This morning, as I checked my GoogleMail, the all-seeing GoogleBrain read my correspondence and decided that I needed to be directed to the portal for recently divorced or bereaved men: “Wife’sGone.Com“, whose general message seems to be: “Okay, so you don’t have a missus any more, but at least you can afford to buy some boys’ toys (oh yeah, and you might want to talk about it with someone else)”.
iiiiiiii
Thanks to Gur Hirshburg for pointing out that music on the site I linked to a couple of days ago is track number 15 on Chava Alberstein’s Songs Of My Beloved Country, the poignant Ballad Of The Horse With A Spot On His Forehead.
Those Beige People All Look The Same
This morning the half-Sri Lankan guy who runs the computer shop mistook me for the half-Indian guy who runs the café.
I Blame The Jews
[requires Flash and a noisy office]
Dude Central
Jeff Bridges is a quirky and talented actor. He has also an interesting Website. Like me he puts his music and his photographs and his bad jokes online. Unlike me he’s a hugely successful Hollywood superstar with great hair. Check out his urinal endorsement. Nicole Kidman’s not going to be doing an ad for Armitage Shanks any time soon.
Ungulating Landscape
Snopes usually only publishes striking images to debunk them, but sometimes the truth really is out there. Look at the camels.
Puerile, I Know
All the women reading this must now punish me in the comments here for giggling like a schoolboy at Jo Salmon’s Star Wars blog post yesterday, in which she actually resorted to the “lesbian-interrupted-by-the-plumber” plotline beloved of another cinematic sub-genre.
Spank me, girls.
Killer One-Two
The original blog post was okay, but read on to enjoy the knocking out of James C in the comments beneath it by the flying fists of Tim Worstall and dearieme.
I’m late to this, I know, but via Drunkenblogging, I read another example of inverted bigotry, even more extreme than James C’s:
Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, fears that continued negative attitudes towards people of his faith could provoke a vast and angry backlash.
“There are a few bad apples in the Muslim community who are doing terrible acts and we want to root them out,” Dr Bari told The Sunday Telegraph.
“But some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they’re all terrorists—and that encourages other people to do the same.
“If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists—700,000 of them in London,” he said. “If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive.”
With less right to be listened to by anyone outside his immediate vicinity than Alf Garnett sitting on a park bench with a bottle of sherry in a paper bag, this so-called community leader tells us that, basically, they’s all terrorists them Muslims, innit? Sounds like incitement to religious hatred to me.
Word!
In the small ads of a musicians’ magazine I subscribe to this month I read the following:
Gospel music like you’ve never heard it before! Totally FREE full song downloads. www.dalestrand.com
Having listened to it [MP3, 3.3 Mb], I’d say the description is accurate.
Clash Of The Sky Fairies
At 11:28 BST the top two headlines on UK Google News were:
The Daily Mail: THE POPE MUST DIE, SAYS MUSLIM
The Guardian: MIXED RESPONSE TO NEW POPE APOLOGY
Testy Aliens
Honestly, I’m Completely Straight
If you are a middle-aged man then two things are going to happen to your hair soon: it’s going to fall out and it’s going to turn grey. My dad managed to escape both of these until he reached 60 years of age, but everyone accused him (unfairly) of using Grecian 2000, so he didn’t even get to enjoy this good fortune properly.
Last week I was at a gathering where a lot of middle-aged women were present. Their hair was amazing. None of them had adopted the horrible, worst-of-the-70s styles currently clinging to many of the heads of The Young People, but a lot of them sported up-to-the-minute looks that had clearly been engineered by Brighton & Hove’s finest stylists. The colouring, the cuts, the glossiness of their barnets were all Hollywood-grade.
It’s a tired, false, and scientifically illiterate complaint of certain “feminists” that because society is run by men far more money and effort have been invested in research into contraceptives that act on women. The crudest refutation is simple: to interfere with conception you can either stop one egg a month or stop 90 million sperm; which target would you aim for?
If I stumbled upon a cure for baldness tomorrow then I’m sure I would be a multi-billionaire within a few years, but looking at all those amazing ‘dos the thought crossed my mind that perhaps the reason middle-aged women’s hair is so much better than middle-aged men’s is that (partly thanks to the achievements of real feminism) the former can and do spend so much more money on theirs than the latter. And they’ve got more of it attached to their heads to spend money on of course.
