06Nov06 — 5

Undertaking Research

I’m currently pitching to shoot a nude calendar—sadly the models are all farm animals—so I had to check out the competition. (That’s my story anyway.) I’d heard of the Girls Of Cheese [just about Safe For Work] getting some of their kit off for L’Association Fromages de Terroirs, but until yesterday I had been unaware of Reel Fish Calendar Productions’ Women In Waders [not quite so WorkSafe], the naked skeptics [SFW], or the Plush Cat Club’s plus-sized Curves ‘n’ Chrome Calendar [borderline]. Easily the most improbable though, has to be Men of Mortuaries [raised eyebrows in the IT dept].

06Nov06 — 5

Sadly Straight

Thursday evening, last week: I’m standing at the bar buying my round in a not-gay pub in Brighton when a man I’ve never met before starts talking to me in a way I am reluctant to categorise as “forward” until he moves in close, starts rubbing his hand up and down my chest, and tells me I’m “really really sexy”.
“And you’re a flirt,” I point out, smiling heterosexually.
“Noooooo!” he says, laughing ironically.
I’m almost tempted to give him a consolatory peck on the cheek, so grateful am I for some sexual interest from anyone of any persuasion, but I don’t.

Thing is, since I moved here, my gaydar has improved significantly and I’d say, from my quick browse of the videos of Ted Haggard that Andrew Sullivan has been hosting since this scandal blew up, that Haggard comes across like the kind of guy who would enjoy a massage from another guy, although in every other respect he seems deeply unpleasant.

Anyway, James, as his name turned out to be from our subsequent conversation, appears at our table at the end of the evening to say that the black bag he came in with has disappeared. Given that I have witnessed a lot of coat confusion in the packed venue this need not have been an incident of theft. So if you were in the Earth and Stars on Windsor Street on Thursday evening and picked up the wrong black bag then do get in touch with the pub because they’ve got his number—even if I haven’t.

05Nov06 — 0

A Correction And A Recommendation

Recently Shalom Lappin and I were interviewed by Ha’aretz about the Euston Manifesto. The published article completely confused and misrepresented our views, though I doubt this was out of malice; the reporter hadn’t brought his recorder so he took notes of our conversation in Hebrew and drank beers as he did so. I haven’t mentioned this before either here or on the EM site because I didn’t want to draw attention to the piece, but it has been cited by at least one mischievous Website so I wanted to put the inaccuracy of the article on on the record.

Shalom has however been interviewed more recently on camera by a Canadian current affairs programme. I have only been able to watch part of this, but what I saw I thought was excellent. (And there’s something surreal about seeing a rostrum camera shot of your own mobile phone number going out on Canadian TV.)

05Nov06 — 1

Aagh! The Day Star, It Burns!

Usually on a Sunday I wake up about noon, having driven back in the small hours from a wedding disco somewhere on the other side of the M25. For all I knew, every Sunday morning Brighton & Hove could have been hosting weekly running street battles between giant lizards and man-eating spiders. Or locals might have been scampering around doing their mid-morning shopping in regular fear (or hope) of being scooped up off the pavement by a fifty-foot blonde dressed only in a skimpy push-up bikini fashioned from animal hides. Our efficient road-sanitation operatives would have had the streets clear of arachnid corpses or the broken bodies of discarded macrophiles long before I was staring at my stubble in the bathroom mirror.

Yesterday I was certainly busy, but not with a photo job, and today I was meeting up with the Anonymous Economist who was passing through town on his/her way to do whatever it is that overpaid US corporate policy wonks do when they are zipping around the planet in business class. This meant my getting up at six in the morning and walking to the station. So I made the most of it, picked up one of my cameras and a wide-angle lens, and squinted through my sleep and the viewfinder at some of the sights on the way. The light was dreamy, and I bumped into a fellow film freak down on the beach who was busy setting up a large format camera just to shoot the empty sea. An architectural photographer, he deliberately had his back to the ruins of the pier, the second corniest subject for anyone with a camera in the city after the Royal Pavilion. We gossiped like men comparing sheds and exchanged contact details for future referrals. Weddings terrify him; buildings mystify me.

