I’m no wildlife photographer and I know this kind of thing has been done before, but I doubt if it’s been done much better than this.
16Feb07 — 0
Bald Men To Fight Over Comb
16Feb07 — 4
The Peak District Massive
My sister has done her share of lecturing and teaching in some of England and Wales’s less illustrious educational institutions. Now (as I have bragged before on her behalf) she teaches law in the sixth form of one of the best state schools in the country. The school is so good she and her family can’t afford to buy a house in its catchment area. The young people whose parents can afford to get them in, however, are very lucky indeed.
Yesterday she rang me up for a gossip. In passing, she told me of the plight of one of her students, that I might laugh heartily at it. I did. This unfortunate young man suffers from what might be described as “urban Tourette’s”. Despite being of milky-white Anglo-Saxon appearance, living in the Derbyshire countryside, and studying at an establishment that sends a significant cohort of its graduates off to Oxbridge every year, he is not only convinced that he is an impoverished African-American, but that his deprivation has forced him to associate with members of the “inna-city” criminal underworld. This manifests itself in, for example, his shouting out the word “gangsta!” at random moments and in doodling in tagging his classroom notes, street-stylee.
My sister is a mother of two children and occasionally wears comfy slacks, but she was born in Africa and is darker than me*, so her public mockery of his behaviour causes him some embarrassment.
*[No we can’t explain the colour of her offspring either.]
16Feb07 — 3
Reach For The Pie
I’m sitting here eating a microwaved vegetable biryani in front of my computer, having returned from a Ginsters-fuelled morning shoot of a band at Shoreham Airport, a cute, art deco building surrounded by dodgy Italian mopeds of the sky—not just propellor aircraft that look like they are powered by elastic bands, but helicopters that were probably based on Leonardo’s original sketches. I don’t have a problem with passenger jets, but you wouldn’t catch me up in one those things in a hundred years, especially if I were famous. From Glenn Miller and Buddy Holly to John F. Kennedy Jr and Aaliyah, light aircraft and celebs are a doomed combination.
Everything was organised by a woman who writes for Bliss, but I don’t think that’s where the pics are going to end up. “The boys” had to get changed into blagged designer clothes. (Did you know that Fender of the guitars make shoes? I didn’t.) Their look was styled. I even had to refer to a brief for the session.
[Poot finishes vegi biryani and wanders to kitchen to zap Bombay aloo.] Hey, I’ve been pressing a shutter release and shouting “Now gimme brooding!” at blokes with spiky hair all morning; I need to keep my blood sugar up.
Anyway, as I waited for the band to appear, wandering around looking at the old black-and-white photos of airmen they had on display, I was pleased by the thought that the might of the Luftwaffe was defeated by men with comedy names like Hugh Hume Piffard and Cecil “Pash” Pashley.
14Feb07 — 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 and dressed like they’ve just walked off the set of Life On Mars.
“I’ve got it, Bill,” says one, “How about ‘CYPRUS: BIRTHPLACE OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE’?”
“Yeah,” says Bill, “and underneath that a photo of a tasty Cypriot bird in a bikini on the beach. A tasty bird with really big tits.”
[At this point a “buxom blonde” with a frilly blouse walks into frame and puts a couple of glass mugs of Nescafé down on the brainstorming table, between Gary and Bill’s pastel Trimphones. Gary and Bill exchange winks.]
Thing is, that at least might work with a subset of their target audience: randy blokes looking for a place where they can lie on a beach and look at tasty birds with really big tits.
In contrast, I’m betting that the latest poster campaign of one of the civil service unions (the PCS?) isn’t going to be effective with anyone other than civil servants. The one I saw says something like “PROTECT CIVIL SERVANTS’ JOBS” and is plastered over a photograph of some, er, civil servants, none of whom are wearing bikinis, even the token ethnic. It didn’t persuade me, and I was recently made redundant by the closure of a government-funded research facility.
