it by writing lengthy blogposts about it. There’s a week to go before it takes place (on Wednesday 30May07) and most of the tickets have already gone. If you want to be there too then email conference@eustonmanifesto.org and give us yer money. If you are reading PooterGeek at a university or other research institution then you can print out this colour A4 poster [PDF, 74K] and put it up in a corridor somewhere.

Now that I am a veteran of the last-minute rushes that accompany these things, I know what’s going to happen next: lots of people with more books on their shelves than organisational skills in their heads will be emailing and phoning us with hours to go asking if there’s some way that they and their five friends from Amnesty/Radio 4/DEMOS/the LSE/the Cats Protection League might just be able to squeeze in and will there be vegan catering/a place to park their Segways/commemorative biros?

So let me remind you: the Euston Manifesto Group is bunch of people who meet in a pub. We have mobile phones and a Website, not a transglobal network of offices staffed by a loyal clone army of operatives wearing belted jumpsuits and hard hats. If you are coming to our conference then please order your ticket now rather than next week when we’ll be busy organising the event and therefore will find adding your name to our sprawling multi-dimensional spreadsheet of attendees something of a distraction.

Thank you.

21May07 — 2

That Conservative Party Pledge Card

  1. A nugget of purest green for every child.
  2. David Cameron to continue not to be Michael Howard.
  3. Working couples guaranteed a shift from an econocentric paradigm to a sociocentric paradigm.
  4. A comprehensive school in every town.
  5. Snickers bar to be called Marathon again.
19May07 — 10

Surely Another Joke?

I very, very rarely bother with “Comment Is Free” here. It’s one of the wrongest things about The Guardian these days. But I’ve just read an irresistible article. In it, the Assistant Editor (or perhaps “an assistant editor”—dontcha love these meedja job titles?) of the newspaper’s arts and entertainment blog—that’s its arts and entertainment blog—confesses that she doesn’t find The Simpsons funny and has to have the jokes explained to her.

I suppose it’s asking a bit much from a culture correspondent with a British broadsheet newspaper to expect her to recognize cultural references made by Harvard-educated comedy writers, but I’m a veteran of The Grauniad from the days when it usually only printed nonsense by accident. She also attacks the show for its predictability and for relying on “a gut-wrenching dose of American schmaltz” to “[hammer] home the moral message”. Is she watching the same programme as everyone else? Is there some kind of anti-American phrase generator that inserts this stuff into articles at random? What does “schmaltz” mean in a newspaper whose readers voted Cinema Paradiso the greatest foreign film ever made?

The first comment in response to this piece is from a standard-issue CiFfer who liked the show until the one in which Tony Blair appeared. It gave him too easy a ride apparently. Just one comment in and it’s already a parody of a CiF discussion thread.

Anyway, forget about Matt Groening; The Guardian‘s Steve Bell: there’s a cartoonist who can do allusive, unpredictable, funny satire. Just yesterday he imagined George Bush and Tony Blair’s last meeting. He drew Blair as a little dog and Bush as a monkey.

16May07 — 4

Like Radio 4 Listeners

The last time I tinkered ever so slightly with the layout of PooterGeek the email and comment complaints were such that I gave up and returned to the current look. This is something like the fourth design of PG since it started five years ago, but when I changed it previously there were no readers to object. Now this place doesn’t get the biggest blog traffic in the country, but it does seem to attract obsessives.

WordPress 2.2 is out and I want to install it here and then experiment with a different look as well, but I don’t want to open my flat door tomorrow morning to be greeted by global villagers brandishing pitchforks and torches and screaming “Burn the Geek!” so I am going to set up a parallel PG on another server some time this week and point you at it for your comments.

One thing that I know from having seen other people read PooterGeek is that only a minority of you enjoy the banner in its full, unpixellated glory. Most Windows machines don’t smooth the fonts in the title and subtitle correctly so you see rastered characters, whereas properly set-up Macs and Linux boxes generally get it right. At the very least, therefore, I’m going to fix that for everyone.

14May07 — 1

Rent Boys

A. N. Wilson has been writting cobblers for years. What disturbs me now is that The New York Times seems to be willing to pay him to write cobblers in its pages. Over at Tom Hamilton’s place there’s some more nonsense from Wilson.

While you’re at Davos Newbies, I also recommend that you read the proprietor’s extensive quoting of Matt Mullenweg, one of the creators of the wonderful WordPress software that I currently run most of my blogs on. Like using his software, reading his words is rewarding and won’t cost you a penny.

Social networking technologies have become useful and successful. As I’ve pointed out before, now that the money has arrived and something else geeky has become fashionable, ignorant people are popping up everywhere in the media to dismiss or hype those technologies. The bubblers pollute the debate with the sort of “leveraging your mindshare for global customer buy-in” gibberspeak of bullshitters who can’t set up a deckchair, never mind a Webserver, but who charge thousands to talk the same crap in glass-walled corporate meeting rooms.

In other news: I noticed that there’s an ad in this week’s Economist inviting applications for the position of Chair of the Treasury Statistics Board—three-days-a-week: £150K—it states: “You need not be a professional statistician”—and, if you can watch Flash video, then this clip about “The Human Cost of Immigration” should make you laugh too.

11May07 — 2

Missed Opportunity

Dave lives in Brighton and has a blog and I think I’ve been out for a drink with him—or rather his posse—on a couple of occasions. The only reason I know he has a blog is that he recently commented on Andrew’s. When I found Dave’s site I had a browse and found that he had posted this photo without comment:
a mouse rides a frog across water
which is a shame. How often do you have a perfectly valid reason to cite Batrachomyamachia?

04May07 — 6

They’re On A Mission To Explain And They’re Bringing The Pain

Am I hallucinating? Are any of you lot seeing this too? Right now Jeremy Vine is wearing a Harry Hill shirt and dancing to hip-hop next to a holographic Menzies Campbell. The caption behind him reads “MING’S BLING”. Has BBC Election Special turned into The Day Today?

UPDATE: Iain Duncan Smith has just said of the poorest voters he’s been talking to: “Real real problems of drug and alcohol abuse—and I’m in all that right now.”

It’s excruciating, but not for the reasons I was afraid of at the start of the evening.

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