It was fun to discover just how glamorous this town manages to look early on a bright Autumn Sunday when most of its residents are recovering from some kind of fireworks party, but I’m a bit knackered right now to reply coherently to your kind and helpful comments about blog advertising. Thank you all though.

02Nov06 — 10

Selling Out: Your Views Sought

I’m not going to share my thoughts on this one with you lot yet, except to link to this post on Black Triangle, but I’d like to read yours about these following plans of mine.

I intend to put advertisements on the Wedding Photography Blog and on another potentially money-making blog that I have started (but isn’t yet ready for public consumption so I haven’t linked to)…so…

Which Web ad services do you recommend?

Or do you think I should deal direct? (For example: I’ve been known to pick up a Nikon, but since I only use Minolta gear professionally, the current owners of Minolta’s camera technology, Sony, might be prepared to pay for an exclusive banner—especially if I really sell out and get one of these.)

How do you feel about my putting advertisements on PooterGeek?

01Nov06 — 2

Notices

Miraculously, unlike Fisking Central, Tim Worstall missed this gem of a Comment Is Fatuous article today, one that neatly combines economic illiteracy, snobbery, and a reassuringly ethnic byline. It’s sad that an interesting question is obscured by article’s stupidity.

But he didn’t miss this collection of Amazon reviews of Great Works, which should appeal more to those of us who specialise in intellectual snobbery. The Great Gatsby, for example, is dismissed by one customer like this:

“If Fitzgerald had written this book properly … it would have been EXACTLY two sentences long – ‘I’m rich’ and ‘Oh, boo hoo’. The plot line resembles an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 (namely ‘Let’s sit around and whine about being rich. Next we’ll get drunk and call each other names, fight, and run each other over!’ SHUT UP ALREADY!) I can rarely can say this, but I HATE HATE HATE HATE this book! FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, STAY AWAY FROM THIS BOOK IF YOU CAN HELP IT!”

1984 gets this:

“The fall of Communism has erased nearly every trace of relevance this book may once have had.”

The Grapes of Wrath:

“This book was 600 pages written purly about a bunch of hicks from Oklahoma starving. Thanks, but no thanks.”

In the comments, someone draws attention to something far more disturbing: positive reviews of lousy books. Take this of The Da Vinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition—no, please, take it:

“I received the Illustrated edition of Da Vinci Code for my birthday and I am so glad I read this edition. It was very helpful to have the works of art to see as I read, made it the code much clearer. In fact, I can’t imagine reading this book with out the illustrations. The novel it self is awesome, edge of your seat thriller/mystery. I’d never read any thing like it. “The Da Vinci Code” Has been my favorite thriller reads of 2005!”

Combining both, I recommend that you also read some of the reviews of Underworld: Evolution at Rotten Tomatoes. Despite also being directed by latex-clad lead Kate Beckinsale’s husband, Len Wiseman, I can honestly say this film is less rubbish than its predecessor, but that didn’t restrain the criterati:

“‘Underworld: Evolution’ was a huge step up from the first film. But then again, there wasn’t really much room to get any worse.
— Kevin Carr, 7M Pictures

“Evolution without a shred of intelligent design”
— Ben Kenigsberg, Village Voice

“A more appropriate title is ‘Underworld: Stagnation'”
— Lisa Rose, Newark Star-Ledger

“So this is what eternal damnation feels like.”
— David Frese, Kansas City Star

“utterly stupid”
— Rich Cline, Shadows On The Wall

31Oct06 — 12

Another Positive Review

A month or so back I was in the farthest darkest reaches of Hove, Actually (practically in Portslade, for the locals reading) having a repair done to my car. While I waited I wandered into a new café called “Intenso”. It’s an unlikely outpost of another Intenso in Ibiza—though not so unlikely with the weather we’ve been having here lately.

entrance to Cafe Intenso

The coffee was excellent, the service was friendly, the staff were entertaining, and the music was just fine. They also have free wi-fi and comfy seating. I liked it so much that I used up the ends of a couple of rolls of film from a wedding I’d just shot to photograph the place—for free. In return, the owner later very kindly gave me coffee gratis for a year, so take that as my declaring my interest up front.