Andrew Marr In Interracial Sex Shocker
I have a gorgeous twentysomething friend “of Punjabi descent” who nurtures a secret love for former BBC political correspondent and Radio 4 culture vulture Andrew Marr:
Yes, that’s Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke’s babyfather Andrew Marr:
Thanks to the certifiable “I Am An Englishman” I can reveal that her secret love is likely to be reciprocated, physically at least. The proprietor of that site writes:
The journalist who wrote what you are about to read, felt secure enough in his own elite, establishment role to lay his totalitarian beliefs on the line in his own column and, as the newspaper’s editor and owners were content to see such material published, one must presume that they also were not averse to seeing such a Brave New World imposed upon the dumb, British herd.
This is what was said:
“Widespread and vigorous miscegenation (race mixing)… is the best answer…
Teachers are the most effective anti-racist campaigners in the country, this means more than education in other religions, it means a form of political education. Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them… have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants.
And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress…
I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good.
Stamp hard on certain ‘natural’ beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off…
A new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too.”
When I read this article I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
1984? Animal Farm? We had arrived, we were there already. It wasn’t paranoia after all, it was very, very real.
It didn’t matter what we did, it didn’t matter what we said, it didn’t matter what we wanted, it didn’t matter how we voted, the same old dark manipulators would always be in charge and we better start getting used to it, or else.
The liberal commissar responsible for the casual sabre rattle recorded above, was none other than that most languid Master of political ceremonies, Andrew Marr, top bloke at the BBC and one of the most powerful political journalists of the age.
The chattering classes have every bit as much of a hold over our lives as the politicians do.
They hand our opinions to us on a plate, they shape our beliefs and attitudes. Everything the media throws at us, from cradle to grave, affects the way we behave and think.
Shiny eyed zealots such as Andrew Marr and Tony Blair do not care what we want or feel, they care only for the promised land that their wisdom, their insight and their determination will lead us on to in the future.
So now you know.
Now you know what THEY have been doing all this time.
After some more not-paranoid-at-all stuff about what “THEY” are up to, he continues:
That [sic] us Andrew Marr is talking about, folks.
The British people.
Actually, as Marr is Scottish and Tony B is Scots-Irish, I reckon their desire to “coerce”, “repress” “civilise” and “miscegenate” is aimed pretty exclusively at the English.
Which is why this website is titled as it is.
This is Andrew Marr:
UPDATE: I’d like to share with you this wonderful “I Am An Englishman” poll:
If England was invaded who would be least likely to collaborate?
- Politicians
- Businessmen
- Police
- Englishwomen
- Englishmen
- Scots, Welsh and Irish
- Negroes
- Jews
- Asians
- Homosexuals
At the time of writing the scores are:
- Englishmen 64.2%
- Scots, Welsh and Irish 16.7%
- Asians 4.9%
- Englishwomen 4.9%
- Jews 3.1%
- Homosexuals 2.5%
- Police 1.9%
- Negroes 1.2%
- Businessmen 0.6%
- Politicians 0.0%
Given that there have only been 167 votes in total, with your help I’d like to take “Negroes” to the number one spot. Get voting, PooterGeekers! [You might have to scroll down the page a bit.]
UPDATE at 14:41: The Negroes are now up to fifth place from eighth, overtaking both the Jews and the Homosexuals.
Yes, It’s Bloody Safe
It’s the sound of ball bearings grinding against fragments of broken glass on a wet pavement. It’s being wired straight into my jaw in full-frequency Dolby surround. Yes it hurts, but if I didn’t have a face full of lidocaine I’d be squealing like a pig in a combine harvester. There’s a man with his fingers in his mouth asking the woman next to him for “that burr, the one shaped like a bullet”. It could be worse. Back in Cambridge my dentist was a white South African who crashed her car a lot. Local anaesthetic during dental surgery: just another way the kids of today are being cushioned against “first hand experience of the world they live in“.
One of the authors of this stupid, stupid letter to the Telegraph:
"Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust—as full-grown adults can—to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change."
—that’s right, granddad: who do you get to program your mobile phone?—is Susan Greenfield, a woman who successfully studied classics and neurophysiology at Oxford University, two of the most rigorous and demanding subjects taught by one of the most rigorous and demanding universities in the World (unless you’re an undergraduate reading modern history). So why does she write intellectual tofu?