I saw the union poster outside the ticket barrier at Victoria. I’m sure the wage slaves streaming through that concourse in the working week often daydream about how they’d like to hand over more of their income to the state in order to keep more civil servants in jobs. I suspect that this one wasn’t devised by an ad exec, even one living in the 70s, but instead was the idea of someone who has plodded his or her way through a series of cushy administrative “roles” within a union for administrators and in the process become completely detached from the way normal working people think, even the ones who are administrators for a living.
I was reminded of this slogan when I read Adloyada this morning and the quote in her post about one of the campaigns in “Israel Apartheid Week”:
13Feb07 — 2
Poot Toots
Richard Brincklow leads a jazz trio called Sesame Forum. They have a Sunday afternoon residency at The Brunswick in Brighton. The weekend after next, The Brunswick is hosting a jazz festival, featuring people who you might have heard of, like Liane Carroll, who won Best Vocalist Award at the 2006 British Jazz Awards and is appearing on the Sunday evening.
Sesame Forum will be supporting Joe Lee Wilson on the first day, Friday 23Feb07. Apparently Wilson has:
a free and resonant baritone, soaring through a three octave range with command of all registers. He has the gorgeous tone of the old time baritones and combines it with a horn articulation, with the sensual curving lines of the saxophone and the sharp bop punctuation of the trumpet.
I don’t. I’m not bad though, and I’ll be doing one song with Sesame Forum before the real singer comes on.
I once shared a dressing room with that Stacey Kent, you know. That she was sharing a dressing room at all, let alone with me, gives you some idea of at what stage in her career she was blessed by that life-changing experience.
(“You’re singing too much from the lower-left surface of your diaphragm,” I told her. From that evening on she never looked back.)*
*[The other stuff is true, but everything in the round brackets is a lie.]
12Feb07 — 7
Retroactive
I’m in Dixons Currys.digital, buying a new computer keyboard. What sounds like a competent cover version of Starship’s We Built This City is playing. For a moment I wonder if it’s the start of one of those godawful trance retreads of 80s guitar hits. You know the sort of thing: Owner Of A Lonely Heart/Max Graham versus Yes, Proper Education/Eric Prydz versus Pink Floyd, Boys Of Summer/DJ Sammy feat. Loona, The Majesty Of Rock/The KLF versus Spinal Tap.
It isn’t, but now I’m trying to block out a sound that I think is something originally recorded by A Flock Of Seagulls. The performance is accurate except for the vocals. These are horribly, horribly out of tune. It can’t be a recent re-recording or someone would have used pitch correction software. What is this shit? Can I endure it long enough to find a decent keyboard?
I’m replacing one old one because I’ve broken it. My main keyboard is an ancient IBM of similar vintage to A Flock Of Seagulls, rescued from a discarded original PC at the Institute of Cancer Research. I learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter so I love clackity old metal-framed IBM keyboards, which I suspect are built from obsolete Israeli tank spares and are the only ones in existence that you could apply to a human torso with fatal results—or, indeed, that I can hammer away at with my heavy fingers for more than a few months without breaking also.
I approach the counter with my soon-to-be-suffering new Logitech, but things are beginning to swim a little as the painfully bad singing continues. Luckily Go West kicks in before I pass out from intonation sickness.
“What is this playing?” I ask the guy behind the counter, “some kind of 80s compilation?”
“It’s The 80s Live,” he says, happily. “They were playing The Best Of The 60s earlier on, but I took it off ’cause it was rubbish. Go West are brilliant. Almost as good as Level 42.”
Our eyes meet and I gaze deep into his soul. He is not being ironic.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
I don’t know exactly what age he really is, but whatever it is he’s at the stage of life when you lie about being twenty-one so someone will sell you an alcoholic drink or a domestic solvent.
“Is there any music you like that was recorded in the last twenty years?” I ask him, trying to keep the mystification out of my voice.
“Has anyone recorded anything good in the last twenty years?”
I pay for my keyboard, laughing: “Kids today!”
“Thanks, granddad,” I mutter on my way out, reflecting that I was a medical school dropout, working in the library of Tamworth College of Further Education and navigating around the home keys of a cast-iron Olivetti while the sales assistant was a toddler.