I’m now going to use my potent Google karma to recommend the place. It’s not exactly the most glam part of town, but you’ve got to admire the people who run Intenso for building a classy venue anyway. It’s a delightful place to sit with a newspaper or book or laptop PC and forget what a state your flat is in, and it’s probably a better place to things done online than one or two of Brighton & Hove’s libraries, where they don’t serve damn fine coffee. (I wouldn’t recommend that you try to write your history of the English-speaking peoples there at school run time when it’s solid with yummy mummies though.)

Why not visit it?

31Oct06 — 7

Weirdy

Over the past week or so I have grown a beard. I’m going to chop it off today, but it’s not bad as beards go: short, thick, dark, and slightly curly, with flecks of grey in it. It’s grown while I’ve been locked indoors doing Web design on my Sepial site. The design isn’t even my own; I’ve merely modified a template written by someone else and installed and customised various bits of software written by other people. But it still felt like pushing a dried pea the length of high street with my nose—and that would have taken less time.

Thank you to those who have helped me with suggestions and bug reports to date. There are still glitches, but I am now past caring. You are welcome to tell me about them and I’ll fix them when I give have recovered enough to give a toss. Jackie will be pleased to note that my professional home on the Web is now a blog, cunningly disguised as a static site.

I detest doing Web design. I detest doing it even more when I have to worry about layout rather than the clear communication of information. Mostly I detest doing Web design because most Web browsers are broken. Instead of the programmers who wrote, say, Internet Explorer 6 being given a modest number of (wo)man hours by their managers to fix the bugs in their own code once, everyone else in the World spends countless thousands of man hours navigating around those bugs again and again in a miserable and unnecessary distribution of labour.

Now I have froth in my whiskers.

30Oct06 — 3

Revealing

Today, unique visits to PooterGeek have been cruising at the elevated level of 50-plus an hour. Why? Because this site has just entered the top ten on Arabic Google for the search term “boobs“.

30Oct06 — 8

PM at EM

Today, Tony Blair, or “The Tonester” as I call him at our weekend soft rock jam sessions, writes for the Euston Manifesto Website. As an experiment I’ve opened a Euston Manifesto forum where you can tell him what you think of what he has to say about public service reform—on a day when the biggest political story is the Stern report: “I’M SAVING THE WORLD…YOU LOT ARE PAYING”—The Sun.

For those of you who don’t babysit for the Tonester and Chezza and can’t send him little tips by txt msg like I do, then this could be your chance to give him the benefit of your own insights on the subject.

Yesterday I also read an article about the Euston Manifesto by a 22-year-old anti-Iraq war Sheffield Labour student.

30Oct06 — 0

The Age Of Beige

Thanks to my dad for telling me about this article in yesterday’s Observer sports section about mixed race sportsmen. There’s lots of pointless hand-wringing about the phrase “half-caste”, but it’s interesting otherwise.

During the rise of Tiger Woods and around the time this hit the headlines I used to joke with a colleague who was a lightweight rower that the only hope for whitey now was to invent more sports like rowing where your parents had to be rich enough to get you into the right school to participate. The double-page spread in The Observer includes an invented and absurdly talented all-star mixed-race English football squad in the bottom right-hand corner.

Meanwhile, despite Agbonlahor, Aston Villa revert to being crap. Come to Villa Park, Becks. You know you want to.

29Oct06 — 1

The Motherland

Brian Micklethwait has a post up about Sierra Leone. It’s opposite of the sort of thing many of journalists would write about the place, being politically incorrect, interesting to the casual reader, and crude but accurate—as opposed to sensitive but misleading. It’s the sort of summary of the place you might get from a mate down the pub, fresh off the plane—and I mean someone who has just been working abroad, not “travelling” there. It reminds you what marvellous resources blogs are. Not everyone has mates who have just got off a plane from Sierra Leone.