I’m just back from an Enterprise Agency networking evening where I won first prize in the business card draw: a course of six sessions of reiki treatments. It’s okay. I swapped them for the second prize: the business psychology seminars. According to the woman offering it, the “spiritual healing” would relax me and reduce my stress levels. I tell you what would reduce my stress levels: people not believing this stuff. Completely made-up statistics show that a reduction of ten percent in my exposure to evidence-free hokum increases my happiness three-fold. Perhaps it would cheer up those kids “depressed” by “junk culture” too, but not as much as a video game in which they get to play McDonald’s characters driving humvees and push hordes of “concerned” middle-aged middle-class “professionals” off a cliff.
There’s no shortage of scientists in this country. There is a shortage of science.
Sorry For The Silence
I’ve been tied up with lots of chores. Over the last couple of days these have included a massive computer backup and installathon and having a tooth I broke and had patched up years ago repaired.
Read Bagrec, with one of several blog posts I’ve noticed lately about the fruitcakery following in the wake of the 9/11 anniversary. He’s on the blogroll here now too.
And Still Three More
Blogspot Lefties Mars Hill, Muscular Liberals, and software whizz Tim Almond join the Geekroll. And, somehow, newly-hitched Tim Newman’s White Sun of the Desert slipped off. It’s back now.
Fishmaster!
Those of you who didn’t know it already will not be surprised to learn that there is a Finnish symphonic rock outfit called Nightwish. They have recently sacked their soprano lead, so, if that’s your bag, now’s your chance to put on your horned helmet and boob-armour and record a demo for them. This YouTube video will give you something to work from. For the rest of us it turns a live performance of one of their goth-tastic songs, Wishmaster, into five minutes of rib-tickling entertainment. I particularly enjoyed the rendering of the guitar solo approaching the three-minute mark.
Ask A Silly Question
There’s no longer any need for you to give a dumb answer to post here because—as Jo, I, and others have noticed—SpamQuiz doesn’t do what it says on the tin. I have deactivated it.
For Jo and anyone else’s information the plug-in that displays the latest comments and trackbacks over on the right hand side of the front page of PooterGeek is “Brian’s Latest Comments“.
Ad-vice For Entrepreneurs
From The Daily Telegraph:
A solicitor who enjoyed a flamboyant lifestyle by living off the earnings of prostitution has been jailed for 12 months.
Davy Tang, 42, a father of two, was able to buy a large country house, a Porsche, a Mercedes and a BMW, as well as jewellery worth £9,000 with his cut from the earnings of a group of escort girls.
He pleaded guilty to controlling prostitution for gain and asked for three counts of living off immoral earnings to be taken into consideration when he appeared before Guildford Crown Court. He was jailed for 12 months and ordered to pay £500 costs.
The court heard that Tang operated a website called www.scandalbabes.co.uk from his home in Ripley, Surrey. Between 2001 and 2005, he earned more than £500,000 by controlling escorts in London.
Tang, who qualified as a solicitor in his native China, had not declared any income since starting his sex business. That, and the large amounts of money in his bank account, led to his arrest.
Judge Derek Inman told him: “Because you paid no taxes it is not surprising that you had a very comfortable lifestyle with a big house and a number of cars. No doubt your neighbours in Ripley will be interested to learn how you earned your money.”
If, like me, Davy Tang had attended one of Revenue and Customs‘ excellent, free “Becoming Self-Employed” courses he might still be trading today, providing flexible and well-paid work for women in the Surrey area.
In the sports section of the same edition of that newspaper is a picture of controversial Chelsea striker William Gallas, unironically captioned “Chelsea claim William Gallas was driven by money”.
Indispensable
Wikipedia will eventually triumph over all other existing encyclopedias. Does any edition of Britannica or Encarta have a “List of films ordered by the use of the word ‘fuck’“?
Yesterday’s featured article was about philosopher and socialist Hilary Putnam, who is the Putnam in the “Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis” and definitely my kind of thinker. (By that I mean I admire his style, not that I am even remotely in his league.) Partly I’m sympathetic because I was accused in the mid-90s by a theologian friend of suffering from terminal case of functionalism.
Putnam is a kind of anti-Chomsky, having developed the dominant model in the theory of mind, but moved away from it as a result of seeing its weaknesses, even as others have gone on to develop it. From his Wikipedia entry I liked this quote especially, under the heading of “Criticism”:
“Ironically, Putnam himself may have been his own most formidable philosophical adversary.”
Dude.