I am become my dad.
11Feb07 — 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.
06Feb07 — 2
See How They Run
Sorry it’s been quiet here. I’ve been busy and ill (again). There’s always The Brighton Argus to cheer me up though.
And its front cover story today is about a “masked raider” being identified by his distinctive smell.
04Feb07 — 6
And Another
I don’t have a TV, but that doesn’t mean I don’t watch it. Having trained myself out of treating television broadcasts as audiovisual wallpaper, whenever I visit friends or relatives and there’s a TV on in the background I have to make a huge effort not to be hypnotized by it. The main reason I have to keep telling people that I don’t have a TV is that people keep beginning conversations with “Did you see…?”
So I enjoyed reading this at Maximum Bob. Not owning a television does not make you a better person. Pretending not to watch it makes you look silly.
04Feb07 — 1
Another Diversion
So there’s no new content here, but qwghlm is back with an excellent, funny post about ads attacking movie “piracy”. (I’m not sure why he’s so down on the first “viral” video though.)
03Feb07 — 0
Yeah, I’m Busy
Go look at some food porn [shouty, but safe for work and potentially arousing to all sexes and orientations].
29Jan07 — 1
More Advertising
A little while back, someone linked me to the Geostationary Banana Over Texas. I thought it was just a Web meme / bit of conceptual art fun. It turns out it’s both of these, but it’s also a real project to launch a gigantic inflatable banana into orbit. It’s worth reading that article right to the end, where a techie involved gives outstandingly good quote:
Manny Teran, founder of aerospace design firm nearSpace Technologies and an engineering consultant on the blimp, is optimistic it’ll get off the ground.
“The technology is sound,” says Teran. “It’s far out, but it’s all possible. Technology has come a long way since the Hindenburg.”
Beat that, Tim.
29Jan07 — 1
A Message From Our Sponsors
The previous post included my first paid link to Amazon. In future, when I recommend a book or CD or DVD here I’ll link to its Amazon page. I always used to do this anyway because it was convenient. It also happens that I am a frequent Amazon customer and that their service has always been excellent.
This is probably as far as I am going to sell out PooterGeek in the immediate future, though I have toyed with the idea of installing a GeekCam and selling subscriber access to exciting 24-hour inter-racial nude keyboarding action.
Oh yes, and visit “Horns-A-Plenty” [safe for work] for all your antler decor needs.
29Jan07 — 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’ … is a travesty of the general situation … The anti-Americanism he describes is confined to a tiny minority of those who seeks [sic] alternative ways of achieving world peace from the appalling judgment that led to the invasion of Iraq
Michael Meadowcroft
Leeds
In exactly the same position as this letter in the preceding spread, above the same newspaper’s main editorial, is a half-page cartoon depicting a massively obese man in plaid shirt and star-and-stripes baseball cap filling his drooling mouth with the contents of oil barrels. A full barrel is clutched in his fist; hundreds of empties are piled up in the background. The speech-bubble emerging from his mouth contains the following text:
GROW OUR OWN FUEL SO THE A-RABS CAN’T JERK OUR CHAIN – BRILLIANT [how many Americans do you know who use the word “brilliant” in that way?] FOR A MOMENT THERE, I THOUGHT WE WERE IN BIG TROUBLE…
It’s worse than anti-American: it’s unoriginal, unfunny, and scientifically and economically illiterate. In this context, however, it does make an important point very well, just not the point its creator intended. That “tiny minority” gets everywhere, doesn’t it?
The Observer is, incidentally, a Left-liberal newspaper that supported the Iraq war.
There’s more about this at the Euston Manifesto Blog.
24Jan07 — 3
Millions Of Souls Cry Out
I’m taking a few days off from blogging because I’m busy so I will leave you, as always on such occasions, with one of PooterGeek’s famously hilarious repackaged jokes.