My mum’s from Sierra Leone, but I’m no expert. A girl is indeed “titi” in Krio (and a boy “bobo” with short two ‘o’s). The photos on Brian’s blog aren’t just posed for the camera: people do indeed carry stuff on their heads—when I was a little boy it was a favourite parlour game of my dad’s to balance things on my big hair and get me walk around for guests. The phrase “Black Man’s Time” is in common use and not just by White Men—as in: “The trouble with you, Damian, is that you work on Black Man’s Time”. The stuff about mobile phones rings true. And yes, many of the locals would be happy to see the British back in control. Sorry, Tariq, they’ll get over it soon, I’m sure; they’ll take a bit longer to get over the amputations.

Sierra Leone has only recently stopped being the poorest country on the planet, partly thanks to the fierce competition between various thieving thugocrats in control elsewhere around the World to take their own countries to the top of the table, and partly for other reasons that I’m not going to go into here. I’ll just say that fairly recently Sierra Leone stopped hosting a UN peacekeeping mission for the bizarre reason that it had worked.

Brian does get a bit of a ticking off in his comments about his description of the Lebanese as being the local Jews. My black cousins are half-Lebanese and some of my best friends are Jewish so I’m not going there either.

You’ll be hearing more about Sierra Leone soon, when the latest DiCaprio movie [for that is how it will be described] Blood Diamond comes out. I’m not optimistic about it. The featured preview on IMDB complains plausibly that it’s a good film likely to be ruined on release by the existing lousy ending. Also, despite being set in West Africa, it was shot on location in South Africa.

27Oct06 — 0

My Kind Of PR Professional

I don’t believe that depicting Steve Irwin as a two-dimensional cartoon figure wandering around Hell with a stingray barb sticking out of his chest is admirable (or particularly funny or insightful satire), but I admire South Park‘s spokesman for his response to those who feel it to be disrespectful to the recently deceased TV wildlife-taunter and his family:

We have offended people in the past and probably will again

Spokesperson for South Park: what a job; what a guy.

27Oct06 — 6

Penis Size: A Scientific Study

Further to this, this.

METHOD: To study the effect of penis width vs. length on female sexual satisfaction, 50 sexually active female undergraduate students were asked which felt better, i. e., was penis width or length more important for their sexual satisfaction.

RESULTS: None reported they did not know, or that width and length were equally satisfying. A large majority, 45 of 50, reported width was more important (p < .001).

CONCLUSION: Implications are discussed, including the fact that the data seem to contradict Masters and Johnson about penis size having no physiological effect on female sexual satisfaction.

[Yeah, I know, but that post title is going to pull in so many hits.]

27Oct06 — 1

Consulting Intelligence

Thanks to the Anonymous Economist for sending me a copy of a New York Times article that highlights some of the monumental point-missing of the current debates about (for example) Iraq and the War on Terror simply by asking a dumb question.

CAN YOU TELL A SUNNI FROM A SHIITE?

By JEFF STEIN

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: ”Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A ”gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?

…

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

My curiosity about our policymakers’ grasp of Islam’s two major branches was piqued in 2005, when Jon Stewart and other TV comedians made hash out of depositions, taken in a whistleblower case, in which top F.B.I. officials drew blanks when asked basic questions about Islam. One of the bemused officials was Gary Bald, then the bureau’s counterterrorism chief. Such expertise, Mr. Bald maintained, wasn’t as important as being a good manager.

A few months later, I asked the F.B.I.’s spokesman, John Miller, about Mr. Bald’s comments. ”A leader needs to drive the organization forward,” Mr. Miller told me. ”If he is the executive in a counterterrorism operation in the post-9/11 world, he does not need to memorize the collected statements of Osama bin Laden, or be able to read Urdu to be effective. Playing ‘Islamic Trivial Pursuit’ was a cheap shot for the lawyers and a cheaper shot for the journalist. It’s just a gimmick.”