And Still One More
Because I linked to Skuds fairly early on in his blogging career I forgot that I hadn’t put him on the blogroll. He’s there now.
I’ve met Skuds. I wouldn’t say he’s hard, but he looks like a young Brian Dennehy with a buzz cut, his 14-year-old daughter has been photographed by two newspapers dressed in camouflage and carrying an automatic weapon, and he calls this a “puppy”:
Captcha!
Commenters here might have noticed that, this week, PooterGeek acquired a new CAPTCHA, that is a test to check that you are, er, “human” before your comment is accepted by the system. It’s to discourage spammers from clogging up this blog with links to their poker, porn, and Viagra sites. The PooterGeek CAPTCHA is basic: you are merely asked to provide a one- or two-character answer to a very simple question in English.
Will the Vulgarian sent me a link yesterday evening to a very interesting and entertaining lecture. Speaker and CAPTCHA inventor, Luis von Ahn starts with an explanation of what a CAPTCHA is and then goes on to outline the fascinating business of what the calls “human computation”. Like Blaise, Luis is witty, a freakin’ genius, and certain to become absurdly rich. This is why I enjoyed noting that he doesn’t know what “statistically significant” means.
And Another
The Wedding Photography Blog is back—sort of. Link to it and, as soon as you let me know, I guarantee I’ll link to you in return—unless your Website flogs snuff videos or something.
Missed One
Welsh non-dragon Suw Charman doesn’t write very often, but she’s interesting when she does and she fought my corner against ruthless streetcorner pushers Antoine and Jackie in the 2006 drug wars. Now she’s joined the other newcomers on my blogroll.
Inverse Convergence
As digital processing drives photographs to become less and less like the things they record, so digital illustration drives images to become more and more like the things they don’t. [The blog I link to has a strange layout. You’ll have scroll down the right-hand-side strip of content to see thumbnails of the dazzling pictures there.]
Guest Post: The Truth About Empire
PooterGeek brings you more linkiness with this report from John Pilger, writing for The Sports Offensive, ed. Jim Campbell.
John Pilger travels to a Galaxy Far Far Away and discovers the reality behind the media distortions
I am in Coruscant, capital of the “evil” and “corrupt” Galactic Empire.
According to the propagandists of the Rebel Alliance this is the home of a “sinister” Emperor who toppled a great and just “democratic” Republic. Supposedly it is a dangerous place to ask questions, yet I have never felt so secure as I wander the towering streets of this mighty metropolis.
In a cramped and dingy bar I talk to a group of ordinary citizens whose lives have been transformed by the Empire. People like 45-year-old Darth Vader who was given free medical care after been callously tossed into a pit of molten lava by the “great Jedi warrior” Obi Wan Kenobi. “All the Empire is trying to do is bring peace and order to the Galaxy”, explained a breathless Vader, “they saved my life and I will be eternally grateful to them.”
Until recently galactic unemployment was running close to 20%, but now the jobless are learning new skills as Imperial Stormtroopers. In the days of the elitist and restrictive Jedi an ordinary unskilled young man like THX-1138 would have been restricted to a life of unspeakable drudgery. Now his horizons have been broadened to “seeing other planets” and “using a blaster”.
For this is the unspoken truth of the Empire. Behind the lies and distortions about the “dark side of the force” they are bringing jobs and hope to numberless worlds.
The destruction of the planet Alderaan is cited as evidence of the inherently undemocratic nature of this bold new experiment. Yet the billions killed on this planet amount to little more than 0.02% of the overall galactic population. Compare this with the callous and unprovoked Rebel attack on the Death Star that led to the death of over 12 million innocent construction workers and clerical staff. Unquestionably this is the greater crime, a fact never mentioned in the “mainstream” press.
Even now Imperial sources say that Rebel strategists are planning another attack. Above all they want to “eliminate” Emperor Palpatine, the architect of this popular movement of reform. When I explained the threat to him he was sanguine. “All I am trying to do is bring peace and order to the Galaxy”, he explained, “but I have anticipated their plans and soon their pathetic rebellion will be crushed forever”.
All true democrats can only hope that he is right.
Better Late Than Never
I’ve not been writing much here lately so this is a good time to make those long overdue new additions to my blogroll.