But first, this is perhaps a good time to link to one man’s account of his attempt to go without the Net for a week:
Day 2: Today went pretty well, except that at about noon I suddenly realized I didn’t know all the lyrics to the theme song to The Facts of Life. I spent a few seconds casting about for my laptop before I remembered my plan. I was forced to spend the afternoon humming “There’s a time you gotta go to show the crow you know the pro the slow plateau the FACTS OF LIFE!” This did not endear me to service workers and passersby.
Day 3: Woke up feeling kind of … itchy. Felt surly and resentful about having to go to the window to see what the weather was like. Someone, somewhere, could be reenacting Ladyhawke with Lego figurines and I’d never know it. Have the folks at Digg tracked down 14 tips for optimizing your FeedBurner experience? HAVE THEY?
And now the obligatory joke:
World War One: A British private arrives at the front and is told by his commanding officer that there is an acute shortage of weapons so he must improvise.
“Improvise?” asks Private Wilkins.
“Yes,” begins the officer, handing him the sawn-off end of a broomstick, “This evening you will be on sentry duty. If at any time you are forced to engage the enemy you must hold this piece of wood as though it is a rifle and shout: ‘Bangity Bang Bang!'”
“Lumme,” thinks Private Wilkins, “I’m in a spot of bothersome bother and no mistake. It’s either follow the mad orders of this toff or the firing squad for me.”
He props the broom-stump against his shoulder, salutes, and heads off for his trench.
In the middle of the night a German soldier approaches through the darkness. Wilkins does his best to stay hidden, but the German sees him and raises his weapon. As a last desperate act, Wilkins lifts the broom gun and shouts, “Bangity Bang Bang!”
To the private’s amazement, his target falls to the ground, clutching his bloody chest.
The next day Wilkins is being commended by the officer for his bravery and quick thinking. He asks if he might now be given a more powerful weapon. The officer replies, “Certainly!” and hands him a tightly rolled piece of paper and a ball of string. Wilkins raises an eyebrow. “This,” explains the officer, pointing at the paper, “is your improvised bayonet. Lash it to the end of your gun. In close-quarter combat you must stick it out ahead of you and shout: ‘Stabity Stab Stab!””
The next day Wilkins and his comrades go over the top. Emboldened by his previous experience he is one of the first into battle and, to his continuing surprise, everyone he points his broom gun at falls dead at the first “Bangity Bang Bang’. As he leaps screaming into the enemy trenches he takes on half-a-dozen German troops with his paper bayonet. Shouted within earshot, the phrase “Stabity Stab Stab” is enough to wound them all mortally.
Just beyond the trench, Wilkins hears a pair of heavy German boots crashing through the undergrowth, marching forward to reinforce the line. He raises his cut-off broom stick and shouts “Bangity Bang Bang!” but the German continues, apparently unharmed. Wilkins thinks for a moment and mimes reloading his broom gun. He lifts it and cries, “Bangity Bang Bang!” again.
Still the German advances.
As soon as they are within arm’s reach of each other, Wilkins attacks with his paper bayonet: “Stabity Stab Stab!”
Nothing happens.
And, as Wilkins is crushed to death under the German’s hefty soles, the last words he hears on this earth are: “Tankity Tank Tank!”
22Jan07 — 3
Catblogging At PooterGeek Now Out Of Control
Earlier today I linked to a picture of a cat in a box before linking to a picture of a cat on a man’s hat. That was before I discovered this animated image of a cat clinging to Jeremy Paxman’s hair.
22Jan07 — 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] is currently threatened by the all-encompassing allure of shopping.
Later in the article, some architects wander into Second Life and their first bumbles into this new environment make for an amusing transcript. Notice also that Second Lifers get rather annoyed when someone tries to extend their property with “3D graffiti”.
Before they can be properly indoctrinated, ideologues are usually made to unlearn important lessons about human behaviour. When lots of ordinary people are given access to a world where they have immense freedom and power, as in certain spaces on the Net for example, those lessons are taught again.
22Jan07 — 3
Cat In A Box
I’m not going to reproduce it here, even as a thumbnail, because (as you can see from the discussion underneath) the creator of the image wouldn’t like that, but at the end of the following link is a lovely photograph. I like it and I am not a cat lover. Do read the photographer’s description of the circumstances under which he took the photo.