Of course, I hadn’t asked about reading Urdu or Mr. bin Laden’s writings.

If you wanted a more clear cut example of the sort of “managerialist dogma” that Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling is always banging on about you couldn’t do better than that: “Of course I don’t have to be competent; I’m a leader and an agent for change.”

If you work for McKinsey that sort of attitude destroys wealth (not yours, obviously); if you work for security agencies it can get people killed.

(By the way, viewing it with my copy of Firefox, the three main menus of links on the front page of the McKinsey Website are obscured by a huge picture of two men in suits. You can just about see the edges of the panels of options, but you can’t click on any of them. It takes highly paid management consultants to deliver that kind of integrated, global, customer-facing stupidity.)

26Oct06 — 21

In Our Defence

Shuggy is complaining about Norm’s and my spelling of “defence” as “defense” and Christopher Hitchens’ spelling of “labour” as “labor”:

Lenin does it. So does Pootergeek. As does Norm. Politically different, yet the same problem; they all spell ‘defence’ with an ‘s’.

Which is an Americanism.

I’m happy for the Yanks to do this but they can’t spell, can they? You lot have no excuse.

Other annoyances: Christopher Hitchens spelling Labour party as ‘Labor party’. Damn it all, man – even the Americans know to render it Labour party, with a ‘u’.

And he has used ‘gotten’ in the past.

Taken the assimilation thing a bit far – in more ways than one, if you ask me.

Sorry, but it’s been annoying me – can’t even concentrate on your articles because you spell defence with a goddam ‘s’. Stop it at once.

Norm and I were quoting Americans when we used “defense” yesterday. I suspect the main reason Hitchens uses “labor” is because his work has been edited for US publications. They edit things in the States, and fact-check them too. Can you imagine the red ink that would appear on a typical edition of The Independent?

(For those of you who don’t know, “Lenin” is a pseudo-Leftist who writes a stupid and unpleasant blog that I don’t even have to pretend not to read. It’s the sort of Webpage that sports a Hizb-Allah flag in its sidebar, in the same way a skinny schoolboy on his way to a game of Dungeons & Dragons might decorate the lapel of his black trenchcoat with an SS badge. The idea that Norm and I merely have “different politics” from him is a bit like the idea that we have “different hobbies” from someone who rapes pensioners.)

I do use “skeptical” though. That’s because my dictionary offers it as an alternative spelling in English English, because it’s phonetic, and because it’s closer to the Greek—the sort of thing the “Yanks” are often right about.

25Oct06 — 0

Pre-Numptial

Close friends of multi-hundred selling music legend Pete McDoherty expressed their concern today at his plans to wed one-nostrilled supermodel and charity campaigner Heather Moss. “I’ve nothing against her personally,” claimed a member of McDoherty’s inner circle, “but Moss has a reputation for marrying a certain kind of man and you can see why a woman in her financial position might be interested in a share of Pete’s county court judgements.”

Even now, long after the peak of Shamblemania, McDoherty, whose hits include (She’s Got A) Ticket To Rehab and (We All Live In A) Shallow Indiescene, is still mobbed wherever he goes in Camden (by people asking him if knows where they can score some H).

Moss, who was last seen on the catwalk modelling a collection of nasal septa hand-carved from sustainable mahogany by Terence Conran, was unavailable for comment.

24Oct06 — 1

Advertisement I Saw In A Post Office Window Today

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[FOLLOWED BY CONTACT DETAILS]

24Oct06 — 2

Personal Messages

A warm “welcome back” to Amsa, Gravesend’s best-looking resident.

Paulie, your blog ate my Collymore comment.

I would love to visit Portsmouth, but I’ll have to be invited first.

Trevor in Sheffield, a man in a long coat will bring you good news of a distant relative.

21Oct06 — 3

…Then There’s Mike Selvey…

…who is usually as reliable as that bloke in the green polo shirt down your local in providing some lazy assessment of the day’s most widely discussed sporting matter. Today he manages to cram ten clichés (two, possibly three, of them misapplied) and three uses of the phrase “in terms of” into a half-page article about current England-Australia cricket rivalry, an article my dad could have dictated in fifteen minutes while doing the Guardian crossword and putting out some bedding plants—and at least I’d have considered my dad’s version worthy of some lively disagreement afterwards.