First of all I want to recommend Paul Evans’s Never Trust a Hippy. He’s got strong and interesting views on politics, football, and music, and his stuff is also thoughtful and witty. He deserves more readers than he gets. And not just because he recommends my photography services and thinks I’m funny. (To be completely accurate Paulie wrote that I make him laugh, which might not be the same—it’s that “laughing at”/”laughing with” question.) Check out his recent linking to a striking cover version [caution: following this connection will take you to the aesthetic scrubland that is MySpace].
Fisking Central has already made an impact, helped by being a collective of bloggers and by having a catchy name. One of Hot Wheels’ friends described Snakes On A Plane as “the Ronseal of films”. Fisking Central is the Ronseal of blogs, even if its rulers have still failed to recognize link to Fiskistan.
Ghost of a flea is a mine of pop culture loveliness.
Let’s Be Sensible is another blog I have found myself googling my way to lately because it isn’t on the roll here. Sure, Tom is a paid agent of a vested interest, but he’s also very clever and he has given his blog a nice new template.
The Party already has majority ownership of Rob Newman‘s soul: he works for a Welsh Labour MP and writes this kind of thing in my comments. Neither fact stops me from reading to and linking to his blog.
Most of the Labour-ish readers here don’t need to be introduced to Jo Salmon and Antonia Bance. Despite (because of?) being in the same party I’ve certainly disagreed with them in the past—Antonia wrote that arguing with me about abortion was like being back in a tutorial—but Saint PooterGeek considers them to be broadly on the side of Good rather than Evil, and is unswayed in that judgement by their being delightful people to meet in the real world.
Despite their perfectly opposed ideological and philosophical positions, Kerron Cross (“The Voice of The Delectable Left“) and Mark Holland (Blognor Regis) compete fiercely in the Online category of the Sid James Memorial Awards for Sexual Innuendo.
The Revd Dr Incitatus, actor, scientist, and Eustonian, is here. Read him.
Shuggy is also on Euston’s CIA payroll. His site is always worth a look.
Clive Davis’s hasn’t been so for a while, but that was because he was taking a break. He is now back in (too much) action. Davis is another of those bloggers, like Norm, you wish would write a little bit less sometimes just so you can keep up.
After this gem I was tempted to link to wardyblog as well, but he has been assimilated into the Harry’s Place collective (already long-time linkees from here) so hardly ever posts at his own place any more.
I’m also sending some traffic James Higham‘s way in the hope of rendering his blog’s name ironic—and out of simple human pity.
Incidentally, Chris Brooke seems to be posting again at The Viral Stoat.
Boll et al.
While I’m on the subject of academics writing rot and being called on it, I discovered this weekend that Uwe Boll, widely criticized as one of the worst directors of all time, has a doctorate in literature. An IMDb contributor reviews a work from his oeuvre, the videogame-“inspired” Alone In The Dark, like this:
“[T]he other practitioners of cinematic drivel can rest a little easier now; they can walk in the daylight with their heads held high, a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts. It’s okay, they’ll tell themselves. I didn’t make Alone in the Dark.”
This and other entertaining reviews are to be found on Wikipedia’s “Films considered the worst ever” page. I recommend in particular that you read the tale of back-and-forth critical bitchery recounted there under the heading of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.
(It is interesting that, like that of Paul W S Anderson, the director of Aliens vs Predator, Boll’s work is reviled even by his presumed target audience: Comic Boy Guy-style fan-boys. They hate him for messing about with the templates for his creations even more than they hate him for making lousy movies.)
The Satisfying Sound Of Leather Hitting Trouser
As you’d expect from an embittered wannabe academic like me, I enjoy immensely reading reviews in which genuine scholars demolish the latest fashionable nonsense published by trend-chasing academic presses.
Here Ben Goldacre casually and rightly puts the boot into an absurd attack on evidence-based medicine—it’s “fascist” apparently.
Here Shalom Lappin does a grand and rigorous job on The Question of Zionism by Jacqueline Rose, a book that combines two fetishes popular with the pretentious and empty-headed: Freudianism and “anti-Zionism”. Even by its own standards the book fails, being peppered with fundamental errors of fact and ignorant of the basic dogmas of the ideologies it so admires. Linking to this is also an excuse for me to point to the latest online edition of Democratiya.
Hey, both the people I’ve linked to have got Jewish-sounding names. Perhaps they’re part of some kind of global conspiracy?
Admirable; Futile
Like a man trying to teach calculus to a hamster, Anthony “Black Triangle” Cox attempts to apply logic to the content of a front page of The Independent. For some reason I am reminded of Norm’s continuing struggles with The Guardian.
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