Brian Micklethwait has found a picture of a kitten on a man’s head.
[Also posted at WedPhotBlog.]
21Jan07 — 0
Who Moved My Deep Freeze?
Today, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago:
“The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?“, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it.”
This does not, of course, refer to real bikesheds, but to a cluster of bureaucratic phenomena common in the planning of major scientific and/or technical projects. In general, scientists and engineers hate administrative duties and sneer at professional cults, but they (and I) often suffer from a specific kind of systematic dogmatism.
The rest of the Wikipedia definition rang bells as big as a minus-eighty. I have been present at standards meetings of an international scientific software project where actual hatred was generated by discussions of the very matters—indentation formatting and naming conventions—cited in the definition. And I have also been unfortunate (or fortunate) enough to have worked through the re-building of two large laboratory buildings in two different locations—in one case my boss was the Professor given the job of divvying up the new space amongst his colleagues. During these developments, if someone had distributed the text of that Wikipedia entry by email to the occupants of gutted labs across each site then it would have raised plenty of weary smiles.
Talking of systematic dogmatism, over at the post I recommended at Baggage Reclaim, an entertaining thread has developed. Do have another look, especially if you enjoy watching sneering pseudo-cleverness unravelled by sweet reason.
Did you know that Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd invented a fridge?
20Jan07 — 2
Kant, Not Puccini
You can download a series of Glasgow University lectures about Kant on MP3.
20Jan07 — 4
Overheard In The Newsagent’s
Remember this place? Yesterday I’m in there and a middle-aged white bloke in a cravat is sounding off at the (Gujarati) proprietor as the nearest consultable expert on the question of contemporary Indian pulchritude.
“Everybody says that one on Big Brother is beautiful, but I’ve seen better. She’s very pale skinned. I wonder if she uses that skin lightening skin like some Indian and black girls use. I’ve seen better. Who was that Miss World?…”
Proprietor: “Aishwarya Rai?”
Cravat Man: “You know, the one who was Miss World…”
Proprietor: “Aishwarya Rai?”
Cravat Man: “I suppose she’s very clever, but so was the one who was Miss World…”
Proprietor: “Aishwarya Rai?”
Cravat Man: “Yes. That’s the one.”
That resolved, within seconds Mr Cravat is wibbling on about the cricket: “…He should have walked. There’s only two players who always walk: Gilchrist and Lara…”
I used to work in a corner shop. No amount of money would be enough to get me back behind the counter engaging with the weirdness of certain members of the British general public over packets of HobNobs and copies of The Daily Mail.
19Jan07 — 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 parodies.
Despite this careful splitting of my personality, I even removed a sniffy PooterGeek review of some terrible science writing because the author of the work phoned me up to complain that a bad notice from someone of my insignificant status within the MRC could be a career-killer. (The scientific journal editor with whom I then shared an office was outraged that I did so, but the article I criticised wasn’t grossly inaccurate, just badly written; and it’s been a general policy of mine to pull stuff on request unless a principle is at stake. PooterGeek has, bizarrely, acquired a certain amount of “power”. I’d rather use it to mock real bullies than to hurt the harmlessly incompetent—people who are overpaid and incompetent are a different matter.)
But I don’t work for the MRC any more, and I can hear the sound of a thousand PooterGeekers groaning at their monitors as I confess that I plan to write a long piece here about the importance of public health programmes. In the meantime, I recommend these two posts on the subject: one by Richard Sanderson reminding us of the value of vaccination and one from Tom Hamilton about how we should set the limits of another kind of medical intervention by the state.
18Jan07 — 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?”
“हाय, लंबी जà¥à¤¦à¤¾à¤ˆ!”
GEORDIE VOICEOVER: Aye, Shilpa’s missin’ her fella arright; but what’s going to happen when the other housemates catch her being dubbed into Urdu, like?
[WILLIAM HURT appears in front of her. He is wearing a waistcoat handwoven from wholemeal bran and an expression of infinite existential discomfort.]