I’m sure Selvey is charming in person, but his written output annoys me so much that, if someone offered me one free custard pie throw and the two smuggest faces on the front of The Guardian‘s sport section today, his and Michael Schumacher’s, then my head would explode.

21Oct06 — 0

New Feature

Up there ↑ you should now be able to see a tab labelled “comments”. Click on it and you will visit a funky new page of the latest discussions on this site. Each link from that page to a given comment becomes paler grey the more time has elapsed since that comment was made. This is a mash-up of MtDewVirus Recent Comments and PHPExec.

Some day soon I also hope to update the PooterGeek “best of” page which is getting on for a year out of date.

21Oct06 — 0

Good Apples

It would be so much easier to dismiss The Guardian if it didn’t employ some excellent writers. Its television critics, for example, are usually more entertaining than the programmes they review. The reason I still buy the paper on Fridays is because the “music” part of the film and music supplement actually covers popular music by making occasional reference to the music. The main focus of the cover story about The Killers yesterday, however, was the lead singer of the band’s adherence to Mormonism, though this in a way tells you what you need to know about their music.

Anyway, here are three links: Via John Naughton’s blog comes another amusing bit of football whimsy by Harry Pearson and a typically thoughtful piece by Victor Keegan about user-generated content. (Keegan certainly wasn’t the youngest speaker at Jackie’s hip and happening MySpace thing earlier this year, but he was probably the best.) And thanks to Vic for txting me this headline—The Guardian also employs some playful subs—that hints at some of the strides backwards Russia has made since the break up of the Soviet Union.

19Oct06 — 9

Gissa Job!

Wondering why I’m blogging regularly again these days? I have gone from two months solid with photography assignments to two months of none at all. If you want to book a bargain shoot then now is your chance. I took these photos on Saturday at my last gig, a naming ceremony in the Scented Garden round the corner in St Ann’s Well Park.

[Click on any thumbnail below to see a 640×420 scan. Make your browser window as big as possible before you view the larger versions or it’ll shrink them to fit and degrade the picture quality. If this happens in Internet Explorer you should click on the “Expand to regular size” box that appears when you mouse over the bottom-right-hand corner; in Firefox/Mozilla, click with the magnifying glass that replaces your mouse pointer.]

bubbles in the cornermother and son read poem by childfather nuzzles grumpy daughter
mobile-crazy Tor and his mentors on a park benchTor is more interested in a phone than a hug
Tor and his female fansmunchkin scrambling on a low park wall
granddad blows bubblesmum holds baby and a cuppa
girl with bubbles and Torgrandparents share a smile
thoughtful uncleskull-and-crossbones boy blows bubbleschocolate face

Hire me for an afternoon to take photographs of your family for 240 quid plus expenses and I’ll throw in forty 6×4 prints, and a CD of medium-resolution scans of the negatives for free. A man can scarcely afford to eat at this kind of rate. C’mon, people, the light is beautiful at this time of year and—even if I do say so myself—I am on cracking form. Contact me now and you could have a set of warm, soft, natural portraits on film ready in time for Christmas.

Or you could pay rather more for a handful of photoshopped, posed digital McSnapshots that’ll very quickly look as naff as anything taken in the 70s against a velvet backdrop at a traditional high street photographers.

(Don’t forget: if you email me your snailmail address then I’ll post you a set of free postcards.)

19Oct06 — 5

Bugs In The Attic

Via Hak I learn that Madeleine Bunting is resigning as Director of Demos because “her vision for Demos is incompatible with that of the trustees”. Apparently “[Bunting] has decided to focus on her interests as a writer and a thinker”.

Since my vision for the Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomics Research proved incompatible with that of the Medical Research Council I have been focusing on my interests as a cross-country skier and women’s lingerie model.

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