HURT [really, really hurt; even more hurt than John Hurt]: I feel the weight of your sorrow, Shilpa, but you know you cannot walk outwith The Boundary, my little one. Those We Do Not Speak Of wait beyond, with their “Hello Mum!” placards and air horns.
[As he speaks, a huge, hooded figure emerges from the woods. SHILPA’s attention shifts from HURT to the approaching menace. Her face is full of terror. Her eyes brim with tears.]
SHILPA [pointing over HURT’s shoulder]: J- J- J-
[MEL GIBSON suddenly runs into frame, brandishing a pitchfork.]
GIBSON: Joooooo!
[SAMUEL L JACKSON comes rolling down the hillside in a wheelchair, his cape flapping in the breeze. As he passes the figure he pulls its hood off to reveal the scowling visage of JADE GOODY.]
JACKSON: That ain’t no Jew! I want this muthafuckin’ Jade off this muthafuckin’ plain! Where’s mah cat?
[“Maverick legislator” GEORGE GALLOWAY emerges from the trees. He is wearing a cerise leotard and licking the backs of his hands.]
JADE [running from GALLOWAY]: Aaauuugh!
[For no reason at all, the air fills with confetti and two dozen south Asian women dressed as late-nineteenth century American milkmaids join Shilpa in a song-and-dance routine, lip-synching poorly.]
[Suddenly the musical soundtrack shrinks to a compressed babble. We are transported to a contemporary setting and the frame is filled with the kneeling form of a child. He is shrouded in darkness, but a phosphorescent glow reflects off his face. After a long moment we close in on his features.]
SMALL CHILD: I see dead people.
[His mother walks into the room and turns on the lights.]
MOTHER: They’re not dead, dear. They’re just not famous any more. Now stop watching that rubbish and go and do your homework.
[She opens the living room door and DAVID CAMERON takes the opportunity to enter.]
CAMERON: I’d just like to say how much I agree with whatever it is you, as an ordinary working mother, feel about whatever it is you’ve just told your son not to watch, for whatever reason it was that you told him not to watch it, especially if it was anything to do with racism, or saving electricity—and I’d like to agree with you in your sentiments in a way that’s consistent with traditional Conservative values.
[She rolls her eyes.]
CAMERON: And I was wondering: do you perhaps need any help with the washing up?
17Jan07 — 5
Doing Wrong
Friends have told me that my obsession with freewill and my belief that there is such a thing as evil are products of my Catholic upbringing. They are, in fact, products of personal experience and of a long, dull training in human biology. I know people who simply do not believe in evil. They are wrong. Norm is right.
17Jan07 — 4
Grammar Horror
[Brace yourself, dad.]
I’m shopping around for a colocation service—crudely, a secure shed with a big pipe to the Net where I can install a server. As you’d expect I’ve been checking out local companies. One I won’t be using is Intramedia. The front page of their Website is dominated by what I suppose I should describe as their “mission statement”:
“INTRAMEDIA WILL DELIVER A CONSISTANTLY FLEXIBLE CORPORATE SERVICE THAT WILL ALWAYS ACHIEVE IT’S CLIENTS TECHNICAL NEEDS”
16Jan07 — 4
Beige Man In White House?
Barack Obama has registered to form a presidential exploratory committee.
16Jan07 — 1
Today I’ll Mostly Be Feeling Sorry For Myself
Go away. I have a cold.
15Jan07 — 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 them then I reckon they’ll fix me up with my own newspaper column eventually.
14Jan07 — 5
Tim-ba!
Talking of recycling, it looks like producer Timbaland has some explaining to do to a Finnish computer musician about a backing track that Mr Land laid down for Nelly Furtado. [The previous link goes to YouTube, but you can follow these links to MP3s of the tunes.]
There’s something amusing about a deep-voiced multimillionaire hip-hop svengali who loves to show off his trunk-like arms and scowl in photos taking inspiration—if that’s what he did—from a Finnish kid who makes his/her music with crappy 80s home computers.
And you know already how I feel about the output of Nelly Furtado.
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